The Old is Gone; The New has Come...

....and it all is still a process; sometimes a painful one, sometimes a joyful one, BUT ALWAYS a changing one.

So as I eluded in the previous post (which you should read if you have not), I am going to open "it" up to you here. What the heck does that mean? I want to share with you the history of my life, the nitty-gritty of my past. I want to tell you what it was like to grow up as a taller, chubby kid. I want to share with you the names I got called that affected my "formative" years in ways that I did not know until I was in a tailspin of destruction. I want to talk about how the death of a very close friend and the dark hole of Alzheimer's that has taken over my dad drove me to dive into emotional eating. I WANT to cover the gambit that is EATING DISORDERS...yes, that's right, we are going to go there for a little bit. Don't worry, this won't be one of those after school specials that we grew up with. I am merely going to share the story of my life with you.

Like I said, I grew up as a taller kid. Don't think that I just mean I was taller than my classmates, I was taller than a few of my teachers and my own mother; nothing like being a "giant" and being surrounded by children who don't understand weight distribution. Perspectively, at four years old, I was too big to play in the McDonald's play lands (you know the ones with Grimace and Hamburglar) and by the time I ended my fifth grade year, I was five-foot-fourish. Not to mention that I played sports and was more than willing to beat the tar out of you for calling me fat. Of course I grew up in the time when "Street Fighter" was all the rage and the kids at recess had no qualms about calling me Ehonda. I spent my childhood being called "Fatty", "Ehonda", "Butter Bar", "Lardo".

In junior high it wasn't any better. Talk about AKWARD years of life. I will skim past them as they were pretty similar to elementary, with the only change being the formation of large breasts and no butt.  OH! And occasionally being told by other girls that if I were just thinner, "Johnny" would totally date me. HA! Yeah, because having a boyfriend when I am 12 is the smartest thing in the world...

Before I go on, I should mention that when I was entering into my eighth grade year my family got terrible news. The company my dad worked for was doing "cut backs". We had to sell our home and move another town over; I had to start my last year of junior high in a brand new school... Enter the start of massive amounts of depression. My depression was––what I would guess is called––pretty normal. I had anger issues (which we can conclude really developed in elementary school), I quit playing all the sports that I LOVED, and started to find comfort in food.

So here I go into high school. I don't have very much to say here because I think we all have terrible stories of this time of our lives. The long and short of this is that this was the time when I started to spiral out of control...Very subtle changes happened. I started smoking, which became a very easy way to deter eating. Soon, I was skipping one meal a day. In my junior year I chose to take a strength and conditioning class for phys ed. (I should back story that my PE classes were always the last period of the day and that my lunch period was at 11:30 AM...) Remember how I said that my dad's company was doing "cut-backs"? Well, my dad got laid off. Why does that matter? Well, you see I have a very distinct memory from a day after school when I came home, grabbed a snack and my dad said to me, "yeah, go ahead and eat that because that won't make you fat". That is all I will say on that.

Anyway, I will fast forward to the summer after my junior year. I graduated that summer and resolved to work third shift as a semi-truck loader for a major company. This particular company has their loaders load by hand mind you. Sooooooo, figured out where this could be going? I basically got paid to work out, which was GREAT...until I plateaued at any given weight. So the first time that happened I cut a meal out of my day, then two meals, eventually I would eat once a week. That was just the beginning; I started to only allow alcohol to be my calories I would intake. I was diving down the wrong rabbit hole. I will round this out by saying I got down to 145 pounds (oh, and by the way, as an adult, I am 5'11-ish and have a broader frame), and I realized that what I was doing was going to be the death of me.

I left that job thinking that would be the thing that would save me. A VERY good friend of mine hired me on to help her function in life as she had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease. In that time of caring, I really began to value life in a new way. I eventually told people that were close to me about my disorder. I started to get "healthy". I say that loosely because really what happened is my friend started getting a lot worse as time went on. She lost her appetite, so lots of us around her would eat with her just to try to get her to eat. I entered back into the emotional binging that I had done when I had moved. Except this time I included alcohol with that binging. I did gain an amount of weight, but what really happened was I came up to a healthy weight. This all happened in the years of 2004-2007.

Yet again I am going to jump ahead a few years. Let's land in October of 2009. This was the year that my family and I officially received the diagnoses that my dad has Alzheimer's. Yep, you guessed it; first I started to skip meals and run like a FREAK. As the years have gone on it has turned into a little more outworking of emotional eating. Neither were as extreme as I had experienced in previous seasons of life.

So here we are in the glorious year of 2013. Here I am FINALLY in love with me! Yes, I have excess weight, Yes, I love me some ice cream and sugar, but most importantly, I LOVE my body. I have learned to not have critical eyes when I look at myself in the mirror, I have learned to ignore all the snide comments one can over hear, I HAVE LEARNED TO BE SECURE!!! Thank GOD!

However, I want to be living HEALTHY and NOT HELLthy... It has taken me a long time to get to a place where I can love me and be secure. I am not going to lie, the prospects of what I plan to do over the next year SCARE the ever-living out of me. But, I will press through it because I know it is yet another area in my life where I AM taking ground back that was so RUDELY stripped out of my hands at a young age.

I will give a SHOUT that shakes the earth and tears down the walls!

Rebecca