Empowered Woman on a Mission. Join me.

    I am excited, shocked, and humbled by the amount of fans my Facebook page has received in the past few days. In light of my New Figure Forward project picking up speed I figured I should take some time to explain who I am, where New Figure Forward came from, and what my mission is as a blogger and as a woman.  

    My name is Alyson, I am 31 years old, and I live in Las Vegas, Nevada.  My passion for figure equality comes from my own life long struggles with weight. I do not remember a time when I was not the biggest kid in my class. I was always the tallest and then I became the roundest. I quickly developed a distain for my own reflection. Up until a year ago I have always hated my body and I punished it in many ways.

     In elementary school, I was bullied, teased, and beat up. Middle school was the same. I was fat and miserable. I did not feel pretty. I started diet pills in 7th grade. I started binging and purging in 8th grade. By high school I was abusing myself in the worst ways.  I wrote about my high school experience here; My diary. 

    After high school my weight went up and down, over and over. By the time I was 25 I was 300 pounds! I lived with it. I was fashionable. I had friends. I had a job I loved. I was making 300 pounds work for me, until a moment in my bathroom changed my life forever. 

       **WARNING** I'm about to get seriously honest.  

     Everything changed for me the day I could not reach around myself. I sat on the toilet unable to reach around. I did what I had to do and then burst into tears. I actually cried myself to sleep on the bathroom floor that night.  I had lost the empowered female I had told myself I was. I was strong enough to be big. I was strong enough to not let the stares, comments, and almost needing to purchase an extra airplane seat make me feel bad about myself. I put on my happy face everyday. Deep down I knew I was lying to myself. I was not happy. I was miserable. I realized I was depressed and stuck - but then I had the realization that I didn't have to settle for this being my life. 

     October of 2007 I signed up for Weight Watchers and proceeded to lose 125 pounds over the next year and a half.  My entire life changed. Forever. I promised myself I would NEVER go back to 300 pounds and I have kept my weight off for 6 years now. The biggest challenges have come from being in a new body. One that did not end up like a super model. I had to learn who the new face in the mirror was. I did not know her, I had never seen her before. My problems were not solved at the end of my weight lose journey. No one told me I would actually have a whole new set of problems fall in my lap. 

     I still struggle with weight issues. I am still a food addict. I still see a fat girl in the mirror. However, I am also a runner and I enjoy cooking and eating healthy. I work everyday to repair the mental damage that simply became apart of my everyday thought process. I am not perfect. No one is. I have stretch marks. Everyone does. My thighs touch. So do the thighs of most people.  I created New Figure Forward as a place to be deeply honest about my body and my struggles at all of my weights.  I created my blog to be a place where women (and men) could come together and empower each other with honesty.  
     
     A passage from a pervious blog I wrote :" I will never be a super model and neither will anyone else. There is no such person. I like this reality; there is a lot less pressure realizing no one has a blemish free body. I am done playing dumb to a culture that assumes I don't know models and actresses are being Photoshopped.  I will not allow these fantasy images to influence the acceptance of my body.  I am human, I am normal, and my body is healthy and strong.  I choose to love myself, to value myself, and to cherish my body.  I will now be removing the "sucker" sticker off my forehead. No one can make me feel bad about myself anymore."

     And with that I took control over the images I see everyday. I do not read magazines any more. "Cosmo" went into the trash and does every month. I follow plus size models and other curvy empowered women on Facebook and Instagram. I love my body so much more when I see other bodies that look just like me. I look at these women and I think they are beautiful. I am beautiful. You are beautiful. I am ending my own self abuse and I hope to inspire others to do the same. Learning to love myself is not easy and everyday I have to keep working on it. I hope to encourage someone to do the same, to shut off the hateful inner monologue and embrace their body, however it maybe shaped!!

     

My weight loss gave me a new figure 

and I am pushing forward!!! 

Welcome to New Figure Forward!! 

The Diary on Video

Photoshopped lies made me hate my body

I kept one hell of a secret in high school. I kept it so well not even my best friends knew. I never talked about it until a few years ago. I've shocked people over it. I've shocked myself over it. I always knew I had it but I never wanted to admit how bad it was.  I had an eating disorder, I hated myself, and put my health at risk for the approval of my peers.  I kept a diary during several attempts to lose 40 pounds or more.  It's time to be brutally honest about how much I hated myself.

February 13, 2000,

     Well this is it...hopefully....the start of the rest of my life. Today I got on the scale and weighed in at 190! Oh my god! I felt so bad.  So I ended the day right, with a an all vegetable meal...

 ...So let's see how long I'm going to last (and yes, I'm trying to stop putting myself down.) 

February 16, 2000,

     I totally screwed up on Valentines Day and yesterday! My punishment today is I'm not eating anything until 5p.m. tonight....

