My Weight Throughout The Decades

In my rush to get my message out into the world, I seem to have lagged behind in a very important piece of the coaching puzzle…my personal story. So here goes.

I was born July 31, 1972 in Abington, Pennsylvania. I arrived hollering my head off in the very early morning, right in that average length/weight sweet spot of 7 pounds, 6 ounces and 20” long. My mom always told me that she named me Dana because she read in a baby name book that it meant “Morning Star.”

Funnily enough, the name “Danica” means “Morning Star” while “Dana” means “One from Denmark”. (I’m not an *actual* Dane…I am a European mongrel mix of Polish/Ukrainian - Mom - and Irish/Scottish/English/German - Dad.)

That first paragraph is an excellent introduction to my divergent storytelling tendencies. So. Onward.

I don’t remember having actual food issues as a tiny kid. I liked sweets a lot, but most kids do. A normal-sized toddler became a chubby five-year-old. Right around second grade, the teasing was getting relentless.

My mom, who was trying to help me in the only way she knew, started taking me to her aerobics classes and helping me to eat less. I was seven years old. This was the time in my life when I actually picked up a good habit of exercise, but I was doing things that I didn’t enjoy and felt like torture (think Jane Fonda/Joanie Greggins workouts. Lots of fire hydrants and donkey kicks. Yikes.)

Hindsight being what it is, I’m pretty sure this is what began my disordered eating. Yep, it started really early. Although I liked the way I looked after slimming down, I also felt mega-deprived and started eating in secret (always sweets) whenever I could sneak junk food out of the kitchen.

The most vivid memory I have of this time…one that I’ve only shared with my therapist 20 years ago until now (lucky you!)…is while sneaking a chocolate bar out of the freezer and upstairs to my room, I passed my mom on the stairs and she saw what I was trying to hide. The look of disappointment that she gave me was implanted in my mind. I’ll never forget the shame I felt. I’m feeling it right now while I write this.

By the time I was 14, I was disgusted with myself enough to try again on my own. I dropped 25 pounds in two and a half months by writing down everything I ate and never going over 1200 calories…the magic number, right? I also started up my exercise habit again by walking the no-sidewalk, country road I lived on (and getting narrowly missed by many cars in the process).

Also, the fire hydrants and donkey kicks returned. And even though I have not one photo from those days, I’ll bet my 15-year-old butt looked great. 🤪

Let’s see…so I turned 15 in the summer of 1987 and I was living the dream as a thin teenage girl with really big hair…for about three months. (The big hair didn’t change until 1991, though). By the time the holidays were over, I was back up the scale, and by the time I graduated high school another 20ish pounds had found me.

At some point I’d tried and failed at Nutri-System…my mom had told me that if I succeeded, she’d pay for it but if I quit, I’d have to pay her back. I knew it pained her, but she stuck by what she said, and I ended up spending every dollar I’d saved up during my junior year of high school on that diet program. Whomp whomp.

Let me backtrack just a minute to include a few more mind-fuck details that truly defined the 80s. I was 5’5” when I reached my full height at around age 16. The doctor’s weight chart dictated that my weight should be 125 pounds. Every time I went to a doctor growing up, my mother and I were told that I had to lose x number of pounds because the only way I could be healthy was to weigh no more than x pounds, and at 5’5” that magic number was 125 pounds. (There was no such thing as a weight range in the 80s, and BMI wasn’t really a popular thing yet.) There was no factoring in that I have a medium frame, enormous boobs, and I’m very muscular.

As a grown-ass adult who has yo-yoed about a dozen times, I now know that my ideal weight range is 150-155 pounds. This is where I can do Tough Mudders (Google is your friend here), run half marathons without injuring my face with my tits, lift heavy shit with ease, and not have a physician up my ass about my weight.

When I did the TM in October of 2014, I weighed 150 pounds and STILL thought I needed to lose at least another ten if not 20. Now, nearly ten years later, I’m baffled at why that amazing accomplishment after having two kids just wasn’t enough for me. But I digress.

So where was I? Right, just graduated high school and around 170 pounds. But no, I was in the 160s because I was so excited about losing weight just before graduation. Not sure how much, but the number back then was very important…keep in mind that 125 was the goal. I’d gotten to 132 for a hot minute, so I figured that if I just found the right diet and stopped being such a fucking failure then I’d finally reach the perfect weight for a 5’5” teenage girl with DDD+ boobs who could lift 25-pound objects without trying very hard. (*Insert sarcasm font here*) 

Going away to college was the most exciting thing that could happen to me at that point. We didn’t travel much…the yearly drives to Florida our family embarked upon when I was a kid were no longer a thing since we were all grown and “out of the house” (I’m the youngest of three, my sister is four years older and my brother is two years older).

