On the outside, I looked like a typical obese woman — someone who people assumed just couldn’t control herself. Inside, I was a woman struggling with an incurable disorder and infertility. And while it was true I was overeating, nobody knew about my out-of-whack endocrine system and how it was creating chaos in my body.
As told to Malkie Schulman
Icouldn’t lose weight. After my first son was born,
I was childless for years. I was having strange symptoms. And then the doctor gave it a name: PCOS.
On the outside, I looked like a typical obese woman — someone who people assumed just couldn’t control herself. Whenever I ventured out to run errands with my toddler, I could feel judgmental eyes darting in my direction. Inside, I was a woman struggling with an incurable disorder and infertility. And while it was true I was overeating, nobody knew about my out-of-whack endocrine system and how it was creating chaos in my body.
I grew up with a health-conscious mom who was a registered nurse, and a dangerously overweight dad. As a child and into my early teens, I was quite hefty; at one point, I weighed 145 pounds at five feet tall. I was one of the heaviest children in my class and I remember feeling freakish about it. I didn’t have many friends, and although my mother tried to teach me healthy eating habits and even brought me to nutritionists, nothing worked until she hit upon the idea to pay me a dollar for every pound I lost. I made a nice chunk of money that year and, thankfully, by ninth grade my weight was healthy.
I married in my junior year of college and had a baby around a year later, with zero complications. But not long after birth, I became depressed. I had stopped school, so I had nothing to keep me in a healthy routine. And we didn’t live in a Jewish neighborhood at the time, so I had no friends nearby.
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