My Story
My name is Catherine and I am a 38-year-old mother of three. I have spent much of my adult life struggling with two compulsions: emotional eating and compulsive hoarding. Nine years ago I had reached rock bottom — I was trapped in a body that weighed 357 pounds and my home was a chaotic mess of clutter and garbage. I felt nearly hopeless.
If you have made it this far, chances are you and I have a lot in common. Before I turned my life around, some of the experiences and feelings I had may sound familiar to you:
- I lived with the pain of a body weighed down with morbid obesity — not just 20 or 30 extra pounds, but nearly 200 extra pounds at my heaviest. This weight seemed like a permanent burden I would have to carry with me everywhere for the rest of my life.
- And the clutter… In my case, for many, many years I truly would have had to use the word squalor to describe how I lived. Have you ever lived in fear of a knock on the door because you simply cannot bear the shame of having someone see the mess you’re living in? This was my reality for years. As a mom, I lived with constant guilt about the environment in which my children were growing up, and yet I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of despair to make it better. It seemed like the mess was just insurmountable and I felt absolutely unworthy.
- And the reclusive lifestyle I led: I frequently turned down invitations and social opportunities because I was worried that the chairs wouldn’t fit my body or that there would be too many stairs to climb or that it would be too far to walk to the destination. Years ago, I remember walking out of a CPR class in tears of humiliation because I could not fit my body into any of the classroom desks. At times, I avoided school and sports activities with my kids because I was afraid that my children would be teased by their friends about their “fat mom.”
- At my heaviest, my greatest fear was that I would get injured or somehow lose my mobility even further, and at one point this actually happened. When I broke my ankle at 330 pounds, I felt so bad for the paramedics as they had to try to heave me onto the stretcher. They almost had to get backup help — it was mortifying. But at least the accident happened outside the house and the paramedics didn’t have to see my mess! The surgeon who fixed my ankle treated me with disgust and complained that my obesity would ruin the work he did on my injury. But I’m sure you know that all the disgust and shame in the world will not help us get thinner. I kept eating and my home got more and more cluttered.
This is me at my largest in 2000.
When I hit rock bottom, I weighed more than 355 pounds. You can see from the look on my face in the picture above (taken on vacation when I should have been happy!) that I was absolutely miserable. Every flat surface in my home was piled with stuff — trash, items I needed but could never find, and even piles of fast food packaging. I had come to believe that I was an utter failure as a human being, eating to stuff down my misery and then hiding away in the filth I had created. I had almost started to wish that I could just die.
February 2009.
But a tiny spark in me wanted to live and to have a better life — and I know that this tiny spark exists in you, too, or you would not be here reading this right now. That miraculous little spark of hope is what saved me. My life now would be unrecognizable to that depressed, defeated woman I used to be. Since 2000 I have lost and kept off more than 110 pounds — without surgery. And I am still shedding my excess body weight as my body gets steadily leaner and healthier. While I still have a lot of fat to lose — after all, I was over 200 pounds overweight at my heaviest — I am energetic, active and healthy. I can buy clothes, go anywhere I like without worrying about stairs or seating, travel in airplanes and just live the life of a normal person. I am no longer living my life as a hostage to compulsive binge eating.
The changes in my body are tremendous, but the changes in my home are even more dramatic and this gives me joy every single day. I gradually conquered the mess and clutter in my home and learned the skills to keep my home tidy, clean and welcoming every day. Today my home is a haven of peace for me and for my family. I still sometimes feel that jolt of fear when somebody knocks on the door — but then a wave of relief washes over me when I realize that my home shines with love and serenity and I can open my doors to anyone at any time.
I know that this transformation must sound too good to be true. I can hardly believe it myself, that I have found a way to permanently lose weight and keep it off and to triumph over the clutter and hoarding that was part of my life from my earliest childhood memories.
How did this transformation come about? I did not change overnight — far from it. Step by step, I made gradual little lifestyle changes I call “tweaks.” Every month or so, I chose a simple new habit (the “tweak”) to make a part of my lifestyle. I systematically introduced these tweaks into my life one by one and the positive benefits started to amount to substantial serious improvements in my health, weight, and home. It’s amazing how it adds up — within six months I felt like a new person.
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More Pictures:
Wedding - September 2005.
Florence, Italy - December 2007