I’m not a huge complainer. I am 32 years old and so far have been blessed with general good health, a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter without too many stressful situations in my life. I hear this from people all the time ‘You are big but you carry your weight well’. Girl I do it because I have to, who am I gonna leave the weight with?
I think of myself as a generally happy person, hardly jolly all the time but I don’t often lose my temper and I try to look on the bright side of life most of the time.
My body however has not always processed stress (whether physical or emotional) very well and the result has been for me to have a tendency to hold on to body fat. I have been overweight since I was a child of 5 or so. People ask me all the time if something stressful happened at that age but it truly didn’t I just started gaining weight.
I went on my first diet at around 13 years old when my mum took me to the family doctor to see if she could help with my weight issue. Low fat was the only prescription in those days and I followed the diet faithfully for about week before it was abandoned. The rest of my childhood went by with short stints at dieting (usually portion control) that usually lasted less than 2 weeks. I never did lose any significant amount of weight.
At around 14 I decided to become a vegetarian which lasted all of 3 months, again without any significant weight loss. As an adult I discovered Atkins when it was all the rage circa 2001. I went on a near zero carb diet, I ate no vegetables my only carbs coming from a teaspoon of ketchup with every meal. I lost 8 pounds that first week and despite feeling tired and lethargic I thought I had finally found the holy grail of weight loss so I kept at it.
I lost 4lb in the second week and over the next 3 months, the weight loss was painfully slow. In total I went from 236 lb to my lowest weight of 201 lb. Inexplicably though at this point despite remaining almost zero carb, I started regaining and my weight finally settled at 214, a far cry from the permanent weigh loss Atkins promised! I am 5 6″ so my ideal weight would be between 140-150.
Unable to take the exhaustion of the low carb lifestyle any more, I added in some vegetables, to deal with chronic constipation plus nut based baked goods (low carb of course) to deal with chronic boredom with food. Slowly the weight crept back up. I’m not sure exactly when I threw in the low carb towel but eventually my weight went back to my starting point actually overshooting it and finally settled at 250 lb.
For the next ten years, believing that low carb was the only way that I would ever hope to lose even a little weight (despite the poor results the first time round), I convinced myself that maybe I hadn’t stayed on zero carb long enough or maybe I was doing low carb wrong, I wasn’t eating enough fat blah blah.
I continued trying to recapture the effect of my first low carb diet. But my body was on to me. My body remembers the low carb way of eating too well and resists it completely. Soon I was unable to last more than a week every time I resolved to low carb again. I must have restarted low carb 2 times a year for 10 years but was never able to last for more than a few days. The last time I tried, I couldn’t even manage a full day before my brain demanded food!
I tried weight watchers numerous times too and I was always able to stick to my plan but after losing a pound or two in the first week I was completely unable to get my weight to budge. I must have done 3 rounds of weight watchers at 3 months per time and never lost anything worth speaking of.
I went completely vegan for 6 months at some point, again, no weight loss. Even when eating McDougall no fat vegan style, I didn’t lose a single pound! I lost about 10 pound a few years ago doing the HCG diet but at just 500 calories per day, I was climbing the walls with hunger and needless to say, as soon as the week was over I regained that weight pretty sharpish.
Body December 14 2012
Eventually I came to the conclusion that only weight loss surgery would work for me so I bit the bullet and had a gastric band installed. That was a year ago this past October. Actually I weighed myself on the 27th of October my 1 year anniversary and I weighed 250.06 lb. I weighed in at 250.8 lb right before I went for gastric band surgery!
I literally burst out laughing as I was writing this because it is so inexplicably ridiculous the idea that you can force your body into a diet with a band around your stomach! My body fought back by lowering my metabolism & body temperature so that I was freezing even in the summer. I also lost the urge to leave the house and do anything even resembling exercise hence keeping my energy expenditure low. The net effect is that I remained the exact same weight despite eating much less.
In late October I got all the liquid taken out of my band because it was serving no purpose. I now eat to satiety, sometimes stuffed-dom but my weight has remained the same, 250 seems to be my weight ceiling.
Oddly enough I don’t regret my decision to have the gastric band. I spent £6000 to have it put in and will probably have to spend the same to have it taken out eventually but it taught me a valuable lesson about my body. I can’t force it into weight loss by trying to manage my calories, carbs or fat. My body has to want to lose weight.
I will never stop trying to get my dream body, simply because the person who never quits, never fails so I am certain that eventually I will find a way. I’ve got a cunning plan in the works right now actually . . . more on that later.
