Okay, let me preface this by saying that I am insanely obsessive about my weight problem. There is not a day that 5 minutes passes that I'm not aware of this fat here, or that fat there. I know. Sick and wrong, but still. My personal opinion is that it all started back when I was little and was the same size as my sister that's three years older than me. Normally not a huge issue, I would venture to guess, but in my case I was living with a very petite mother and grandmother (neither of them, or my sister is over 5'4", and I'm 5'7.1/2"), so every morning my grandmother would start the day by saying "maybe you should skip breakfast, since the way you eat, you're going to be as big as a house". I was 7. Now, mind you, I was a gymnast that had practice 5-6 times a week, and frankly could have probably eaten 3 sides of beef daily and not put on an ounce of fat (looking back at pictures, I was very toned, and not at all in danger of being fat), but you believe what you're told when you're 7 and it affected me. Every time I opened the fridge, or sat down for a meal, I knew I was good for at least a 3 minute lecture on how much smaller my sister was and that nobody likes big fat girls. I can remember times when I was 8 or 9 that my grandmother would refuse to serve me the main meal that the family was eating, telling me I could just have the side vegetable, since I needed to lose weight anyway. I started stealing food from the pantry and hiding it in my closet or under my bed, or in the back of my drawers. Anything. Crackers, boxes of cake mix, dried pasta, anything. To this day, when I'm feeling incredibly stressed, I catch myself hiding food in my desk, or on the highest shelf in the kitchen, and on really bad days, I gourge. I hide in the bathroom or bedroom, and eat what ever I can find, as fast as I can. I've just never gotten past it. The first time my husband ever met my grandmother I told him that I would bet him $50, that the first thing she said to me would either be "you're too fat" or "your hair looks terrible"...we walked in the door, she took one look at me and said "you would think that you'd try to get a better haircut so that people wouldn't notice how fat you're getting". I was a size 8 at the time.
Anyway, back to my point...I know this about myself, and I know that on the rare occasions that I look at the scale I can easily freak myself out and send myself into a nasty self-hating binge and purge mode, so, as a general rule, I just don't look. Plus, I've read and re-read Why the Scale Lies, so I know better than to trust the judgement of my worth to a stupid little piece of metal and plastic. Unless I'm doing BFL, because then, of course, you have to know where you start, but, being as I'm pregnant right now, I just don't look. When I go to the office, and I step on the scale, I stand backwards, and I ask that the nurse just write down the figure and not tell me the bad news. My old doctor even knew this, and had the decency to never ever mention to me how much I was gaining. My new doctor, unfortunately, just doesn't get it. I walked in for my appointment yesterday and she said to me "gee, you're the 4th woman I've seen today that's gained between 6 and 8 pounds this month", obviously having no idea that her innocent comment was going to send me off the deep end. But here I am, treading water between the shores of "hey, I'm pregnant, and the baby needs solid nutrition to grow and be healthy" and "oh my god, my grandmother is right and I'm as big as a house". Yes, so far my rational mind is winning and I'm resisting the urge to starve, or binge and purge, but my whole heart hurts.
I spent the rest of the appointment (I had to be there an hour to have my glucose tolerance test), watching women in different stages of their pregnancy walk in and out, wondering why some are blessed to remain thin everywhere but that cute little ball of baby on their stomach, while others, like me, are destined to spread all over, and cursing myself for being in the wrong group.
