Do You Yo-Yo?

My parents did their best raising me and my siblings. Both my older sister and brother are adopted. I wasn’t exactly expected, but I was wanted immensely. Both my brother and sister were, too. My parents were married in that era that if you weren’t pregnant before the end of the first year, you just must not be having children or there’s something wrong with one of the partners.

I preface this article with that story because my older sister and brother didn’t grow up fat. I, on the other hand, definitely did. I was called names growing up on the playground. I countered with the “I’m not fat, I’m just big-boned” in an effort to try and avoid the shame and stigma that a belly and no real athletic prowess gets you in a blue collar suburb. (Don’t even get me started on the fact that everyone knew I was gay, myself included, but Lowell, MA in the 80s was already trouble enough.) But I grew up overweight with a mom who struggled to lose weight herself. I grew up in a house well-versed in diet culture.

My mom did Weight Watchers, still does from time to time. She found the meetings to help her a lot. She successfully lost a good amount of weight one year. I don’t really remember it, but there are a few pictures from that Christmas and when I see them, I don’t immediately recognize her. Her face is clearly thinner and she’s smiling, but she doesn’t have the smile in her eyes. Her brothers were all big men. My grandmother and grandfather weren’t. My Bumpie (because my sister couldn’t say Grampy when she was younger and she was the oldest) was not a heavy man, but he was from good Finnish stock. My grandmother wasn’t what I would call overweight. But my mom and my three uncles were not small people. I know exactly whose genes I got. I was praised for having a healthy appetite, but also be told that I was too big. I wasn’t sure which side to please, so I stuck with the appetite lovers for the most part.

My mom took me with her to a Weight Watchers meeting when I was young. She had me weigh in. I was excited, not realizing what this really was, to go with her. It was her meeting she went to weekly, and I was being included. I don’t ascribe nefarious intentions on her part for doing this. I know in my heart she had no intention of the path that would unfold after this meeting. But one of the neighborhood moms was at this meeting, and she went home that evening and must have said she saw me getting weighed in. The teasing was unrelenting for several weeks. I never told my mom. I never went back, but not because I said anything, but because my mom didn’t invite me again. I wasn’t hurt by the lack of invitation.

From a young age, weight was a frequent conversation. Her weight, my weight, stranger’s weight, celebrity’s weight. Thin was good. Fat was bad. Gaining weight was bad. Losing weight was good. Praise came with weight loss. Quiet came with weight gain. I had a great-aunt who talked about other people’s weight as if it were the nightly news reported on Channel 5. My dad’s father would call me names. He wasn’t a kind man, and wasn’t a kind father, so no one told him to stop. He died when I was 9, so the teasing from him stopped early.

I had a friend once tell me, they would pay for my liposuction if they could. I was 12. I left every summer for 5 years for summer camp (not a fat camp for the record, just a regular boys’ summer camp) where food was limited, activities were plenty, and as adolescents sometimes do, I lost weight. My mom would always try and guess how much weight I lost, and she’d be wrong. I would have to tell her that she was right. I would gain it back pretty easily.

I watched movies and television shows where fat people were made fun of, gays were relatively non-existent though also the butt of the joke when they were present, and that losing weight was praised and gaining weight was not. I tried to diet in middle school, high school, and college. I was told numerous times “you’ll lose it once you get older” by teachers and other staff alike. Every year in high school, I would need a waist size larger than the previous year. I believe I got to a 42, and my mom said any more weight and she’d have to special order clothes for me. Casual asides like that stung. Also in the early 90s, big and tall clothes were not fashionable. I remember shopping with her once and nothing fitting and going to the big and tall section and quietly crying in the changing room because the only thing that fit were ugly clothes.

The last few months of my senior year of high school, I weighed myself regularly. We had an old bathroom scale, the kind that had the spring inside and the number wheel that would whirl around when you stepped on it. It had a capacity of 320 pounds. I weighed myself regularly enough that I knew I stretched out the spring because it would strain its way to 350. I probably weighed more. At just over 6’3” tall and a very wide frame, no one would ever guess my weight correctly. I often got 250. Which could have been people being nice, or just the fact that no one really has a sense of what anyone weighs. I started doing my mom’s Sweatin’ to the Oldies tapes in our basement. With money I made at my part-time job, I bought Buns of Steel and Abs of Steel VHS tapes to rotate through. I lost a lot of weight. I left for college at my physical at about 275. I never really weighed myself much after that.

Into my adult life, the number 300 loomed large. “I can never get that big again” I would swear to myself. I would get that big again. Any weight over that number was seen as laziness, indulgent, worthless, unlovable, undesirable. Why my husband stayed with me when I got heavier, I would often wonder to myself, I couldn’t really understand. Spouses left their fatso partners in movies and television. They made fun of them to motivate them to lose weight. They didn’t love them in spite of it all.

I tried to do Atkins at one point. I also tried using my coworker’s Weight Watchers points formula. I tried a version of Richard Simmons’s Deal-A-Meal that I found part of in a thrift store. I’ve tried Intermittent Fasting. I’ve tried carb-cycling. I’ve tried Mediterranean and South Beach. I found myself jealous of colleagues who would lose weight with relative ease while I felt like I was depriving myself. I counted calories religiously and would quit after one meal threw me off, and I would just give up. I would eat as I cooked dinner, eat dinner, have seconds, and eat while wrapping up left overs. I would get things into a better space, but work, I was a teacher, and marital life would get in the way sometimes, and I would put the weight back on.

When I was turning 40, I was working with a trainer who stopped putting up with my bullshit. He was on the verge of firing me as a client, I think, and I was scared. The thing that scared me was that I wouldn’t be able to do it again. He had to help me do it, or else I wasn’t going to be able to do it at all. Without his saying it, I realized that I couldn’t rely on him to help me lose weight. I had to do it. I couldn’t rely on him to help me fix my relationship with food, I had to do it.

I spent most of my life looking for the shortest cut to take to losing weight. Like my former coworker’s who would do liquid diets and work out relentlessly and be thin. (Then hearing the gossip hens at work clucking about their inevitable weight gain, but ignoring that part.) I finally accepted that there were no shortcuts. That I would have to find a deficit and stay in it. I would have to forgive myself if I went off track, and try to get back on track again next time. I had to stop looking for praise from anyone but myself. I was who I needed to impress. Not my most recent personal trainer, not my husband, not my mom. Me. And that’s when it clicked.

This is a long post. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I tell you all this to say, “I’ve yo-yoed.” A lot. Multiple times. Name a diet, I’ve read about it at least and probably tried it. Name a supplement that’s been sold to “stop you from feeling hungry” and I’ve purchased a few bottles. I’ve been mean to myself. I’ve been cruel to myself. I’ve deprived myself. I’ve forgiven myself. I have been on this road for a long time, and I am here for you. No magic numbers from me. No “you’ll look better naked” bullshit from me. You want to make a change, and I want to support you in that change. I speak from the heart and from experience. No judgments. No admonishments. Allow me to help you. Let’s stop yo-yoing together.