How do you share years and years of hurt and pain on one place? It’s hard for me to capture the depth and intensity of what it felt like for me to be trapped in a body that I didn’t feel was mine.
On the inside, I was happyand joyful. On the outside I was trapped, bound inside a shell I didn’t recognize. I was physically restrained by my size and depressed because there was such a discrepancy between who I felt I really was and what I looked like to other people.
I weighed nearly 300 pounds and was a size 28. I couldn’t bend down to tie my shoes, couldn’t fit at a restaurant table and couldn’t stretch my seatbelt any more in the car. My heart ached when I couldn’t physically get down on the floor to play with my children and I avoided looking at myself in the mirror any more than was absolutely necessary.
I constantly beat myself up because of what I’d let myself become and felt I deserved to be fat because I couldn’t control myself.
I was stuck in a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting and every failed attempt was another reminder of how worthless I was and how I deserved to feel insignificant and weak. Any weight I lost using the newest diet pill or fad diet was gained back, plus some. This thrust me deeper and deeper into a dark hole of depression and desperation. Because of my lack of success and the progression of my problem, I felt like there was no hope and I was destined to be fat forever and to never truly become the person I was created to be.
