I'M STILL SKINNY, YOU JUST CANT SEE IT UNDER THE 50 EXTRA POUNDS I GAINED FROM EDS...

10/3/2014

As an infant, I wasn't a roly-poly baby and my entire childhood, I was a thin little girl with knobby-knees and ribs you could see whenever I wore a bathing suit. I spent all of my life as a thin person, never once watching what I ate - my mom had 8 children, and I the youngest by ten years grew up on a steady diet of Flav-or-Aid (Kool-Aid) "juice", tuna fish sandwiches with mayo on white bread and dinners that consisted of a protein, a veggie and a starch - it was nothing particularly UN-healthy, but my mother was certainly not the type to keep the house devoid of junk. You could always count on various flavors of potato chips, several boxes of Tasty-Kakes, Oatmeal Cream Pies and a large selection of fruit snacks - typical childhood foods of the 80's and 90's.

   People like my grandmother would accuse my mother of never feeding me enough, but most others would write off that my inability to sit still (for even just a moment) was the clear explanation for my ability to put away massive quantities of sugar-filled foods and never gain any substantial weight, and I never gave it two thoughts. I realize now in retrospect that I really had a lot to be thankful for, but I spent a good deal of my time being picked on and bullied in school, so even though I was thin, and not exactly unattractive, I hid under baggy boy-ish clothing and got picked on for wearing shorts for three straight years even in the dead of winter. I couldn't explain to anyone why the heat in our middle school made me nauseous and dizzy, as I wasn't diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (otherwise known as POTS) until I was 32- but I knew VERY early in life that I couldn't handle being over-heated, and so despite the constant torment from my fellow students, I wore shorts right through the blizzard of 1993 and the ice storms of 1994. It solidified my place as a "freak" and a person to be picked on. People wrote in my yearbooks "Wear some pants."

    I graduated high school at 5'8'' - and had not yet reached 100 lbs. I was happy with being a size 0 - and for a little while I even enjoyed the shopping for clothing and smugly thought to myself that being a size 0 without even trying was pretty damn cool. No worries- the 32-year old me wants to back and smack that smug grin right off my 19 year old face.

    Like most adolescents, I moved away from home a few weeks shy of my 21st birthday and by then, I had reached my adult height of nearly 5'10'' and weighed about 114 lbs. That was 2003, and I'm pretty certain the only weight I'd gained was in my chest. I was 110% sure that I would never have children, and freshly over a long-term relationship I decided that Depo-Provera shots every three months (along with never having a period) was well-suited to living in the Sunshine State where shorts and bikinis were normal nearly 10 months out of the year.

    I was naturally thin, and other than a deep-seated hatred for my thighs (which were the most muscular part of me, having played soccer for 15 years) I'd always had a pretty healthy body image. I'd spent the majority of my school years hiding my thin figure under sporty t-shirt and baggy soccer swish-pants but early in my 20's and newly living in Florida I went from hating having grown up with red hair to realizing that a young red-head in a beach bar is a bit of a commodity.


   I became a pretty popular bar-fly at my local watering hole (O'Maddys, in Gulfport,Florida), and the only weight I gained for a while was thanks to the magic of Depo-Provera. When I graduated high school, I was more or less wearing a training bra. Within the first two times I'd been given the Depo shot, I had put on 20 lbs.... all in my chest. I'd gone from sports bras to a 30-D. Thank you, Depo-Provera!

    As I settled into my fairly active life in Florida, I took for granted that I would always be one of those girls who simply couldn't gain weight ever. Now, remember, I had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome back then but didn't know it (I was always called "hyper-mobile" or "double-jointed" and all the knee, hip and back pain I lived with were shushed-away as "growing pains". My knee pain was attributed to Osgood-Sclautter's Disease (a problem caused by extreme growth spurts, where your knees don't catch up with your extreme leg growth) and believed this to be true. I skipped out on physical activity when I really didn't feel up to it (IE, running the mile in high school gym) but mostly, didn't let it hold me back. It was no different once I'd moved by myself to Florida... I always lived with an uncommon amount of minor injuries, but explained it away as clumsiness or perhaps a low tolerance for pain. No doctor ever suggested I had anything to worry about, even those I showed my "leg trick" to. (I'll link a video HERE later on!)

