A few surprises this morning – on the scale I was down to 67.3 (down from 67.9 earlier in the week) and then when I went to put my ZW suit trousers on THAT I WAS WEARING YESTERDAY they felt quite loose and baggy. I have put it down to the fact that I didn’t have a proper dinner last night as I had a work event to go to so I only had 2 large glasses of champagne (am calling it 3 points and you can’t stop me) and 3 canapés (2 points – they weren’t the really nice fried-looking ones) so when I got home at 11pm it was all I could do to open a tin of pears and spoon some yoghurt on the top and eat it while half asleep on the sofa. I had 13.5pts for the whole day yesterday so its no wonder I’m feeling a bit lighter today. Weirdly though I was still puffy when I woke up so I was retaining water somehow.
Anyway, I’ll take it. Only 1.3kg to go in 2 weeks 1 day to make my target – oh PLEASE let me get there.
I felt pretty good yesterday wearing my ZW suit and a size 12 Pink (brand not colour. Well, actually colour as well) business shirt which I hadn’t worn in ages because it was too tight. It was a little snug and gaped a little bit (especially by the afternoon after I had had lunch and 2 litres of water) but I was very pleased to be in it.
So I thought I might recount the tale of my first WW attempt, back in 2000 – and more importantly the mother of all binges that followed. By the time I joined WW I weighed 72.1kg (I think – all my old WW stuff is back in NZ) and I had already lost quite a bit of weight before then and was wearing size 14 trousers for the first time in my adult life. I remember feeling a little put out when I went along to join that people weren’t looking at me and going ‘what are YOU doing here, you don’t need to lose weight’. In my head I knew I needed to lose weight but because I was lighter than I had been in ages I kind of wanted recognition for the fact that I wasn’t as big as some of the other members.
Actually I probably need to go back a bit and explain what was going on with me at the time. In 1999 I was 23, I had just started my first real job after university. I was working hard and it was really quite stressful. I was a NZ size 16 which is a fairly generous size so more like a UK size 18 I guess. I had been watching what I ate and started running but an Achilles tendon strain put paid to that pretty shortly after. After my first real big important project, I got sick – some sort of gastro bug type thing in November of that year. I had also just split up with my boyfriend of 2 years who I was living with and had moved in to a flat share with people I hadn’t previously known. I spent a week in bed feeling very fragile and sorry for myself and when I finally resurfaced, I had lost an entire dress size! It was great! I was down to a size 14 which was the smallest I had been since I was about 13 or 14 years old.
I decided to capitalise on my weight loss and continued to watch what I ate. Then I had a brief summer romance with a guy who lived in another city who I had met at university. It soon fizzled but I was GUTTED when he split up with me in February of 2000. I really was heartbroken and cried and cried and cried. God only knows why, looking back, because he was a complete dick and he bored the hell out of me. I guess it was because he was a little older than me, educated (the ex I had broken up with was not smart, not funny, smoked dope which I hated and was not physically attractive to me. Begs the question why I was with him but he really loved me and treated me well. I grew out of him really, as my confidence grew after finishing university and starting a great job he just wasn’t fitting in with where I wanted my life to go), ambitious and we had a lot in common as we both did the same job and were both at the same stage of life.
Anyway, we broke up and I took it hard. I lost a bit of weight without even trying because I was so upset (this later proved to be not a good thing as I copped on to the fact that breaking up with someone obviously made me lose my appetite and therefore lose weight, so I became conscious of it in the future and once I was waiting to feel ‘not hungry’ I never felt ‘not hungry’ and ate, thus putting on weight. Stupid awareness).
About a month after that, I met another guy at a party and quickly forgot about summer romance guy. This guy, lets call him Poisonous Dwarf or PD for short, was EVERYTHING I wanted in a guy. He was cute (kind of looked like Kevin Spacey who I have always fancied), very witty and funny, mean and sarcastic humour, a real ‘guy’s guy’. He was short though, barely taller than me and I’m only 156cm or 5’2, hence the name ‘PD’. And he WAS poisonous. A lot of my friends hated him and thought he was a complete jerk because he was so mean, so cutting. But I thought he was hilarious and used to love being as equally mean and cutting (this was to prove my undoing).
We ‘saw each other’ for maybe a few months but it was never a real relationship as much as I wanted it to be. And the more I wanted it to be, the more he pulled away and I acted like a complete psycho. I mean if there was ONE time in my life that I could go back and change and do over, it would be how I acted with PD. Awful.
Anyway, he didn’t even need to tell me it was over, it was so completely obvious after a miserable weekend away with a group of friends. I had started to gain a bit of weight back at that stage as well thanks to all the alcohol I was consuming, and hangovers that needed to be fed burgers the next day.
I was so ANGRY after that ‘break up’, probably more angry than I was sad. I was mainly angry at myself for acting like a complete freak but I was angry at him too, for not wanting to be with me. I was COOL dammit! But clearly I was not.
