Let me tell you a little about myself before I tell you about my journey toward health and finding myself. I'm Amy. I'm a 36 year old wife, mom, host-mom to foreign exchange students, and social worker. I've been married to my high school sweetheart, Joel for 16.5 years. He's stuck with me through thick (NO PUN INTENDED!!!!!) and thin (that's to come!) We're parents to the two most beautiful boy babies on the planet. Nope, no bias there. Jack Carroll is 10 and is a miracle in and of himself. He came to this world in a teeny tiny 1 pound package! And Noah is 7 and the cutest little snaggle-tooth you ever saw! We've hosted German exchange students for the last 6 years and this year, added a precious little French girl to our list of foreign "daughters." I'm a social worker helping reunite families through my state's Department of Children's Services. Next to my own children, this is the joy of my life. OK, enough about all that! Let me tell you the stuff you REALLY came here to find out!
While I'm not to the end of my journey yet, let me tell you a little about the journey so far. First of all, I'm an addict! Pure and simple. I LOVE food. I don't mean I just enjoy eating. It goes SOOOO far beyond that. Food tastes so good. It smells so good. It IS so good. Even not-so-great tasting food is good because I was eating it too.
My love affair with and addiction to food started at an early age. Both my mother and grandmother were fabulous cooks! What they couldn't make taste wonderful has never been thought of! I grew up in both their kitchens just watching and learning. Both of them and pretty much everyone in my whole family loves to eat. Unforunately, it didn't seem to affect everyone else like it did me. I can very much remember starting to put on weight around age 7. My parents divorced about that time and food became my friend, my companion, my confidante', my first love, my EVERYTHING! I put on a little weight and would've been "pudgy" by today's standards. But in the 70's, the overweight epidemic had not yet hit. Anybody carrying a little more weight than "normal" was just a freak! I know because I was reminded every single day by every single person that I crossed paths with.
I was always on the heavy side all through school. I can remember having my Senior pictures taken in high school and crying because I thought I was so huge compared to the other girls. Now I long to be "that huge" again! I finished a year of college and then came home and married my high school sweetheart....the only person who ever really gave me the time of day. We've been married over 16 years now. When we were first married, I tested out all my cooking skills. Turns out, I don't just love to eat it, I love to COOK it too! And boy, do I love to make fantastic buffets! Honey, Ryan's buffet ain't got NOTHIN' on ole Amy's buffet! And if I cooked it, I HAD to eat it! And eat it and eat it! With every good thing came good food. With every bad thing came food. Heck, with everything PERIOD came food. That's just the way it was. I noticed after I'd been married a few months that nothing was fitting anymore. Well, they still made sizes bigger, so what the heck....keep eating ole girl! And I did. Over the years I packed on pound after pound until one day I didn't even recognize myself anymore. But I still didn't stop. I tried diet after diet. I'd stick with it a little while and then fall off the wagon. I had tried all kind of crazy diets growing up. My grandmother loved to eat as much as I did, but never could understand why I was so big. I spent a great deal of time with her and she put me on every nutty diet that came out. I will never forget one of those crazy "lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks" diets! A boiled egg and toast was breakfast everyday. Dry tuna and more toast with a grapefruit was lunch. Another boiled egg and toast for dinner. Sure, I lost some weight. But I gained it and plenty of its friends back everytime. I had done the low fat thing. I had done Richard Simmons. I tried a Christian weight loss program at church called First Place. Before this go around, that was where I found the most success. Unfortunately, it was a 13 week program. We took a couple weeks off after that first 13 weeks and I never could get fully back on the wagon after that. And I gained and gained and gained about another 100 pounds AFTER doing First Place.