And that's how it went throughout my twenties... I'd gain a little weight here and there (on my first trip home, five months after I turned 21, my mom was shocked to see me at close to 135 lbs.... but empty calories at the bar will do that. I'd officially gained my freshman fifteen! But that same year, when I returned home for Christmas, I was back in my size three jeans and back around 115 lbs. When I entered the police academy in August 2004 I weighed all of 114 lbs at weigh-in, and an eight months later at graduation, I was in the best shape I'd ever be in (This after two dozen asthma-attacks, an encounter with capsaicin (which I'm allergic to, and ended up using an epi-pen for the first time), a broken toe that I continued to do push-ups and run on, with a VERY aggravated bone spur in my right shoulder, and that i had done P/T for months through HUNDREDS of hip, shoulder, knee and ankle subluxations and dislocations) - I was 124 lbs, mostly muscle, yet even so- I had FAR less muscle tone than a single other person in my academy class, even those who had started out over weight. I was just incredibly proud to have graduated.

It never made much sense that I was so much weaker - so much more easily injured than everyone around me, but I just presumed that it was just who I was. I still didn't know that my entire body was made of defective collagen and that graduating from the police academy, and keeping up with those around me was probably 200 times HARDER for me than it was for anyone around me. After all, other people's bodies don't have to exert a ton of energy just keeping their joints from sliding out of socket while they are sitting still. Ah... EDS. Ah... to be so young and naive.

When I got pregnant with my son, I was 29 years old - he was born January 24th, 2011 at 8lbs 10oz via a c-section and it was one of the greatest moments of my life - even though everything about my pregnancy ultimately set the ball rolling for all of my medical conditions to come crashing down on me at once. (Although my pregnancy did have a big part in helping put my Crohn's Disease into remission, so I can't forget to be thankful for that.)

My EDS became a full-blown thing, debilitating me and causing my activity levels to slow down to from being a full-time police officer to unable to work at all in a matter of the nine months I was pregnant with my son. Despite the increasing pain, and what would eventually lead to the diagnosis of all my main medical issues - just five days after my son's birth, I went back into my size five jeans, and I remained around 135 lbs until early 2012....

Not long after I started on pain-management, on muscle relaxors to help control the ever-present and extremely painful muscle spasms, and right around the time when my thyroid quit working, I began to gain weight, and began to gain it rapidly. At first, I was shocked to be 150 lbs, but thought it was post-baby weight and it would slowly come off. Despite my appetite slowing down more and more to the point where I'd often go days without eating... in a period of approximately seven months, I skyrocketed to 195 lbs.

I have been fluctuating between 180-196 lbs since 2012 and I can't stand myself for it. I avoid photographs, I no longer get (or show anyone) my tattoos, I'm mortified by my once tight, slim and frankly, beautiful body and I don't feel like myself. I used to be the center of photos, and now I avoid going out because I can't stand the chance of being in a photograph. I hate that I take eight thousand photos of my now three year old son, but that almost none of them include much more than my face.

I have tried everything within my power - I often don't eat for days on end, or eat nothing but fruit. I've tried to go back on my ADHD medication which has always in the past lead to weight loss, but nothing I've done has helped. I got to about 185 lbs and stagnated, a few years into living with EDS, and I'm hell bent on doing something about it. But before I could - I felt that I needed to write the back story because a weight-loss journey is so personal, and so individual. I have no idea what it is like to be a person with genetics who makes them pre-disposed to carrying weight. I come from a thin family, and inside, I know that there's a thin person - ME - who is DYING to get out of this body that I'm trapped in, and get back to living my life.

This is my "before". This is the last time I will ever look like this, no matter what it takes to change things. I don't want to be 114 lbs again, but I WILL get back under 140, and it will happen within 2015. I can't change living with chronic illness, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend the rest of my life more depressed about my weight than the chronic pain and diseases that caused it.

<3 K

This has GOT to go: