A Weight-y History:
1989-1990 - 2nd grade - the first time I felt insecure about my weight when the smaller girls didn't want to teeter-totter with me. I had to teeter-totter with the other chubby kid in the class.
1990-1992 - 3rd/4th grade - Got serious about dance lessons. Made the competition team, and started comparing my body to my team mates' bodies. Leotards and tights are not an insecure girls best friend.
1992-1993 - 5th grade - auditioned with my friends for The Nutcracker. Friends were cast as "party children" and got to wear pretty dresses. I was cast as a rat because I was too big to fit the 'party children' dress. That was traumatic for my 10 year old self.
1993-1994 - 6th grade - puberty, angsty pre-teen drama and the death of my granddad = me eating my emotions and then mom signing me up for Weight Watchers for the first time. Also began Pointe lessons (along with my usual ballet, tap and jazz classes) and got praise from my teacher for how skinny I was getting.
1994-1995 - 7th grade - joined the JV Basketball team at school because there were no cuts that year (ha!) and I wanted to stay in shape. Was still on Weight Watchers, still taking 4 dance classes a week, and spending all day on Saturdays rehearsing for the competition dance team. Got too skinny, and friend's parents made some wrong assumptions about my eating habits.
1995-1996 - 8th grade - Gained Weight Watchers lifetime membership, and quit because I didn't "need" it anymore. Also, quit dancing for the basketball team. Off season hit me hard with a big weight gain and a resurgence of insecurity.
1996-2000 - High School - Moved to a new city, went to public school for the first time, had to find a personal style {no more uniforms!}, had to make new friends, joined a killer basketball team {and therefore rode the JV bench}, and was introduced to my first love. Through all of this managed to hide my massive insecurity behind the excuse of being shy, but had to face my insecurity when I was dating my boyfriend. Funny how love/infatuation brings a lot to the surface. Ultimately, insecurity won and I left him right before I went away to College. The whole "reject you before you reject me" thing. It's always a mistake to make decisions based on insecurity.
2000-2004 - College - Yo-yoed my way through college trying many different combinations of dieting, not eating, exercising, drinking too much, not drinking at all, and eating too much. Threw myself into church and religion trying to find security. Made some amazing life-friends, pushed away some important people, ultimately learned how to trust God, and how to find my security in Jesus not in external things.
2004-2007 - Beginning Adult Life - While I understood that security comes from Jesus, I still struggled with sef-acceptance and ballooned up to my heaviest weight ever. Those three years held some of the biggest decisions I had to make on my own. Went to ministry school, built a financial support team, resigned my ministry position before I ever got to my post, moved back to Tallahassee and took a job as a personal assistant to a real estate agent (turns out I'm pretty good at being someone's right hand woman), discovered a newness in my relationship with God, and felt like God was calling me away from Tallahassee. All in the period of 6 weeks I realized He was taking me back to St. Augustine, interviewed & the got the job in St. Aug, and moved 2 weeks later. Throughout all of the changes, the only thing that remained constant was my increasing weight and the knowledge that God had so much more than what I was living at that time.
To say the least, I dealt with change by controlling my food. While many people control their food by limiting their intake, I increased mine because it was the opposite of what others wanted me to do. What I didn't see was that I was only messing myself up and no one else. Not only did this yo-yo diet pattern have physical affects, it had some spiritual affects that I did not anticipate.
Coming up next in Part 3 I'll talk about life since moving to St. Augustine and begin connecting my life theme to how it has affected my relationship with God.
If you have any questions along the way, please ask! :)
