South Beach Diet

One of my co-workers is doing the South Beach Diet. If you're unfamiliar, during the first 2 weeks of the SBD, you fore go without anything to eat but fish, chicken, veggies and fat-free cheese. No bread, no pasta, no sugars. Impossible. We had a picnic at work- hot dogs, bakes beans, macaroni salad, brownies... so delicious. Do you know what my co-worker ate? Spinach and lettuce with oil and vinegar and celery stalks with low fat string cheese. My problem comes in that 1: I love hot dogs 2: I believe that ranch dressing is a cure-all and you can't eat it on the SBD 3: She looked miserable, sitting there, munching on her celery and I just can't do that. I have a relationship with food. A good one and I'm not willing to lose that. I'm afraid I'll be fat forever.

"She has such a pretty face..."

"It's a shame she can't lose some weight." If I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me, I could afford a personal trainer. I rarely talk about my weight issues. For a long time, I didn't think I had any weight issues. My weight was never a big deal. Then my dad died at 57. He'd had a lot of weight related complications: diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, sleep apnea... I was terrified that I would miss pivotal events in my children's lives.

I don't really know when my weight got "out of control." I remember when I started to notice I was too heavy. I was in 4th grade. I weighed 120lbs. One of my classmates, who was pretty and popular, told everyone that she weighed 100lbs. For year, my ideal weight was 100lbs. That was probably the time that puberty was starting, because that was the year my mom bought me my Garfield underwire bra and undies set. The bra was a B cup. I know a lot of adults who don't wear a B and that's where I started out.

I figured I ate because I was lonely. We had moved when I was in 2nd grade to take care of my great aunt and great grandfather. Granted, we still lived on the same street. It was so lonely. My mom was so busy taking care of them that she stopped taking care of me. She was so tired, so I can't really blame. She was still working full-time in her own business and coming home at night to change diapers. I just retreated to the upstairs, away from my aunt who passed the time by sitting in her chair, moaning.

I had a friend who lived next door to our old house, so she would walk down the road and we'd play, but we fought a lot, too. Potato Chips never fought with me.

I'm sure my mom didn't know what to do about my growning weight problem. She tried to help, but it pretty much made me feel worse. She was great for saying, "You have such a pretty face, if you'd only lose some weight." I remember another time, she told me to go stand naked in front of the floor length mirror in her bathroom, because then I'd see "how bad" it really was.

Most of my mom's tactics were to try and motivate me by feeling badly about myself. That never worked, it just made me turn to my good friends Chocolate and Ice Cream for some emotional support.

At the beginning of the month, I bought a Wii Fit and I was doing really well. But, now I've kinda fizzled out. I'm tired and it's frustrating when I work so hard and only burn 190 calories. I'm hoping that by writing this blog, I will find other people in the "Pretty Faces" Society, who are at their wits-end like me. Hopefully, I will be able to do what I haven't been able to do in the last 16 years.