If you're waiting to find out what finally "clicked," you'll have to keep waiting. I can't tell you that one moment in time that was the defining moment for me. A number of things happened. First of all, I'm happier in my life now than I have ever been. I have 2 beautiful boys who are involved in everything under the sun. I have the most fulfilling and rewarding job I could imagine having. Life is just good! Then last November 2004, just days before my 35th birthday, I got food poisoned. My brother and his entire family were too. Thankfully my own husband and boys managed to not eat what made the rest of us so sick. Well, I finally recovered from that and then a week or so later, had the most God-awful pain I've ever experienced in my life. I thought it was kidney stones because I've had those before. But this kept lasting and lasting. I suffered for about 8 weeks before someone finally ordered an ultrasound and discovered I had gallstones. During those 8 weeks, sometimes I would go 4 days at a time without anything besides water passing my lips. So by January when I was finally diagnosed, I had already lost between 20 and 30 pounds I imagine. I have no way of actually knowing as I couldn't find a scale that would weigh me. But all my clothes fit a little looser. I mentioned to some online friends that I knew I had lost weight and wished I could find a way to stick with it and take a lot more off. Several of those friends suggested Weight Watchers to me. Of all the diets I had ever tried, Weight Watchers was not one of them. I wasn't very sure because I LOVE food. Have I mentioned that? I DO! It's the best thing in the world I'm telling you! And too, I didn't want to start some program where somebody could lose 10-15 pounds and feel like they've really done something. Now don't get me wrong.....if you've only got 15 pounds to lose and WW has worked for you, SUPER. But honestly, I don't want to hear about folks who just have that tiny amount to lose. Show me someone who has lost HUNDREDS! Not just 100, but plural....MORE than 100. So one of those online friends (THANKS KATH!!!!) who had suggested I try WW gave me a link to this man's site who had lost over 300 pounds on WW. I was amazed! I just couldn't believe he had lost so much weight! I was so filled with hope then that I decided to give it a try. I stayed on it faithfully the first 3 months without ever weighing. I knew that the doctor's scales still wouldn't weigh me. I had an idea of just how high my weight was.....or at least the top number I was willing to admit to myself (ONLY!) that I had gotten to. I knew there were no scales, short of going to a livestock barn, that would weigh me. So after I had been on WW about 3 months, I sent my VERY skinny husband to Wal-Mart to perform an experiment. I told him to find 2 identical scales and calibrate them both to zero then place one foot on each scale and see what it weighed him at, then weigh on one single scale to see if they compared accurately. The experiment was a success. I decided I would go to Wal-Mart VERY early one Saturday morning before most folks are up and get in the most back corner I could find with my 2 scales and just see what it said. Well, I found a scale that would weigh up to 400 pounds. So I tried weighing on 1 scale. IT WEIGHED ME!!!! I was amazed! I couldn't believe it! I had LOST! So I bought that sucker and brought it home with me! It's lived here for several months now. I've lost about another 130 pounds since then. Currently I'm down 168 pounds from the highest number I'll allow myself to think I got to. I still have a LONG way to go. But I've come a long way too! The journey hasn't been easy, but it has been very do-able!
Now with all that said, if you're STILL reading to this point, I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart that I LOVE Weight Watchers! NO, they are NOT paying me to say that. Heck, other than my online account with them, they have no idea who I am. Weight Watchers has been a God-send to me. I do the "points" system. It basically says there's nothing you can't have as long as you have the points for it. It's a lifestyle I can live with the rest of my life. I don't feel deprived. I don't feel cheated. I feel like a million bucks! If you are sitting there reading this and wish you could lose a few hundred pounds, I can't extol the virtues of Weight Watchers enough. It's a fabulous program that ANYONE can do. If I can do it, anybody can do it! It doesn't take a lot of willpower because it's eating healthy for dummies! :o) Absolutely anybody can do the program and succeed if you truly want to. Now, let me throw the monkey wrench in there for you. Weight Watchers is fabulous, but it ain't magic! If you want to lose weight, simply changing your eating habits ain't gonna cut it. I'm just being honest with you here. If you're my size, you didn't get this way by simply putting a fork in your mouth. I got this way because the biggest exercise I got was lifting that fork to my mouth. Most of my time was spent sitting on my considerable rump. I had kids and a husband that could