My Story

My weight has been a problem for me since elementary school. I was a normal, healthy child until puberty hit... and it hit early, at about age 10. I was always taller than everyone else was, but as things began to develop, I soon became bigger than everyone else as well. No one in my family had ever had a weight problem. My mother had struggled to gain weight for most of her life, so there was no one there to help me through this awkward time, nor to explain to me that during puberty little girls often grow out and then up. And after years of being conditioned to eat every bit of what I was served, I had finally become the good little girl who always cleaned her plate.

Left: Puberty hit early. This is me at age 11 with my sisters. All the kids told me I was fat, but I simply was a little girl in a woman's body... 5'6" and a size 9. Note the sister on the right is only 20 months younger than I am. Had we let nature take its course, I may never have had a problem. I still had two inches to grow before reaching my adult height of 5'8". Right: At a friend's wedding in August, 2002 with the same two sisters (a third sister is not pictured).
By 6th grade, my height, development and increased weight made me a target for merciless teasing by the other girls at school. I was 12 years old, and soon learned to loathe my body and the uncontrollable changes that were happening to it, because it was my body that everyone made of fun of. What can be a difficult time for any child became an absolute nightmare for me. I was 12, but looked 17, and was unprepared for and uncomfortable with the catcalls and suggestive looks I would get from adult males while out in public. I was a little girl in a woman's body, while all the other girls my age still were still girls. To them I was fat. To the rest of the world, I was a very curvy young teenager. I was depressed and out of control, and began to eat to console myself.

My junior high school was not a beacon of good nutrition, and with French fries and nachos the daily lunch norm, my weight began to skyrocket. By the end of 7th grade I was 5'8" and was a size 16-18. That summer, I began the first of what would become my annual summer diet, eating 1000 calories per day and aerobicising like a mad woman. I lost more than 20 pounds, and gained a new lease on life, swearing never to be that fat girl again. Boy, was I mistaken.

I managed to maintain my weight loss in relative terms by continuing my exercise habits, but I would still eat crap during the school year like any other teenager. For the remainder of my high school career, a pattern would develop: spend the summer dieting and exercising and come back to school skinny, then regain the weight slowly over the school year only to start the whole pattern over again. I'd begin every September feeling triumphant and accomplished, buoyed by the compliments I received from friends and family. I would finish the school year every June disgusted and self-loathing, looking wistfully at fashion magazines to mix and match the body parts I wanted for myself. My identity had become inexorably tied to my body image.

What I didn't know then was that I was not fat. My weight was higher than everyone else's was, but I was also taller, further developed and fitter than most everyone else. In addition to daily PE and dance instruction, I would often come home and work out on my own. So I was carrying quite a lot of lean muscle mass. I never really had a "teenager's" body. I went straight from child to woman, with no stops in between. What my dysmorphic mind saw as fat was the normal development and changes in this woman's body. Rather than accepting my genetic predisposition towards broader hips and strong legs, I learned to loathe it, thinking my life would change completely as soon as my thighs were slimmer.

My yo-yo lifestyle continued through college, where the lethal combination of junk food and body obsession is honed into an art form. This was the great equalizer, and the first time I realized how shaky my confidence really was. I had always been an overachiever academically, but the years of teasing had long since boomeranged into an unrelenting need to stand up for myself. Once I discovered I had a voice, I was unafraid to use it. But socially, I felt completely inadequate, and was absolutely clueless. I went to college at a big southern school where everyone was beautiful and tiny, in a state where I didn't know a soul. Feeling totally inadequate, I compared myself to every female I met - and came out the loser. I was convinced that my life wouldn't really get started until I was thin.

My cousin's wedding in May, 2001. My first of two "a-ha" moments that summer. Dangerously close to my all-time highest weight, I spent the day as a bridesmaid in a half-zipped skirt because I'd put on 20 lbs in the 3 months since I'd ordered it. Later that summer, I'd have trouble fitting in a rollercoaster with my then 10-year-old sister because my thighs had grown too big for the restraints. On the right is the difference a year can make.
It was about this time that I first discovered the FIRM aerobic workouts after seeing an ad in a magazine. Dorm life had turned me into the video exercise queen, but Jane Fonda, Kathy Smith and Aerobicise were boring me to tears and just didn't seem to work anymore. The ad promised visible results in 10 workouts, so I pinched my pennies and paid $50 for my copy of Volume 2. I was floored. I had been working out for years, and liked to think of myself as fit, but this tape kicked my butt. Free fall to the toilet anyone? I quickly called back to purchase Volume 1 and pre-order Volume 3, and continued to FIRM right on up through Volume 6. But it wasn't until I gave up junk food and got proper eating habits in place that the real results began to show. By the end of my senior year in college, I was 50 pounds thinner and felt on top of the world. But there were more trials to come.

My first job out of school took me back to Northern California to work for a state university that gave me free gym access. I worked about 70 hours per week but made almost no money, so all I could I afford was a tiny studio apartment with low ceilings and no real room to work out. So I made the worst decision of my life and packed my FIRMs, weights and equipment into storage, foolishly believing the gym at work would sustain me. It didn't. Not only was it easier for me to find excuses not to work out, the workouts themselves were not as effective as the FIRM had been, even though I worked out longer and harder at the gym - when I did work out, that is. The weight began to come back.

It was during this stressful time that I developed a medical condition known as polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS. My sister had been diagnosed back when she was in college, and slowly but surely the strange physical symptoms began to develop in me. My perfect complexion had developed into severe cystic acne my senior year of college, and by age 27 it still showed no signs of abating, despite the best prescriptions money could buy. I began to develop hair in places I shouldn't, and became a slave to waxing. And most significantly, my weight gain spiraled out of control. At first I thought it was my own lack of discipline that was at fault, but when I continued to gain (or in my mind, fail at losing) despite all of my best efforts, I fell into a great depression. The fat girl had caught up with me again. But now she felt like a leper.

I was miserable and depressed by what was happening to my body, felt completely out of control and virtually went into hiding. A blood test confirmed the PCOS diagnosis, and medication helped control many of my secondary conditions, but my weight continued to spiral out of control into my late 20s and my early 30s. I began to avoid friends and activities that I loved because I was so ashamed of what was happening to me. I gave up, quit exercising and allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted. All controls went out the window. Finally, in the summer of 2001, I hit my lowest point at my highest weight of 240 lbs. I didn't even know who I was any more. Eventually my research into the long-term effects of PCOS began to frighten me. It often leads to heart disease and diabetes, both of which already loomed in my family history. It finally became clear that this was no longer an aesthetic issue, it was a health issue. I decided it was time to take serious action.