LifeLover
Hello, my name is Christi. I am the mother to an amazing little angel and the wife to the most incredible husband imaginable. We lead a very happy life and I am fortunate enough to be able to stay home and raise our son. My home life is wonderful, but my body issues have always been a problem. I have never had a healthy relationship with food. We have a love hate thing going for us. I love the way it tastes going down, but I hate myself after eating it.
I have always suffered from multiple weight issues. I was bulimic as a teenager until my mother caught me a couple years into my eating disorder and took me to get immediate help. After winning the fight with that, I went on to my next obsession which actually became dieting with Weight Watchers.
WW is wonderful for a lot of people and they have great success. Unfortunately it became a bit of an obsession with me. For those of you that do not know, Weight Watchers works on a point system. You are allowed to have a certain amount of points a day. All food had numbers for me! I no longer enjoyed what I was eating; I was too busy counting up these constant numbers. I'd lose sleep trying to figure out what I could eat to get to that exact # the following day. If I cheated and went over my allowed #, I would then starve myself for a day or 2 to make sure that I still had that goal #. My mother brought it again to my attention that I wasn't just dieting; I was again obsessing over food.
Which takes me to the next issue I had. I realized that I loved food too much and I always felt like I was punishing myself if I couldn't have it. So I decided to start working out...very heavily. I would get up 2 hours before work in the morning and do cardio for 45 minutes, weights, and 300-500 crunches EVERY day. My body began to look better then it ever had and I felt good. I even had a six-pack on my abs. I was able to eat more of the food that I wanted because I was burning so many calories. Then my obsessive behaviors started creeping back in. I had to do more and more and more exercising. I hired a private personal trainer at the cost of $500 a week and added that 5 day a week session to the one I was already doing. I really loved working out and the way it made me feel. Strong, confident, beautiful! Only problem is, I worked out so much that I no longer had time for anything else. What was the point of being confident if no one ever saw you? I was single at the time and all I did was work, work out, and sleep. I was no longer living life, I just existed in yet another one of my obsessions.
My mother once again caught on that there was a problem when we were taking a trip to Las Vegas and I had an entire bag of luggage filled with weights and work out items. Instead of enjoying a wonderful vacation in Las Vegas, I wanted to spend time working out in the hotel room. I too, realized that is was becoming ridiculous. I eventually slowed down my work out routine to a healthier schedule and maintained my weight pretty well.
I then found my soul mate. He too had struggled with weight issues his entire life and was actually at the lowest weight he had ever been at when we got together. He was a very strong cyclist and spent time every day on his bike. We started to enjoy spending our free time with each other instead of working out. We tried to work out together, but he enjoyed one way of training and I enjoyed another. Eventually our working out came to a complete halt. We just enjoyed every moment together. It was the happiest I had ever been in my life. My husband is also a wonderful home chef and loves to cook for me…and of course I love to eat!!! I didn’t worry about food for a long time and eventually the weight started to creep back on both of us.
Then I got pregnant with our now 2 year old son and got up to a whopping 240 pounds. This coming from a person who once swore she would never see a scale hit 200. Never in my mind did I think that I could get to that weight especially with all of the extremes that I had gone to try to prevent gaining weight. After giving birth to my 10 lb. 14 oz. son I lost 40 pounds within 6 weeks. I’m assuming a lot of it was water because he was such a large baby.
Which brings us to the present. I have stayed anywhere from 195 – 210 pounds and have not been at all happy about that, but since becoming a mother, he has been my main priority and my weight issues weren’t constantly haunting me. It was also never a problem with my husband because we both love each other no matter what size we are. He tells me all the time that I am beautiful just the way that I am and I really do believe him. But I became unhappy with myself. I can’t stand to look into a mirror or God forbid I catch a profile of myself in a store. I don’t feel like leaving the house that much because it requires me having to get dressed up in clothes that I look awful and feel uncomfortable in. (I rarely buy clothes because I kept insisting that I was not going to stay this size.) I’d rather stay in my husband’s big t-shirts and my lounge pants and hang out comfortably in my house.
I have now come to the realization that I am so tired of living this way. I want to go out with my husband and son and not be cooped up in the house because of my own body phobias. This is what brought me to deciding to get surgery. After tons of research, I finally found that the gastric sleeve sounds the best for me. I am ready to have a healthy relationship with food and my body. I need to eat to live – not live to eat. I need to not be stuffing food in all day long or starving myself the next. (I like to call it the Reward – Punishment system) I need to have small portions and not obsess about food morning, noon, and night. I am looking so forward to having a new, healthy relationship with food and learning how to eat right so that my son can learn the proper way to eat as well. As my profile name states, I am a LIFE LOVER and I am so ready to enjoy absolutely all that it has to offer. I am scheduled for surgery on 2-25-2010. I am so excited to start my new journey!!!