So I decided I was going to get even. I was going to diet and get thin and THEN he would be sorry. And so I joined WW. This would have been maybe in June or so of 2000. I had joined a gym as well and was going 5 times a week in the morning before work. I started off doing 3 1 hour sessions of cardio and 2 sessions of weights per week and then went hell for leather doing an hour and a half at the gym a day, combining about 50 minutes of cardio (different machines for 10 mins each) and a weights programme. I did fairly well at WW, my first week I lost 1.3kg (sound familiar?) and thereafter I lost a lot slower. I can’t now remember how long I attended meetings for but it was for the rest of that year and probably until the March or so of 2001.
I got down to 58kg and I was looking GOOD. I was wearing size 10 trousers and sometimes a size 8 top. People were commenting all the time about how fabulous I looked. I felt like I had made it. I remember I took a month off over Christmas of that year as it just got too hard with all the socialising and I only gained 1kg over that period. Gotta love that youthful metabolism.
Looking back, god knows how I managed to lose so much weight as I must have been grossly underestimating my points. I remember scones on WW were 2 points each – of course they meant tiny little drop-scones that you would have with tea and jam but the supermarket near where I worked sold these GORGEOUS cheese scones about the size of a coffee mug which I would count as 3 (making the grand concession of adding an extra point for the cheese!). Every morning I had a starbucks non fat latte which I counted as 1.5pts when they are in fact 2.5. Every week I would go out and end up drinking way too much at least one night and then just kind of not count those points (but I would save lots of points from the rest of the week). So it really was a miracle that I lose weight (the 6-7.5 hours at the gym each week probably also helped).
My willpower was fuelled by daydreams of seeing PD at a party somewhere when I had got down to my goal weight (that elusive 55kg) where he would realise what a fool he had been and want to get back together again. I had an outfit in my mind that I would be wearing – dark jeans and a black v-neck knit sleeveless top and he would regret that he had ditched me. I hadn’t decided whether I would take him back or not but either way he was going to suffer (it was all very melodramatic in my mind – clearly I was channelling Days of our Lives or similar).
But by about March of 2001, my anger had died down. I no longer really cared about PD. I was surprised I hadn’t seen him out as we ran in the sort of same circle of friends and I still hoped I would bump in to him one day so he could see what he was missing. But I just got so fricking sick of dieting. I was so so so tired of it. I started kind of giving myself a week off here and there and just having a break, filled with resolve to get back on it later. My WW goal weight had been purposely set high so I could stop paying sooner so I hit that (I think it was around 60kg) and even though I had another 5kg I wanted to lose, mentally I kind of gave up as well.
I remember the last time I went to a meeting (I didn’t know it was the last time at that stage). I weighed in on a Monday night and that night I had worn a light cotton shift dress (I knew it would weigh next to nothing and so I’d have a happy result on the scales). I weighed in at 58kg (might have been 58.something but I can’t recall) and was feeling pleased. Relieved. And tired. Afterwards, I went off to the video rental place (god, videos!!) to drop off some videos and pick up some more and go to the supermarket etc. While I was in the video store I walked past a freezer that had icecreams in it – you know, popsicles, cornettos etc and I just remember thinking ‘That’s it, I’m done’.
I walked out of the shop, in to the supermarket and filled up my basket with non-diet foods. No idea what but it wouldn’t have been good – biscuits, bread and butter and crap probably. And with that, I finished WW for the first time.
I don’t know what it was that made me so firmly stop dieting. There really was no question of me going back. I thought I could handle it. I thought I’m thin now, I struggled really hard to get here and while I didn’t make it to 55kg it was only a few kilos off. I worked hard and I don’t need to do this anymore. I gave the WW maintenance guidelines a quick lookover but I didn’t think I needed it. I was done.
I remember feeling a niggling irritation that I might gain back some weight before my older sister who lives in Melbourne next saw me. She is 10 years older than me and moved to Australia when I was 9 years old. As a chubby child and a fat teenager, she only ever saw me overweight although she had managed to slay her fat dragon (all the girls in my family have weight issues). I really wanted her to see me slim. We talked on the phone a bit and she nearly fell over when I told her I had reached 50-something kilos because although she is not tall either (5’4) she is of a much bigger build than me and 64kg for her is pretty trim. She was due to come over for a visit that Easter (April) and I remember trying to hold it together a bit before she saw me. I was really nervous about it actually – I really wanted her to see that I could do it. I had probably gone back to 59-60 when I did see her and it was still a massive shock (the last time she saw me would have been when I was 75kg+) as I probably didn’t look any different with that tiny gain. But I was disappointed in myself that I hadn’t quite made it.
Well it was a slippery slope from there on in. I have thought about this a lot since and wonder just what it was that made me really binge that year. Because binge I did. By the time I met my then boyfriend in December 2001, I was back up to a size 16. Not that he minded. And interestingly he was the first guy I had any attention from since PD, despite being way thinner (and therefore in my mind, and probably in reality for me, way hotter) for most of the year prior.
