Ok, this is going to be sort of odd, but here goes.

Before everything - getting married and all - I was not a gym nut, but I was a regular exercise person. Working out was my stress relief. I was not skinny, shoot, I weighed usually almost 200 pounds, but had a lot of muscle, I was in shape wearing clothes you could go buy anywhere, size 10-12. (This has a point, bear with me.) I also have always loved to eat and cook, I was the kid that tried all the different stuff on culture days at church or whatever and never thought twice about it. You know, keeping everything from kimchi to pesto to curry paste in my fridge. Participated in hot pepper eating contests, that kind of thing.

Ok, so dead kid.

Medical bills, the gym membership had to go. Along with lots of other things.

I kept cooking but my ingredients turned into the stuff you can get down here. So, fatty hamburger, noodles, not much else. I couldn't make anything taste good but I could at least make a lot of it. I was also taught not to cook more than I could eat. So I ate it.

I ballooned up to the point my scale stopped measuring me. Not overnight - it took a while - but it happened. I realized that I couldn't kill myself that way, but that I was making life worse when I was having to special order scrubs and had to buy plus-size men's clothes at the Goodwill to have anything to wear, that the money that wasn't going to medical bills was all going to food.

So, I tried to start losing weight. Basically, I just stopped eating. Well, that wasn't really smart either. Caused some other medical problems, some of which might or might not ever heal, we're still working on them, but I got back down to where the scale read a number - 370 - and I could at least buy women's scrubs at one of the shops in town.

Well, then I started actually doing the right thing, got down to 300, and now I'm at another rocky spot in my life thanks to not thinking about other issues with that. The muscle's gone, and thanks to a bad c-section I won't ever be the way I used to be, but I guess I'm okay with that, I just want to be able to walk the halls without sweating and about falling over, maybe not have to monitor my glucose "just in case" anymore.

But, I guess my point here is that I finally got (thanks to picking up Coke bottle caps from all over the place in parking lots and turning them in) a subscription to one of my old magazines, SELF. I get the first issue. Guess what? In the little weight loss inspiration story section, there's a woman staring out at me. She lost her two year old and basically had done the same thing I had, trying to eat herself to death. Didn't click for her till she broke a toilet seat.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here, but I guess it just took seeing that for me to realize that I'm not alone, and maybe there's others of you out there that are doing the same thing - or heck, something sort of opposite, trying to exercise yourselves to death. It's not worth it.

I just want to say way to go for losing weight - that is no easy feat and you did it - good on you for getting healthy.

I second Monique... congrats on the weight loss. And congratulations for having the insight to recognize what you were doing to yourself.

I totally get what you are saying. I think that grief and guilt and shame and all of the other ugly feelings that baby loss arouses cause people to sometimes do damaging things to themselves. For six months, I ate much more than usual. Food was one of the few things that brought me pleasure. It caused about a 15 lb. weight gain which, fortunately, I have almost taken off. In a lot of ways, my loss caused (and, to some degree, still causes) me to just give up doing a lot of the things I used to do. The energy that I would need to expend just seemed/seems too great. I also think that there's some degree of self-punishment thrown in there.

i went from unable-to-eat to a LOT of comfort eating. i weigh more than i did while pregnant. i find that really upsetting, yet can't manage to do anything about it.

thank you for letting us know there is hope.

Thank you for writing that. Those little moments-where you opened the magazine and felt more conntected than isolated-they nudge me along. Even if the story didn't happen to me I benefit.