I thought I'd give you a little background on my life and share some of my dirty secrets with you. Well, not the GOOD dirty secrets; those are for another blog, lol. But these are the secrets that accompanied me on my journey growing up and growing out.
I've always been overweight, even as a little kid, but as a little kid I loved playing outside and being active as much as I loved curling up with a stack of books. When I was in pre-school I was in gymnastics. In elementary school I'd ride my bike for hours, and when I was a teenager, for miles. At 8 I was the only girl on an all-boys soccer team in an all-boys soccer league - this was the 80's, not many girls did stuff like that then. When I was 12 I started karate and continued for three years, until I got my brown belt. The same year I also moved up from my plastic kids bow to a real compound bow and started making my own arrows with my dad and competing in archery tournaments (my favorites were the ones where you had to hike through the woods looking for the 3-D targets). For three years in high school I was in the matching band, which meant after school and summer practices as we perfected walking straight lines in five-eights, mastered songs like Mustang Sally, Glad All Over, Touch Me, and the theme from Shaft, and choreographed ourselves into the EP logo of my school so we could play and dance to YMCA for the football half-times shows. My Junior year I was on the tennis team. And if it was about 60 degrees, you could always find me in a pool.
Despite all this, I was fat in junior high, and fatter in high school. I weighed about 180 lbs when I was 12, and when I graduated high school at 18 years old, I was wearing a size 18 (and barely fitting in them) and probably weighed about 250 lbs.
How did I gain that weight if I was active? Easy peasy, twice as cheesey: the older I got, the less active I got, until I was struggling to keep up with my line in marching band and faking playing my instrument as I wheezed to try and catch my breath and wondered what would happen if I fell down and died right there on the 50 yard line. Knowing my band instructor, he would have given three sharp blasts on his whistle, the signal to ignore the mistake and keep plying as if nothing has ever happened.
Oh yeah, and I ate a lot of really bad for me foods. Mmmmm...cheese....
Along with the lazy and foodie sides to my personality, I also had a strong crazy side to deal with. My usual routine for that involved eating, crying, eating more, ranting and raving, screaming and in general having a temper tantrum like a three year old, eating again, crying, eating, slipping into lethargy and depression, and eating. Then I'd emerge from my food and depression coma, be good for a time being, sometimes three days, sometimes three weeks, and repeat the process all over again. Although this really grew to a head when I was in high school, it started when I hit puberty, and the first sign of my mental illness (or, as I like to call it, my trips to Funky Town), was when I had a breakdown and started having panic attacks when I was 7.
Sadly, I didn't get the help I needed for this until after my second breakdown, when I was 21 and a senior in college. Even worse, that was just me dipping my toe in the water. It took years of medication changes, self reflection, bouts of severe depression, and therapy to get where I am now.
Where am I now, you ask?
I'm good. I'm about 75% less crazy then I used to be (according to my therapist and my Mom, lol), and the remaining crazy is the good kind; the kind that makes me fun and eccentric, funny and unique. The kind that makes me, me.
And that's why I decided now was the time to tackle the other big issue in my life: my lack of movement. My weight. My laziness. The fat ass-print permanently ingrained in my leather sofa.
I've rescued myself from Funky Town. Now I need to rescue myself from Cupcake-Landia!
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