The date is March 24, 2014. I’m on my bathroom floor, alone, crying my eyes out, but silently so that my kids and husband won’t hear from the living room. I feel angry and embarrassed and fed up. The worst thought I’ve ever had crosses my mind: Maybe they’d all be better off without me. I’m in the midst of my “I’ve Had Enough Moment.” It was my all-time low point. How did I, a happily married mother of three beautiful kids, get here?
I had struggled with my weight my whole life. As a kid, I was outdoorsy and athletic. I loved to go fishing, catch lizards and snakes, and play softball, basketball, and tennis. Despite this, I generally stayed on the heavier side. It was painful because my classmates would tease me about my weight. One called me OSL, which later he told me stood for oversized load. Ouch.
I tried lots of diets, diet pills, and exercise. Sometimes I lost the weight, but I generally gained it back. When I was about 16, I lost a good bit of weight with Metabolift. The FDA later banned it because it contained ephedra. So much for that.
I went to college early, at age 17, and met my future husband, J. He was in the Delayed Entry Program for the Marine Corps. He left college for boot camp and eventually was stationed at Camp Pendleton. I left college, drove across the country to California, and we got married that weekend. I was 19 and my weight was still in a good place. In fact, that period was the longest my weight had stayed in a good range. I was in a place where I felt comfortable in my own skin.
That first year of marriage was tough. I was 19, out on the west coast, with no family around. J was training out in the field for weeks at a time and then was deployed to Iraq 7 months into our marriage. It was at this point the weight started to creep back on. I gained about 25 pounds but worked on getting it off after he returned safely home 7 months later. It was at this point that the babies started coming.
Pregnancy was a bit terrifying because it meant I needed to gain weight. I didn’t want to gain too much, but I also didn’t want to be selfish and deny my baby the calories he needed to grow. In other words, I was a mess. In the end, I decided to err on the side of eating too much. I gained 60 pounds with baby #1, my son, Ezra.
Surprisingly, I got that weight off after he was born. I did a lot of Dance Dance Revolution, and switched from drinking sweet tea to water. He was a high-need baby and I had to carry him a lot and do lots of deep knee bends with him to keep him happy. Maybe I was too tired to eat too much. Maybe it was all the activity. Either way, the weight was gone. When J got out of the Marine Corps, we moved back to the east coast, and the weight again started to creep back up. There were the stresses of the move itself and the economy was in crisis (2007) as J was transitioning into a civilian career.
I got pregnant in 2008 and gained 50 or so pounds with my daughter, Elizabeth. I got some of the weight off, but I found it harder to make time for myself with a toddler and a baby. In 2011, I got pregnant again and I just stopped looking at the scale when I went to the doctor. Even after I had baby # 3, Elijah, I didn’t weigh myself. I told myself I’d eventually get the weight off. I further told myself that I probably hadn’t gained that much weight with him.
I was in full-on ostrich mode, and that continued until March 24, 2014. That was the day that I saw a notification that I had been tagged in some photos on Facebook. I was sure it was just going to be pictures of my kids, since I did my best to avoid the camera, or at least control the angle at which I was photographed. As I swiped through the photos, I was mortified. I did not recognize myself.
It’s interesting to me that this photo made such an impact. After all, I had seen myself in the mirror every day. I’m sure people had snapped photos of me and I had looked at them. I even did a Youtube video series with my sister-in-law, called That Mommy Webshow the year before. I held a pillow over my stomach any time I was on camera on the couch because I was so self-conscious about that particular “problem area.” Maybe this photo just hit me at just the right time, when I was in just the right mood.
Henry Cloud, the author of the wonderfully helpful book Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life, says that change will not happen until the pain of same is greater than the pain of change. My weight situation up until that point was painful, but just not quite painful enough. The photo was what pushed me over the edge, into a place where I was ready to go through the pain of change. In that moment, I said “I’ve Had Enough.” It took me almost two years before I really started making progress and getting the weight off. It took another year to get down to my first goal weight. It took me another year to get some more weight off and put myself firmly in the normal BMI range. Weight loss has plenty of painful moments, like when the scale just stops moving, or when it starts to tick back up. Or those times when I found I’d overeaten, yet again, even though I was trying hard not to. Even in maintenance, there are ups and downs. Times when bad habits try to creep back in. The pain of realizing, once again, that I’m not perfect and I ate too much. But all the pain has been worth it, and I can look back to my “I’ve Had Enough Moment” as the reason why it all began.
As it turns out, pain can be a good thing. (For an interesting look at this, check out The Gift of Pain by Dr. Paul Brand.) The pain of that moment gave me the fuel I needed to make changes, and the memory of that pain has motivated me over these years to keep the weight off.
