My Weight Story, Part 2

Here continues the story of my life and weight…

So, to sum things up, I was underweight all throughout my teen years. I ate whatever I wanted - my parents fed us quite healthy with three round meals a day and watched our sugar intake. I was very active as a kid - always walking and biking everywhere.

My breast size was 32A throughout my teens years. I occasionally wished that they would grow bigger and that I would get a more womanly figure. I was blessed with an hourglass type body, but being so slim made me long to have more curves. I spent most of those years weighing about 100-110.

Then my parents died in my late teen years (long story I won’t get into). My younger sister and I ended up going through several foster homes and group homes. I was living in a foster home at the age of 17 1/2 one day, and got on the scale. I was SO EXCITED to see my weight was: 121! I hadn’t even noticed the gain until then. I took off my clothes and looked in the mirror, excited to see that yes, I did look curvier.

I hadn’t changed my diet at all - still ate three meals or so per day and snacks. Still walked to school and walked most places.

About 2 months before my 18th birthday, I got on the scale. It read… 130. I noticed that most of my clothes stopped fitting around that time. I got naked again and looked in the bathroom mirror, and noticed that for once, my stomach wouldn’t suck in like it used to.

And then I realized… 130 isn’t good for my body. I had gained too much weight. I needed a diet! What really pushed this thought was that I had seen myself in a recent photo, and couldn’t believe how much… bigger I looked. I didn’t like it.

I had no idea how to diet. I thought dieting meant skipping meals. It was a bit hard to do where I lived. Then I went to live in a group home place until a week after I turned 18. Around that time, I learned how to “hate” my body and weight for the first (or is it second) time. Dieting did not work.

A month after my 18th birthday, I ran away from the group home and went to live with my best friend Jeannie. I had inherited a little bit of money at that time (a few thousand). My friend had messed up eating habits, and soon we were both skipping meals and walking miles and miles each day - mostly to go visit guys and run around flirting with guys at malls. It only took me 2 months or so to lose most of my gained weight.

I got back down to 117 - got on one of those mall electronic scales at GNC (have you checked YOUR weight today?) and was thrilled. I figured that 117 was perfect for my height, which was 5′4 at that time. And it was, although some people thought I was too thin. But I actually had a smokin’ body around that time (and have pictures to prove it, which I’ll possibly post later).

So, through the rest of my 18th and 19th year, my weight remained around that. It possibly fluctuated between 115-120 or so. I figured my weight problems were in my past.

WRONG.

I finally got my driver’s license and car at age 21.

And within a couple months, I had gained 10 pounds. I got a second job at a movie theater to pay for the car, and often had no time to eat anything other than fast food. I quickly gained another 10 or so pounds.

One day, I saw a photo of myself that had just been taken the week before. In it, I probably weighed 140 or so. I looked HORRIBLE and bloated. Even my older sister mentioned something about it.

Not again!? (To this day, I can’t always tell how much weight I’ve truly gained until seeing an actual photo of myself. The mirror lies!)

Thus began the yoyo dieting that continued throughout most of my 20’s. When I was about 22, I lost 10 quick pounds doing Atkins diet. I got extremely sick and had some heart problems throughout the time, not knowing that my body can’t handle huge amounts of water and that it flushed out my electrolytes when I was losing weight rapidly. I had to wear a halter monitor (which records your heartbeats for 24 hours). They couldn’t figure out what was causing my heart to beat so rapidly and erratically. The damn doctors didn’t think to take my blood test… and if they had, (I found out years later), they would have seen very low potassium or sodium reading. To make a long story short, after 7 days on the Atkins diet and with me drinking huge, HUGE amounts of water, I woke up in the middle of the night so weak I couldn’t get out of bed right away. My heart was racing too fast to even keep track. I was living in the same apt. complex as my sister at the time - in Anaheim, CA, but had my own apartment. Anyway, I would have called one of them to take me to the hospital, but I was too weak to pick up the phone! It was a horrible, horrible night which resulted in me going to ER the next morning.

When I was 24, I embarked on an actual jogging and exercise AND dieting plan that helped me to lose about 15 pounds. By the time I got to NH (when I was nearly 25), I was in great shape and probably weighed 125 or so. But then I gained weight yet again, this time going up to an all-time high of 155 or so, around age 27.

I decided to try a semi-low carb, 6 meal per day thing which worked wonders. I felt amazing and had tons of energy, and lost weight quite rapidly. But when I got to about 143 or so, the weight loss stopped, so I cut out even more and more carbs until I was back doing an Atkins type of thing again.

And guess what happened…? Yep. I was drinking huge amounts of water again - after being told on several diet sites to do so - I started feeling crappy again. I was getting cramps in my leg muscles and felt kind of weak. One night, I had a really depressed, dreadful feeling. I drank a huge cup of water and went to bed.

An hour later, I woke up with symptoms similar to those that I had when I was 22 and doing Atkins - extreme weakness, seeing spots in front of my eyes, super-fast heartbeat. I could barely walk - and I knew something was very wrong. One of my pupils was enormously dilated and I could barely focus my eyes. I called a taxi to the ER, feeling like I was literally about to die. (Little did I know how close I was to actually dying or having a seizure).

I got to the ER and thankfully it was mostly empty. My blood pressure was around 157/90 or something and they were concerned when I told them how weak I was. I had little to no reflexes and the doctor thought I might have brain problems or something because of my pupil size.

Anyway… I got a blood test, which came back showing a level of 124 for sodium, which is enough to send you into a seizure or coma! My magnesium level was also low, as was my potassium. They were very concerned and said they were admitting me. I was supposed to go to work the next day and said “no, can’t I go home and drink gatorade or something?” But they wouldn’t let me leave. Not that I could do much walking or much else! They gave me pills (painkiller and potassium right up front) that I almost couldn’t swallow. It is a scary, scary thing to have your muscles so weak that you can’t swallow.

To make this already long story short, I had hyponatremia caused by overloading my body with water while losing weight. !!

To be continued later…