I’ve been promising for awhile that I would write about the way I’ve been eating lately. Â I’ve already shared with you the positive effects on my health and my weight. Â I haven’t sat down to write before now because it feels important to start at the beginning, and the beginning was a LONG time ago.
I went on my first diet when I was a slightly chubby four-year-old, on the orders of my pediatrician.  So I have spent a lifetime feeling fat (even though there were many periods in my life where I now believe I looked just fine), and have been off and on diets ever since.
What that first diet was I don’t remember, and I had plenty of treats as a child.  What I do remember is always having the sense that I wasn’t supposed to be eating them, and feeling guilty when I did.  I remember weighing in at the Diet Workshop every week, and eating things kind of like brownies made with Sweet ‘n’ Low and drinking Alba 77.  As I entered high school there was the Scarsdale Diet and then the Change-Your-Metabolism-Diet.  Some of them worked better than others, but I never lost ALL the weight.  I never weighed the magic number the weight tables told me I should.
After gaining the Freshman 15 in college, I came home for the summer and went on the rice diet.  Only instead of the recommended two weeks I did it all summer long, along with walking several miles each day, swimming laps at the pool, and doing 150 sit-ups and crunches every night after working full-time as a Cracker Barrel waitress (a brutal job).  I went back to school weighing 142, my lowest adult weight, but still unsatisfied because the Met Life table said I should weigh 130. (The rice diet allowed me one piece of fruit for breakfast, and one piece of fruit plus either three rice cakes or a cup of plain rice for lunch and dinner.)
I continued dieting all through college, eating very little a lot of the time but what I now know to be all the wrong things (bagels, giant corn muffins, sandwiches, pizza).  After I graduated and got married I found another diet in an old magazine–I can’t remember what it was called but it was mostly vegetables.  I lost 30 pounds in six months (I was still far from 130 but I look good in pictures from back then!), then got pregnant and gained 70 lbs.  I used that diet again after Emily was born and lost almost all the baby weight, the only time I ever came close to doing that!
Right around this time the low-fat craze started.  I read a book that said you couldn’t gain weight unless you ate fat.  If you avoided all fat, you could eat anything else you wanted and you couldn’t help but lose.  I fell for this hook, line, and sinker, and ate carbs like crazy, avoiding cheese, meat, and french fries, and gained instead of losing.  At some point I did Jenny Craig.  There were a couple of stints in Weight Watchers, one of which helped me lose 60 lbs. in time for my sister’s wedding, at which point I got pregnant for the fifth time.
When Lorelei was little I stopped dieting.  I told myself when I was ready I would join a gym and do Weight Watchers again, but that what I needed to do was live life without constantly feeling guilty about food and bad about myself.  And I do believe I needed to do that.
In the meantime, while not avoiding the occasional treat, I ate what I considered to be healthy: Â beans and rice, whole grain bread and oatmeal and other whole grain cereals, lots of fruit and vegetables, very little meat or cheese because they were high in fat. Â Of course, I had my vices: Â coffee with cream and sugar, Mountain Dew Monkey Ice from Weigel’s, a shared dessert while eating out, but although I went through fast food drive-thrus with the big kids almost daily, I rarely indulged.
I didn’t weigh myself for many years, and while I did not balloon when I stopped dieting constantly, I did slowly add pounds. Â And I got older. Â Finally, my weight began to affect the way I felt. Â A friend not much older than I had a close call. Â My left leg was swollen and painful, and walking upstairs made me breathless. Â I could tell my blood pressure was getting high (after a lifetime of being subnormal!), and I started to get scared. Â I decided that in 2014, as soon as I had access to medical care, I would have everything checked and then start a journey to better health.
I’ve been sharing some of this journey with you in my ObamaCare posts, without including a lot of details about how I’ve changed my eating habits . . . but now this post has grown very long so I will make this a two-parter with Low-Carb Love Affair to be published in a day or two!
