Image stuff

I mentioned a few days ago that I would be starting weight watchers, and in the spirit of purging everything toxic from my life, I should probably talk a bit about my body image problems.

Like a lot of women, the root of my self-esteem and body issues is, of course, my mother. My mom was tiny (size 0) before she accidentally got pregnant with my brother. She lost weight quickly after him, but after having me, she never got quite that skinny again, and I think she never forgave me.

When I was literally about 3 or 4, she started nagging me about what I ate. Now, I was NOT a chubby kid, so it wasn’t justified concern or anything like that. She just truly believes that for a girl to make it in life, she has to be physically perfect, and she wanted me off to a good start. Of course, the constant nagging and commenting when I ate had the opposite effect, and just created a lot of guilt in me. I got to the point where I couldn’t really eat anything but vegetables in front of my mom.

The backlash of that was that when no one was around, I binged. I ate whatever I could find. Once I ate plain butter. The whole time I lived with my family, there were not many times when no one was home, so I didn’t eat much, and I was pretty small.

The sad thing was, I remember thinking that I was the fattest kid in school. If I see pictures of myself from high school, I can’t believe I thought that, because I wasn’t even kind of chubby. My freshman year of high school was probably the worst year for me, and I remember wanting to kill myself because I was so disgusted with how fat I was. At the time, I weighed 105 pounds.

Getting my drivers license was really bad for me, because it really fed into the binging by myself thing. I gorged myself on food while I was driving home so that I wouldn’t be hungry and would only need to eat a little bit in front of my mom. I started gaining weight, which of course freaked me out, not to mention stepped up the nagging from my mom, so I went through several years of trying not to eat anything at all, succeeding for a few days, then giving up and eating everything within reach. So my weight has gone drastically up and down a lot.

Hubby really helped me with the whole loving myself thing. He loves me on my fat days just as much as he does every other day. So I’m now at a point where I can have a healthy body image. Except for the problem that the years of disordered eating really took its toll on my body, and now I weigh a lot more than I want to.

So that’s all my baggage. I need to get that all on the table before I can make a sincere effort to get healthy. Last night hubby and I went through the cabinets and basically threw out anything unhealthy. I made him promise to be supportive (he’s not usually supportive of me losing weight, I think because he thinks being supportive equals telling me I’m fat).

I start tomorrow. Wish me luck!