My Coping Mechanism Has Always Been Food
September 26, 2013Caitlin, A Retrospective
Featured Blogger: Caitlin
OH Username: auberginegem
"I've always LOVED food, it has been my coping mechanism."-Caitlin
It is hard to really know where to start. I've always been bigger, well for as long as I can remember. I obviously can't speak for what I was like as a toddler. I've seen pictures of myself as a youngster and the older I got the bigger the size gap between my friends and I became. After about grade four I was always the biggest in my group of friends, and often the largest in my grade. In high school I was one of the biggest in the entire school.
I want to put a caveat here. I know that my family will be reading this and I want to make it clear that my horrible relationship with food and the resulting problems I now face are entirely my fault. I'm just trying to give some background to how I've come to be where I am today.
I've always LOVED food, it has been my coping mechanism. My dads side of the family is (was) fairly food oriented. My dad grew up living on a farm and is also really physically active. The portions that my dad gave us (my brother and I) as children were bigger than they should have been considering we were city kids. We were fairly active, my parents saw to that. I biked, walked, swam, played baseball, cross country skied, did karate, dance. Honestly I can't imagine how much huger I would be if I didn't exercise as much as I did when I was a kid. The physical activity could not outstrip the food intake though and I have steadily gained weight for approximately the last 20 years.
I went from overweight to obese in high school. In grade 10 I became horrrrrrrribly depressed and packed on a lot of weight in a really short time. I maintained at approximately the same weight/size from age 16-20, fluctuating a size or two. When I was 20 I volunteered for a program called Katimavik. I lost quite a bit of weight, as I was more physically active than I'd been in years and I had NO money to eat out and the food we ate in the house was very healthy.
While I was at Katimavik (you live in other communities in Canada that aren't your own) two things happened. My parents divorced, and I met the first guy I'd ever been in love with. Neither of these things ended up being good for my mental health. My relationship with Alex was incredibly tumultuous, and working through my parents divorce living two provinces away was not easy. I had no money and no access to fast food as I was living in small communities. I did lose quite a bit of weight at this point, and when I got back to Saskatoon I was the smallest I'd been since the beginning of high school. I started working with the government of Saskatchewan as a summer student and dating a new guy who lived about two hours away from where I was working. He was a really nice guy, but big, and it was so very very easy to eat badly when I was with someone else who loved to eat junk. Again, I am not trying to pass the responsibility buck, but making good choices when they only places you go to eat are fast food and your boyfriend has no actual food in the house, eating well isn't easy. I also returned to a reality of a family that had fallen apart and I really hadn't dealt with that at all. So I was back in Saskatoon, back in university and back to access with LOTS of bad food. I gained, and gained, and gained. Up to this point I still exercised, not a lot, but some, but it was getting harder and harder and harder to move. The cycle that had been bad up until that point got worse. I ate, and ate, and got bigger and bigger and moving got harder and harder.
I'm 28 years old and have the mobility of a senior citizen.
There have been a lot of wake up moments, not being able to walk up stairs, finding clothes to fit properly, awful lower limb edema. I'm so limited in the physical activity I can do. I can swim, but even getting in and out of pools is hard. I have great friends and family who love me and support me and who are desperately worried about me. I have made some life modifications, I don't eat a lot of junk food or fast food, my husband and I don't order or go out to eat that often, I used to eat pasta several times a week and now we barely eat pasta at all. Now my big problem is portion size and snacking and my ability to partake in any kind of physical activity.
So I've made the decision to get this surgery. I'm 28 years old and have the mobility of a senior citizen. I'm so limited in in everything I can do. I want to start a career, have babies, travel, and live a real life. So here we go.