I can feel myself circling... circling...

After just getting on a scale for the first time since January, I want to cry: 260

I am now only 18 pounds away from where I was at my heaviest when I graduated high school. I never wanted to be at that place again. NEVER. Finding myself here makes me so angry at myself. One would think that this would make me more motivated to lose weight. But as strongly as I feel about this, weight loss for me is a tricky thing.

My relationship with food has never been the best. I was a pretty heavy child by the time I hit second grade thanks to an eye disease, copious amounts of steroids medication and a complete lack of information given to my parents by my many healthcare providers. My parents had no experience with steroids or their side affects. They didn't know what kind of questions to ask. My eye doctor never said anything because maybe he didn't think that was his place? And our family doctor was, let's face it, just an asshole who liked to tell me I needed to stop eating cake and cookies. Telling things like that to a child makes them feel like it's entirely their fault they're overweight. Add to that being made fun of by not only my sister and my classmates, but having to deal with my mother's insensitive comments contributed to my complete lack of self worth and started me down a long, dark road that took me many, many years to get off of.

I should mention at this point, to those who don't know me, that my mother is severely manic, my father worked all the time to support everyone since my mother couldn't work and my sister, I am convinced, felt jealous that I got so much "attention" because I was sick therefore leading to her harsh treatment of me. I did not have much of a support system when I was young. After my grandmother passed away when I was 11, I didn't have one in my family period. I love my family, don't get me wrong, but I never had the relationship with any of them, outside my grandmother, where I felt I could turn to them with things, except maybe my oldest cousin when we were older.

So, in my times of pain and stress, I turned to food. I turned to food and I hid it. I bet you can see where this is going. I progressively put on more and more weight, until I reached high school. I hit my highest weight to date and plateaued. When I was 16, my eye doctor moved his practice and I had to find a new eye doctor. She was the first doctor that actually stressed the dangers of having been on the meds I was on for so long.

Besides all the weight gain, I was at higher risk for glaucoma which could have made me GO BLIND. This scared the shit out of me. I had long since been given the responsibility of administer my own eye drops, my new doctor drastically dropped my dose since I hadn't had too many symptoms in a while and after about a year... I stopped taking the medication all together. And hid it.

I let everyone believe that I was still putting in the eye drops the way I was supposed to. And wonders of wonders, I got better. I had no symptoms. At all. For the first time since I was SIX. And over the year after graduation high school, I dropped a drastic amount of weight, somewhere near to the amount of 70 pounds. Doing absolutely nothing.

I felt fantastic... about that. Everything else in my life was kind of shitty, but that's another story. Around the same time my dad was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He changed his diet, which meant everyone else in the house changed their diet, and became more active and I joined him a lot when he took walks. I started walking to work, walking when I got home from work, walking before I went to work. Basically I was walking all the time and I was on my feet all day at work as well.

Right around my 21 birthday, I was at the lowest weight I had been in years, an almost unbelievable 193 pounds. I slowly started coming out of my shell and slightly believing that, Hey, I actually don't look bad.The summer after my 22 birthday, I got my first boyfriend. I know, I know, I give new meaning to the term "late bloomer." But I could never believe before that a man was actually attracted to me.

At first, it was great. He was nice to me and we had a lot in common and I thought everything was great. Without getting into to many details (cause let's face it this isn't the right place to discuss it), he turned out to be a dick and dumped me, I cut off all my hair, got super depressed and started feeling like shit again and putting weight back on, if not more slowly. It still wasn't too bad until recently.

To get back to my original point, I've gotten lazy and complacent over the last few years and fallen back into a lot my my bad eating habits. Making unhealthy choices becasue they're easy and "comforting." I'm not sure how to drag myself out of this again. I'm circling back into the abyss. For every healthy choice I make, I make three bad ones.

I'm trying to go vegetarian most of the time because I haven't been craving meat and for a while the mere thought of eating it made me nauseous, but it's kind of hard because I tend to fall back on bread and pasta when I don't eat meat. I've been trying out a lot of frozen vegetarian meal options because they're easy when I come home from work half dead and don't feel like cooking, but I need to get out of the habit of snacking on things like ice cream and chips.

I use to be that person who ate rice cakes and loved them! Where did that girl go because I can't seem to find her.