Hi! I'm Glenda!

I share my story hoping that in some small way, my experience will touch something in you.

December, 2007

At my highest weight of over 340 pounds, I'm walking around with the bones and joints God gave me to carry a specific amount of weight to live a long and healthy life as a person 5'5" with a small frame. I didn't wake up one morning weighing over 340 pounds.  My lifelong relationship with food, lifestyle choices and decisions dealing with life, heartache and disappointment has brought me to where I am.  When I met my husband, I was not seriously overweight.  But I have become complacent with the knowledge that my husband loves me no matter what, and through a several year period, I have gone back to my old habits of emotional eating that first surfaced in my childhood.

I hate myself for the past experiences that have led to the emotional eating in the first place, and I grow far more uncomfortable in my own skin with each pound I put on.  I hate my weight and know I need to lose it.  But the bottom line is that I don't want to do the work that will be necessary.  There is no instant gratification "fix" and  I know it, so I just become more entrenched in my thought process and my complacency regarding my emotional eating. 

My excess weight taxes my body to its limits by merely moving and doing the things others take for granted.  My legs go to sleep if I sit too long.  If I walk too far from my car to the door of the building, the pain increases to the point that my legs will buckle on me.  My life has become too painful for me to keep living the way I am.  My excess weight is slowly killing me and robbing me of living.

It is my time to change. 

Trapped in a body weighing in over 340 pounds makes me ashamed of the fact that I haven't been able to reach my feet for 15 years.  I can't tie my own shoes like I used to do back when I was a little girl in school.  I have defined myself as a morbidly obese woman with a lot to offer the world if they will just look inside and then I live within the boundaries of that definition. I hurt all the time but keep a smile on my face and keep my bubbly personality to make sure everyone likes me.  And I AM truly happy with the person that is inside me.  But I am afraid of change because, miserable as I am, I am comforted by the normality of what I know.  I never push the envelope and don't actually believe that I have it within myself to change.

Being called all the fat names in the book as I was growing up, I thought I had heard them all.  Now I'm learning that what I thought only happened in grade school also happens when you're an adult, and it hurts a lot more. The insults come in seemingly harmless disguises like, "Oh, we don't carry your size in this store, Ma'am", "Look at who you married, son", "Maybe we could all fit in two cars; Glenda's going with so and so, right"  And I get disgusted with my weight and I try a diet for a few days but when I find out that it isn't going to make me lose 90 pounds by the next morning, I give up. I give all of the same old excuses you've heard. "I'm praying for God to make me lose weight, but God's just not listening!"  "I'm doing everything right!" "I'm doing what they're telling me to do!" "I don't know what's wrong with me!" "I'm just going to be fat forever!"

Ummmm, yeah, except for the gallons of ice cream, and the candy, and the 16 ounce rib eye that I eat by myself for dinner at night. I even find myself hoping for a thyroid problem so that I can blame it on genetics and happily get back to my ice cream. No such luck.  Who's heard the saying – " You are what you eat," or, "You get out of your body what you put into it"?

I cannot count the times I wake up the next day after eating fried chicken, French fries, fried okra and whatever else I can fit on my plate, to find greasy little pimples on my face and just feel sluggish, and I guess you could even go so far as to say, "hung over".   

Wretched woman that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Romans 7:24, paraphrased from New American Standard Bible

Thank God, there is more to the story!