A brief background on me and food/weight, part 1

Well, I will try to keep this part fairly brief, because it's apt to be a bit depressing.  But you know what they say, to know where you're going you have to know where you've been.  And I think that everyone has an underlying cause to their weight issues, whether emotional or physical (or both).  I think it's rare that it's solely because a person is lazy and gluttonous.

Sadly, my issues with weight started in infancy.  I won't get into detail, but my father was not a nice person (he's currently serving a lengthy prison sentence).  I was 4 days old when I came home from the hospital, and my mother was immediately forbidden from taking care of me at night (yes, including feeding me).  As a result, I was born a healthy 7 and a halfish pounds, but at 3 months old, barely weight 9.  Food issues with my father didn't stop there.  When my brother and I were small, everyone was done eating when my father was, whether or not you were really done.  For whatever reason, when we got older, it changed to no one was allowed to leave the dinner table until their plate was clean.  Even the flu didn't excuse you from cleaning your plate; I vividly remember my brother being 5 or 6 years old and terribly sick with the flu, running to the bathroom to throw up in between bites (and being beaten for getting sick).

I was very thin during my childhood, but when I started going through puberty at the tender age of 10, I gained some weight, which is very normal and healthy.  My father didn't see it that way, though, and started oinking and mooing at me during dinner.  As a result, I quit eating much, and by 12 I was pretty well anorexic.  I found my "food diary" years later, with entries like "Today I ate half a piece of toast."  "Today I ate 3 saltines and half a Popsicle."  I also became a big "exercise bulimic," exercising in the middle of the night in my large closest until I passed out.  At first my father seemed pleased with my thinness, but as I passed "thin" and went to "skinny" and then "sickly" he got angry.  Now, instead of mooing at me during dinner, he would scream at me while I pushed food around on my plate and tell me that if I was going to starve myself to death I could do it in my room, because he wasn't going to waste the money to put me in the hospital.

So, to say that my childhood history with food is disordered is probably an understatement.

Although I never went into a program specifically for anorexics, I did get into therapy (after a suicide attempt at 13) and my mother took custody of me.  After a couple of years I got back to a healthy weight, and I was also doing Tae Kwon Do with my mother and brother, which I really enjoyed.  I still had a lot of emotional issues, but physically I was in great shape!

I met my husband a month shy of my 17th birthday.  He was an ornery punk rocker and we spent most of our time drinking lots and lots of alcohol.  When we ate, it was pure crap (usually fast food).  We both gained a lot of weight, I quit TKD, and by the time I was 18, I was nearly 200 pounds and looking at a positive pregnancy test.