**This portion of my blog will be cut up into a few posts, as dealing with my issues with the scale and how the scale became my obsession will take some time sharing.**
I was once at a comfortable point in my life where I could easily pass by a scale and not have my heart pound with the dreaded agony of what it would say to me. I could step onto one and have the numbers range from 132 to 145 pounds and I was OK with it. Not always happy, but OK. It's uncannily kind of funny, but looking back onto the moment of when I would pull out my scale, it was as if I were the wicked Queen in Snow White looking into her magic mirror while chanting 'mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all'...When the mirror would respond with Snow White the angry Queen would do all in her power to change it in her favor so the mirror would give her the answer she so desperately wanted to hear. Now here I was, stepping onto the scale begging it to tell me that I was "skinny" only to find it was responding to me that I was too fat. Was that a fair presumption when my scale was merely a battery operated object that could only provide a superficial, unsubstantiated, conclusion as to who I really was by providing me with numbers. How can 3 numbers on a scale make a fair assessment as to who a person is? But I'd be damned if I was going to let that scale tell me that I wasn't skinny. In my mind skinny was most definitely NOT where I was at by a long shot. I needed to loose at LEAST 15 pounds and drop from a size 10 to a size 7. Hence the need for power.
It was almost a year after I had had my son that I stepped onto the scale and it read 147 lbs. I had just had a baby and yet I was livid! My scale was not my friend. I was hanging out with a new circle of friends and they were all tall and beautiful with perfect skin, hair and fashion. They had their houses organized and seemed to have it all. It would be months later that I would discover they, too, were fighting the predominance of perfection. Around that same time I was feeling myself slip slowly into a depression. When their conversations would turn to how they needed or wanted to loose weight I found myself slipping into my old self deprecating habits of judging myself. One of my friends had been dealing with anorexia, which she admittedly was not yet recovered from, and I found myself drifting into my old pre-programed ways of eating as little as I could while exercising as much as possible. Quicker than I had ever imagined my scale dropped to 140 pounds. I ate even less and worked out more and then it hit 135 and eventually once it hit 130 I was like WOW! I was controlling it's response to MY satisfaction once and for all! But I wasn't yet satisfied. Then came the surgery.
I had been dealing with severe endometriosis and multiple rupturing cysts for the past 14 years. It finally hit such a peak of misery I was left with only one option and that was a hysterectomy. To me it was no big deal as this would turn out to be a much less severe surgery than what followed my birth with my daughter. So once my son turned one, it was literally 2 days later that I was in surgery. One week into my recovery, in which I had lost even more weight, we received a devastating blow. My husbands division was pulling out and he was being demoted to the lowest position above being fired. We were hanging on by a thread. It was so much more than I could mentally handle and so once again, began the need for comfort from the control of the scale and the food. I was purging more and more and stepping onto the scale as much as 12 times a day. If the scale did not respond to my liking I fought harder with more binges and purges. I have to say that I became insanely crazy obsessed. I was dropping into the low 120's and yet I wasn't happy. My husband, Scott, moved to Louisiana for work to support our family and I binged more. The kids got sick, water would get shut off, collectors were calling and I could not slow down. I needed some sort of release from the stress. The scale would say I gained one measly pound in one day, royally pissing me off, and I would spend the next day making sure that I got it to read two pounds less by nightfall. It was exhausting.
Every day I would continue with the same cycle over and over telling myself that at 118 I would stop. Truly, I was only fooling myself. I was feeding myself a bucket full of lies and I knew it. I figured that if the scale was saying I was skinny then I must be looking hot and amazing and I must be making people jealous for once! I would walk around like I was next in line to be crowned Hottest Mom of the Year, or something like that. How naive I was! Deep down I knew the scale number was getting too low. I knew it wasn't healthy but I had power. Control. Dominance. The scale was no longer an insight into my weight as a number but had become my fuel. When I would get it to speak to my satisfaction I developed a sense of accomplishment that inspired me to tackle my daily tasks with an impenetrable force field. If something would puncture a hole in my force field I went back to the scale for my refueling. The incredibly sad thing is that even though my magic source reached an insanely strong 113, my gut would churn in guilt, but my fire would burn even stronger with consummation. My fire would be complete and closer to burning perfectly; I was attaining perfection in my control. Then came the day I had to face a new reason of thinking and fight to part with my so called magic mirror. That began a brand new battle I was blindly entering into with no direction or hope that I would find victory in this new war with myself...
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