Transitions - The beginning

About a year ago I stepped on the scale in my Doctor's office and watched with tears in my eyes as the numbers barely skirted 300 lbs.   While I didn't actually hit that number I was close enough for the numbers to have been rounded up.  I had been complaining for some time about something being wrong, the amount of medication I was on, the mixture, something had turned my appetite to the permanently on position.  My doctor looked at me and gave me the typical answer of "Eat less, move more."  That is when I decided I wasn't going to get help from that quarter and took things into my own hands.
I assessed the meds I was on and 75% of them claimed a possible side effect of weight gain.  I figured the only way I could get anyone to listen to me is if I took drastic measures.  So without permission or knowledge from my doctor, I stopped taking ALL my medications.  Now as an asthmatic with tendencies towards depression and anxiety that was not the best move.  After about a month of not taking any of my medications, my appetite balanced out and I could actually get to the point where I felt full again, and even started to lose some of the weight. I changed doctors and went in for a physical.  Told the new doctor what I had done, and after she picked her jaw up off the floor we began an assessment of my medications and what could have contributed to a 70 lb. gain in less than 8 months.  Slowly we re-introduced the medications that I truly needed and have monitored my health to ensure that I do not go back to where I was.  We talked about diets and I was reminded of something that I was told several years ago when I was living in Panama.   The reason why diets fail is because once you get to your goal weight, you quit the diet.  The trick to successfully losing weight and keeping it off is to make permanent changes that you can live with.
The truth of the matter is, while I have not always been overweight... I have always BELIEVED I was overweight.  I looked at magazines and models and compared myself to them and always found myself falling short.  I wore baggy clothes that made me look several sizes larger than I actually was.  Slowly my body turned into what my mind believed my body image to be.  The truth is, I didn't gain the weight overnight. Like every other person who struggles with their weight, I have gained it in incremental jumps, then found it hard to get the weight back off.
I am learning as I get older, that our society has changed its definition of what the human body shape should be that not even the fashion models can meet the criteria. In the 1950's and 1960's Marilyn Monroe defined the ideal body shape and measurements of 36-24-36.  She was curvy, and a size 14.  Jump forward to 2012, Kate Upton is being trashed for having the same measurements.  Today a model that is over a size 6 is classified as "Plus size" The body image goals that the fashion and entertainment industry have created for us today are impossible for real people to maintain.  The average woman today is somewhere between a size 12 and 16, there is a huge disconnect between reality and the fiction of the fashion world.  Designers who try to design for the real woman are criticized for encouraging obesity. Yet their definition of obese does not match the medical definition.  As I began to look over those facts, I realized that I was letting a group of people with a fictional view of the world determine my body image. 
To date I have lost 20 lbs. and am slowly gaining my health and life back. I have done this by documenting and making myself aware of where my weight gain pattern is, and have realized that if I am truly going to lose the weight, then I have to look back on the road map that got me here in the first place.