...I'm so hungry. I have diet pills on me that I'm going to take after this class...

...Well I'm very proud of myself. I survived lunch and didn't even take my pills. Can you believe food means so much to me?

Filled with hateful words. I was my worst enemy. 

Entry after entry detailed my longing for food, how hungry I was, and how I had to make it until 5p.m. until I would eat. I always had diet pills with me and many days they would be all I would have. 
No wonder I was such an angry teenager - I was starving! My grades and classes suffered because I wasn't able to focus on anything expect my empty stomach. 

My goal was to weigh 140 pounds. That was the magic number that would make me beautiful, popular, and would bring the boys to their knees. ...At least at that weight someone will find me attractive ...It's 13 years later and I have NEVER made it to 140 pounds! My doctor told me that between 170 and 180 are healthy weights for my body type. I'm 5'9, I'm not meant to weigh 140 pounds.

It wasn't long before not eating until 5 p.m. and diet pills also included taking a run before school. In my diary I used words like "fat ass" to encourage myself out of bed.  I lived off my diet pills and hateful inner monologue.  By March I had included a diet pill to take in my sleep,...I'm excited to see myself in three months.Starting tomorrow I'm going to take a new diet pill to help... This was a great combination. I'm starving and NOW I'm not sleeping. (I can feel my husband's heart tighten as he thinks of me both hungry and tired.) 

Hard on myself is an understatement. 

Rereading my diary makes me cry. I was hurting, I was starving, I was seeking someones approval, and I was slipping under the radar. The entires continue for a year and by the following February I was 220 pounds. How does a starving girl GAIN weight?! It's because of what I didn't write down. The binge eating. I refer to it in my diary as "a bad day." I would binge and purge. When I grew too weak to mentally fight off the need for food, I would stuff myself until I was sick. I remember telling myself I couldn't even torture myself thin. I couldn't starve the fat off or purge it off either. 

The worst binge memory I have includes an entire grocery bag full of candy. We sold candy in school to fundraise. I didn't want to sell it - handing me a bag of candy was like handing a drug user crack. The candy  didn't even make it a day. I was home only minutes before the carnage of candy wrappers covered my bedroom floor. This day was not entered into my diary. Many of these kinds of days didn't get written about. Acknowledgment would make them real. Instead I handed over my  money to cover the cost; that way,  no one knew I ate it all and life continued. 

Page from my diary. There are many pictures like this. 

As a senior, I wanted prom to be the highlight of my high school career. I wanted to be thin and amazing with my dream date on my arm.  Instead, it became my darkest time. My diary entries turn into daily check-ins of measurements, weight, food and exercise log. While on the outside I was an active senior; AP/Honors student, drama club president and editor on the paper, on the inside I was destroying myself. The closer prom got the worse my destruction became. I would go home after school, kill myself with an intense hour of exercise, then shower and return to school to work on the paper.  I timed everything around my school schedule and my mom's work hours. No one ever knew. I had reached my goal by the time prom rolled around. I was even lucky enough to have my crush as my date. I felt amazing. Then it was the next day. 

I road this roller coaster of weight lost and gained for almost 10 years. When I tipped the scale at 300 pounds, I knew I was fighting for my life now. I needed help. I wasn't winning the war with myself. I tried crazy diet after crazy diet. When I saw the commercial for Weight Watchers I figured, why not give that a try? Something has to work. Weight Watchers was what I needed. I needed to learn how to eat. My eating philosophy prior was eat salads to be thin and eat the entire package of cookies so there would be no evidence and purge. This was getting me nowhere. Weight Watchers taught me how to balance healthy with junk food. Healthy wasn't just rabbit food, in fact I lost my first 100 pounds without eating a single salad because I hated them! 

I now weigh 175 pounds. That's not much smaller than my smallest in high school. I worked hard to get to where I am physically though my greatest achievement has been breaking the mental hold my weight had on me.  I'm ending the war within myself. It's not a fight to be at my current weight. I do have to take care of myself, eat healthy (which does include salads), indulge occasionally, and exercise 4-5 times a week. I'm no longer on a "diet"  - I eat to live a long and happy life which sometimes includes cake! 

I still hear the voice of my disorder in the back of my head. 95% of time I am able to shut it up and move on with my healthy habit day. Then there is that 5% where I succumb to the voice and binge eat. After the blanket of guilt lifts off me, I forgive myself and just move past it. It is not easy, sometimes I get so unbelievably pissed at myself, however I made a promise to myself that I would love myself. Forgiveness is a part of love. 

I'm not perfect. I never achieved super model statues. My thighs still touch and I'm soft around the middle. I still have two digits in my size tag and the double chin has been known to make an appearance in pictures. I cannot get back those years of self-hate and torture. All I can do now is give myself the gift of love and forgiveness.  For today and many tomorrows I vow to embrace my body, just the way it is, and love it!