The Beginning

When I moved to Chicago at the end of 2004 I had recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend, had been miserable in my old job and living situation and was apprehensive about moving away from friends in Nashville and even further away from family in North Carolina. I consoled myself by eating, an old habit that I could never shake and probably never will.

One morning, a few months after moving to Chicago, I decided I should see just how much I weighed. The last time I'd been weighed was during a visit to my physician's office the previous summer, some eight months prior. At that time my weight had ballooned up to a value as high as it had ever been.

I gingerly nudged the digital scale from against the wall. I pressed lightly on it with my right foot, awakening it from its slumber. The yellow digital display came alive and read "0.0". I stepped onto the scale, right foot first, and as I did the display blinked "---", indicating that the scale was calculating my weight. I delicately placed my left foot on the apparatus, my entire bulk now firmly on the scale, and waited for it to determine how much I weighed. I stared at the blinking hyphens, anticipating and dreading the number that would be displayed. Finally, the hyphens resolved and the display said, "Err."

"Err?" What on earth does that mean, I wondered.

I turned the scale over and looked at the instruction sticker adhered to the bottom. I scanned for what this message meant, and was shocked to find that this was an error message that displayed if the scale's maximum weight had been exceeded.

The scale's maximum weight was 330 pounds.

The realization that I weighed in excess of 330 pounds was sobering. At that moment I understood that I had two choices: to get bigger and bigger or to work to reduce my weight. It didn't take me long to decide to choose option 2. This was the heaviest I had ever been in my entire life, and I resolved that it would be the heaviest I ever would be.

I next had to determine the best course of action to lose weight. Never a slave to reason, I figured it would be best to go it alone and make all my decisions independent of a health care provider. Fortunately I have enough training in physiology and science that I can read and learn about nutrition and synthesize the information with relative ease. However I would say to anyone else, even a person with training in biology and medicine such as myself, that seeking out a registered dietitian is the better way to go. Talking to your physician is a good start, but most general practitioners are so overworked they don't really have time to do much beyond shove diet and nutrition pamphlets into your hand. Working with a dietitian or nutritionist, which I did several years ago, is helpful because they have more time to dedicate to you and can help you come up with an individualized eating plan based on your personal likes and dislikes. Perhaps more importantly, they become a person to whom you feel accountable regarding your weight loss. I found this accountability helpful, and others I know have expressed similar sentiments.

I knew that losing weight would be a long-term endeavor, and that keeping it off would require changing the way I ate, shopped, lived and worked. I wouldn't start a "fad" diet - fads are temporary, and I wanted my weight loss to be permanent. I would monitor myself minimally in the beginning, afraid of becoming discouraged because I wasn't progressing rapidly enough. I also assured myself that permanent change would take time, so I reasoned that to lose the amount of weight I desired to lose, 110 pounds, would require a minimum of two years.

During the next few months I would decide on a focus point - something I desired that I felt would be impossible to achieve without losing weight - and alter how I interacted with food. In the next installment I'll discuss my focus point and talk about changing my perceptions about food and eating.