A year and four months after going on my diet, I walked into a holiday party, and heads turned, jaws dropped._
"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.” Edwin Lewis Cole
Eighty-eight pounds in 14 months! My original plan was to lose around 40 pounds. I more than doubled that figure in a little over a year. When I shimmied into my old favorite pair of skinny jeans, my mission was accomplished. It was official—I shrunk nine dress sizes, a shoe size and two ring sizes.Admittedly, I was a thin person through childhood and early adulthood—even into my 40s. It was in part, due to my “thinking” that I allowed a mid-40s, stress-related weight gain to spiral out of control. Ultimately, I couldn't slide into my car without having my tummy rub uncomfortably against the steering wheel, and I couldn't push the seat back to compensate because if I did that, my feet wouldn't reach the gas pedal.
I remember being so mortified about my weight gain, one year especially, that I declined all invitations from friends simply because I didn’t want them to see how much weight I had gained. Life was passing me by and years were being wasted. That same year, my husband and I had driven to the post office and by happenstance, ran into his brother and wife, along with their three adult children, all of whom I hadn’t seen for many months. My husband got out of the car and walked over to visit. I stayed in the car. I was so self-conscious and so down on myself that day that I didn’t want to talk to or be seen by them. I heard one of the kids say, “Is that Nadia?” and I knew that I had changed so much that she wasn’t even sure it was me. I eventually did go over and visit, I had to. I didn’t want to look any more stupid than I already did. Worse, I must have seemed standoffish and unfriendly.
I have doezens of stories like this that I could share, but you get the idea. I carried that excess weight for fifteen years.