fetch anything I wanted. So I let them fetch it. Now I make a concerted effort to sit less and be up moving more. If you are my size and simply can't do a lot of activity in the beginning, that's cool. Go to Wal-Mart and buy yourself a pedometer. I wear one every single day. No matter where I go. I wear it so I can see just how many miles I walk in a days time. When I first bought it, I tried to make myself walk up to the next 1/2 mile before bedtime. While in my office, I make an effort to get up and move more. When I first started wearing it, I would just walk inside my office. Then I ventured out to the parking lot. Then I decided I would try to walk the block around our office building. I made it all the way without dying. That was such a victory for me. Before I started Weight Watchers in January, I would drive around the parking lot of Wal-Mart looking for the nearest parking space so I didn't have to walk so far to the door. Then I would have to sit down in Wal-Mart several times before I could finish my shopping. So buy yourself a pedometer and try to move more. It might not be much at first, but everybody has to start somewhere. I bought a 1 mile Walk Away the Pounds video. The first morning I did it, I could only make it through 4 minutes of it! I kept doing it until I could make it through the entire 20 minutes. Then I got out a Tae Bo tape I had bought several years ago around New Year's when I made a resolution to get healthy. I think I did it once and then put it away again. So I got ole Billy out of the video cabinet and put him in the VCR. Yeah, a VIDEO CASSETTE! Not DVD! That's how old this thing was. I could only do about 4 minutes of that too! Gradually, I increased my time. Before I quit Tae Bo'ing for the summer last year to swim, I was up to 20 full minutes of Tae Bo every morning! We have a pool in our back yard. So when it go warm enough to get in the pool, I started swimming everyday for my exercise. I started at 20 minutes. I dragged my half-dead self out of the pool that first morning. WHEW! That was some workout. Before summer was over, I worked myself up to 40 minutes without fail EVERY single day, but sometimes did up to 70 minutes at a time! Unless it was lightening, my hiney was in the pool at 6:00 every morning. NO EXCUSES!
I say all this to make you understand that while Weight Watchers is a fabulous program and I LOVE it, I would NOT have had this kind of success if I hadn't partnered Weight Watchers with exercise. The two MUST go hand-in-hand. The key is start small. Don't expect yourself to be able to do a whole exercise video. Don't expect to be able to walk 3 miles. If you're the size I was, you CAN'T physically do a lot. But you can do SOMETHING. And ANY movement for someone that large is exercise, let me tell you! Don't not do anything because you think you can't. You CAN! If nothing else, sit in your recliner and do the movements to some exercise video from your chair until you work up enough stamina to do it standing up.
Well, if you're still with me, HOORAH! Nobody likes to hear that exercise stuff. I didn't. But just wait until the first time you finish a whole exercise video or finish your first 1 mile walk. You'll be hearing the theme from "Rocky" in your head! You can do it! I KNOW you can do it because I'm doing it. I won't say I've done it because I'm not to the end of my journey yet. But I AM doing it. And you can do it too. I highly recommend Weight Watchers. If you're like I was and so big you're afraid the scales won't weigh you, do Weight Watchers online. Do your points everyday and exercise and simply never weigh. I didn't weigh for over 3 full months after I started Weight Watchers. If you do the program and you exercise, you WILL lose weight. Pure and simple! Is it easy? No. It's not easy. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in life. But you know what? Birthing those 2 gorgeous boys wasn't "easy" either. But boy howdy, I'm glad I did it. It's over now and my memory has faded as to just how hard it really was. In another year or so when I've finished the losing part and get to the maintaining part, it STILL won't be easy. Because I'm not addicted to childbirth. I WILL still be addicted to food. I don't have to remember on a daily basis how difficult it was to bring those boys into the world. But when I lose all I want to lose and get to a healthy weight, I will still have to do battle every single day the rest of my life with the food demon. But I can do it! I WILL do it! And you can do it too!
If you have questions or want a little help or a gentle push in the right direction, I encourage you to e-mail me. OH how I would have loved to have had someone that had been my size to e-mail with and commiserate with during this journey! So feel free to e-mail me. There is a link to e-mail me in the box to your left. Hopefully I can help. I encourage you to start your journey TODAY! Don't wait for Monday. Don't wait for the beginning of the month. Don't wait for New Year's. Start living your life TODAY. Good luck and may God richly bless your journey to good health!
