From Fat to Fabulous – My Story

I have struggled with weight since I was a child. I remember at an early age asking to be excused from the Thanksgiving dinner table at my grandmother’s home. Everyone gasped and asked what was wrong; I still had food on my plate. Our family belief that something was wrong if you didn’t finish your meal transferred to me in that very moment.

I was taught that I must eat everything on my plate because the children in China were starving. My dad’s words ring as loudly now as they did decades ago: “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” Of course, when you are serving yourself, you think you’re hungrier than you are, so it’s easy to take too much. But you still had to eat it all; our family was a collective member of the clean plate club. The habits were being formed early about not wasting food. I never considered until many years later that, when I ate everything on my plate instead of paying attention to my stomach, I was treating my body as a substitute garbage disposal.

The habits were soon embellished with emotional components of eating. My parents divorced when I was six. I remember thinking, “Daddy left because I was not a good enough little girl.” Then my mother died suddenly four months later in December, just before my seventh birthday and Christmas. My young interpretation created the belief that I was not good enough and that I was not lovable.

Feeling worthless and unlovable are terrifying ways for anyone, especially a young child, to view herself. So I learned that food could numb and comfort the hole in my heart. I began the road of emotional eating and body image problems as I developed a love-hate relationship with food … and myself.

I also learned as a child that food equals love. Both of my grandmothers were excellent cooks, so when my sister and I visited either of them, I knew they loved us when they prepared our favorite meals. To this day, a homemade lemon meringue pie evokes feelings of love and acceptance.

Fast forward to teen age and early adulthood. Twiggy, the British teenage model, actress, singer, and one of the world’s first supermodels, set the standard of beauty for girls during the mid-1960s with her skinny, boy-shaped figure from which her nickname was derived. Other models of that time showcased the look that we now call anorexic—thin bodies, sunken cheeks, and eyes like saucers. The curvy and sometimes voluptuous actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s, including Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, were no longer role models, especially for girls my age.

With an active lifestyle, my body was fit and toned, not fat. However, I was shapely, with curves, nothing like Twiggy. So I decided that I WAS too fat and began to crash diet. I tried every diet known to mankind: diet colas as a meal substitute, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, diet chocolate squares called Ayds Reducing Candy, meal replacement shakes. Starving and bingeing gave way through the years to no fat, high-carb, low-carb, vegetarian, Atkins, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, NutriSystem, and fasting … to name a few! I turned into a world expert in weight loss, from my extensive reading and research to my years of experience—my own and others. But something was still missing in my ability to keep the weight off.

Considering the bad habits, the emotional eating, and the striving to change my body type, it’s no surprise that my cycle of gaining and losing weight messed up my metabolism. Between binges, my body thought I was starving, so it became harder and harder to drop the pounds. As I got older, my weight would go up and down, but with each cycle the gains were higher and the losses were not as low.

Over the course of 20 years my weight ranged from 30 pounds underweight to 70 pounds overweight. When I was skinny, my bones hurt when I was lying in bed or sitting in a hard chair. And I still didn’t like myself or my body any better when I was thin. When I was fat, I despised myself and my body. I felt ugly and uncomfortable in my clothes. I isolated myself socially, emotionally, and physically due to embarrassment and shame. I lacked energy and vitality. My blood pressure was alarmingly high, my joints hurt, and I was prediabetic.

The final straw to this struggling and suffering pattern from anorexic to obese occurred during a ballroom dance performance in front of 300 people when the zipper on my costume broke, exposing my body’s rolls of fat. I had not realized how much weight I had gained since the previous competition when I last wore the costume. I was humiliated and ashamed. I silently declared that something HAD to change.

Desperate for relief, I began the inner work—the emotional/psychological/spiritual components, rather than just the physical ones, which addressed only diet and exercise. I released my excess weight, and I never became anorexic again. I learned to love myself. I began a new career as a life coach because I want to help others learn to love themselves and succeed too. I identified the 9 sabotage patterns that keep us fat and what to do about them. The #1 Sabotage Pattern was the hardest form me to break, and it was the most transformational.

If you or someone you know would like to learn about the #1 Sabotage Pattern Preventing Permanent Weight Loss and get proven tips to eliminate it, please download my FREE report and start using these tips today…