Weight! I've Been There Blog

In my last blog, I spoke about five incidents in my past that "haunted" me. In this blog, I’m going to share my experience of "unraveling" a haunting incident* from high school and how it taught me about one of my major patterns and helped me understand how I could have gained so much weight.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was a freshman at an all-girls, Catholic High School in Maryland. One of the only things I liked about high school was our soccer team. I was a great soccer player when I was a teenager and my high school team was one of the best in the DC Metro area. I...

A few years ago, when I was fat, I thought the only real issue in my life was that I couldn’t lose weight. And at the time, I used every excuse for why I was overweight: I had a bad metabolism, it ran in my family, I had hormone problems, etc. The truth was, I had a deeper issue at play: I wasn’t happy in my life or my marriage and I was numbing myself with food and alcohol. But I didn’t want anyone to know that! So, I pretended I...

Every New Year’s Eve, for most of my life, I had made the same New Year’s Resolution: to go on a diet and lose weight. And every year, I woke up on January 1st (usually hung over) but very enthusiastic and excited about my plan. The problem was I never made it past the third week of January before I cheated on my diet and gave up.

Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to...

The other day I was a guest speaker at a Handel Group® “Dream Body” event in Manhattan with Laurie Gerber, discussing my 130 pound weight loss story. (I reached my goal weight in May 2008.) A woman attending the event asked me the predictable question, had I put any of the weight back...

Whenever people hear about my story, I get asked the same question. “What made you change your life? What happened?” I don’t even have to think about it. I remember the exact moment. It was the best and worst moment of my life.

It was the spring of 2005 and I was a married screenwriter / filmmaker living in Los Angeles. I had written a movie that was about to be released on 2000...