my journey to health

So I have four children, 22,  16,  5, and 4. My eldest is from my teenage relationship with whom I guess you could call my first love, we were together around 18 months which as a teen certainly seems like a lifetime.

I had him on my own and struggled quite a bit as a single mother. I also started struggling with my weight around this stage. I was not a fat child or teen, sure I was always a bit bigger than some of my friends but by no means was I fat. At high school I had a friend who was obsessed with being skinny and diets, it was the first time I had ever struck it and I used to do stupid diets with her, the bread diet, a diet where we ate nothing but crackers, and apples, all sorts of crazy things, I never really took them seriously but she certainly did!!

At 18 I joined jenny craig and went on my first real diet, I was 68 kilos and wanted to get to 63 because everything everywhere told me that was my ideal weight! I hit my 63 kilos and I thought I looked awesome, I look back now realise how ridiculous this was and it started a downward spiral to maintain the “ideal weight” I put on a bit of weight when I had josh but still sat under 70 kilos, at stages over the next few years I went through phases of losing weight, one such phase I stopped drinking and smoking, I barely ate and I did aerobics numerous times a day off a video at home. I distinctly remember one day eating a peanut butter sandwich and feeling so guilty I did an hours aerobics afterwards.

At this time I met my first husband, he was a friend of my flatmates who came to stay and he was nice to me and pretty much adored me, I look back now and realise I was just desperate to have a family, to have a father for my son and live a proper life of being married, owning a home and living happily ever after like I was supposed to do.
There were signs right from the start that things weren’t right but this was what I wanted so I ignored them and carried on, we were married within a year of meeting, moved to christchurch, I got pregnant, we bought a home and were supposed to live happily ever after!! Three months into the relationship I had stopped my obsessive exercising and had put on a little weight, not a lot but I remember him telling me he didn’t find me as attractive as he did when we first met, as I had put on weight, I should have run right there and then, but I didn’t, instead I watched what I ate and was paranoid about putting weight on.

Now don’t get me wrong this was not a miserable marriage we had a lot of happy times but he was very obsessed with my weight and I was supposed to look a certain way, he would do things like when we had people over if I ate a handful of chips he would say do you really think you should eat that? Haven’t you had enough, that kind of thing, always in front of people and it was mortifying, so I stopped eating in front of people and I snuck food, I would eat when he wasn’t home, I would hide packets and evidence, it was here that my really bad eating would start.
I would go to the bakery to get us all something for lunch and I would grab a donut, stuff it down on the way home before he could see, it was very destructive and I wonder looking back had he not been like this would I have a much healthier relationship with food now??

He used to point out how attractive other women were and how unattractive I was, now I am not a little doormat of a women who would tolerate that kind of thing, but it was done slowly over time and I don’t think I really noticed it happening until it was too late, and I become the type of woman who had a lot of insecurities and very little self esteem. I lived in a city where I had no family, very few friends (because he didn’t like any of them) I was alone and lonely. Even after he had a 6 month long affair with a close friend I still stayed with him. And my eating became comfort to me

We eventually moved back to auckland and we went to a new years party at a friends, there I met a man who was incredibly kind and just a lovely man to talk to, at some stage during the evening he gave me a hug and I remember thinking I cannot remember the last time anyone bar my children had hugged me or shown me any real affection. It was a real lightbulb moment for me. That week I left my husband and a month later I started dating this man who would eventually become my husband and the father to my youngest two children.

Now this man was the opposite of everything my ex husband was, when I met him I weighed 85 kilos, there was no need to hide food from him, he didn’t care what I ate, he didn’t care what I drank, he didn’t care if I looked like crap in the mornings, he genuinely loved me for who I was, I didn’t have to worry about gaining weight or what I ate, it was incredibly liberating and felt wonderful.
Alas the bad relationship I had with food was well and truly entrenched in my life and I let myself go I think because I was finally allowed to and I did the opposite from what I had always done and I started putting on weight, I think I was almost testing my husband to see when he would comment, he never did, to this day 55 kilos heavier than when we met, he has never commented on my weight nor has he ever criticised me.

I still have moments when I will go to buy food for the family and scoff down a treat before I get home, and I don’t know why I do this, I don’t need to, I don’t even want to, I do it and afterwards think WTF, why did I do that, though those times are getting less and less now. I am learning that I can have bad food just in smaller quantities I don’t have to eat a whole bag of chips, I don’t have to go without the chips I can just have a handful and enjoy them and move on. It is however a hard thing to change a habit of years, to be able to stop at that handful and not scoff down the whole bag, and I know people say it is willpower make yourself stop, but it just isn’t that easy, if it was I wouldn’t be fat!!! And I think this is something I will struggle with for the rest of my life and it is a real mind fuck as well, on one hand I know what I am doing but on the other hand I cannot stop.

So I exercise so I can still have these treats, still have these slipups and not have to stress about how much weight I will put on. Now my focus is on getting better, I don’t want to focus on weight loss because this is what I have always done and I have always felt like such a failure when I put it back on, this time it is about my health, getting fitter, getting better, eating like a normal person, stopping the gorging, the eating late at night, the taking a packet of chips to bed with me – and as I do this as I slowly work on everything, the weight loss will come, I know it will, I have complete faith it will but I am not going to give up when it doesn’t happen overnight.