Weighty Matters

This has been a long time coming, but is a difficult topic of discussion for me. It is something I have been very private about, but have realized it is only fear that is keeping me from talking about it and succeeding at it. I'm talking about my struggle with my weight. I'm going to tell you all my story.

I was a fat baby then a very thin child. However, once I hit puberty my body really began to change. I was by no means an overweight teenager, although, I really believed that I was. All through high school I thought I was fat, because I had a figure and very athletic looking "thick" legs and I guess I thought I should be rail thin. The summer in between my sophmore and junior year I actually really worked my rump off trying to lose weight and only lost 5 lbs., not because weight loss was an issue, but because I just didn't really have that much weight to lose. I'm only 5'5" and when I have had my body comps done have discovered that minus all of my body fat, I would still weigh almost 130 lbs. Which, I might add is the low end of my weight range on the BMI scale. 21 - 32% is a healthy body fat percentage for women. At the bottom end of that I would weigh about 160. So, all the time that I thought I was fat in school I actually had less than 20% body fat. I say all of that to say that no matter how hard I try, I will never be a supermodel. I will always have a curvy figure and I have come to accept that. So, when did my struggle with weight begin. You'd think it was while I was pregnant, but that's not exactly how it worked for me. I actually didn't gain very much weight with my pregnancies and lost the majority of it after I had my babies. My weight gain happens in the year after I give birth. After I married and before I had my girls I had gained about 5 lbs. When I left the hospital I was already at my pre-pregnancy weight. By my 6 week check-up I had gained 9 lbs. By the time the girls were a year old I had gained a total of 27 lbs. I stayed at that weight until I got pregnant with my son three years after the girls were born. I carried Mason 10 weeks longer than the girls and spent ten weeks on bed rest so I gained more weight than I did with them. However, it was almost the same story. I had 10 lbs. to lose after I had him, but ended up in the same pattern of gaining 30 more pounds in the first year after his birth. He is now 7 and in the last 6 years as a result of three surgeries I have gained an additional 9 lbs. So, as you can see I really don't have a weight gaining problem as long as I'm not having babies, but I do have a hard time losing. In total I have gained about 65 lbs. since giving birth to my daughters. I have only really tried once or twice to lose any weight. Once after Mason was born and once about 2 or 3 years ago. I just didn't want to be a yo-yo dieter. If I started trying to lose the weight I wanted it to be a permanent change. Hence the reason for the long blog post. I've decided not to operate out of fear anymore, so I am actually going to be public about this and make an announcement to all that read my blog. I am going to begin a weight loss program this week. It will truly have to be a long term change. My metabolism is very slow and there are a lot of overweight people in my family (as a matter of fact, my Dad had lap band surgery about a year and a half ago). My goals I think are fairly realistic. I do not expect to have my pre-pregnancy body back. I was almost 19 when I got married and almost 21 when we found out I was expecting, so it is not at all realistic to think that I would ever look exactly like that again. My goals are in baby steps of course I will have the small 5, 10, 20 lb. goals, but my first big one is not a weight it's a size. I want to shop in the Misses section again and I want to buy a bra that fits, without having to worry about special ordering. Maybe that's too much information, but I'm just laying it all out on the table.

My goals here are to keep the Lord as the focus of my weight loss. I want to commit this time to prayer and lean on Him to be all that I need while I'm going through this process. I want to feel better about myself and I want to be able to be as active as I once was. You may or may not know that I have had surgery on both of my knees because of a genetic defect that was aggravated by my times of bed rest with my pregnancies and by losing weight I will be getting pressure off of my knees and allow them to heal even more. I'll try to keep my blog updated probably weekly about how things are going. Please keep me in your prayers.