Definition for Ladies Spring 2014 Issue 001 April 2014 | Page 46

First, I was obese.
This realization came when we brought home a Nintendo Wii Fit. That fateful evening, opening and setting up our new toy, I stepped on the board and was shocked to see my weight. Crap.
Really? Holy cow. There was no denying that I had really let myself get heavy again.
To really rub it in, that sweet little Wii voice tells me, “That’s obese”. Then, the little Mii character transformed in front of my eyes from a stick figure to a chubby little thing; as the digital waist
expanded, the shirt shrank to really exaggerate the point.
But it wasn’t just the Wii telling me I was overweight. I was uncomfortable in my skin. My clothes
were getting tighter and tighter, and I was having a hard time finding clothes in stores that fit me. I
was out of breath from a single flight of stairs. I was beyond the point of just being chubby.
Second, I had terrible eating habits.
In those days, I was a vegetarian, but a more accurate description would’ve
been a junkfoodetarian. I was a vegetarian who never ate vegetables! I was
a dairyoholic. Never one to shy away from junk food, fast food, or processed food, my diet pretty much consisted of three food groups: highly
processed grains, high cholesterol dairy products, and sugary sweets. Staple
foods often included greasy cheese pizzas, super sweet chocolate mochas
with whipped cream, processed sugary breakfast cereals, macaroni and
cheese, Pop Tarts, bagels with cream cheese, veggie cheeseburgers, onion
rings, and to wash it all down, milk or soda pop.
Unfortunately, from time to time, I was willing to put myself through the
suffering of ‘fad diets’ or ‘crash diets’ or other unhealthy eating habits, in
order to shed the extra pounds. You name it, I tried it. In my efforts to lose
weight, I would sometimes follow what I know now to be a very dangerous,
low-calorie, low-carb, very low-nutritient diet. It would sometimes help me
drop a few pounds before reaching a plateau. But, as with all fad diets or
temporary restrictions, as soon as my goal was reached, I returned to my old
habits. The weight would creep back up again, and then some.
NOW: Thriving Vegan, 2014. Photo by Nathan Smith.
BEFORE: “Junk Food Vegetarian” since 1996; photos taken 2009-2011.

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