Moving

Hi Everyone!  I have started my own website that includes my own blog!  Come visit and follow me there.  It is still in progress, but you can come on over!  http://www.mjryall.com/

#5

Long time, no post!  So I have been really struggling with my weight loss to the point where I have gained myself back up to 352 pounds!  What have I done?  I quit smoking and immediately turned to food.  Not a good thing at all!  I feel completely depressed, disgusted and I feel like a failure.  I know what I need to do, but getting back to where I was at seems an impossible task.  What to do, where to go, what to wear?  Those are todays questions.....

#4 - Struggles

The weight loss journey for most people is filled with struggles. Unless of course you are one of the lucky few that hits your goal without ever gaining a pound! I am not one of those people. (Insert sarcastic comment here...)! I started out at almost 400 pounds. By the time I actually hit my goal weight of 150, i will have lost over 225 pounds. Yes, that makes me obese. And yes, i am still obese. Struggling sucks. It's like you get in this groove and then you stumble and fall. I think the trick is to get back up and start walking again. That is the trick that most of us really need to learn.

In 2008 I got down to my lowest weight of 252.8 pounds. And then came my first fall. It is a little weird for me to say this, but before I knew it, I started to gain weight. I received an award in my TOPS club that year. I was the Division 1, 2nd place winner for the state of Oregon. By the time the state recognition days came around in April of 2009, I found myself up 20 pounds. I had to struggle to lose enough to go on stage and accept my award. I managed to do it by the skin of my teeth. As soon as the recognition days were over, however, I just kept going up. I was not eating right and I was not exercising. By the time Christmas came around in 2009, I was back up to 303 pounds. I had another wake up moment. Oh my god! How could I gain almost 50 pounds back. Did I not feel happy with all of that weight gone? Did I not realize how much work I put in to take off over a hundred pounds? The answer was yes, I did know all of this but old habits die hard and apparently I did not make sure mine were dead before I buried them. Like zombies, they rose from the grave and tried to eat me! Damn zombies!

So hitting over 300 pounds again, I freaked out and got hardcore for awhile. I dropped back down to 272 pounds. I was on my way again, thank the lord! Unfortunately, I fell again. I gained weight again and I was 292 pounds. This yo-yo stuff is for the birds I tell you! So now I am back on track and focused on losing my weight. I have come to the realization that, yes I fell hard and I backslid. But if I look into the past, I see that before, I never kept weight off. I lost and then I gained it all back, plus more. I have not done that this time. I still have over 80 pounds off of me and this is an amazing accomplishment all on its own! I can do this. Even with the struggles and the falls. I spent years adding weight to my body and destroying its vitality day by day. I spent years so depressed that all I knew how to do was eat. So what if it takes another year or so to reach my goal. The point now is that I WILL reach my goal.

To be continued.....

#3 - The Wake Up Moment

Someone asked me to share my wake up moment and I am not really sure if there was one amazingly clear perfect moment that screamed "hey fat ass, wake up!" I mean, there were so many things that can lead up to the point where you just can't take it anymore. I remember standing at a bus stop after work. I was minding my own business and this guy walks by. He stopped right in front of me and very loudly exclaims "your so fat I don't know what to think." I was so embarrassed and immediately angry. Who the hell was he to say such a thing to me and so loudly the whole world could hear? Of course the thought never crossed my mind that my "excess FAT" was there for all the world to see! I mean, I am standing there in my size 54 pants and 7XXL shirts. Yes I was that big! I had to do all my clothes shopping via catalog. Gotta love that one!

Then there was that moment in the ER where the doctor came back and asked me if I was diabetic. I emphatically said "No". Why would they even ask me that kind of question? The doctor looked at me and said that I was spilling sugar into my urine. Apparently this is not a good sign. They took my blood sugar and it was 350. Wow. I remember going home afterwords and crying, I had weight onset Type 2 Diabetes. I went to the store and bought a cake and a gallon of ice cream, came home and ate it. I guess that was not my wake up either.

I finally got insurance through work so I was able to go to the doctor on a regular basis. They started with Labs to test my A1C (this test shows you what your blood sugars have been for the previous 3 months). When the labs came back I got more great news! High cholesterol, high blood pressure, high everything. My CT scan results from the prior ER visit came back too. Fatty Liver and Kidney Stones. Yay me! I was on a roll! Wake up moment? NO.

I was laying on the couch watching TV and my phone rang. This was in the summer of 2007, about 4 months after all of the health issues coming into light. I tried to get up and couldn't. I literally could not get up from a lying down position. I was way too big and had no upper body strength. I had to roll myself off the edge of the couch, let myself painfully hit the floor and then use the coffee table and the couch to pull myself up. Again, no upper body strength, so this was quite a process. Also, it hurt! Another moment, but not the one!

