And that other thing...

Yeah, so, I haven't actually started talking about the diet thing yet.

I am 38, soon to be 39, years old. I weigh approximately 197 pounds. I am 5'4" and I have really tiny wrists and ankles and nearly half of my body weight is fat. I wasn't always like this.

I was one of those skinny kids who never ate anything. Then I became a skinny teenager, and a skinny college student. I started to gain after college. Just a bit each year, nothing major. I had finally discovered food, but I still wasn't, you know, pathological about eating it. I was simply willing to eat more of it than I had been as a picky kid.

Then the first baby came. I can't even recall what my weight was when I went back to work after her birth, but I do clearly recall the woman who asked me when I was due. She had been a total bitch even before that, so I took great pleasure in getting really upset as I told her that my baby was already FOUR MONTHS OLD. Work was awful, and got worse each day, and eventually I responded to the stress by not eating. I got down to about 130 through sheer starvation, and I looked gooooooood.

Then I quit. Got a new job, one that let me sit at a desk instead of chasing after bitchy, rude customers all day. A desk that had ample room for snacks, and a padded chair that had ample room for my increasingly ample ass.

By the time I got pregnant with my second child, roughly 18 months later, I was about 165. The pregnancy was awful, and I developed a problem with my hip joints that made walking agonizing, and so I left work and stayed home for the last half of my daughter's gestation. I was about 200 pounds when she was born, and she was a 9-pounder herself.

I started dropping pounds during breastfeeding, but both those things were derailed by multiple bouts with mastitis and a bout with postpartum depression.

Between stopping breastfeeding and going on antidepressants, I gained back all the weight I lost after her birth.

I am fat, and I am miserable. My feet and my knees hurt when I walk. Nothing fits except stretch pants and t-shirts. I even need wide shoes now. I wheeze when I carry may baby girl up the steps, and I sweat profusely from the slightest effort. My belly has been stretched beyond its capacity to rebound, and it hangs from my torso, as do my breasts. I am uncomfortable and embarrassed and my blood pressure is rising, and god only knows what my cholesterol level is. I used to stop eating when I was stressed out about something, and now I turn to food for comfort.

I want to change, just like I want to learn to sew and I want to stop burping out loud all the time and I want to save money so we can take the kids to Disneyworld in a few years. But nothing good is ever easy, and all I can do is try.

And write about it on the internet so random strangers will email me misspelled insults!