Introduction

It had finally arrived, that day every respectable overweight mom dreads.  Bryce, my then 8 year old son arrived home from school with an announcement.

Bryce: “Mommy, my friend Daniel says you have a big bum.”

I knew it was only a matter of time before my son’s friends starting teasing him about his chubby mother.  Of course, I had great plans to lose the weight before that day came.  I spent the next ten minutes explaining to my son that it was wrong of Daniel to say hurtful things. 

Mommy:  “The next time Daniel says something like that about your mother, you tell him it hurts your feelings, and it’s not nice.”

Yet there it was; the proverbial pink elephant in the room that no one is suppose to notice.  Apparently it was me.

I’ve fought with excess weight most of my grownup life.  There followed all the fad diets; the Watermelon Diet that turns your stool pink, the Cabbage Diet that creates a disconcerting sulfur fog at every bowel movement, doctor prescribed pills that created miniature oil spills floating in the tank, the cleansing diet that’s end result gave you a reprocessed bird’s eye view of what you’d eaten that day, only to name a few.  It occurred to me, why are we so concerned about what comes out of our bodies, and not what goes into them?

Dorian: “Mommy, don’t break the toilet.”

Mommy: “Why would I break the toilet?”

Dorian: “You’re so big!”

            Dorian, my very observant 7 year old son cautions me.  I would have laughed, had I not been mortified.  “Dorian, what do you want to be when you grow up?”  How many times have we asked our children this?  “I want to be a rocket scientist, a brain surgeon or President,” is the anticipated response.  A more accurate response is “I’d like to be a train conductor for Thomas the Tank Engine, mommy!”  So, what does mommy want to be when she grows up?  She’d like to be 155 lbs lighter!  Like that blue #1 train travelling down the rails, so began my journey.