Those trips were replaced with a week “down the shore” (hey, New Jersey!!) in the summer. Once I got to college, I discovered the freedom of underage drinking and pizza delivery at 1 a.m. I also started my first significant romantic relationship, which…let’s just say wasn’t the healthiest for my self-esteem. 

After a tumultuous year, we broke up. This breakup devastated me emotionally because I was convinced that I was unlovable and no one else would ever find me physically attractive (there was no one disputing this at the time, or at least I couldn’t hear it if anyone was) and it was after the breakup that I was introduced to the act of bingeing and purging otherwise known as bulimia. (By whom is not important; the fact that soooooo many of us were doing this in secret is, though. There’s even a passing glimpse of bulimia in the 1989 film Heathers.) I’ll be addressing this more in other blog posts.

My college boyfriend and I ended up getting back together after a few months and stayed together for 9 years total. Got married 6 years in (attempted several different weight loss programs in these years including but not limited to Weight Watchers, The Three Day Diet, and whatever else the magazines were rolling out in the days pre-internet), moved to California 8 years in, and 8 months after that we separated. 

During those years my weight fluctuated a good 40 pounds. And at the time when I was moving out of the apartment I shared with my ex, I was halfway through losing 30 pounds yet again (this time it was Body For Life)…had to be skinny in Los Angeles, right? Ugh.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I fluctuated about 30 pounds. That’s quite a swing, and it took its toll. And even though I was noticing the positive attention for the first time in my life, the things I remember the most vividly are the times when I was insulted about my body. (Of course.)

When I was 32 years old I met my husband. The courtship that led to marriage happened quickly; we married after dating for less than a year and a half. But as they say…when you know, you know. I gave birth to our first son two days before my 37th birthday, weighing in at my all-time highest weight of 222 pounds. I’ll never forget that number.

I’ll also never forget the doctor in downtown Los Angeles (the only office where my limited insurance was accepted for the type of check-up I needed at that time, so I couldn’t just “find a different doctor”) who told me that I was so heavy it was endangering my son’s life.

That bitch easily weighed in at over 200 pounds herself, and her words to me were along the lines of, “Your weight problem is killing your baby, you know. You need to fix that. Stop eating sugar.” Wtf kind of thing is that to say to a pregnant woman?!?! And it was 2009 when that was said to me, not 1989. Like that bitch didn’t know better? Fuck her. I hope she had constant diarrhea for a month.

Yes, it’s 15 years later and I’m still bitter about that.

After I gave birth PPD hit me hard; Declan was a champion napper but wasn’t a good nighttime sleeper, and he was a very fussy child until he was about 6 years old. Fortunately, my husband was super supportive of me being a SAHM, which was my preference…I even ended up turning down a pretty good job offer with zero regrets. I then got pregnant again before Declan turned a year old (38 years old…yes, I’m very familiar with the term “geriatric pregnancy”, TYVM) and had Parker 19 months after Declan was born.

In a lot of ways it felt like having twins, and even though I knew being a mom was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever do (why do you think I waited so long?), I was not prepared for the emotional toll. I struggled then. A lot. (I wrote a post about depression that talks about this a bit more…you can find that here.)

It was Declan’s second birthday and we were having a little gathering, when I complained to one of my then closest friends about my weight. She said something very matter-of-factly…that maybe this is just who I am. Not everyone is meant to be thin; some people are just obese, and that’s okay. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a fact. It didn’t sit well with me. 

That left me thinking about how I could approach things differently this time. For the next five months, I prepared myself mentally to lose it for the last time. I did visualization techniques, picturing my ideal weight glowing up at me from my digital scale. I envisioned myself being happy with healthy foods, and being disgusted by my trigger foods. 

*Note - I just realized that I completely glossed over the years that bulimia had me in a stranglehold. I guess it’s because, outside of therapy sessions, I’ve rarely talked about it in more than a few sentences. I’ve lied dozens of times over the decades about being in recovery while still actively bingeing and purging.

I can confidently tell you today that I am recovered from the raw and unfiltered act of actively planned episodes, particularly the way I used to do it. Good grief…the time I spent obsessing over how much I hated myself and how bulimia was the only thing that really made me feel like I had some control. (Oh, the irony.) 

The shame I feel just thinking about it brings me right back to the staircase in my childhood home, my mother looking at me with thinly-veiled disgust as if to say, “Ugh…where did I go wrong?”