My blood sugars started hitting into the 600's. I was forgetting things and my work life was suffering. The only thing that I could focus on was eating. Which was making things worse. Although I did not care too much. I did not want to think about having all of these medical issues.
Friends and family were becoming more and more concerned. They would tell me that I needed to lose weight for my health and that I was not looking good. Hello people! I was 400 pounds, I know I did not look good! Contrary to popular belief, most fat people know they are FAT! We usually are the hardest on ourselves for it and nothing you say will penetrate into our brains enough to make a change! I had to get to a point on my own!

I almost got fired from my job because I was not taking care of myself. Did this wake me up? Not really. I mean, I did not want to lose my job, but life was not very pretty for me. I was in a major depression and could not get out of it. Looking back I can tell you now that I truly hated myself. I was killing myself bite by bite, hiding away the real me behind layers of fat. I could not and would not love myself enough to change.

In early October of 2007, I lost my apartment to mold. I lost all of my personal belongings along with the apartment. Mold had gotten into everything and I had not even known. I had no money saved up and had nowhere to go. Thankfully, my parents let me come and live with them for a bit so I could save up for a new apartment. It was kind of weird. All of a sudden I was living out in the boonies with my mom and dad and eating normal food with them. I had no money to eat out, so I had to eat like them.

My mom was overweight almost her whole life and she was in the process of losing herself. When I moved in she had about 40 pounds to go to reach her goal. She was looking really good and I was so proud of her. She was in a group called TOPS, which is a support group for "taking off pounds sensibly". She kept pushing me to join and I kept saying maybe later. In early November of 2007 I weighed myself and I was down 25 pounds! I was in shock! I was losing weight from eating real food. Who knew?!

It was that moment on the scale. That one shocking, exciting, Oh My God moment that I saw the tiniest bit of light at the end of the tunnel. One thought crossed my mind over and over. "MAYBE I COULD DO THIS!"

Go figure! I had all of these moments that you would think would have made the light bulb above my head turn on. It never did. My wake up moment was my first positive experience on this very long journey ahead of me.

To be continued.....

#2 - The Beginning, How I Ate

If I can describe my eating in one word it would be - "endless". In order for you to understand my eating I have to start at the beginning. Apparently I was a normal weight child until I was about six years old. I can remember starting kindergarten way back when and both of my parents worked to support the family. My mom would drop me off at the local church who provided childcare before school. I would basically eat breakfast at home, go to the church and eat breakfast again and then go to school and eat breakfast again. I started gaining weight and the eating disorder began.

I became an overweight child and the problems with food progressed. If you get queasy, stop reading because I am getting down to the nitty gritty! As I got older I started stealing food from neighbors houses so I could go hide away and eat and eat and eat. I have a younger brother and sister and I started conning them out of the food on their plates. I just couldn't get enough food. When I was ten years old I began sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to get into the food. If there was food sitting out from dinner, I ate it. It did not matter if it was gross or cold, I just needed it in my stomach. I remember the first time when leftovers were nowhere to be found. I was so hungry and I needed food. I happened by the garbage can and saw food that was thrown away from dinner the night before. I could not help myself, I had to eat. The compulsion was overwhelming. I took the food from the garbage and I ate it. I know what you thinking, "that is sooo gross!" Well, that was the nature of my addiction.

When I was around 12 or 13 I started to steal money from my mom so I could go buy food. One of the most memorable moments of my life was when I went to the store and bought; a loaf of bread, 2 packages of hot dogs, 2 boxes of macaroni and cheese, a gallon of milk, a whole cake, 5 candy bars and 2 half gallons of ice cream. Sounds like a lot of right? It was and I cooked everything up, locked myself in the bathroom and ate every single bit of it.

That is what I did for several years. As I got older, my body image became an issue. I decided to start throwing up after these binges. I threw up on purpose for the first time in junior high. I just knew that it was going to help lose weight. Boy was I wrong! I continued gaining weight and on top of that I started getting bloody noses from the stomach acids eroding my nostrils. The enamel on the back of my teeth was eroding as well and I started having issues with my bowels! No it was not fun. I actually had to have my nose cauterized 4 times!

My parents started noticing a problem when they realized food was disappearing and they were finding wrappers hidden all over the house. My dad even went so far as to install locks on the fridge, freezer and all of the cupboards. I hate to say it, but all that did was teach me how to pick locks!

I am glad to say that I figured out that the whole binge and purge thing was not working. I went on a path of recovery. It was pretty hard to stop the puking thing because I had gotten so good at it that all I had to do was flex my stomach and I would get sick. But get over it I did. I did not get over eating though. I just kept getting fatter with every bite.

I hit the 300 pound mark in high school. I became an adult and all I could do was think of food. I binged til I was so full and then I would sleep, wake up, eat, sleep, wake up, eat. It was a never ending cycle.

When i hit my thirties my typical eating was insane. Fast food and loads of sugar. I would stop somewhere and pick up 4 burgers, 2 fries and soda. Then I would stop at the store and grab a double layer cake, a gallon of ice cream and bags of chips for snacks. When I got home I would get comfortable, set up all the food and eat it all. I could polish off a cake in one sitting.

And that is how I came to be 35 years old and almost 400 pounds and sicker than I could even imagine.

To be continued.....