Weight.
Like a lot of women I know, I have never been satisfied with mine no matter what it is.
I went on my first diet in elementary school.
My nickname when I was little was a filipino slang term for "chubby." I know my parents meant it as a term of endearment (chubby kids are cute, after all), but it still gave me a label very early on that I tried to overcome. For me, it was hard enough being one of the only non-white kids in my neighborhood. I didn't really want to have to deal with being the fat asian kid on top of it.
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| Those rolls! Cute when you're a toddler, but... |
My ways of combating this were two-fold. (1) I relied heavily on my personality to make friends and (2) I was perpetually on some kind of a diet and/or exercise program.
It started with jamming in the living room to my mom's Jane Fonda tapes, continued through reading and adopting Susan Powter's mantra/lifestyle (remember Stop the Insanity!?), moving on to Oprah and Bob Greene, jumping on the fat-free everything bandwagon (Snackwells, frozen yogurt, and bagels comprise a healthy diet, right?), going back to Slim Fast, and eventually succumbing to the low-carb Atkins craze. Meanwhile I was playing tennis and taking aerobics classes and eventually running marathons (slowly).
I think a lot of girls say they were always on a diet, but I was seriously ALWAYS on a diet. Why? I would say mostly because of my culture (i.e. family members greeting me with the arm-pinch and some commentary on my weight at every major filipino gathering), comparisons to my skinny older sister...and...did I mention my culture?!?
Let's just say a low point was when I came home from my freshman year of college and an aunt told me, through pinches and laughter, that I looked pregnant.
It is because of this decades-long battle that I would probably be considered a "yo-yo dieter." I didn't have huge fluctuations, and I never considered myself obese or underweight, but I had my peaks and valleys. Then starting about 10 years ago, I seemed to hover around what I assumed was my "steady state" weight. This weight seemed to stay put no matter what I did. See, while I was arguably in really great shape through running marathons and half-marathons, I was also eating my fair share of nachos, wings and cheese fries and washing it all down with Miller Lite. As a result, the scale rarely budged.
I figured that I was destined to live out my adult life being not as slim, toned, athletic or healthy as I wanted. I tried everything to stay motivated...from bribing myself with vacations [one year, ProMo even agreed to pay for a trip to Key West if I reached my goal weight loss], to putting pictures up on the refrigerator of myself in what I considered my prime (1997).
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING worked for about 10 years. UNTIL...I moved to the 'burg. When I got here, I participated in a free health screening where I learned that my BMI (body mass index) put me in the "overweight" range. While this was mildly alarming, it was more the move itself that set off a chain of events:
(1) Limited friends
(2) Limited food options. (At least of the rich, decadent variety I had grown accustomed to.)
(3) Lots of free time (see #1), which meant
(4) More time to exercise due to lack of going out with friends (and a job that didn't require I work about 6 days a week, 10 hours/day).
Now, it wasn't as easy or as simple as those 4 steps make it seem, but over the course of about a year I eventually lost about 30 pounds. Which is awesome, I can give myself that.
But everything in life is a tradeoff. People rarely "have it all" no matter how it may seem. While I'm super happy to be operating at or close to a "goal weight" right now, and I (not so secretly) love being confused for a student (most of the time, anyway), it has come at a price...
Some "before and after" photos: My vain self would rather not put these "before" pictures out there, but they're already floating around Facebook so why not, right?
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| At a friend's wedding in May 2008 (left) and college reunion April 2011 (right) |
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| Pure coincidence that I'm wearing rival shirts. :) Seeing the picture of myself on the left (Sept 2009) motivated me to REALLY get serious about losing weight. |
While I am proud of my health and weight loss accomplishments, I am fully aware that I likely would have never hit these goals if other things in life were "going my way." As a bonus, this whole journey has really done wonders for my psychological perspective. To go along with a previous post's theme, no matter how things may seem, I've learned not to envy or make assumptions about anyone's life - positive or negative. We're all just doing what we can to accomplish our personal best and make the most of the cards we've been dealt.
It turns out that reaching my weight loss goal wasn't the "silver bullet" that I was looking for all this time, and this shouldn't have come as a surprise. What has been slightly unexpected is that I've encountered a whole other set of unanticipated challenges and a not-so-flattering side of people. I'll save that for another blog post, but these challenges have lead to some self-reflection and evaluation and I hope to come out the other side as an even better version of myself.
If nothing else, I think I've finally learned, after nearly 38 years and numerous people telling me this, to not wrap my self-worth around others' perception of me. It sounds so obvious and I feel like it's advice I dole out all the time, but I guess I never took those words to heart.
In the end, it took living in a small college town...in some ways MORE than losing those 30 pounds...for me to finally figure it out.
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