Weight problem

Let me explain my problem with weight. I’ve always been thin and pretty. At some point, for no apparent reason, I started gaining weight like crazy. I put on 29 pounds in a year. I started eating less, because I thought I was getting older, maybe my metabolism wasn’t the same anymore. And I kept gaining weight. And I ate less. And gained weight. I went to several doctors, and followed their instructions religiously, and still gained weight. Eventually, I got to a point where I ate so little, that I stopped gaining weight. My calorie consumption was 1200 a day, divided into 6 small portions. I heard you can’t be too long without eating because it lowers your metabolism. So I made sure to have 3 “meals”, or whatever you call a portion of 300 calories. I ate maybe 10 grams of fat a day. Before you ask, I did exercise. I wasled the equivaled of 10 miles a week, plus gym. I didn’t have any soda, specially diet, because I heard that aspartame can give you a boost of insulin and prevent you from losing weight.

There was a time I tried to eat 800, and actually lost some weight. I had to stop that, because I was starting to feel dizzy during my gym classes. Weird thing is that I didn’t feel hungry. I ate 1200 calories a day just to keep my weight as it was and just enough so I wouldn’t faint on the street and get hit by a car.

I went to three different doctors during this period. I always think you have to stay with the same doctor for a few months, because otherwise you don’t have time to see any treatment results. All three of them gave me diets that I followed religiously. I drink the exact number of glasses of water they recommended, and measured the food in a little kitchen scale I bought. But I kept gaining weight.

One of the doctors said that it was impossible that I was gaining weight while following his diet. I should be eating without noticing. He said maybe I was putting too much oil in the rice, too much butter in the meat, eating the wrong bread, etc. But I don’t cook rice with oil, and I cook meat in the oven only, with no butter. I actually didn’t have any oil or butter in my house. My bread was light. It should be something else I was “eating without noticing”.

I keep religious track of what I ate for a while more. Still gaining weight. Something was wrong. What was I eating without noticing? I cried almost every day.

So I decided to get drastic. I woke up in the morning, and put everything I could eat on top of the kitchen table. I counted the quantities and calories and wrote them down. And that’s all I ate during the day. Not a crumble more. And I kept gaining weight.

I thought… if I’m not eating without noticing when I’m awake… I can be eating without noticing while sleeping! Maybe I was sleep walking, and eating by night. Now that would explain everything, and you can see how desperate I was at the time. Can you believe a sane person can actually make herself believe that she is sleep walking to the kitchen and emptying the cookie jar? Today I look back and I don’t recognize that person.

But that seemed like the only explanation possible. So before I went to bed, I took a picture of my fridge and pans, and in the morning I checked to see if I touched anything during the night. “Without noticing”, you know. My husband liked to eat cookies, so we always had a little supply. I opened the cookie jars and counted how many cookies were there before I sleep, then counted again in the morning. They were all there. And I kept gaining weight.

So I decided to give affirmations a try on this one. There was clearly something wrong with my metabolism. The doctors didn’t believe me. They did not believe it was impossible for me to be eating something “without noticing”, because I was borderline crazy of so much watching and noting and picture and counting. Even so, one of them actually made exams to check if my thyroid and hormones were ok, and everything was fine. So it wasn’t a hormone problem, it wasn’t a food quantity problem. What was it? Why, why, why was I gaining weight like a pig? Now that’s a challenge to affirmations.

I started writing every day, 15 times a day, “I, Affirmagal, will weigh 120 pounds.” I wrote that for about 3 months. Nothing really happened, other than one or two fat free recipes with almost zero calories reaching my hands. They were quite yummy, but didn't solve the problem. I was disappointed.

One day, a little bell ringed. “Change your birth control pills”.

About 1 and a half years before, I changed birth control pills because my face was full of spots and supposedly this new pill would make my skin better. I didn’t have the skin like a peach, but it actually made me look less like a 15 years old teenager. I told about the pill change to the doctors and they were all unanimous that “no way” my birth control pills could make me gain weight like that. There was nothing in that brand that could remotely make me gain weight. No way, it’s my diet.

But the bell kept ringing: “Change your birth control pills”. And I did. And in 3 months, I was 29 pounds lighter, reaching 120. It took a couple of weeks after I stopped the pill to actually start losing weight, but after that it was so fast I had to actually start eating more! Of course, I was eating so little for so long. After I stopped that shitty pill, I became a normal person. A normal person actually loses a lot of weight when eating 1200 calories a day!

So I had to increase my calorie count to 1500, and as I was still losing more than 4 pounds a week, I had to raise it to 1800. I always made a lot of physical exercise, so I guess 1800 was ok – losing 2 pounds a week and counting. When I reached 120, my weight naturally stabilized, and I could maintain a diet with about 2200 calories a day.

You have to imagine the joy of eating again! Imagine yourself in a time wasting diet that lasts for 1 year! Imagine you, believing that that’s all you’ll be able to eat for the rest of your life, or else you might become an elephant. Worse, you already are an elephant. Now imagine that, suddenly, you can eat an ice cream again, every once in a while! You can eat some meat, or a piece of birthday cake, like a normal person. Imagine how it tastes like! Imagine my joy! I was beautiful, and normal. I couldn’t eat everything I wanted, of course – you eat too much, you gain weight. But I was normal. I could eat like a normal person!

I remember the joy of ordering a dessert and knowing that, even if I gained a little weight, I’ll be able to compensate the other day with a little more exercise, or a little less food. And that was ok! I wasn’t cursed anymore. I was pretty, I was feeling pretty. Can you imagine how it is like? It’s beautiful. That was the best feeling of my life. Food is great, food is delicious, and I love to eat. I started playing with flavors, and experimenting a lot of stuff I never tried before. How delicious that time of re-discovery of food was for me.

After that miraculous recovery, I started warning about that birth control pill to every woman I knew. Let’s call the pill Femala, because I don’t want to disclose the real pill name and get sued. And while talking to a lot of women about Femala, it’s surprising how many of them said to me: “You took Femala? Are you crazy? That pill makes you put on a lot of weight!!”. My beloved sister in law told me that when she was a teenager, Femala made her gain 12 pounds, and that she lost them as soon as she stopped. A friend of my mom’s said “Put one pill of Femala in a flower vase and see how well it will grow”. Right, that’s why I gained weight. I was prescribed fertilizer.

So, apparently the female community knew about Femala pills. Apparently just the male doctors I went didn’t know about it. If I had close friends or family back then, I might have been able to talk to them about the pill and figuring that out myself. But I was friendless, and I trusted doctors and their medicine degrees. Apparently, there was no known hormones on that pill that would make me get fat. Well, maybe doctors should start considering things they didn’t know. Maybe I should start thinking about things I didn’t know.

But you see, at the end… was it really the affirmations that helped me? Wasn’t it something I saw on TV that gave the hint? Or maybe I unconsciously realized that the pill was the only thing I didn’t try before.

I classified the experiment as inconclusive. I was starting to believe in affirmations, of course. Plus, I felt better when I did them, so no harm on that. And two hits in a row. But both of them had a reasonable explanation. First, my fixation on the number 4000 made me have the guts to ask for 4000 dollars when the opportunity came. Second, my fixation in losing weight might have helped me remember (unconsciously) that I have never tried to change the pill.

I didn’t know if there was anything magic there… but seemed like affirmations were helping me do the right choice. I was even a little afraid of asking for something and regretting later, and get too focus on the wrong thing. I started to think better before asking for stuff.