The early years...

I feel like I started my life out as a normal kid.  I had long, curly hair that my mom would put up in pony tails, 2 on either side of my head or one in the back, and always braided, with those great yarn ribbons and plastic headbands from the 70s and 80s.  I was styling back in the day!  I soon knew that something was different...I used to be eye level with most kids and then all of a sudden all I could see was the top of everyone's head.  I was growing, and growing at a pretty fast pace. 

When we took our class pictures, the photographer would ask who was the tallest and all of the little kids would point up at me, and I was...usually like a head taller than everyone else.  I hated my height growing up, because it made me different, and really different.  It's not like a Jan Brady wig, it was my body, getting taller and taller, which seemed by the minute. 

Not only was I getting taller, but my body was starting to "change" and I was only 7!  OMG!  What in the hell was going on?!  I was soooooooooooo different than everyone else, and to tell you the truth...I hated it...

Somewhere around 8 or 9 years old I discovered the comfort of food...ahhhh...food, my new friend.  It would never make fun of me for being tall or looking different.  It was always there for me...tacos, fried chicken, cereal by the bowl(s), you name it I was eating it.  What I didn't know at the time was that my new "friend" would later in life become my arch enemy. 

After discovering food all I wanted to do was eat and eat and eat.  I would eat so much food and was at the point that I was completely out of control with it and would obsess about it at every waking moment.  When was I going to eat, what was I going to eat and how much was going to be available for me to eat.  Diets were popping up EVERYWHERE...eat grapefruit, no don't eat grapefruit, only at 800 calories a day, only meat, only carbs, you name it was out there and at a very early age I was dieting.   

How crazy is that?!  I was still a tween and was dieting to "look" like all of the girls in the magazines and on the shows that I watched.  They were all so small and pretty, and here I was a tall, overweight girl, whose nicknames ranged from The Jolly Green Giant to Linebacker.  When all of the other girls were wearing cute little jeans...I was wearing boys jeans...sized "husky".  Which to those of you who don't know what husky means, it's a way to describe boys who are overweight back in the 80s. 

Those were not the happiest days of my life.  I sometimes think of those days and wish that I didn't go through them, but in the end they have made me the person that I am today, and for that I am totally grateful.