My Weight Journey
“One and two and three and four and get them situps right in, Tuck yo tummy tight and do your crunches like this” New Workout Plan- Kanye West
I’d love to write about how I’m on the wonderful journey of weight loss. How life, Covid, stress has caused me to sin in the form of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and double bacon cheeseburgers but I haven’t seen the glorious light and have repented in the name of weight loss. That’s not what this is about. In fact, I’ve gained a whopping 35 pounds on top of the 15 pounds I was already overweight and don’t have any real intentions of losing them. This isn’t a sympathy post. It’s not a post about glorifying weight gain. It’s Shane’s weight reality post and it will be full of somethings that are uneducated and hopefully funny.
I currently stand 5’7 ish maybe a half or a full inch taller, weighing 190 pounds. The last time I weighed 190 pounds I was about 7 months pregnant with my half-giant baby who came out at 10 pounds 9 ounces. After I had my son, I wasn’t happy with my weight but my return to work full time and breastfeeding helped get me down to about 170. From there I managed to diet and exercise myself down to 150. At the time I weighed 150 I thought I was still big. I wore a size 8-10 in women’s clothing. Because my son was too big to pass through my lack of hips I had an emergency C-Section for his birth. This near-death experience caused pain, scaring, and a one-year delay in my ability to work out my midsection. My FUPA laughed at the audacity of me trying to look slimmer with body shapers. For the first 3 years of my son’s life I would continually receive “are you pregnant?” questions. Dealing with postpartum and body image issues, I was in a mix between being offended and ashamed of being shaped the way I was. It didn’t help that I was naturally shaped like a rectangle, Spongebobish to be more exact. The little cushion God had given me on my lower buttcheeks and enhanced breast size was quickly evaporating as my baby weight started to drop. I had a poor self-image and wanted a change.
I refused to pay someone to help me lose weight. Money for me was tighter with the baby and I figured if Oprah is rich and still fat even though she’s promoted weight watchers, what difference would paying money to lose weight do? I downloaded a free tracking app, created inspiration boards, and started working out from home. I’d celebrate each pound lost with a gift to myself. I’d sometimes fast, which is basically timed starvation. I drank more water, I ate more veggies. I did it. I got down from 220 pounds to 150 pounds. My son is 10 years old. So for the decade of 2011 to now I’ve fluctuated in weight up and down 150-170, but never over 170.
2019 came around and while most people will tell you 2020 was the worst, I’ll tell you my 2020 had a PMS phase a year earlier. Having the role of a General Manager commuting 1.5 hours each way every day, being a mom of a child on the spectrum who is suddenly acting out, and being married to someone that I wasn’t trusting at the time was taking a huge toll on me. In every role, I felt like I was giving 200% and I wasn’t giving myself enough. I was ready to break all the way down. During the winter holidays, I quit my job of almost 6 years that I worked hard to get to find peace. I started to feel closer to balance. I was able to leave my work at work and face home head-on. I spent more time with my son and uncovered the challenges he was facing. I tried really hard to be the wife I thought I needed to be and worked on the intimacy in our relationship. Work and mom roles were connecting but the wife role was still out of sync.
2020 comes and life hits me fast. It wasn’t the feeling that Covid made my life suck, even though it did. It was the feeling that my life sucked before Covid and the world may be ending. If you were living your last days, is this how you’d want to end them? I sat on my back porch one day and asked myself this. It was at this moment that I realized that how I’d lived, enjoyed, and/or hated my life up until this point was my choice. I had an honest conversation with my spouse and told him that I wasn’t in love anymore. Very rapidly this moment of honesty spiraled into conversations about divorce.
Following the separation, I thought I needed to get in shape to love myself. I thought I needed to look more like an Instagram model. I even considered plastic surgery once or fifty-seven times. I met someone. This person seemed to like me the way that I was. This person has a love for food as much as I love food. This person cooks for me and feeds me. Literally feeds me. Every time I complain about my shape, my size, or my weight, this person affirms my beauty. This person speaks more positivity in my image than I ever had from head to toenail. The funny thing about everything you want in life is you have to really want it to achieve it.
To be continued..