Weight Loss Journey – The Body Project 2.0
Weight Loss Journey – The Body Project 2.0
Body Project 2.0 Start Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Body positivity… I love myself… I do not like my body…
Weight Loss Journey – The Body Project 2.0 – I can do it for others, but not myself. I was watching Sara Rae Vargas a while ago, and she was talking about body positivity and how she’s kind of tired of hearing about it. And I get it. I just do not like my body right now. To all the women out there who love their weight and size, you go, girl! I know my body is off and if I just accept the weight gain, it’s going to be bad for my physical and mental health long-term. I still love me, just not the extra weight.
After having my daughter, my belly looked like a faded road map with dips and valleys, and the texture of my skin on my stomach was just too much for me to handle. I didn’t want to even look at it. I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want anyone else to look at it. And, I sure as fuck didn’t want anyone else to touch it, even Chad. Anyway, this was a frustrating time.
Body positivity is, “the mindset that everyone is worthy of love and a positive body image, regardless of how the media and society tries to define beauty or the ideal body type.”[84] When individuals have a positive body image, they reduce the development of Anxiety and depression. Wikipedia
What Caused Me to Gain Nearly 100 Pounds? Chronic Stress.
Before the lawsuit and having my daughter, I weighed about 107 pounds and wore size 5 jeans. I was a relatively tiny person. I’m just under 5′ tall, 4′ 11″ to be exact. My daughter was born in the middle of a legal shitstorm that started nearly 4 years before she was born. The stress of fighting at home and work, losing my job, losing my health insurance, a huge legal battle, starting a brand new business, and then ending up pregnant in the middle of it, proved to be more stressful than my nervous system could handle. I didn’t notice the effect all of these events had on my nervous system and body until a over decade later.
Did you know that stress from traumatic events can make you fat?
Yep, it does. My life was pretty boring until the war in the family broke out in 2008. I wasn’t a fighter. I never had to be. I tended to avoid confrontation where possible. I didn’t care enough about a lot of things to fight for them. I would give in often to move forward in both business and relationships. So long as it didn’t cost me anything, I would concede. What started the legal battle? Honestly, control and greed on the other side, and a lot of fear on their part looking back. Desperate people do desperate things. That’s a story for another day.
My world turned upside down in 24 hours between September 11th and 12th of 2008. You break up with someone and they accept it, or you break up with someone and they go bat-shit crazy. The request for the end of a business relationship caused the opposing side to go bat-shit crazy. Crazy begets scary. The death threats, stalking, breaking into our offices, taking of personal property, and the amount of harassing phone calls, faxes, and emails that my family and I have received over the past 15 years are probably up in the hundreds of thousands. I literally had banker boxes full of them as evidence for court. When you live under these circumstances, I think we believe we are dealing with the stress of it as it is happening. The truth is that traumatic events that trigger your fight or flight response have to be processed by your body. Having a traumatic event once in a while is okay. Your body can go through the event, process the hormones released, and return to a calm state. I lived in a state of fight or flight every day for many many years. My body sure did not have the time to process each event before the next one happened. At one point, I had to change my phone numbers and get rid of my fax machine (way back in the day) because the ringing of the phone or the fax machine would cause me to have an instant panic attack. I never knew what type of nasty threatening message was coming through the line.
My body didn’t return to a calm state for a decent period of time for over a decade, and then it was too late. The damage was done. The stress of life over the past decade had me gain over 90 pounds. So, I went from being 5 feet tall and 107 pounds to 5 feet tall and 200 pounds, this was a bad scale day in December of 2022. The weight came on steadily I was barely eating with the amount of stress I was under. I didn’t understand. I would work out and that would cause me to gain weight. I had no clue that you reach a certain amount of cardio and your body starts producing cortisol. The very thing that was making me fat when I wasn’t working out, my body was now making when I worked out. I had no clue.
How Do You Just Let Yourself Go?
It was really easy! You just have no clue as to how your body works. You have no idea how traumatic events affect your digestion and your organs. You have no clue your liver is holding all of the cortisol your body hasn’t been calm enough to release yet, and it’s been holding it and building it up for years. It runs out of room and starts storing more cortisol in your fat and wherever it can find a place to tuck it. And I used to think, how do people let themselves gain so much weight? How do they just let themselves go? Now, I get it. Life happens. That assault you had in your 20s and the long court case that followed it. The death of your parent where you grieved for months. The ex-husband just won’t agree on how to handle the kids and child support, and it’s been in court for years. You have a boss who makes you miserable, but you haven’t found another job yet. You just don’t think about the events that leave marks on your nervous system and that those hormones that are constantly released so you can make it through the event, in the end, need to be processed and released completely to be healthy both mentally and physically. And you stop caring about the aesthetics along the way. And you stop trying to lose weight because you diet and exercise and keep losing the same 10 pounds over and over again.
