From the Darkness
I take a deep breath ... what am I doing? Who am I seeing staring back at me? These are the unanswerable questions I thought I could never really answer, until a really listened to what I was saying to myself.
I am looking into what I think is a never ending abyss of despair and anger .. anger at myself and anger at the doctors who just didn’t seem to really listen to me when I was reaching out. The anger stems from my laissez-faire attitude toward my eating habits and that maybe I would somehow see this body I see staring back at me would just go away, as if I was looking at a mirage or that maybe someone had secretly snuck into my house and switched all the mirrors with those “fun house” mirrors and I really was a “normal, healthy” person.
With great inner disgust with myself, I knew what I was doing was not working and no matter how many times I tried all these “fad” diets losing twenty pounds here and there was not really working out for me. I couldn’t exercise properly as my weight was an issue and if I didn’t get the weight off, I could exercise properly. Ahhh, the conundrum I was in! “What to do? ... What to do?” would continually swarm around my head like a hamster running on its exercise wheel.
Well, I had to do something and I had to do it fast. My husband, an avid runner who was now training for marathons, was very encouraging, but, I knew what I was doing was just not working and I needed to find an answer. My family doctor I had when I was growing up and who looked after me during my two pregnancies suggested Dr. Bernstein’s Diet and Health Clinics. I thought about it .. for about five minutes ... and thought, as the stubborn person I was (and have always been), I can get the weight off once my boys start to get more active and I should just see those pounds melt off. Boy, was I about to get a rude awakening some five years later! That never happened for me and I’m not really sure if that happens with anyone else ... but I can tell you this, I just did not have that positive experience of getting back to my pre-children weight and wish I had paid more attention to what I was doing to myself more and my body.
One of my biggest problems I had once I was pregnant was that when I asked my family doctor if my weight gain was a concern, as now I was about 60 pounds heavier and about 7 months pregnant, and he just didn’t seem to be as concerned as I was. He simply stated that my blood tests never came back with a hint of underlying pregnancy related problems and my blood pressure was always normal, so armed with those two facts, he wasn’t concerned ... yet ... I was and I knew there was a problem, but, like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand I listened to the doctor and thought “well, he thinks there is no problem, so, maybe I will have no problem getting this weight off” ... nothing could have been further from the truth!
I wonder if they have weight interventions like they have drug and alcohol interventions ... This is where my journey begins.
