My Journey Part 1

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I've been inspired to write about my weight loss journey. I figure I'll start from the beginning. I was always overweight. I mean, I was born at an average weight, but when you grow up on a farm where there are meat and potatoes for much of the meals in your formative years, one can only guess that you'll put on a few pounds. I was pleasingly plump when I was young. I would go to gramma's house, who always had soda, ice cream, cookies and whole milk for our snacks. I can't remember healthy snacks like banana's, or apples being around. It was always a huge bowl of ice cream. With Hershey's syrup dribbled on top. It was good. I loved it.
Now keep in mind, I did grow up on a farm. We did have fresh veggies in the summer, that we ate in abundance. Towards the end of the summer every night was corn on the cob (slathered in butter) and sliced tomatoes (with my mom's homemade mayo on top, like .5 cup of oil in each batch). During the winter there was my gramma's scalloped potatoes, apple pies, mac n cheese (oh, I'd break my diet for a dish of that right now, there are some things worth the calories!) and other assundry items. Eating at my house and my gramma's house was good. Too good. My the time I was in 3rd grade I weighed 100lbs. I still remember being in the nurses office with my class and the nurse shouting the weight across the room to the teacher over everyone's head. Humiliating. Anyway. I was big.
Most of my pictures, when I was young, I was overweight. My brother made fun of me. My maternal grandmother made fun of me. She once called me a tub of lard. That hurt. It still does. One of the reasons I can't bring up the gumption to go see her. Even though she's only 3 hours away. But yet, she'd call me fat and then turn around and feed me, stuff me full of food, feel my stomach to make sure it was full. I never understood her philosophy of eating and being fat.
When I was 7 or 8, my mom got on a real health kick. I mean, it was extreme. The thing is, she's never gotten off of it. She put my brother and me on an extreme diet. Sugars, white flours, dairy, basically all of the food groups we ate were cut out of our diet. It put strain on our family, strain on our budget (health food is expensive! and even more so 20 years ago), a strain on my parents marriage. And nevermind, we didn't eat that way when we went to gramma's. We'd sneak back and eat cookies, candy and ice cream. And my gramma would say 'you daren't (have you heard that word in a while?) have that, but here you go'. Completely usurping my mother's rule. I can see why that relationship is strained now.
There was one extreme diet that my mom had us on, it was so low cal it's not funny. I lost so much weight being on it. I have one picture of me, thin, in my childhood and its from that picture.
The thing about those diets were that, my brother and I cheated every moment we got. And we went overboard. We ate more than what we probably would've if we would've been allowed a treat every now and then. I can remember hiding icing containers under my dresser in my room and sitting in the privacy of my room, eating finger full after finger full of icing. Disgusting. How shameful.
So that was my childhood, basically. I was heavy, my mother put us on diets and I still really never learned how to eat right, or how to stay at a good weight. I learned extremes in eating. And those lessons served me for a long time.