My Mom.
My mother is suffering from a hernia that the doctors can't fix because her morbid obesity makes it too dangerous to perform the surgery necessary to fix it. Everytime she moves too hard or fast, she has to worry that the hernia will get worse again. She's had two ER visits due to said hernia in the past couple of months so the doctors can at least help to relieve the pain and make it better for the short term by sort of working it back into place. Each of those times, if they weren't able to put the metaphorical bandage over it, I don't know what would have happened. She could have died. She could still die.
My mother is huge. Bordering on 500 pounds if she isn't there already. She's on so many daily medications. Genuinely, it's like she carries a pharmacy with her. Some are for her diabetes, I don't even know what the others are for. Her diabetes is fully weight-related.
She can barely walk around the store when she has to go shopping and avoids having to get groceries at all costs. I do most of her errands for her that involve walking more then 5+ minutes.
She drinks 8+ cans of diet coke a day. She smokes half a pack of cigarettes a day. Why is this that relevant for a weight loss post? The ONLY way to fix her hernia is for her to lose weight. At her weight, the doctors believe her best bet is a weight loss surgery considering how hard it would be for her to naturally lose weight at this point. She has to stop drinking soda and stop smoking for the surgery that could literally save her life. She hasn't tried to stop doing either.
She eats a SALAD BOWL filled with cereal each morning. She eats 800-calorie lunches then 800-1000 calorie dinners and ends the day off with ice cream every day. She hasn't even tried to cut back even though she HAS to lose weight for her surgery. I try to help. I try to cook for her, I try to teach her to calorie count, my dad and I broke our backs (metaphorically) to get her a pool running so she could swim to help with weight loss.
She doesn't care. At all. She doesn't try. She doesn't want to lose weight - that couldn't be more clear. She likes eating and likes being, I hate to say it, lazy. If it wasn't for the hernia, she wouldn't try at all. She has lied to her doctors in front of my face (Covid means a lot of remote visits while I'm in the house).
She uses her stomach as a shelf to rest her plate on while she eats 1000 calories in one sitting and then makes someone else grab her a soda from the fridge. She throws her finished plate on the floor so the dog can lick it clean so she doesn't have to take it into the kitchen.
I love my mom. I do. But... I can't keep pretending I love what she's become. I don't respect her like I used to. I just can't. I want her to be better but she doesn't want that for herself.
My Sister.
She at least cares to some extent. She's around 300 pounds. She, like myself, is constantly jumping on the weight loss wagon before falling off again in a week or two. She sleeps all day. ALL day. Yes, she does suffer from depression, and yes, she is on meds and in contact with doctors to help her. But there's still a disconnect somewhere in there because she sleeps 14+ hours a day if she doesn't have to work. When she's not working, she's eating or sleeping. I've talked to her about maybe talking to her doctor about a different medication or dosage but that hasn't gone anywhere.
She keeps saying she wants to lose weight because she doesn't want to turn out like our mom, but all she does is write down recipes in pretty colors and then never do anything else with them. She wants a salad spinner so she can start making salads, so I asked her why she can't eat salads in the meantime? Apparently she physically cannot make salads without a salad spinner? She WANTS to lose weight, but she doesn't want to do anything required for it.
She visits most weekends and I try to get her to go on walks with me and she won't. She has a gym membership that she won't use. She KNOWS about calories but just refuses to pay attention to them.
Because she has specifically expressed wanting to lose weight, I've mentioned to her that surprisingly there are a LOT of calories in butter. I was genuinely surprised when I realized how much there were, so I thought it would help her to know as most meals are paired with buttered bread and that's easily 100-200 calories per meal she could avoid. She told me she doesn't care. Yet she wants to lose weight.
She's pre-diabetic. She knows she needs to lose weight. She prefers to just talk about losing weight to actually putting work in.
I love my sister, too. I really do. But I'm terrified of ever being her. And I can feel myself teetering on the edge. It's like I have two paths in front of me. One is the path she and my mom took. One is a path where I overcome my weight. I have one foot planted on the path of my mom and sister and it terrifies me.
Me.
I'm around 250 pounds (I've been too scared to weigh myself recently, I'll talk more about it further down). I'm a 23 year old female and I'm 5 foot tall. I'm DIRECTLY in my sister's shadow and I can feel the ground underneath me pushing me in my mom's path as well.
I'm a yo-yo dieter for sure. Once, long ago, I did it. I was a healthy weight, maybe had ten pounds left to lose. It was my senior year of high school. I calorie counted and ran (to the best of my out of shape abilities) every morning. It was amazing.
Then my mother had a cancer scare. Something about those months where we thought she had cancer triggered something in me. I stopped working out and eating right and I just haven't ever been able to go back to it in the same way as before.
I've suffered with bulimia and binge eating disorder for years. I'm convinced I have a food addiction. I was raised on foods I could make myself so my mom didn't have to cook - ramen and mac and cheese and corn dogs and hot dogs - and have a super limited taste palette as a result. These used to be my excuses as to why I couldn't lose weight. That and growing up fat in a fat family. They're not excuses any more. They're my reasons TO lose weight. I can't let this cycle keep going.
I will not become my sister. I will not gain that 50-100 pounds that separates us. I will not let myself stop trying like my mom. I won't have a child who I can't be there for because of my weight. My future children will NOT be embarrassed to bring friends home because of how much I weigh.
My child won't learn disordered eating from me.
I love myself. I don't love my body right now, but I respect it and it deserves better than this. I deserve better than this. I'm done with the yo-yoing. This is it. It HAS to be it. I have so much life left to live that would be held back and shortened by this weight. I won't let that happen.
Me. V2. Electric Boogaloo.
I always go in with an all or nothing attitude. EVERY time. I refused to do that this time. That's why I haven't weighted myself yet.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to just start walking again. Every morning. Didn't matter if it was 5 minutes or 20. I JUST wanted to develop a habit of walking every day. I use my old favorite running tool (Zombies, Run) to keep me motivated, and for a week that was all I cared about. Walking. With a liiiittle concern about what I eat, but not much.
Then, the next week, I started to count my calories. My TDEE is around 2500. So I just set my calorie limit to 2000. That way I wasn't going to make a huge shift to my diet at once but I could get back into the habit of counting calories and could relearn how many calories were in the food I ate.
That's brought me up to today, Sunday. I've successfully walked every single day the past 14 days except for one day. I've been under my 2000 calories every day except for one treat day, which I made sure to keep under that 2500.
I've successfully said no to fast food offered by my family twice this past week alone. Something I didn't know if I could ever do.
Saturday I did a test run of intermittent fasting with a slightly smaller fasting period, today I did the whole thing. Tomorrow I start intermittent fasting regularly and the calorie limit drops down and I keep walking. I still don't care how far or how long I walk. I just need to move.
This time genuinely feels different. I've forced myself not to do it all or nothing and to ease in and easing in has made it so much better. Tomorrow I weigh myself, and for now I'll just weigh once a week. I don't care how much weight I drop each week, not yet. As long as I slowly see a downward trend, I'm doing it right.
I have so much wisdom to gain from my family. Every day I see them doing the same things I do and I can finally see how much those hurt them, and subsequently hurt me.
I have to be honest, this post wasn't really just for you. It's so long, I doubt you read the whole thing. It was really for me. I needed to say this and I needed to say it someplace where it feels like it actually means something.
I hope that this isn't my last post. Accountability is the one thing that has been missing from every diet attempt so far, and I would love to finally have someone other than myself holding me accountable. Even if it's one person who bothers reading this.
I appreciate you.
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