What Led To This

So yesterday I spent the better part of my time putting together this blog and got absolutely no exercise in so I am making today officially day one!  I'm still working out the kinks here so forgive me if it doesn't go smoothly but I'm sure I'll find a posting groove rather quickly.  I feel as though I should begin with just a smidge of background information because, even though I currently have no followers as yet, I am hoping to gain some and they may want to know where it all began, though I will avoid making this an auto-biography. 

I was born in 1982 so I'm less than a week away from turning 28 years old.  I was raised in a religious,  filled with bad eating habits and there is a history of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in my family.  So weight, at first, was an issue of bad eating habits and being an anti-social book worm; in those days I could put away as much at a buffet as my father.  My parents made a concerted effort though and from 12 to 15 I was relatively normal, then I hit "the change" ... you know the one.  The one all girls go through except I was hitting it a little later than most.  It seems like from my 15th birthday on (yep mother nature visited on my birthday) weight became an epic struggle.

The need to stay thin and be cute so boys would ask me to proms fed a negative behavior disorder in which I started eating as little as possible and wouldn't stop moving from morning to night.  I avoided family meals and lied to my mother when she offered me dinner.  I would tell her that I ate at work when, in reality, I was on a regiment of granola bars, green olives and orange juice.  I was riding my bike three miles to work then riding home.  I bussed tables, shoveled rock, stripped tile, then finished every night with sit-ups, jumping jacks, leg lifts and stretches before bed.

It worked, I was thin, but just barely.  I never lost enough weight to look anorexic even with all that hell.  In college it was a roommate who first noticed my problem and one day I came home from class to be accosted by her at the door.  She pinned me to the ground, black belt that she was, shoved an apple in my mouth and plugged my nose until I took a bite and swallowed it.  After two years of her often less than gentle persuasion and the fact that it was hard to exercise 16 hours a day when I had to spend 8 to 10 of those hours in class and another 4-5 hours studying.  That's when the real weight problems hit.

I learned that I tend to gain weight even more when I get into a relationship and I tend to lose it faster than what is probably healthy when I end one.  I generally self-medicate by refusing to stay in one place for very long when I'm lonely.  I would make myself feel better by going to dance clubs and softball games in the hopes of meeting someone new.  I also hate to cook and hate eating out alone even more so when I'm single I more or less stop eating with the exception of a few handfuls of snack food.

So here I am in a happy relationship, one that has lasted for 2.5 years and I hope it will continue to last much longer.  I'm also more over weight than I have ever been before and climbing steadily.  I'm still not a junk food junky and I still don't eat big portions or bad foods but it just seems like relationships always equal weight gain for me.  Boyfriend's don't typically do well with the idea of never sitting down to an actual meal; at the very least they like to have dinner every night so my usual habits of skipping breakfast, lunch, and dinner in favor of a dill pickle, and a few 100 calorie snack packs just doesn't work with them.

I should add, since I'm sure many of you are thinking this already, that yes I am hormonal.  It's Dr. confirmed but I'm unwilling to take hormone replacements because of the increased risks of stroke or heart attack so I'm bound and determined to tackle this weight problem the old fashioned way.  Good diet, lots of exercise and determination.

Just a heads up:  You may often hear me refer to "Temptation" as though it is a living, breathing being.  That's because he is.  He's a 6 foot hunk of carpet cleaning, romancing, treats me better than anyone in the world, hottie.  He's a junk food junky and he is always trying to tempt me with fast food, buying cookies and cakes and all manner of ice cream, and wanting to eat at buffet's and nice restaurants.  I do my best to say no to him but, I must admit that it's harder than ever to be a good girl when he's in my life because his eating habits suck!  He can get away with it because he works his butt off 10 hours a day while I'm working at my computer, doing college classes on my computer, or writing the book I'm working on ... on my computer.

*sigh*  This is going to be really, really hard.