How I Turned Around My Weight Gain and Depression

Obesity and I have been at odds for more than five years. I'm back in my own body now, but getting here took work, and I passed through a lot of different stages along the way. It started not long after our first wedding anniversary, when I became pregnant and delivered my son by C-section. My doctor put me on bed rest for months afterward. Between feedings and sleepless nights, I simply didn't register that the pounds were piling on. By the time I noticed, the gain was real.

We were getting ready for our son's first birthday when it hit me in a concrete way: picking an outfit became a small ordeal. Dress after favorite dress no longer fit, which was deflating, but I found something new and the party went off fine. A couple of relatives and friends made remarks about my size that day. I brushed them off. What I couldn't brush off was the photo album that arrived afterward. In those pictures I looked like a giant ball, and older than my husband, who was lean and good-looking back then. That was the moment I resolved to get my pre-pregnancy figure back.

The vanity was only part of it. Six months later I was told I was pre-diabetic and at risk for heart trouble. The surgery and its complications ruled out most real exercise, so I cycled through diet after diet, each one promising quick results. Nothing held. What I mostly accomplished was wearing myself down and becoming undernourished and weak. Yoga for weight loss didn't move the needle either. All of it dragged me into a depression. Every time I passed a mirror I saw that giant ball, and I had no idea how to climb out.

The image settled in and became how I saw myself. I talked myself into believing I'd be obese forever, and my interest in things drained away. Work brought me no peace. I stopped going to parties. I stopped shopping, because a trip to the mall for clothes usually ended in some small humiliation.

One afternoon I was cleaning my son's room and found an old book, 'Positive Imaging.' A colleague from my working days, before I married, had given it to me years earlier. I carried it to my room and started reading in whatever free time I had. A calm I hadn't felt in a long while came over me almost immediately. One chapter told of a woman with the same weight struggles I had. She went to a priest for help, and he told her to write down the exact measurements and proportions she wanted, along with the time she'd need to reach them. She drew it all onto an outline of a woman's body and set the timeframe at one year. The priest's instruction was that alongside her physical efforts, she had to picture that figure every single day and hold it firmly in her mind. Within the year, he promised, she would become that woman. A year on she returned to him weighing even a little less than her target, thanked him, and went on with her life.

That story lit something in me. I grabbed a pencil, sketched a female figure, and wrote in the measurements and the weight I was after. For my target date I chose the following year's anniversary, sixteen months out. I prayed, held the picture of a beautiful version of myself in my head, and began. Healthier meals. Green tea. Gentle workouts and walking. Getting out of the house and seeing people again. A daily meditation on that ideal image. The quality I most wanted to reclaim was confidence, and I promised myself I would not quit.

The months did their work quietly. My dresses loosened. Old clothes started fitting again. There was a warmth back in the house, something romantic, and I was smiling, which mattered more than any of it.

When the day I'd been counting toward for sixteen months arrived, I threw a party and invited everyone, friends and family alike. I wore my wedding reception dress. The look on my husband's face when he saw me carried the same spark it had on our wedding day. It was our fifth anniversary, yet the two of us could have passed for the couple from the altar. I was overjoyed. I gave thanks to God and to the man whose book had reset my outlook, Norman Vincent Peale.

Hard stretches have come since then, of course, but the way I meet them is different now. I've turned into an optimist. The dark never stays, I've learned. Each morning the sun comes up and lights the corners of our lives that had gone dim.