By Katherine

I was a fat kid.

I could write a book about growing up overweight, but the gist is this: everything is harder for a fat kid; picture days, dance recitals, pool days, adolescence, puberty, school dances.

The social impact of it is something so large I don’t know if I will ever really get over it.

I lost the weight at 16, and spent the next ten years wrapped up in a terrible relationship with food. I counted every calorie, in and out, like a bank ledger. Terrified of gaining back even an ounce of the weight, I obsessed; pounding away on cardio machines with their shiny declarations of CALORIES BURNED. When I wasn’t restricting, I was gorging myself on ‘forbidden’ foods and quietly vomiting it all back up in my bathroom.

I lived that way all through high school and college, four serious boyfriends, seven roommates one broken engagement, and the marriage to my husband. The deceit and selfishness involved in keeping my addiction ruined many relationships.

Living in Arizona, after my oldest daughter was born, I started running. I was hoping it would help me lose some of the post partum pounds. Maybe it was the hours I got to spend out of the house without a baby shackled to my body, or the dusty desert trails in the afternoons? Maybe it was acknowledging the miracle of watching my body create and birth such a perfect baby girl? I don’t know really, but something changed.

I started to like running — and I don’t mean ‘like running’ like I used to when I used it as a means to an end. I started liking the running process. I started liking the way I could use my body to propel myself faster and harder and longer. I raced past tourists in the mountains around Sedona, smiling and sweating and happy.

Running changed the way I viewed everything, the way I thought about food as fuel for my body. It may seem simple to some of you, but it took me years to learn that if I put good things into my body, then it could do amazing things. It took me years to see my body for what it was; a lovely heap of muscles, bones, and skin. Running made it all click for me in a way that therapy and support groups never could – it made me love my body for what it could do, not what it was.

Today, well, I’m still recovering. I’m trying to figure out how to have a healthy, balanced diet without counting every single thing that goes into my body, without logging every run into my Nike Fit. I’m working to add fats and carbohydrates into my meals without feeling guilty. I am learning to deal with the TOTAL AND COMPLETE FEAR that I feel when walking into a gym, or meeting other runners at a trailhead and just force myself to go for it. I’m still a work in progress, but I am totally and completely committed to it, and that is half the battle. Right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Blogs, Will Run for Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.