More than four years after the birth of my daughter, I have reached the weight I was at when I first found out I was pregnant, 182lbs. Six months after she was born, I had lost some of the weight and was about 202lbs. But over the next 3+ years, I gained an additional 30lbs or so. Yikes. So there I was, at my daughter’s fourth birthday, knowing she only knew me as the blob of a human I thought I was. I couldn’t stand it.
I had tried Weight Watchers in the past. The first time I did it, I lost 20lbs within a few months. It all came back. A few years afterward, I quit smoking. I put on some more weight as a result. Then I signed up to do Weight Watchers again. I did it for a year. I didn’t lose any more than 5lbs. I gave up, and then I got pregnant at my heaviest weight ever, 182. Anyone who knew what I weighed insisted that I “carried it well” or otherwise intimated that they never would have guessed I weighed so much based on how I look. That’s sort of comforting, for about a second.
During pregnancy, I had a few food aversions. But what I craved, I ate. And ate. I gave in to every food indulgence I was allowed and I did it in excess. What did I eat most during pregnancy? Peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. Vanilla pudding. Ice cream. Lots of milk. And obscene amounts of peanut M’n’ms. Carbs, carbs, and more carbs. I stopped looking at the scale when I visited the OB after seeing I was up to 232lbs. I’m sure there were several weeks left in the pregnancy at that point, and the quickest weight gain usually takes place at the end of a pregnancy. So I truly don’t know what I weighed right before giving birth. I was too afraid to know.
I remember bringing my favorite Quizno’s sandwich over to my parents’ house and my mom warned me that I shouldn’t be eating a lot of stuff like that. She told me she gained 60 or 70lbs with her first pregnancy and it was a nightmare taking it off. I totally blew her off, thinking I was going to breastfeed and do yoga, and that everything would be fine. Sadly, Mom was so right (as usual).
For a while after the baby was born, I knew I had a grace period for taking the weight off. It didn’t make it any easier knowing how heavy I was, but I tried to cut myself some slack. Then she was six months old and I didn’t feel I had the luxury of the grace period any longer. Friends tried to extend it, but I knew at her first birthday that it was long gone.
I tried increasing my exercise. I tried watching what I ate. My breastfeeding efforts had not gone as planned, and I stopped pumping when she was six weeks old. My exercise and eating efforts were half-hearted. I was tired and stressed out. I was depressed. Nothing about my lifestyle was conducive to weight loss.
Finally I tried hypnosis. It was promising at first. Then I was traumatized by an incident that left me back at square one. I kept going with the hypnosis, and over the next 22 months I did make progress in other areas of my life, like stress management, organization, etc. Practically every area besides the whole purpose behind starting the hypnosis program – weight loss. Finally, in January 2011 I decided to strike out in some other direction and stop going to the sessions with my hypnotherapist.
One of the things I learned with hypnosis is that diets don’t work. If you lose weight on a diet, you’ll just gain it back (likely plus more) once you stop doing the diet. So I resisted every program out there. Then I tried Dr. Natasha Turner’s Hormone Diet. I lost about 6lbs at first on the 2-week “detox” beginning, when I cut out a lot of specific foods and added a lot of healthy foods. Once the detox was over, the weight loss started to stall out. Then I saw myself in pictures from my sister’s wedding in April. Ouch.
Finally, I decided to try Medifast. I hear radio commercials all the time for their local Medifast Weight Control Center. But online I discovered I don’t have to go to the center. I can order the food myself and they can provide one-on-one health coaching for free. So that’s what I did. I ordered a month’s worth of meal replacements and signed up to get a health coach.
I received my food and talked to my health coach on the phone, and I got started the next morning. April 30, 2011, a Saturday, was my first day. It wasn’t a picnic the first few days, but I was ready and so I dug in my heels and did what I was supposed to do. The first week I lost more than 10lbs. Since then, my weight loss averages 2-2.5lbs per week. Four months down, 47lbs lost. It’s kind of unbelievable—I am not 100% sure the reality has sunk in that I am 182lbs again, for the first time in five years.
My daughter now weighs the equivalent of the weight I’ve lost. When I pick her up, she is really heavy and I can’t carry her for too long. How is it that only four months ago, I lived as if I carried her 24/7? It’s no wonder my body was breaking down. My knees and ankles gave me trouble, I developed mild plantar fasciitis in addition to my ankle tendinitis, and my energy was low. Even though I knew my husband loved me, I didn’t feel he could possibly be attracted to me in the shape I was in. My wardrobe was so limited and I was embarrassed that size XL t-shirts fit me, or at least I had no extra room when wearing them. I’m only 5’2”, so if XL isn’t big enough, I am waaay out of proportion.
Now, I have purged my closet of almost all the clothes I wore four months ago. I’m wearing things that are sizes like 16, 14, and 12, as opposed to the one pair of size 20 jeans I wore for a year and a half until they developed a hole in the inner thigh from my legs rubbing together when I walked. Now, when I lie on my side, legs stacked, my knees feel too bony one on top of the other. I can actually feel my hip bones, ribs, etc. when I try, as opposed to knowing everything is “in there somewhere.”
I’m hoping to continue until I reach the top end of the normal BMI range for my height (which would be 136). I don’t know if my body will cooperate in this goal, and I think I will be happy wherever my weight loss stops. I know I’ll lose another 20lbs at the minimum. My ultimate goal would be to lose 100lbs, which would put me at 130. At 5’2”, 130lbs is certainly not underweight. My lightest adult weight was about 125lbs, when I was a senior in high school. When people see pictures of me at that weight, they think I look too thin. But the problem with me then was that my weight wasn’t a result of healthy living. I was a smoker, I didn’t eat correctly, but I was very active, so I ended up being pretty thin. But I didn’t have muscle tone. This time, when I get to a healthy weight, I will have muscle tone, I will eat healthy, and I am not a smoker. It will be a kind of me I have never seen. And it will be wonderful.
For now, I continue the Medifast 5 & 1, which means I eat a Medifast meal every 2-3 hours, at least five times per day. One meal per day is Lean & Green, which means I have one serving of lean meat (or meatless protein) and three servings of non-starchy veggies. Drinking a lot of water helps (on my best days I reach 100oz of water by dinnertime, not including coffee, tea, or zero-calorie beverages). Once I reach my weight loss goal, I’ll begin a transition period. I will likely need a 12-week period to transition from Medifast 5 & 1 to healthy eating with my own foods. I may continue using Medifast meals as part of my regular diet. There are some that I really love.
From there, I hope to continue using Dr. Anderson’s Habits of Health to live the best way I can. I’m not finished reading his book, but one thing I’ve learned so far is that there are not just two kinds of people: healthy and sick. There are three: healthy, non-sick, and sick. Right now I’m closest to non-sick, on my way to sick. I’d rather be healthy. So it’s up to me to regain my own health.