And why did I binge? At this stage of my life I had been out of university for a year. I had a pretty mental boss who was REALLY hard on me. She controlled me in any way she could – calling me up at 6am to tell me that the office had run out of pads of paper; she would give me the silent treatment if she felt I had not spoken to her enough at a work social event; she would fly in to absolute RAGES for no reason and scream and shout and slam things around. It really was pretty incredible. At that stage in my office there was me, a middle aged female receptionist who was lovely and a guy who was at my level work-wise but probably 5 or so years older. My boss would really take stuff out on me and the receptionist but she didn’t really do it to the same extent with my male colleague – although he saw her craziness daily.
The weirdest part about her though, was her capacity for kindness and generosity which always took you by surprise and made the craziness that much worse to bear. We used to say it was like being in a violent relationship – she would be fine, then the tension would build and you knew something was coming, you would walk around on eggshells hoping it wasn’t YOU that set her off, then she would go NUTS and you’d limp home at the end of the day, exhausted and feeling emotionally wrought. Then the next day you would creep in to work and she would come bounding out of her office saying ‘let’s all take the afternoon off and go out for lunch today, my treat’ or you would come in and there would be a gift from her of jewellery or makeup for no reason whatsoever. It was so exhausting and you just never knew where you stood.
Around April or so of the following year, 2002, me and my colleague were both asked to enter in to new contracts to stay where we were working. The terms were fairly onerous and didn’t really offer us any more security or perks. We had a month to decide what to do but my mind was made up pretty much immediately really – as was his. I decided not to renew but because of my relationship with my boss and my need to keep in good with her (I work in a pretty small industry where relationships are everything) I knew that I had to tell her face to face. I went to her home (she used to work from home a lot) and told her I wouldn’t be staying on. She got such a shock – it was quite gratifying although I HATE that kind of confrontation or feeling like I’m letting someone down). She immediately wanted to know what I was going to do and I just said in an as enigmatic way as possible that I was exploring a few possibilities. It didn’t go down well, but too late she realised that she may have thrown her crazy at us too many times and now that we were no longer working for her, she couldn’t control what we said and to WHOM (as I said, we were in a small industry) she then became as nice as pie to me and treated me like a respected colleague rather than her punching bag. The receptionist didn’t fare so well unfortunately and left a few months later.
So having removed myself from that poisonous situation, I was faced with the prospect of going it alone. Despite being only out of university for 2 years by that stage, I decided to go free-lance and build up a business based on my contacts and reputation (the woman was nuts but she knew EVERYONE and I will always be grateful for that). And this is where I wonder if the binging really kicked in. I was doing it before then for sure, but I really upped the scale and ferocity of my binges – and they WERE ferocious.
At this stage I had moved out of my flat share and was sharing a small flat with my cousin who was a few years younger. We didn’t cook or eat together because our schedules were quite different and that meant I was pretty much not bothering with any normal meals (except MAYBE breakfast) and just eating crap. I am not joking, I wouldn’t have dinner. Instead I would go to bed and read my book and eat an entire (or as close to as I could get) orange chocolate marble sponge cake. In bed. With a fork. I would then have a really uncomfortable night’s sleep, sweating and feeling desperately sick. On the weekends if my cousin was out, I would have fish and chips for dinner, usually with a few deep fried battered oysters. I went through a service station pie phase where I could easily have two for dinner with a cupcake chaser. I became addicted to baked goods – specifically caramel slice and chocolate mint slice. And a particular supermarket near where I lived sold divine little orange flavoured donuts. I really went to town.
Was I eating to cover my anxiety of going out on a limb with my job? Was I comfort eating through the stress of trying to make a living for myself? Was I eating with gay abandon to celebrate leaving a really difficult, toxic work environment? Was it that a diet where I had to control and restrict myself just did not fit in with my new found sense of freedom? Was it that I did not feel comfortable in my new-found ‘thin’ skin? Was it all of this?
I think there is definitely something in the feeling of liberation I felt not working for Beelzebub anymore and not wanting to hamper this feeling by restricting myself. It also felt a lot like moving out of home, away from strict parents and that inevitable going off the rails that seems to be a rite of passage. And it is also true that it was fricking stressful. I didn’t have a regular wage coming in. If I didn’t get the work, I didn’t get the money to pay the bills. At my fairly tender age, that was kind of scary. And food was comforting – I mean what could be better than knowing you could eat 6 rounds of toast with butter and honey IN BED any time you wanted? There was no ill THAT couldn’t cure.
But at the time, and I did try and analyse this at the time, I really didn’t think I was stress eating. I really didn’t think I was comfort eating. I knew in my heart of hearts that I wasn’t going to starve and I wasn’t going to fail. I had options. It was stressful and a little isolating at times, but I was enjoying it. So what was I eating for?
Well this has been the longest post ever so will stop navel-gazing now. I will reflect on this – this has been a really useful exercise actually and I know I will see patterns emerging when I write about my next 2 diet/binge episodes so this will hopefully arm me for the future. Because I really can’t go through all this again.
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