5/14/10 A Walk Through History...

 As much as I would like a positive declaration and attitude to be sufficient in the road to weight loss, it's much more complicated than that.  Sure it will take hard work to lose weight, but even that effort and discipline doesn't guarantee it will all come off or stay off.  If we are to truly get out from the inertia and comfort of addictive eating, we must look back on how it all began.  For some it's a lifetime, for others it may be a decades, years or months.  When and what caused the shift from healthy to unhealthy food choices?
As much as I want to stay in this feel good mode I'm in now,  I need to also look back at my weight gain history to see how, when and why it may have happened.  If I don't try to understand and study this personal history, then that old saying "History will repeat itself," could become a reality for me once more.  I've come too far now to allow myself to gently fall back into my old self defeating eating habits and choices again.

Looking back into my personal  history vault, I see my first real issue with weight gain happening after our miscarriage in the fall of 1997 which was within a year after my father's death.  In the summer of 1997, we had our first round of IVF which looked successful at first, but then began to unravel before I hardly began to show.  It seemed that 2 of the 3 embryos took.  However, one  died shortly after implantation and then just days shy of my second trimester, the other one died as well.  It was earth shattering.   It felt like this quest for children would remain unanswered forever.  It also seemed that no one else seemed to understand the pain of infertility that we were going through.
That Thanksgiving shortly after our miscarriage, it was as if we were expected to act like nothing happened and join the family for dinner, etc.  I remember being desperate for validation of my feelings.  My husband and I both agreed it was too soon to be surrounded by a house full of children and chose not to join the festivities that year.  I remember measuring my waist during my pregnancy and how it was obviously growing.  After the baby was gone the expanded waist size stayed.  I just couldn't shake the extra inches and pounds.  Then I took more infertility drugs for further procedures to no avail and the weight seemed to be steadily creeping up little by little.

I tried Atkins and the South Beach diets.  I finally joined Weight Watchers and  lost almost 30 pounds.  I got back into running and walking fairly regularly and was experiencing good health.  Around that time, just three years after our miscarriage, we adopted our precious daughter.   A couple years later we moved into a new home.  It was at that time I made a pretty stupid choice took some Adderal pills I had left from when I was convinced I had ADD.  I took them like one would take uppers while redecorating our new home.  I'd stay up super late plastering and wall papering, etc.  The next day I'd do it again.  Here I was, a stay at home mom doing all the things a mom does for her child in addition to getting everything done at record speed with the help of the Adderal.  Oh, it all got done quickly alright.  I removed and wallpapered 7 rooms within a week.  I even plastered and faux painted one of the bathrooms.  As you can imagine, operating on little sleep and a lot of adrenaline shortchanged my family, especially our daughter considerably.   I'd get so disappointed and resentful when she stopped napping at 2 years old.  I remember one particularly stressful day when I tossed my daughter onto the bed, shut the bedroom door and yelled from the other side, "NOW GO TO SLEEP!!"  My poor daughter just wailed until I came to my senses shortly after and rescued her from her nap time imprisonment.  I was getting irritable and moody regularly.  Where did my faith go during this time?  Where did I let God into my daily reality?  I would read the Bible only selectively.  Sure I was going to church, but I wasn't really focused on the teachings or implementing what the Bible taught in my home.  I decided to see a Psychiatrist who was convinced after a 5 minute question/answer review with me that I must be manic depressive.  I never divulged that I'd been misusing Adderal nor did he ask what medicines I was taking.  I was eager to stop being irritable and moody so I took the medications he  prescribed. However, the medicine he gave me just made things worse and gave me side effects of anxiety and weight gain.  I was not only anxious now, but constantly hungry.  The pounds started pouring on.

It wasn't until about a year later that we realized I was mot only misdiagnosed with ADD, but Manic Depression as well.  There are definitely real cases of these illnesses out there, but there are many people like myself that are hastily misdiagnosed with some sort of mental illness due to a temporary stressful situation or other influences and given potent medicines as a quick fix instead.  I'm just thankful we didn't continue blindly down the "I'm different so there must be something wrong with me" path.

So I got off all those meds that were an attempt to fix something that wasn't broken, but still had the extra pounds from the treatment to deal with.  I tried Weight Watchers again, but this time it didn't seem to click for me.  I was getting fed up with my lackluster results and asked my husband if he and his Bible study group would add me to their prayer list.  Within a week I found out about the book "Eat To Live,"

by Dr. Joel Fuhrman thanks to one of our employees.  I read this book from cover to cover and made the connection not only between food and addictive eating, but between food and disease.  I stopped eating animal products and started feeling better almost immediately.  The weight fell off and before I knew it, I was venturing into a 40 day fast.  In the first week of the fast I was off all my asthma medicine.  I did so well sticking to a mostly vegan diet.  Fast forward to 2007-2009 and I see myself choosing to make less than healthy food choices while under the stress of our financial situation and then losing both of my mother and father-in-law a week apart from each other.  It's not necessarily that I was simply using food as a comfort, but that I let my defenses down so to speak.  I chose to conveniently "forget" on a consistent basis, why I had originally chosen not to eat certain foods.  I was now eating cheese,  meats, sweets and other fatty processed foods that are highly addictive.  Before I new it I gained 30 pounds and was starting to wheeze again.

 So here I am today since I bit the bullet and chose to get off the mindless eating train.  I am nowhere close to my healthy goal weight yet, but I'm implementing healthy habits and choices daily.  I get to continue to stay grounded in the One who created me through prayer and His Holy Word.   As AW Tozar once said "An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him very quickly."

It is those times when I was scattered in my focus and didn't look to God solely for the support I needed that I've tarried into times of stress and the less than stellar fruits of those stresses.  Yes, a journey into one's history vaults can be a little dark at times, but it's just for a visit not a season.  As I revisit those dark places I do so with the lamp of the Lord.  "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path."  Psalm 119:105