The Weight of the Matter

I broke the #2 rule of Weight Watchers (cause, of course the #1 rule of weight watchers is to not talk about weight watchers) and weighed myself before going to the meeting.

It said I gained. I went in and they said I lost 1.2 pounds.
Loudly, I exclaimed "Suck it, home scale!" and grinned.

Today I crammed my bottom half into a pair of jeans one size smaller than I wore this time last week and smiled.

I've struggled with weight my entire life from growing up with three tiny siblings (no, seriously, not sure any of them weigh over a full buck) and being called names having anything to do with lard by them as well - lardbutt and lardo were the most common.

Hurtful is putting it lightly; it was brutal. And if my parents tried to stop them, it fell on my deaf ears as the damage was done. When asked if I really wanted a second helping of corn or if I just enjoyed being fat (true story), it finally clicked in me that enough was enough.

Thanks in part to growing like a boy in 8th grade, and not eating breakfast or lunch and only dinner if I couldn't make plans with a friend, I was slim in high school. It took a lot of work to stay that way and I was tired and hungry most days.

But? I wasn't made fun of.

In fact, I made fun of others. I swore to my friend that if I ever, EVER had to wear a size Large in anything to just kill me because I'd be too fat to be worth living. (I'd kill to fit nicely into a size Large.) I was kind of a bully about it, but not to any one person and really, kind of to the old me.

It started to crumble when my teammates went to our cross country coach and told him I wasn't eating. He confronted me and there, in the halls of Jefferson Area High School, I cried on his shoulder. I started eating as little as possible to make them shut up and never told my family what happened although I'm not so sure that he didn't call my mother.

I was crushed. It was so hurtful to go from being told I was eating too much to being told I needed to eat more.

I couldn't win.

I gave up in college. I decided I didn't care anymore and on came the freshman 15 and it's been up and down ever since.

It took a long, long time for me to realize I was NORMAL and that my siblings, actually, were quite skinny. And when I asked my sister about it a few years back, I found out that she doesn't necessarily love it and would give almost anything to have some of my features (read: hips and boobs). Funny how you learn these things so much later than when it would have mattered most.

So you can imagine, that after only 5 weeks of Weight Watchers and losing a mere 10.2 pounds thus far, just how excited I was to not only get on the next size down but to get them buttoned AND STILL BREATHE. AND WALK. AND SIT.

And that? Is awesome.