How I Said Goodbye To My Chubby Inner Child

Pretty much all my adult life I’ve wanted to lose 10 pounds.

Karin Wilson Edmonds

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Me at 16 years old.

I always thought I was fat. Or maybe not fat, but chubby, plump. And I loved to eat. As a kid I was always the child my grandmother liked to feed because I was happy to “eat up” everything on my plate.

Being chubby and loving to eat did not go well with my other passion, loving to dance. I started ballet at age 6 and danced till I was over 40. Throughout my entire dancing career, I struggled with not having a “dancer’s body” (tall and thin) and loving to eat, drink and basically have a good time.

Moving to the US from Jamaica at age 13 didn’t help, where my ideas about having to be skinny seemed to take root. Here’s a self-portrait taken from my diary, written at age 14, a year after we moved.

Taken from my diary, 14 years old.

To make things worse, I was also well endowed, which didn’t typically jive with being a serious professional dancer. I remember being thrilled to see a large breasted woman on stage in a Broadway musical once and thinking wow, that could be me! Having big boobs didn’t have to prevent me from dancing on stage.

It also didn’t help that most of my girlfriends were pretty skinny and flat chested.

Over the years, I dieted and dieted. I tried the grapefruit diet, the Atkins diet, the only-hard-boiled-eggs diet and many others. I lost a few pounds here and there, but it never seemed to be enough.

The reality was I wasn’t fat. I was just not skinny.

It has taken me the better part of 20 years to finally come to terms with my body and to accept and be happy with my assets, the large (boobs, butt, thighs) and small (stature — I’m 5’3”).

I eventually lost 20 pounds in my early 50s, which took me 2 years- I went from 145 to 125 pounds.

I was finally motivated enough to really lose weight due to my escalating blood pressure and my not wanting to go on meds. (Losing weight and changing my diet has enabled me to stay off blood pressure medication…

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