Fat Pamela

I've been meaning to post about my relationship with food for a while now.

The beginning

(Mom, if you're reading this please don't be offended)
I grew up eating what was in front of me and eating just as much as my brothers. Age was an indicator of how much we were allowed to eat. At a certain point, you didn't have to order from the kids menu anymore. As you aged, you were allowed to eat more. So, I ate more. Just to be clear, I'm going to recall my youth as if I was 300 lbs and 3'2" but i tend to exaggerate a bit. My mother cooked for our family of 5 bratty kids religiously, but eventually that task dropped on the priority list. Looking back, I've realized this cut off from 5pm dinners didn't just happen in my househould. I'm pretty sure that women found their independence before 1998, but I think that there was a second wave or "round two" of the women's movement that occured in the 1990's. In my family, this was when my mom realized that she was a smart woman and there was nothing holding her back from continuing her education. She went back to school and there was less meatloaf and more grilled cheese. When she stopped cooking, we ate what we could find and whatever was easiest for us to make. This meant microwavable foods and the basic bad-for-you easy to grab stuff. I loved Ramen noodles.


Being able to finally drive through that drive-through

Getting a car changes many things in your life. Finally, when you're hungry, you can be to McDonalds and back in less than 20 minutes with a car full of dollar menu items. Your diet becomes a result of convenience. When you're deciding breakfast, you think about where you can drive to get a cheap meal. Usually lunch disappears and dinner becomes a big meal of saturated fat and sugar. My budget would determine how much I could eat. I thought that if I was only spending $3, there was no way I was eating bad. I was wrong. Three dollars was a jr.bacon cheeseburger, fries and a frosty. The salads cost more. No, I didn't think the salad was worse for me because it was more expensive, but I definitely didn't think I could be gaining weight from $3 meals.



Old enough to underage drink

Let's face it, most people who drink alchohol don't experience their first sip on their 21st birthday. Many people seem to live out their most rebelious drinking days before that big bday. That was the case for me. I decided that I wouldn't drink until I had firmly planted myself in a good school and received all of the scholarships available to me. This meant I didn't drink until senior year of high school(My peers started years before me.). I was proud of myself for waiting a long time but looking back I wonder if drinking gradually throughout highschool would have been better than starting when I did. The good and bad thing about starting at that time was the trust we had established. It wasn't just me who waited to drink, it was all of my friends. It was great because all of our parents trusted us. They knew we weren't getting into trouble so when we finally decided to get in trouble, no one was looking to catch us! Luckily, we were smart kids and even though we sipped illegally, we really weren't doing anything super wild. Another "issue" was that when we started drinking, we all had jobs and we could afford to drink. Often times when you're drinking at an early age, money is the limiting factor for your buzz level. We didn't have that issue.We purchased more liquor than we could drink. After graduating high school, we really didn't have much to worry about. Oh, that one summer, how nice it was to be free! A typical weekend back then consisted of buying the booze, getting ready to look good in pics that would later show up on facebook, drinking, exaggerating our buzz, fighting with each other, eating Taco Bell at 2am, waking up the next morning feeling like crap, telling everyone how much fun we had (even though it was rarely as fun as we said it was) and nursing a hangover until it was time to go to work.

Too busy to eat right

Once college started it seemed like there wasn't a moment in the day to even think about what I was going to eat. There was no plan, no regular meals, I just waited until I was starving then stuffed my face until I didn't have that feeling anymore. My sister and I joked about "sleeping it off". That meant indulging until our eyelids fell heavy, napping for an hour, then waking up to eat more. It was a funny joke when we did it, but looking back and wondering why I was gaining weight, it's not hard to see that the "sleep it off" theory pretty much sums it up.

Time to grow up
During my Junior year of college I decided to start working out. That was the first decision. I didn't change my eating, I just started exercising. What drove me to workout? Well, it was a combination of a few things. 1- Pictures of me at my nephew's 2nd birthday party and 2- one social gathering that summed up alot of things. One night, after hanging out with my family, I stopped by a friend's garage party. I showed up and felt pretty good about myself. (For the record, I never thought I was fat until the day I decided to lose weight. I loved myself.) When I got there, my friends yelled at me for "getting ready". Apparently we were supposed to be "scrubbin' it". After talking with them for a little while, I was told that I was apparently fighting with someone. "So wait, I'm in a fight with someone who I haven't talked to?". Yes. After another hour or 2 of "hanging out" with my "friends", I decided to leave. I drove home with my true best friend and kept saying, "what did we gain from this experience?, we talked about nothing! and now... I just feel like crap". I went home and couldn't shake the bad mood. I stayed up late eating pizza rolls and watching infomercials. The TURBO JAM infomercial came on and I couldn't help but think, "this is nothing like me". I hated dancing. I hated spandex. I hated people who seemed happier than happy could be. So I decided to order it. It wasn't 1960, and I did have a computer regularly available, but for some reason, I ordered it over the phone.

