My History Continued - Pregnancy to Present

It was while I was pregnant with my son, Joshua, that my weight really started to pile back on and I felt powerless to stop it. I remember the mortification of stepping on the scale at my OB's office, only to find out that their scale only went to 350lbs. I was more than that. Granted, I was pregnant, but still. It was severely embarrassing and I'm sure was one of the factors that led to me developing pre-eclampsia over the course of that pregnancy and ultimately my need to be induced. But then again, I would justify my increasing weight with the fact that I was pregnant and my growing child needed the nutrition. I never actually knew how much I gained during my pregnancy because the scale just didn't go high enough.

I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight by my 6-week post-natal checkup. That felt great, and I resolved to eat better and lose even more weight as time went on. Unfortunately, that resolution was short-lived--I was nursing a growing baby, who always seemed to require more milk than I produced (and which somehow I took to mean I needed more food to make more milk, so I ate more), and I was unhappy at work. I told myself I had no time for exercise, what with working a full-time job, caring for an infant who rarely slept more than 2-3 hours at a time, supporting a husband who was having a difficult time with school and working a night job from 12-4am, and my eventually taking on a work-at-home job in the evenings. I took all the stress on myself and stopped caring if I ate healthy or not--after all, I didn't have any of the health problems that other obese people did, right? I had good blood pressure, I wasn't diabetic, I could still walk a mile or so.

But time went on, and I got bigger. And bigger. A year ago, I decided it was time for a complete physical. Imagine my shock when I got on the scale and realized I had grown to over 400 pounds. I cried when the nurse left the room after taking my blood pressure. And this time, there was no mistaking it--not only was I morbidly obese, but I now had some of the symptoms caused by such a lifestyle: high blood pressure, which would need to be controlled by medication, joint pain, and even some indications of pre-diabetes. I was only 27 years old! It was almost too much to bear, and instead of being the incentive it should have been, I found myself falling deeper into depression.

And now, here I am, all 430+ pounds of me. Sometimes I wonder how I let this happen. I tell myself I've just been through so much stress and hardship, what with our money problems and having to work to support a family, and I just have so much on my plate that I don't know what to do. My clothes don't fit anymore. I don't have shoes that feel comfortable on my swollen feet--the only things that work are sandals and flip-flops, which is really bad since we had snow on the ground this morning. And most of all, I just don't have the energy to keep up with my very active, very hyper almost-three-year-old. It's so very hard, and I almost feel trapped.