Joann E.
Do you ever have the feeling you are all alone? Well for much of my life that is exactly how I felt. I come from a big family, a loving family, but for some reason I still felt alone. I was unaccepted by the majority of people in school and had very few real friends growing up. I was tall for my age, skinny as a bean pole, had glasses, was uncoordinated and felt like I was not good at much of anything. So with that basis as a little kid, those feelings just kept coming up as I became a teen and a young lady. I was not good at sports, made fun of a lot, so I learned to hate exercise. I was never able to find what I was good with in that area, not really given the chance, so exercise was not high on my list of fun things to do. As I grew up with more emotions and feelings than I knew what to do with, I looked to food. When both of my parents were at work, I would come home to an empty house, being a very social person, this didn't work well for me. I loved peanut butter and marshmallow cream and I would hide a jar of each in my room. I would come home and stuff down all the feelings from school, and feelings of loneliness, with so much peanut butter and marshmallow cream, that I wouldn't want dinner. But, I had to eat to cover up what I was doing, so down would go dinner. At school, I would use my lunch money to buy candy bars and soda. We had a great little junk truck and I would eat there at lunch, all things bad, funions became a staple. So up went the weight, down went the self esteem, and the only thing I knew to make me feel better was more food. Cycles are cycles, and it continued through jr high and then in High School I broke up with a boyfriend that I had been dating for 4 years. I lost so much weight, I was normal for the first time ever. Then food really over took me after I was married and living in Germany. While my husband was at work, I ate, slept, and played tetris. On came the pounds. The more deep my depression, the more food I ate. I always joked that I ate my way through Germany. We did eat a lot during those years, a lot of heavy German food, full of fat and flavor. Soon after coming back stateside I was pregnant with our first child. 50lbs later, I had her, and the weight didn't come off, it went up. Almost 5 years later, another baby, more weight that I didn't loose. I can say that depression played a huge roll in my weight gains, but even when on medication, that depression lingered and I always had my old friend to stuff down all the feelings. So that is how I came to be 317lbs of an unhealthy, closed off human being. And now, that is all changing, a whole new realization has been awakened and I am ready to see what God has in store for me now.
