I’ve struggled a lot, lately, and came to the realization (yet again!) that something in my brain has been holding me back from achieving my goals. I ate much more freely during the holiday season than I should have, and I knew exactly what I was doing, but allowed it. I’ve been thinking about this, and still have some figuring out to do.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The current book is about a group of women who, like me, have been morbidly obese, lost a bunch of weight, regained it and have had to battle with it all over again. Although I haven’t necessarily identified with any one story, it stands out to me where I would have been had I not made the decision to start again. Going on seven years later, where would I be, today? Right this moment?

Mind you, in September of 2013, I weighed in at 371 pounds. I am 5 feet 2 inches tall. The recommended normal weight range for my height tops out at 136 pounds, although I don’t necessarily give that range a lot of credence. (My doctor recently mentioned a different, higher number.)

I don’t often play what-if. More than anything else, I am beyond thankful for having made that simple decision to start one more time, and I would like to think that I would have found some way to give myself that huge gift in some other way. Unfortunately, I firmly believe that had I not made the decision back then, the decision would have been made for me. What would it have taken? A heart attack? Full-blown diabetes? Submission to the depression that often accompanies morbid obesity, leaving me without hope? Complete disability?

How far was I, at 371 pounds, from not being able to function at all, becoming completely dependent on others? Had I continued in the same fashion, would have I just ballooned bigger, succumbed to any number of health-related issues, possibly bedridden, unable to enjoy even the simple things like playing with my grandson?

Or would I even be alive today?

My world was ugly, then. I am the first to admit that living my life at 371 pounds was brutal. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I feared for my life, back then, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t die before I could lift myself up and lose enough weight to improve my health. Even just thinking about it, now, raises my anxiety level. While I’ve spent a fair amount of time reminding myself of where I’ve been, I haven’t really imagined what would have happened to me if I hadn’t risked another start.

As I read about one story in particular, it hit home that I could have ended up like one of the women in the book — over 400 pounds, on disability, unable to work, unable to understand what I was doing to my body; or rather, choosing not to understand. Because I have been amazingly good at lying to myself over the years, and that’s how I ended up at my top weight, as well as dozens of other previously top weights over the decades.

Admittedly, part of it was not really understanding my own physiology. When I did make various efforts, I often didn’t dig deeper than whatever diet I was on suggested. I read a lot of self-help stuff over the years, and whether or not the authors hit on what my solution was, my takeaway from those wasn’t necessarily the absorption of the right information. Remember one diet guru and her pile of naked potatoes, spouting off about how you could eat those all day? Or another author, who partially blamed obesity on lacking brown fat in our bodies? Oh, the recipes I followed that were promised to help — and didn’t.

I gave up at a lot of points, just figuring that I was destined to be fat. I wanted to believe that as long as I was healthy, being fat was okay. I lied to myself about what I was really doing to my body. And while I have no problems with those who espouse fat acceptance, I damaged myself by allowing that in my world; lumbering about in pain was not fat acceptance. It was the denial of what I was doing to my body and the real price I was paying.

Make no mistake: being morbidly obese and fearing for your life is not an easy path. Nor is fearing change or committing to trying again. We have so much judgment surrounding obesity; we accuse the obese of a lot of things, so when those of us who are obese want to start again, we flog ourselves with the accusations society makes: we are fat because we’re lazy, addicted to food, sitting around and binge-eating, we’re a burden on health care, we’re disgusting, we infringe on the space of others. I knew, without a doubt, that even if people didn’t say so, their eyes when they fell on me screamed it.

And I have also made those same judgments about the obese when I have been in the throes of fitness; I finally shut up about it when I regained 140 pounds. Who am I to judge what someone else’s journey is?

Giving myself a life to look forward to has not been easy. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Yes, there are times where my brain starts in with a pity party; enjoy this for a little bit, it’s not fair that I shouldn’t be able to enjoy what others do. I’ve earned it, haven’t I? And it’s clear moments like now, where I have to remind myself that there’s no fairness or earning bad behavior involved. I can either choose to work toward my health — or I can choose the path I was once on.

So here I am, swallowing my pride and making sure I make the right choices; not the emotional ones. Not the easy ones — although now, contemplating where I might have been, my life is much easier than it was seven years ago. Even as much as I have to talk to myself to get out and get my exercise for the day, or push myself to make the right food choices at the right time, the burdens I invoked on myself back then made life extremely difficult; not just in function and movement, but in the haze of depression. I didn’t want to think about what might happen; I lived in the moment, and if my stomach was full and I wasn’t in pain at that very moment, I told myself that I was okay. But I spent just as much time, if not more, hearing my own heartbeat pound in my ears while laying awake in the dark hours of the night, knowing I had to change if I wanted to survive, but scared of trying to figure out how I could move forward.

Every attempt before had been a failure. I finally accepted that even if I tried again and failed, it surpassed doing nothing at all, because that was a failure of a different type. In retrospect, while the journey to health has been long and hard, staying morbidly obese was much longer and harder. Figuring all this out has not been easy, especially since I had to accept that no one was going to do the science of learning what my body needs for me, but robbing myself of life and knowing it had dire effects on my body and mind. Freeing myself of those burdens has been the best thing I could ever do for myself.

I told someone just this morning that small things add up to big things. That’s as true today as it was the first time I made the small choice to not eat something that I knew wasn’t on my eating program. Or the next. Or the literally millions of times I’ve since made small choices about what to eat, when to move, how to face the next challenge. Those decisions are there as long as we draw breath.

Back then, I had to swallow my pride in order to move on and do what needed to be done, no matter how difficult it might be. And now — in fact, any time my head isn’t fully in the right place to do battle — I have to swallow it all over again and do what needs to be done.

I plan to finish what I start, now, but if I hadn’t started in the first place, the finish line would be impossible.