Irony is a cold-hearted bitch.

I officially weigh the least I have ever weighed in my adult life. Also, this is a really long post because I just felt like typing today, apparently.

According to BMI standards, at my heaviest of 220 pounds I was just tipping the scale into morbid obesity. That scared me. I’ve always been heavy, and sometimes it bothered me and other times it didn’t. Obesity was just a fact of life. But the words “morbid obesity” at the age of 22 was not something I was okay with.

In the second grade we had a day where we all weighed ourselves and used the information for some project or another. I have absolutely no idea how this was of any scholastic value, nor do I know why the teacher thought it was acceptable for children to publicly weigh themselves. What I do know is that I was the heaviest girl in the class and my classmates made sure I knew that. That’s the first time I remember thinking I was fat.

I went on to believe I was a ginormous cow for most of middle and high school. In all actuality, I totally wasn’t. Throughout most of those years I was about a size 16. During my junior year of high school I travelled to northeastern Mexico for a year as an exchange student and it was there that my struggle with body image really escalated. Turns out there are no fat people in Mexico. Sure, there were a couple here and there, but all of my friends at school were itty bitty and found me to be rather abnormal. A fellow exchange student (who I later found out was bulimic… it explained a lot) decided it was appropriate to make frequent comments about my diet and exercise habits (which were poor and non-existent, granted, but I didn’t need her to tell me that). Halfway through the year I was required to switch host families. My new family, while very kind in some ways, proved very unkind in others. I had three host brothers, the oldest of which told me once that no one would ever want me in my current physical condition. My host mother often critiqued my eating habits and appearance. I began to eat as little as possible and leave the house every afternoon to walk around my neighborhood for hours. My poor nutrition caused my hair to start to fall out, but my weight plummeted and I began to hear from everyone how great I looked. When I arrived back home after my year was up, I weighed 159 pounds. My host mother gave me a letter in the airport explaining that she took her marital problems out on me. She also told me to make sure I didn’t gain the weight back. That was the last time we spoke.

I heard from everyone at home how great I looked as well, so you can imagine my dismay when the scale crept back up again because I dared to consume actual food. The frustration at the instant gain led me to gain back what I had lost (about 25 pounds) plus even more. When I graduated high school I weighed 200 pounds. I hovered in the 200-210 region for the next three years, except for a brief foray into the 180s while working at a mill for the summer. Turns out stacking boards all day burns crazy amounts of calories. It wasn’t until my third and final year of college (I graduated early) that my weight got up to 220, and I had basically given up.

I have tried every. single. diet. South Beach, Slim Fast, low carb, no carb, high protein, starvation, liquid, etc. Many of these were attempted during my first year of college because a friend needed a dieting buddy. For a very ridiculous 10 days I even did the Master Cleanse (shudder) though that was more of an experimental thing than a weight loss attempt. After I graduated and moved to BFE, I started exercising more and trying to eat sensibly. I lost 40 pounds. I credit a lot of this to the fact that I put myself through college and having to face mass amounts of debt and bills led to me not being able to afford to eat. Still, my overall tendency was to eat as little as possible regardless of my financial status.

About ten months ago I decided to do the Couch to 5k program. I had started to gain back a few pounds and really wanted to avoid seeing the 200 mark again. It was definitely slow going at first. Somehow I managed to complete both the program and my first 5k. From there I went on to continue running and discovered it was a hobby I loved. I read more and more about nutrition and health issues, and realized I’d been torturing myself for over 23 years.

Why bother starving myself or eating things I hated? That’s not something I can commit to for the rest of my life, obviously, or I would have done it already. So I started to eat more. I reintroduced things like fruit and even crazy items like bread and pasta into my diet (the low-carb habits die hard, let me tell you). I included all the food groups and figured out what all of the food groups actually were (I’m pretty sure I should have learned that in second grade instead of learning that I was a fatty). Balancing my intake of carbs, proteins and healthy fats proved to be less difficult than I would have thought and I found I can eat a wide variety of things and be happy at the same time. I even allow myself things like ice cream every so often. Shocker! Eventually, my running endurance increased. Now I’ve gone from struggling through my first 5k to training for my first half marathon. Which for me, is an actual shocker.

The interesting part of this is that when I stopped paying attention to my scale (we broke up, remember?) is exactly when the number started to go down. I hadn’t weighed myself in awhile and so today I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder where I’m at.” I like to check in often enough to not be obsessive, but also to keep myself in check. The scale told me 156. I replied to the scale with, “What the fuck? Really?”

So now I officially weigh less than I did when I was 17 (technically not even my adult life, but you get the picture). And it happened by changing my lifestyle instead of torturing myself. I still have all my hair, I still eat (a lot—I pretty much love cooking and food) and I have a new hobby that keeps me entertained.

I find this all very ironic. And I can’t decide if it should make me happy or a little sad.