How I lost my weight

Hi. I’m Andrea Christian Parks, and I’m a homeschooling mom of four, an obstetrician/gynecologist, and a strong believer in natural and organic living. How does all this work together? It’s been a journey, and certainly hasn’t been because I’m so organized or talented. I’m like most women, figuring it out as we go along, changing, evolving as I learn. I have lots of stories of change on this journey,? and I’m hoping that by telling them to you, you’ll find strength as you live your journey in the chaos and busyness of everyday.

Let me tell you how I lost my weight.

 

I’ve been overweight most of my life. The awareness of weight started very early, in elementary school. I know I thought I was fat in third grade, though when I look back at photos, I looked very normal. I went to school with a racially mixed group of kids, but most were white, and most were very thin. Comparison can be very dangerous. Being built differently was concerning to me, and because I was shorter (average), muscular, and not white, I interpreted that to mean that I was fat. Your mind can produce the reality that you believe…

 

Anyhow, by the time I was in high school I was overweight. It was a painful thing for me, and I carried a lot of self-hatred because of it. I didn’t do much to change it, mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I figured I overate, but for me, that seemed normal, so how do you change what is normal to you?

 

Fast forward through college, medical school, residency and my wedding. We decided to start our family at the very end of residency since I didn’t think I could take care of a baby and work a zillion hours a weeks, but we needed to hurry up if we were going to have the big family we talked about. So we started trying. And nothing happened. Month after month after month…

So we got help (that’s a whole ‘nother story). And we had our first baby, who was beautiful and perfect, and slightly more than 5 weeks early. It was incredible and amazing and exhausting. I gained about 25 lbs., and somewhere in my mind, if I breastfed the weight would all magically disappear. Even the weight I started the pregnancy with. At my 6 week postpartum visit, I was exactly where I started the pregnancy: 196 lbs. And that didn’t change for another year. I breastfed her for 16 months.

So what changed? Right before her first birthday, we were pulling out all the Christmas decorations, and in typical fashion the baby was into everything and climbing on me. My husband wanted to preserve the memory of our first Christmas together and pulled out the camera. I resisted. No pictures – just take photos of her, please. But he took the pictures with me in them anyway. When I saw the pictures I was overwhelmed with disappointment – first because of how tired, old and heavy I looked, and second, because after all the grief and tears it took to have this beautiful baby, I didn’t want to be in pictures with her. This could NOT continue.

I was 31 years old and tired. So completely worn out and exhausted. Ever feel that? Ever have something that you want so badly to change and it just won’t? That’s where I was, feeling so discouraged and sad and weighed down by the weight on my body and the thought that it wouldn’t ever go away. I had a terrible thought: I would raise this little girl up to follow in the same path that I had gone, hating my body, overeating for comfort and being powerless to change it, and she would learn to do the same thing. She would learn to cover up the parts of her body that were too big, or wear makeup as camouflage, or straighten her curls to look like the other girls – all things I had done.? The thought of committing my daughter to the same misery I had lived in this body was so very awful that I cried for her. This radiant, doll-like little almost-toddler couldn’t already be doomed to live out that reality. Could she?

 

So I did what I had only recently learned to do: I prayed. I became a Christian in 1999 at age 23, so I had been developing by faith and relationship with God purposefully for a few years (though He had been pursuing me my whole life). In the midst of my sniffling puddle of misery, memories of past challenges came to me, one after the other. The miscarriage, medical school, sleepless nights and 80+ hour weeks and years in residency, … All these I had survived, and conquered. And then a thought came to me. I don’t think I created it. If He could bring me through all these difficult times, why didn’t I think that the creator of my body couldn’t help me to heal from being overweight? Was God too small for that? Powerful enough to create the cosmos but lacking the ability to help me lose the weight? I completely rejected that possibility.

 

Some years prior, in the midst of looking for ways to lose weight, I came across a faith based program called Weigh Down (weighdown.com). I bought and read the books and agreed with the concepts, but didn’t have great success. At this point though, I was ready to really give everything I had. I had tried the cabbage soup diet, a metabolic diet, Weight Watchers (cheated on that), and anything else I could think of. I was living on the I Deserve It Diet: I worked hard, was tired, needed a pick-me-up, so I ate it, diet. None of it was working. I need something that I could live with, forever. And I couldn’t do it alone, because I’d cheat. So I got online and signed up, reasoning that I’d pay my money and this was something I would do for God, and for my daughter. ?Doing it for me alone wouldn’t be enough to keep me from sabotaging myself. My workbooks and course materials came in the mail, and I started signing in to the online class once a week, listening to the lessons and following the plan. I weighed myself regularly (which I hadn’t every done before – too painful!), and I wrote down every bite I put in my mouth.

 

The weight started coming off.

 

And it was hard. I’d wait to get hungry, prepare a meal, get two or three bites in and realize that I was full. It didn’t seem fair, and I often questioned if this was right. But every time I stopped when I knew I should and waited to eat when I was truly hungry, the next day the scale would go down, even if it was just a little. Day after day after day, the number dropped.

It took 6 months. I lost about 55 lbs. and went from a size 14 to a size 4. The best part was how much better I felt, not only in my lighter body, but in my mind. The food wasn’t in control anymore – I didn’t have to eat something because it was there, but I could if I was hungry. I could always take it with me for when I was hungry, and I needed so much less than I used to think I did. I started to feel like me – the mismatch and disappointment I used to feel when I looked in the mirror was gone. It doesn’t mean that all my 30+ years of food and body image issues were gone, but I had turned a corner. I still fight some of my old thinking – you’ll see in later posts! But losing the weight has made a huge difference in everything.