I was actively bulimic from 1992 until I got pregnant with Declan in 2009. That’s 22 years. It greatly affected my vocal abilities. (I attempted a career as a singer-songwriter; it’s what brought my ex and I to California in the first place.)

It has resurfaced occasionally and briefly in the last 13 years mostly as just binge eating. Yes, purging has happened, but at about a hundredth of what it had been prior to my becoming a mother. It has not happened recently, thank goodness.

Being a mother improved my self-opinion somewhat. So January 2012, six months before my 40th birthday, I started losing weight again by using My Fitness Pal; weighing and measuring everything that went into my mouth and really focusing on getting fit in the process.

By the following January, I was 144 pounds, my lowest adult weight. And I was scared to death that I would gain it all back because random binge eating episodes were happening again…not to mention how much alcohol I was drinking. (The way I lost it that time is referred to as “white-knuckling” - trying to hold on to healthy habits while my old ones were kicking and screaming at the door to be let in.)

Over the next three years my weight fluctuated about 10-15 pounds…I found a love for trail running and did a Tough Mudder, a few 10ks, and two half-marathons while my toddlers became little boys.

My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in July of 2015; two months later my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and on January 1, 2016, she died. She was my anchor in this world. I was there, sobbing with my father, holding her hand when she passed. That was the hardest day of my life.

I was still running at that time; I kept that up for a few more months until my hip pain became too much. I’m not really sure exactly when I stopped, but it was sometime around May of 2016. Since Parker was starting kindergarten in the fall, I applied for a job at my local grocery store and became their bookkeeper. It was a part-time union job with health insurance and a two-mile commute. The downside was the abysmal pay and the fact that I had to be at work at 3 am. But I enjoyed the job and my co-workers, and I was really good at what I did.

I also managed to work out a better schedule and higher pay over the years, and by the time I left five years later my pay had doubled and I started work at 4:30 am. Still, my body never got fully used to that schedule. I would mindlessly eat and the weight piled back on. Revisited Weight Watchers for a few months in 2017. Lost some, gained it back plus.

In October 2018 I got my shit slightly together and got the scale moving downward again; started a guided IF (Intermittent Fasting) program in January of 2019. It’s a really great program, but it’s not recommended for someone with an eating disorder (which was I warning that I, of course, ignored.)

I lost all but 15 pounds of what I’d gained back…but again struggled with binge eating. The diet guidelines were too restrictive for someone with an ED, and after I stopped fasting for 16 hours a day I gradually dropped other good habits I’d formed for bad ones yet again.

Then came COVID-19, having to quit my job in May of 2021 because of how much pain my body was in every day, and bleeding (and at times hemorrhaging) for months on end with the only solution being offered by my ob/gyn being birth control pills.

I can’t take BCPs, they make me want to skateboard (reference found in this blog here), but she didn’t really pay attention. This was during the pandemic; the healthcare industry was completely overwhelmed. So I don’t fault my doctor for dropping the ball, and I don’t fault myself for not pursuing it longer than a couple of months.

That entire time was a blur of pretending to be functional punctuated by deep depressive episodes. I then learned that I had three herniated discs in my back in February of 2022, and for much of that year, my depression just seemed to be hopeless. The scale crept back up to over 200 by August 31, a month after my 50th birthday. (Best birthday gift ever!) 

Which brings us to September 2022. I couldn’t really see a way to shake off that heavy layer of depression. I had actually resigned myself to being between 40 and 50 pounds overweight for the rest of my life. The summer of 2022 someone somewhere in the vast hellscape known as Facebook had recommended Corrine Crabtree’s podcast, “Losing 100 Pounds with Corrine”; I bookmarked it because I liked what that person posted about it. The idea of being focused on the mental changes needed for weight loss really sang to me.

It was around this time that I also started taking hormones that I found on the internet because I was so desperate for some help getting this extra layer of depression the hell off of me…and within a week, I felt the shift. Seriously. I was no longer giving up on myself.

On September 1 I started listening to Corrine’s podcast…that’s the day my life drastically changed because that is the first day that I lost weight by using common sense and not some diet mentality bullshit. That’s why Corrine’s company is called No BS…and I will be eternally grateful to her for opening my eyes to a new perspective. (Believe me, she knows. I’ve told her. A lot. Loudly.)

So that’s the extended disco version of my lifelong battle with my weight. I no longer struggle with it; today, I manage it. I’ve made peace with my aging body. I’ve embraced my humanness, my inability to be perfect. Because, as I say on my homepage and to just about anyone who will listen…perfect isn’t actually a thing. ✌🏼✨