My name is Jennie, and for most of my life, I have been big. From what my mum has told me, my weight problem started when I was around three (I'm 22 now). My father and (late) grandfather are also quite big, and my mum was quite big when she was younger, so that might be part of the reason as to why I'm as big as I am. I have always been quite self-conscious about my size, and the fact that I used to get picked on about my size a lot while I was still at school didn't help matters much. I remember when I was still at high school, (normal-sized) girls always seemed to go out of their way to talk about their weight while I was around, making comments such as how they thought they had huge stomachs/bums/thighs (yeah right!), and how they thought they needed to lose 30-40 pounds. It was almost as though they were hinting at me that that was how much weight I needed to lose. But little did they know that I had actually tried a lot of different diets, but none of them seemed to work - I would always go back to my old eating habits and regain the weight I'd lost, plus more. The trouble with those diets was that they all involved severely restricting my food intake, and if you're anything like me (ie-love your food), those sort of diets are impossible to stick to for more than a few weeks at a time. The turning point for me was in August of last year, when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I was told that in order to get the diabetes under control, I would need to lose some weight, and to also eat healthily. Being a nursing student, I already knew a lot about diabetes, and was aware of just how important that was. That was when I made a pact with myself to stop all of these fad diets and to eat healthily. I think that this was also when I began to accept myself for who I am, and that if I was to get serious about losing the weight, I had to do it for myself, not just do it to shut everyone else up. I was around 117kg (258 pounds) at one point, but at the moment, my weight is sitting at around 100kg (220 pounds). When I had previously dieted, I would try to get the weight off, even if it meant virtually starving myself, but now, I am just concentrating on eating healthily, and seeing what point my weight gets to. I've decided that once the weight loss stops, I'm going to just concentrate on keeping it at that point, and not go back to starving myself just for the sake of a few more kilos. Surely doing that would be just as bad for me as eating the junk I used to. I mean, I'll still have the occasional piece of chocolate, but I just be careful not to do that too often. I think that this also shows that I'm starting to accept myself for who I am. I know that I'm never going to be thin, and at the moment, I'm not aiming for that, whereas that's what I used to do. I used to look at models and think "Gee, I wish I could look like that", but now, I look at models and think "Gee, they look anorexic, someone get them some food, and quick!". And I wish that some of my normal-sized friends would start thinking the same way.
This page hosted by 
Get your own Free Home Page