Why?

Why did I gain so much Weight?

What happened?

I was thinking yesterday about my weight loss journey. Suddenly a question came to mind. Why did I gain so much weight?

Well, as I have said many times, I was obese since before I can even remember. If I look at old pictures there was a time that I was not obese, but I honestly can’t remember that time.

However, there was a time that I can look at where I started putting on weight much more rapidly.

I am not making excuses

When I say what happened at the time that I started gaining weight to a greater degree, some will say that I am making excuses. No, I am making no excuses. I am only trying to figure out if something happened that hastened my weight gain.

I did it myself. Nobody else caused me to become 430 pounds. I am the only one who was responsible for that.

So, what happened?

What happened that caused a sudden increase in my weight gain?

When I was 17 years old, at the beginning of my senior year in High School, I was working at a local retail chain store in the town where I went to school. I lived out of town, about a 20-minute drive.

My work was in the afternoon and into the evening. One night, after I got off of work, I was driving home. As I drove, I could see in the distance that there were the flashing lights of a police car. No, it was not a single police car, I realized, it was many police cars.

As I got closer to the flashing lights, it really lit up the sky like it was daytime instead of night. Suddenly I realized that there was a traffic accident. The police were directing traffic through the accident scene.

Then I saw one of the cars

As I was passing by, my instinct was to look and see what was going on. I took a quick glance at one of the cars, it was on the road. It was unbelievable how badly it was damaged.

Then it hit me. That car was very distinct. It belonged to my family. I panicked and pulled over to the side of the road. I got out of my car and started running toward the police officer nearest me. He yelled at me and told me to leave, there was nothing I could do there.

I told him – “That green car belongs to my family.” He then came to me and took me away from the scene, into a police car and brought some people to talk to me.

I thought my whole family was in the car

My immediate thought was that my entire family was in the car. That would be my Father, Mother, Brother, and Sister. Based on the looks of the car, I felt there was no way that anybody could have survived the crash.

I asked the officer who was in the car. He said that a young girl was in the car, but nobody else. I asked him if the girl was OK. He told me to flat out that the girl had died. It was my sister. She was 15 years old. We lived, at the time, in the State of Louisiana, and the legal age to get a driver’s license was 15, so she was a licensed driver.

How did it happen?

Unfortunately, a drunk driver was coming the other way down the road. He fell asleep while driving, and swerved off of the road, onto the shoulder on his side. The shoulder was dirt with gravel. When he hit the gravel, it woke him up, and he pulled the steering wheel to get back on the road, but he overcorrected. He ended up on my sister’s side of the road and they hit head-on.

She was dead. I was 17, my sister was 15.

My sister’s death really affected me

Over the coming months, I gained about 50 pounds. That is when my rapid weight gain started. I would have to say that due to my grieving, and turning to food to ease my pain, I started gaining weight rapidly.

As I said, I am not blaming anybody or anything for my weight gain, I am the only one to blame. And, I was already obese before my sister’s death. But, that event really traumatized me, and I firmly believe that the accident and death of my sister was the thing that caused me to turn to food even more than I had previously.

I dealt poorly with this event

As I said, I was 17 when this happened. That was in 1979. For the next 30 years, I could never talk about the event without breaking down and crying. Even if I just thought of my sister, I was in tears.

At the age of 47, I had a very close friend who had a background in counseling. One day, we were at the pool, we used to swim daily for exercise. After our swim we were sitting alongside the pool and talking, The topic of my sister came up, and as normal, I was in tears. It was very traumatic for me.

My friend, Gene, started talking to me very seriously. He was using some of the counseling techniques that he knew on me. We talked for several hours. I have never cried about that incident again. Right time? Right place? Right person? Whatever happened, it all came together, and I finally dealt with the incident. I can now freely talk about it. Yes, it makes me sad, but I don’t start crying about it.

Mental Illness

Yesterday I posted an article asking if readers felt that mental illness would be a welcome topic here. In that article, I said that I had never really had any mental issues in the past. Today, it struck me that indeed I had experienced mental issues. The death of my sister and the 30 years that it took me to come to terms with it was, no doubt, a serious mental issue.

I will be writing more about this traumatic event in my life over the coming weeks and months. But, today, I wanted to just connect it with extreme weight gain.

I wish I had not dealt with it by turning to food. That caused me to experience many serious health problems over the years, and I flirted with death more than once. Really, I should not even be alive anymore, but I made it. I think I am here to stay for a long, long time now.