How I Gained My Post-Trauma Weight?
Oh…to be frustrated by your weight. So, let’s think back about when the weight gain started, how much stress have you endured since then? Did you get a break? Did you have 6 months or a year of happy peacefulness where you could work on your body and mind and just live peacefully in the moment? Probably not. I’ve not lived peacefully in the moment since maybe 2007. It’s sad.
I look at my fat and weight in terms of stress and unhappiness now. I gain weight fast when I am unhappy and stressed. All the cortisol and adrenaline hormones just hang around inside me. I have a hard time relaxing long enough for them to be released. It’s been true my entire life looking back. I have been overweight at the end of every relationship I broke off and every job I’ve left. After they were over, I would move on to be happy again for a decent period of time and the weight would disappear.
I gained 15 pounds when my parents moved the family to a new home when I was 11. Kids in my new junior high sucked. Everyone made fun of my weight here. I wasn’t fat in the 5th grade! I was terrified to move and go to a new school. I gained the weight the summer before 6th grade. I had no friends. I lived in the middle of nowhere. My parents limited my long-distance calls. You had to pay by the minute for long-distance calls back then. Cell phones were not even a thing in 1989. By the time I was in 7th grade and had a super solid friend group, the weight dropped.
By the time I broke up with my boyfriend of 7 years and moved from Milwaukee to Chicago in May of 1999. I had gained over 50 pounds in a little over a year’s time. I weighed 168 pounds. The boy cheated. He was verbally abusive and an asshole. Looking back, his parents turned into raging alcoholics over a death in the family, and they became verbally and emotionally abusive to him. It’s not an excuse for his behavior, just insight as to why he changed in the end.
When I found out my friends knew he was cheating and didn’t tell me. I was fuming mad and humiliated. I just up and moved without telling anyone except my parents. I ghosted him and all of my friends. I quit my job and camped on my cousin’s couch in Chicago. By the end of that week, I had decided to live with my cousin, enrolled myself back in college, and had a new job. No man, but didn’t want one after the last one. I trusted no one. By the holidays, I was 110 pounds and living peacefully.
I stayed that weight until the lawsuits started in 2008. I hit 200 pounds in December of 2022, which was part of my mental breakdown amongst other things. This time there was no leaving to be happy quick. I had no man to leave, I was married and loved my husband, Chad. No job to quit, I built my own business. I had constant stress from outside sources and I realized that I didn’t know how to handle my current stress and release the past stress to take care of myself. I started therapy in December of 2022. By the end of January 2023, I was given a diagnosis of Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD).
What is the difference between PTSD and CPTSD?
C-PTSD is caused by ongoing trauma that lasts for months or years, while PTSD may be caused by a single traumatic event. The symptoms of C-PTSD are also more complex and may take longer to treat. Therapy can help you recover from trauma. Choosing Therapy
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising knowing what I’ve been through, but I didn’t realize I was holding on to so much stress in my body. Knowing what is going on inside of me and having the tools to fix it is helping the weight start to come off for the first time in years, maybe a decade. I’m not trying to eat or drown all the bad feelings or numb out. I’m working through them. I’m learning to create and protect my happiness. It’s hard. I am now the boundary queen. I don’t really have a food and weight problem. I don’t think I ever have. I have hormonal and emotional build-ups due to chronic stress. I had a lot of BIG emotions that were too painful to deal with at the time, so I pushed them down and they ended up on my body in the form of fat rolls and cellulite. Lol
Now that you know the background, it’s time to come along for the healing journey.
It’s taken me years to get over the aesthetic portion of my body. When I say over it, I mean I don’t like it, but I’ll live with it. I can’t change the stretchmarks from having a baby. Those who are proud of yours, good for you. I just tolerate mine. I’m Okay with it now most days…the grooves and the stretchmarks that is. I’m more concerned with the health aspect because I’m 45, and I really need to do something about being 200 pounds and over 50% body fat because that is just not good.
The Body Project 2.0 – Starting Over Yet Again.
Body Project 2.0 Start Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2023
It’s been about twelve years since I’ve exercised, or worked out, on a daily basis. Before I was pregnant, I worked out every day for an hour. I would walk, run, dance, take Zumba classes, do yoga, lift weights, and do anything else that made me sweaty and feel good. You can add sex to that list too. Do I start at that level this time? Nope. My main bodywork is to calm my body so I can start releasing all of the stress hormones I am supposedly full of.
