~Jenn

This is a bit of a long one.

I met a guy a few months after I took my ‘After’ pic that you see here on FFF. I was happy, healthy, confident, and excited about life. He and I became serious pretty quickly.  I told him I had been overweight until fairly recently, but was committed to my new healthy lifestyle. He seemed to take that pretty well.

About a month into our relationship, we were discussing relationships, and how important it is to feel attracted to your partner. During that discussion he brought up my weight. He told me that it would be a good idea if I stay within ten pounds of my goal weight. That way he’d stay attracted to me, and we wouldn’t have to break up.

In retrospect, as soon as that came out of his mouth I should have told him to fuck right off, and never spoken to him again.

But did I?

No. I did not.

You see, at that time I was relatively freshly at goal. Inside, I had a fear that for some reason I might go back to where I had been, that I would screw this whole thing up. Did I? No, three years later I’m still five pounds below what I was in my ‘After’ photo. But at that time, the fear was very real. He was saying exactly what I was thinking; that I would get fat again, and he would leave. After all, I hadn’t loved myself at 220, so in a weird way, I thought I wouldn’t have blamed him for not loving me either.

So I agreed with him.

Fast forward to a year later. For some time I had been noticing him acting weirdly around me whenever I ate something not ‘on plan’. I didn’t do it a lot, but part of living a healthy normal life is sometimes eating or drinking things that aren’t awesome for you.  My weight was virtually the same as it had been since we met. We were on a road trip, and stopped at a Starbucks, so I thought I’d perform a test to see if I was imagining things. I went in with him, and ordered a small mocha chocolatey chip frappachino extravaganza.

He didn’t speak to me for twenty minutes. Even when spoken to.

After poking at him for miles, he finally broke down and admitted that he couldn’t handle me eating non-healthy things, and that he “felt a need to control everything that I ate”.  That I wasn’t fat, but he knew I had been, and was always on edge that I was going to snap and become the size of a beluga, and he’d have to break up with me, and he really didn’t want to have to break up with me.  He apologized and said he’d try to stop. But the damage was done.

Did I leave? No again. Facepalm.

I thought it would lower his stress if I just didn’t eat bad things around him, and he’d see over time I was doing ok.  So I started hiding food and eating when he wasn’t around. Slowly this behavior grew until I actually couldn’t eat anything at all when he was around, so I made sure I wasn’t home for dinner when he was. Shortly after that, I couldn’t eat anything around anyone, even my friends, because I was afraid they would think I was a failure for some reason.

And then I could barely eat alone.

I ended that relationship for various reasons shortly thereafter. One of his parting comments to me was a sincerely meant thank you, for making him see that he could be attracted to women “with more to them.”

I was five pounds below my goal picture then too.

Would this happen to me now? Absolutely not. But I learned a lot from that experience. I will never again have a relationship with a non-supportive partner who loves me in SPITE of the fact that I lost a lot of weight. I will only be with someone who sees and loves my personality and my strengths, and who loves me for more than just my appearance.  I can only imagine what he would have done if I’d gotten cancer. I dodged a bullet there, I’ll tell ya.

And will I ever be overweight again?

Well, I can definitely say with confidence that I won’t be carrying 180 pounds of douchebag with me ever again.

That’s a great start.