What a great thread. I love all the directions it has taken. I know that my body image is completely distorted and has been since childhood. There's nothing like having to wear a "chubby" size (thank goodness they don't call it that any more) or have to wear home-made clothes to drum it into you that you're different. The sad thing is that I was only a little overweight at that point. Last year my mother had to go into a nursing home, and I was in tears when I was going through our family photographs because I realized that I looked pretty good at times when I thought (partly because my parents told me in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways) that I was too fat.

My weight gain was gradual but inexorable, so I had no sense of how much fatter I was at 280 than I had been at 180. And a few years ago when I lost 50 lb, I had no sense that I was smaller at 235 than at 285.

A couple of weeks ago my 17-year-old gave me a hug and told me that she was proud of me, but warned me not to disappear. I said that I wished I'd done it earlier because even when she was little I'd been embarassed to go to her school, because I was afraid that the other kids would tease her because I was fat. She was completely shocked at the idea. She gives me lots of reasons to be proud, but the most important is that she's completely happy with her body--5'3", 115 lb--and she has always had a remarkably healthy attitude toward food.

One of the side benefits of eating low carb is that it makes me feel so good that I'm much less self-conscious about how I look (of course, it's still a shock to look in the mirror). I walk into the gym feeling that I have every reason to be there--well, I still feel like a beached whale when I'm doing abdominal exercises. I hope that I can hold onto this. The way I feel now, if I walked into a clothing store and someone told me they had nothing my size, I'd ask to speak to her manager and explain that they just lost my business.

Susan