My weight problem and how I solved it (part 1)
I trace the origin of my weight problem back to my 16th year. But really it goes back prior to my conception. My mother was fat. Her mother was fat. And her mother’s mother was fat. But I do not attribute my problem with weight to genetics. I believe it had more to do with attitudes and habits about food and eating that were handed down from generation to generation to generation, albeit unknowingly. I was a thin baby and a thin child, thin to the point of being skinny and being ridiculed about it. I remember drinking malted milk shakes in the hopes of rectifying the situation. All to no avail. Until sometime between my fourteenth and sixteenth years, I gradually began to put on weight.
How It All Began
At first I was pleased by this turn of events because finally I was no longer skinny. But I almost immediately began fearing the opposite possibility – that I would become fat like my mother. At the time I was 5’7″ tall and weighed 125 pounds, hardly overweight, much less fat. But that was my fear. At about this time, I met two women who were acquaintances of my mother. They were discussing ways of controlling weight. According to them the quickest and most efficient way to lose weight was to fast – a person could lose 10 or even 15 pounds this way in a week’s time. The idea of fasting had never occurred to me and probably never would have had I not met these women. However, the idea immediately appealed to me and seemed the answer to my problem (a problem that was all in my head, of course, but very real to me, none the less). I decided to stop eating until I had lost enough weight to give myself a comfortable margin of safety.
The Fast
The first two days of the fast were very difficult. I was extremely hungry and maintained the fast only by exercising great will power. By the third day, however, the hunger had passed. I was not the slightest bit hungry. I had no appetite at all. I felt that I did not want or need to eat ever again. I continued on the fast, ingesting nothing but water, for two weeks. At this point, I weighed 105 pounds. But I was not quite satisfied that I was thin enough. My hips were not as slim as they should have been. I decided a few more pounds and a couple of more days would do it. However, I was frightened into terminating the fast prematurely. I had gone to the beach and gotten a severe sunburn. I applied cooling Noxzema that night and a few minutes later I woke up on the floor. I had fainted. I applied Noxzema again and woke up on the floor again. I had felt no weakness up to that point. Although the shock of the cold application against my sunburned skin was undoubtedly the precipitating factor in my fainting, I felt that the underlying cause was my weakened condition due to the fast. I had never fainted before, and I was scared. I decided the time had come to resume eating. And so I did. And all hell broke loose.
What happened when I broke the fast will be the subject of next week’s article.
Mary Lou Williams, M. Ed., is a lecturer and writer in the field of nutrition. She welcomes inquiries. She can be reached at (239) 267-6480.