Legitimate question. Rude and hurtful, but honest.

I weighed 392 pounds at my heaviest. I’m 5’7.

How did I get that fat?

The 5-second answer is embarrassingly simple. I ate too much and I hated to sweat.

The layered, nuanced answer requires you to peek inside my flawed thinking. And yes, I am nervous about opening this particular set of doors, thank you for asking. But it’s time to be honest.

Here is the how I got to be 392 pounds before I chose to do anything about it:

1.  I had a life-long, seriously screwed up relationship with food. It controlled me. I thought about food from the time I woke up, to the time I went to bed. I was addicted to food and the comfort it gave. I would make or change plans based on food. My happiest moments growing up are centered around food. You can’t not eat. You have to have SOME kind of relationship with food. Food owned me.
2. I had given up hope and was flirting non-stop with apathy. I knew I weighed a ridiculous amount. I had been overweight my entire life. Diets had failed me. Why bother? I was just destined to be fat. If society was hung up on looks — screw ’em. I knew I was a good person, the packaging should not matter
3. T2 diabetes could easily be managed with drugs. I didn’t need to do the work. And how serious was it really? Plenty of people lived long lives with T2. Giving myself shots? There were worse things.
4. To reverse this train wreck would take serious work. I knew it would be unbearably hard work. Work you could never, ever stop doing.
5. I had failed every single ‘diet’ I had ever tried. Every. Single. One. Fen-phen. Nutrisystems. Weight Watchers. Alli. Medi-fast. South Beach. Atkins. Jenny Craig. Cabbage soup. You name it… I tried and failed at it.
6. I was hiding. Wait.. What? Those who know anything about me know that I am an unabashed extrovert. I am a genuinely happy person and in most cases – a totally open book. I also happen to have severe self-confidence issues about my body. Staying fat kept me well protected from dealing with unwanted attention. I have always been uncertain and nervous around men. Being fat kept me padded from comments or attention and was the perfect solution. I was not the pretty friend, I was the funny, kind friend who was the trustworthy side-kick. I could be happy and work hard and be confident about everything else in my life and yet successfully hide from the world in plain sight as a fat woman.

Ouch.

Getting to be grossly overweight is like the analogy of how to boil a frog. If you boiled a pot of water and then threw a frog in, it would immediately hop back out to safety. BUT if you took the same frog and placed him in a cold pot of water and turned up the heat gradually… You would wind up with perfectly boiled frogs’ legs. They don’t realize what’s happening. They don’t feel a need to jump to safety. They accept each passing moment as their new reality. It eventually kills them.

You get to be 392 pounds because you very slowly adapt and change to your increasing bulk. It never alarms you in the day to day. You just wake up one day and realize you weigh 392 pounds.  And it’s killing you.

It has taken years and miles of running and some blessedly patient friends with good listening skills to help me understand exactly how best to begin to answer this tough question…

*Work in progress. Stay tuned.*

I get asked a lot of questions about my journey in reversing type 2 (T2) diabetes and finding a healthy life.  LOTS.

They are probing, emotion-laden, frantic, rude, personal, funny.  They are never easy to answer. These are not casual questions, even if it might seem that way on the surface.

I began compiling a list of some of the FAQ’s and conversations starters that I have encountered these past 3+ years. The list is three pages long, single-spaced. I wasn’t kidding.  I told you… I get asked a lot of questions.

I also get asked at least weekly if I have a blog.

I do now.

I want to answer those questions. My answers are based only on my personal experience with this roller coaster of adopting a new lifestyle. I will be honest about the tough stuff that comes with mega-weight loss and battling T2 and learning to love being physically active.

Now for the disclaimer: I’m obviously not a doctor. I’m just a stubborn, former fat girl who decided she wanted something different. And started fighting for it.  And continues to chase it down each and every day. That’s all the credentials I can offer up.

I can talk about what it feels like to have a triple-digit weight loss staring you in the face.  I totally understand having tried every diet/pill/magic remedy no matter how ridiculous or questionable or unsafe. I know what it is like to be told to exercise when walking out to your car after work saps every spare ounce of energy you have left.  I will never forget the overwhelm when my doctor explained my T2 diabetes diagnosis, shoved packages of needles and syringes in my hands and let me walk out the door with no instructions on how to actually give myself an injection. I was told to ‘eat better’. Whatever in the hell that meant…  I mean my track record and the scale would prove that perhaps the judgement needed to ‘eat better’ was not one of my stronger skills.

There was no one to help me navigate those confusing and isolated paths. I would love to be the help or encouragement for someone that I really, really needed back when my health started to unravel. This is no way discounts my friends who never left my side.  But I desperately needed to talk to someone who had been in those 400 pound shoes. Someone to offer up a word of advice as I struggled to figure out a relationship with food that was overtly and ‘suddenly’ a poison to my T2 system. Someone to talk to me about starting to exercise when you wear 4X clothing.

How did you let yourself get so fat?

How did you learn to love running, because I absolutely HATE exercise?

So… Are you telling me that I can never eat ice cream/candy/cake/pie/pizza again?  Ever?

I have to lose so much weight this is impossible.

What’s your secret?  There must be some sort of secret…

I have found a scant handful of folks who have successfully reversed T2. And fewer folks who have lost significant amounts of weight and are successfully keeping it off.  (Surgical or not…)  It’s a lonely little club. Right now at least.

My new-found passion and quest in life?  Find others facing and battling T2.  Find others who are ready to tackle weight loss, want to learn to love exercise and understand that means they have to embrace radical lifestyle shifts.  I will help where I can with support and encouragement. I want to use what I have learned to HELP people.

I would love to grow this lonely little club into a freaking monster tribe of healthy and active friends.