Then & Now, Part 3; Growing up as "The Fat Kid", More Rantings of The Angry Blonde

If you haven't done so already, you can read the 2 previous installments:

Then & Now, Part 1

Then & Now, Part 2

I could no longer go on living the way I had been living and I knew this...I also knew that I needed help. Having had a small and short-lived success with LA Weight Loss, prior to Michael coming into my life, I sought out the local center that had just opened in Daytona Beach. They didn't have to talk me into signing, I went in with a purpose, which was to get myself back on track and get my life back in order.

I signed the client agreement on January 5, 2005 and so my lifestyle change began. I stepped on the scale and was horrified to see the number...354lbs. Holy Cow! How did I gain that much weight back? I knew the answer to that...I had stopped focusing on me and what I started before meeting Michael, I had let my troubles with him take priority over what I wanted to accomplish. I don't want to make this chapter of my "Then & Now" series to be about Michael, so I will write more about him another time.

I began to learn more about eating then I had ever known before. I didn't get fat by not eating, all throughout my childhood, I gained weight year after year and it was from eating. A lot of my eating was a distorted version of self-love; it was the only thing that made me feel good. As I got older, I continued that self-love, but it was followed by self-loathing because I had eaten so much and because I was gaining more and more weight. My life turned into a vicious cycle of looking for love in all the wrong places, as the famous song goes. Looking for it in food, in the few friends that I had, which weren't really friends, looking for it in various boyfriends, but never finding the love and acceptance that I so desperately craved. So, I ate more.

Food of course, didn't love me back…I looked for love and acceptance in people, because it was something I'd never had. Not from my family, or their friends and not from any kids that I went to school with and certainly not from any father figure in my life. My birth-father disappeared after he and my mother were separated when I was 16…I saw him once in my early 20's and that was about it. When I was off in college in Ohio, I wrote my father many letters, but never received a response from him. My step-father was an emotionally, mentally and verbally abusive bastard, who several times tried to put his hands on me, but I never let him get far with that. I used to go on jobs with him a lot, he was nice to me then….but when I complained that I was tired, he'd tell me to put my feet in his lap and he'd rub them as we were driving, then his hands would wander up to my legs…it was not a rubbing that you would give someone that you were trying to give a massage to, or trying to relieve muscle pain…it was the kind of rubbing you do which is sensual and you're trying to turn your partner on. I recall one road trip where we were in NYC and there were prostitutes on the street, just outside of the NY Ship terminal where the cruise ships are docked, he stopped to look at one and she stood there in front of the van he was driving and opened her blouse up, exposing her breasts…he commented about how nice they were, but that mine were bigger. I would stop going with him not too long after that, I tried to tell my family what he was like, he wasn't nice to me any longer. This too is a story for another day.

Oh….and I ate more.

So, time and time again, while I looked for love and acceptance, I made a lot of mistakes and as a result, my emotions, self-esteem and self-confidence continued to crash and burn. While those aspects of my personality all continued to plummet, my weight continued to climb.

I was always overweight, apparently as the joke goes in my family, from the time I was almost 2 years old. When my mother went into the hospital to give birth to my brother, I went and stayed with my grandmother and they laugh as they tell people that I came home from her house a fat baby…it's a big joke to them. Both of my Grandmother's passed away when I was 9 or 10 years old and they did so within a few months of each other. But, while she was alive, I spent a lot of time with my mother's mom. I recall one point where I was so heavy as a child, that she expressed concern and I remember her telling me that if I lost weight, she would buy me an entire new wardrobe. This was exciting to me because I never had a lot of clothes. I don't think my parents had a lot of money, but that wasn't the reason…it was because back then they didn't make plus-size clothes for little girls and at the age of 7, 8, 9…it was very difficult to find clothes to fit a child who weighed probably 150lbs, give or take…so rather then put forth the effort to do so, my mother would get just one outfit and I would wear it every single day. It was clean, because she would wash it every night, but I still wore the same outfit day in and day out.

And, I ate more.

This clothing problem became an issue for me, as I got older and as I gained more weight. By the time I entered high school, I was extremely large, I can't give an exact figure, but I'm going to guess I was somewhere in the mid 200's. I had always been teased growing up, but in middle school and then after entering high school, I learned the hard way what it was like to be tortured and tormented by the other kids. And, they had plenty of things to torture me about. I had 1 outfit, it was a purple-ish women's style of the 70's leisure suit. It was the type of outfit someone who was 35-40 years old would wear, it was thick heavy polyester and this kind of fuscia, plum, purple color…just imagine a mixture of those 3 colors. There was no doubt that I was wearing the same clothes every day, I mean who in their right mind would buy more than one of these horrible things? On top of the clothes, I had a last name that just ached to be made fun of, I wore thick glasses and of course, I was the fattest kid they had ever seen. Torment? To simply say torment is an understatement…it was a never ending barrage of insults, laughter, making fun of and more. It would start from the moment I got to school, or ran into someone on the way there and it lasted throughout the day, then continued until I got out of range on the way home. When I began to have to take a school bus, I was unfortunately the first pick up in the morning and of course the last drop off at the end of the day. My fellow students had the joy of extending their torture for another hour in each direction.

I never learned how to handle their teasing, which was probably what started my low self-esteem and virtually non-existent self-confidence. When people tease and make fun of you relentlessly and you are made to believe it's your own fault, you don't learn how to just shrug it off, but instead, you internalize everything. And, of course…I ate more.

Yes, you read that last paragraph correctly; I grew up believing everything that happened to me was my own fault because I was overweight. All throughout my childhood I heard phrases such as "You're so smart! But…" or "You've got such a beautiful face! But…" Along with many other compliments, that "but" was always followed by "If only you weren't so heavy." What those people didn't realize, or perhaps they did and they didn't care, was that by adding that "but" to every sentence, they basically just wiped out any compliment given. If I said something about being teased, my mother would respond with "Well, what did you do to them?" And, when I replied that I hadn't done anything, she didn't believe me and said that I must have done something to make them tease me so endlessly, because they wouldn't just do it if I hadn't given them a reason. My mother (I don't recall ever having this discussion about this with my Father) taught me that it was my own fault that I was tormented by the other school kids because I was overweight and if I weren't overweight, then they wouldn't have any reason to tease me about it…my being overweight made her life difficult I suppose, but as a child, she never did anything to help me lose the weight.

Actually, let me correct that last statement about doing something in regards to my weight…when my Grandmother expressed her concern and made that deal with me about buying a new wardrobe, I joined a gym and my mother took me a few times. I really enjoyed the exercises they taught and I did end up losing weight. I was very proud of losing, but I only went a few times because my mother stopped taking me there and I guess I gained back the weight that I lost…and then some. And, I ate more.

Both Grandmothers passed away within a few months of each other and I was pretty sad, especially about my Mom's mom, because I was very close to her. When she passed away, I cried a lot because I was never going to see her again…"stop being stupid" I was told and sent to bed. And, I ate more.

My parents separated when I was 16 and as I said previously, my father pretty much disappeared from my life. I blamed myself for that too and probably thought that it was somehow related to my weight, but also, my father always made me feel like it was my fault he had to get married to my mother. After all, she got pregnant with me when she was 17 and he was 19, so they had to get married. If I hadn't been on the way then perhaps his life would have turned out differently…when you're a little girl and you are made to believe this, you don't know any better, so you think it's true.

And, you guessed it, I ate more.

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My Birthday; June 27th; Then & Now, Part 2: Rantings of The Angry Blonde

The Angry Blonde

Fri Jun 27

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