Rock Bottom

(Caution! This is my first post and I started my blog where I started my most recent journey out of the land of fat. It is dark and depressing. If you are weak of heart, or just not in the mood to read the inner thoughts of a fat girl hitting rock bottom, this first post is not for you. However, it is necessary for me to write it out because the truth will set me free!)



I am a Food Addict. Hard to say but completely true. I love food. Food is my lover, my friend, my God and my executioner. And I am fat...ultra morbidly obese actually. My top weight was over 500 pounds but unrecorded because there was no medical scale capable of weighing me. That was in 1988. On April 5, 2008, I weighed in at a trim 484 pounds. Today, I heard a person say, "I am digging my grave with a fork and a spoon." And I thought to myself, me too.

Why am I fat? Because, historically, I have made poor food choices. But I was fat at age 6. Why can some people eat and metabolize their food more effectively than others? Who knows? Not me, for sure, but it is a question I have pondered for 33 years. Other people can eat chocolate chip cookies and Ben & Jerry's ice cream and french fries and Tim's Cascade Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips and not get fat, so why can't I? I even have friends in my life who fall into this category. In fact we have bellied up to many a restaurant table together and consumed great food and mediocre food with very different results. But I digress...

After 33 years of inconsistent dieting, exercise, hypnosis, self help books, prayers where I pleaded and begged with God, a $25,000 weight loss surgery and a most recently failed attempt at Jenny Craig...I hit rock bottom. So many 12 steppers talk about rock bottom but I was never sure where that was exactly...and who cared really...because they were crazy, drunken, drugged out, 12 steppers. Around the end of March 2008 I bought a one-way ticket to rock bottom and it was NOT a fun trip.

My legs and feet were so swollen I could hardly walk. I had fluid building up all over my body and in my chest. I could not breathe. My joints and my back ached. I couldn't stand in place more than about 2 minutes and I couldn't walk any further than about 25 yards. When I was awake I was exhausted and when I should have been sleeping I was in pain. Short term memory vanished. Me, the one who can repeat conversations from 10 years ago verbatim, could not remember the answer to a simple question I may have asked only 10 minutes ago. And my spunky, happy-go-lucky personality was no where to be found.

And I couldn't turn to God for help because I wasn't talking to Him. After all, where was He when I needed Him? I mean, if He really loved me He might have answered at least a few of the many prayers I tossed up over the years...right? But more likely, He thought I wasn't worth the effort. And who could blame Him. Certainly not me. I knew, deep down, in the places we don't talk about at parties, that I was no damn good. Unlovable and hopeless.

So now what? I could kill myself, but really it's just too messy and I'm a coward. Or I could just keep eating and go out real slow and painful. Or I could try and find a way out of my deep dark hole...AGAIN.

Believe it or not, I'm an optomist. In college, a friend told me I was like Pollyana because I always played the "glad game". No matter what the crisis or problem you can choose to find a positive side. So I forced myself to search for a positive and I found one. It was a bit of a gloomy positive, but a positive...I'm not dead, yet. There it was. In all its glory. I'M NOT DEAD, YET!

But did that really matter? Maybe the future was inevitable. Maybe I had done irrepairable damage to my body. "So, then, what do I have to lose," my internal, optimistic voice asked quietly. And I listened to that still small voice.