I thought I would write about my struggle with my weight over the past decade because a) most women have experienced something similar throughout their lives, and b) I've never really spoken about it in depth before.
**note that some of the pictures are quite bad quality. I spent so long trying to find photos of myself over the years & it was way more of a debacle than expected! Most photos were just of my face & with friends so I had to dig a little deeper...
Where it all began...
Growing up, I was always the sporty type- mostly dance, swimming, athletics & netball. From the age of 5 through til 13 I spent almost every weekend at a dance comp, swimming carnival or athletics meet. Back then fast food wasn't really an option & I was doing so much physical activity I doubt what I ate would have made a dent anyway..
2001-2004 (13-15 yrs old)
Hello high school.
And hello puberty. Suddenly, boys & booze were way more important than sport & I gave it all up, even my beloved dance, to dedicate my time solely to my social life. Luckily, at that point my metabolism was still working in my favour and all I seemed to gain was a big set of boobies and some slender hips. Which were my best assets for a couple of years there. The big boobs had run in the family for generations & were inevitable, but it was still strange to sprout a DD cup overnight when you're 14 years old.
(2004, 15 years old- As you would catch me most weekends back then)
2004-2006 (15 & 16 yrs old)
Once my girlfriends and I got our licences things moved to a whole new level food wise. Drive throughs. How convenient!! I remember during a typical school week we would be switching between Burger King & KFC on consecutive days. And not just a little hamburger or anything pansy like that, triple cheese burgers were our fav. We could inhale so much of that crap so often and to this day I still don't understand how we didn't have heart attacks. On top of that- every weekend I would be drinking an entire box of bourbon and cola pre mixed drinks and smoking rolly cigarettes like I was the coolest kid on the block. I skulled that poison regularly for around 3 years, every single weekend. I don't even want to imagine the horror on my livers face. By some miracle, my body kept itself together mostly throughout that 3 years, I was still doing PE & Dance at school so I wasn't completely sedentary but it must have mostly been my metabolism working on overdrive for a while there. Bless her.
(Me at my high school ball in 2006 at 17 years old) holding some puppy fat on those cheeks)
2007 (17 & 18 years old)
Suddenly school was over, hello real working world. Two of my girlfriends and I immediately moved out of home together & got big girl full-time jobs. Every lunch break I was trekking to the nearest fast food joint getting tubs of pasta with feta & chorizo, or white rice teriyaki chicken sushi with zero nutritional content. The weight started piling on.. I joined a gym right by my work & would regularly go at least 3 times a week doing circuit training and cardio but that didn't stop the scales from creeping up. Looking back- I am in complete disbelief at how I had little to no knowledge of what good nutrition was whatsoever. We would be going to the gym & then we would go back to our flat and cook up a huge batch of carbonara pasta and eat 3 servings each. It was utterly ridiculous. I had no idea what I was doing to my body at that point, and I was definitely not getting my 5 + a day either. Ironically, my parents owned one of the biggest fruit & vegetable markets in our city throughout this entire time, and I had unlimited access to all of it for free. It also had the biggest organic food section and I barely even looked in it in the entire 10 years it was there. All I ever got was chocolate bars, meat & bread, and the odd tub of strawberries in summer. Yes, I am shaking my head in shame right at this moment.
That year I put on around 10 kilos, but it was so gradual I barely noticed.
2008 (18-19yrs old)
Along came 2008. This was a big year of changes, I had broken up with my long term boyfriend at the end of 2007, moved to Australia and moved back within 8 weeks and ended up back in with my parents. I got a good job in an office which turns out had a lot of downtime, this was convenient as the newest and coolest thing to hit the web had just arrived. Hello Facebook. This new revolutionary trend was a portal for information and sharing whatever your heart desired (namely pictures of yourself looking as best as possible). I noticed more and more status updates and links shared about dieting & calorie counting, and naturally I was intrigued. So from there I began to research different diets and how to lose weight. Before I got the office job I had started climbing up the mount on a regular basis as I was beginning to feel pretty shit about myself and my appearance by then. But I had initially thought that exercise was the key to weight loss all that time, how wrong was I?! By the end of 2008 I had lost around 5kilos from eating less sugar and climbing the Mount but I was still fairly naive about what I was eating & how to have a good wholesome diet.
2009 (19-20yrs old)
In 2009 I moved down to Dunedin with Oli to begin a degree at Otago University. Our relationship was tumultuous & living with a bunch of boys was really hard work. They loved to drink almost every night & I was over it by then. Slowly, I began to resent my living situation & became obsessed with what I ate and how much I exercised. I was walking everywhere as a student which was great and I was also going to the gym 3 or 4 times a week. But I began to binge eat. Some nights I would order myself a large dominos pizza and scoff it all down in no time at all, then I would sneak across to the dairy for chocolate and lollies and hide out in my room eating the lot. I was miserable. The next day I would restrict my diet to soup & water or something absurd like that, but the cycle would continue. My weight hovered around the 65 kilo mark that year, never really gaining or losing all that much. Towards the end of the year Oli and I broke up and I had to move out by myself in a city where I knew next to no one. The bingeing got much worse and I found myself drowning in a sea of self loathing. It was so horrible. The break up literally broke me and I felt like an empty shell of a human. After getting straight A's all year I suddenly stopped going to my classes and just hid out in my studio room eating just fish and spinach one day, McDonald's burgers the next. Before long, school was out and it was time to head home for summer. My girlfriend and I had got summer jobs together and I was much healthier and happier back home, working & eating better with not as much bingeing happening as a result. I was at a reasonable weight by the end of that year, I felt more comfortable in my skin & a lot more confident.
(Oli and I in Bali June 2009, I had just turned 20 years old. This photo still shocks me as I swear my face was never that chubby then!)
To be continued......
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