The Adventure Continues

Chapter 2: Health Nut or Hedonist?

My senior year, I moved in with my boyfriend (who is now my wonderful husband and father of our three lovely children).

We had already bonded over numerous omelets and plates of enchiladas. Now that we lived together, we really went crazy. Our credit cards allowed us to frequent a nearby Mexican place, that made huge plates of unbelievable food just loaded with cheese and rich sauces. They also made an amazing mango margarita. Then there was the Thai place next door that had the most wonderful curries, just dripping with coconut milk. We ate dinner out at least 4-5 times a week and usually had a big pancake breakfast at a nearby diner Saturday or Sunday.

We packed on the pounds as fast as we packed on the debt. At some point, we were given a scale. I was a little surprised to see that I was 165 in the morning (when I was dehydrated) and more like 170 during the day. Wow. My husband didn't share his weight with me, but I was aware that it was too high. In fact, he was approaching 300 pounds. He also had sleep apnea and snored quite loudly, which I found irritating. However, he never talked about his weight or his body at all, and generally avoided doctors. We were both reasonably healthy, we thought, and since we didn't own a car, walked a fair amount.

My husband was very supportive of my vegetarianism, though he claimed that he "couldn't be that strong," and continued to eat meat at restaurants. However, we did keep a vegetarian house and ate a fair amount of fruit and salad, along with boxed rice dishes, canned beans and other packaged foods at home.

He graduated a year before me and had a teaching job in an inner city high school. The next year, I did the same thing. I struggled quite a bit and was under a huge amount of stress. Life events led me to question our relationship and it was rocky for a year or so. We broke up, then reunited.

All of this life stress, our mounting debt, our climbing weights... Shouldn't we have been paying attention? But we just continued soothing ourselves with lots of food.