Turbo Jam Obsession
I started working out in my basement, by myself. I felt so awkward and didn't have any rhythm. After a week or two I had lost 10lbs. It came off QUICK. Eventually, I was doing the workouts more and getting better. There were 5 workout videos. Just five. I lost almost ALL of my weight doing those five workouts. I always said, "I'm not on a diet, it's a lifestyle change." My best friend Caterina had been obsessed with Turbo Jam for a year and I never took the time to ask what it was all about. Now, I knew. It was fun! Well, after the workout, it was fun to look back at. During it- it was definitely a good sweaty workout.

Taking it to the next level- calorie counting
My goal was always to lose 2-3lbs a week. I started with just a few workouts a week, then every day, then I paired up workouts and did 2 or 3 each day. Then, I changed my diet. First I started eating what I like to call "trendy weight loss food" which was lean cuisines, 100 calorie packs and salads. I didn't count calories at that point, I just ate stuff that people deemed "healthy". Eventually, I wanted to know how many calories I was burning and eating so I started counting calories. I LOVE MATH. I LOVE NUMBERS. I calculated my approximate BMR, then started looking up approximately how many calories I was burning in each workout. I always underestimated this number and over estimated the calories in the food I was eat. As I lost more weight, I'd recalculate my BMR and always try to keep my calories 500 under my bmr to lose 1 lb a week based on cutting calories and 1 lb from workouts. I started in November and was at my lowest weight sometime around May. It took me 7 months to lose 65lbs. I didn't have a goal weight, which was probably a bad idea. Near the end of my journey, I didn't know when to stop, I just thought I'd keep losing weight until my body was perfect. I'd stop when my body was perfect. HA. PS- you'll never be happy with your body. There isn't a magical point when you look in the mirror and say, "yes, I've done it!". For me, I was becoming more satisfied, but I didn't know when to stop.

Gone a bit too far, perhaps

Looking back I think I may have hurt my body in the last month or two of weight loss. I was cutting the same amount of calories as I was before and expecting to lose just as much weight as I had been. You can't do that when you're thinner! Near the end of my weight loss, my hair started coming out in clumps, and I was EXTREMELY sensitive to the cold. I had to cut my hair shorter because it looked terrible the way it was. When I went outside in the winter, I'd cry because it HURT to be that cold. I started taking vitamins to try to fix my issues, but in the end, I think I just needed to eat more.

When the summer came, I bought a bicycle and commuted EVERYWHERE. Eventually, I started eating like a normal human being and maintained my weight. Of course, I was still trying to lose weight, but I was sick of starving. When the winter came, I started training to become a triathlete. I went from eating a head of lettuce with a 110 cal veggie burger to eating STACKS of pancakes and BOWLS of pasta. It was quite a transition! It was a huge struggle for me. I wanted to eat like I used to but it was impossible with the way I was working out. I would go 2 days eating low calorie food then have 1 day devoted to ABSOLUTE BINGING. I ate everything in sight because I couldn't control my hunger. During my weight loss, I think I may have lost some muscle mass as well. During triathlon training, I started GAINING weight. Some was muscle, other was fat. I know this because it's just NOT okay to eat 5 eggos and an entire box of cereal. So, now I was watching the scale climb back up. I wasn't that worried because I knew I was unhealthy at my lowest weight. I'll talk more about eating as an athlete later because I just now FINALLY feel like I'm getting the hang of it.

So, as I sit here today, I lost 50lbs total. If you have 50lbs to lose, it's really not that hard. It's hard when you get down to the last 10-20. When I look at how my relationship with food developed I realized that it was emotional and based on the society I live in. I ate more because McDonalds has a kids meal, then a value meal. I wasn't a kid, so I thought it was time to eat more. I drank because that's what everyone else was doing and I ate taco bell because if you stay up all night, you get hungry. My victory was I had that moment when I realized- my life is going in one direction, and I DON'T WANT TO GO THERE. It was genuinely an ephiphany. I wasn't happy (and many people arent...that's not the hard part to figure out). It was when I realized I CAN be happy and deserve to be happy when everything changed.

Like usual, this blog is longer than the attention span of anyone reading it. I gotta wrap it up, I'm hungry!