My history

Where to start........ uhmm the beginning, right??

I have been overweight since i was about 2 yrs old. I look back at old pics of me and i see a cute chubby little girl with puffy cheeks, poutty mouth and a bubble butt. Of course back then in Colombia, being a chubby baby meant that you were healthy and strong, and boy was i "healthy." I come from a poor part of town, and leaving food on your plate was just plain cruel when there were other people in our neighboorhood that sometimes went a couple of days without eating. And so i was thaught early on that we do not waste food, under no circumstance. That added to the fact that a common meal was a combo of rice, meat, beans and plantains, was the perfect recipe for unhealthy eating from the get-go.

I once came across a set of pics when i was about 8 or 9 yrs old where i looked rather thin. I said to mom once "look!! i was skinny," she answered by saying "yup that was when you got a really bad flu and you were sick for about 3 weeks, you lost a lot of weight." How funny is that?? i had to get awfully sick to loose weight.

So in 1986 we made our voyage across the sky to New York City. My parents really didn't like the big apple so we moved to good old Rhode Island after about a month. Despite the fact that i was well over 2000 miles away from Colombia, our family kept the same customs as if we were back in Killa (Barranquilla - city where i was born). So we were still eating our normal staples of starch, meat and fat!!!!

As soon as we came to the US we were introduced to the wonderful American cusine of, you guessed it, FAST FOOD. I took to fast food like a duck in water!!!! I mean what kid doesn't like happy meals, hot dogs, PIZZA, tacos... etc, etc. And i fed into my unhealthy eating yet in another way.

Bad habits are hard to brake when you and your family do not realize you are not eating healthy. My father was overweight, my brother was overweight, my sis was a bit overweight, and my mom was the only one who wasn't. Please do not get me wrong, i am not blaming my mother for her awful cooking... just the opposite!!! She cooked so good, so hearty that it was just extremely hard to say no to those red beans and rice. My mother makes the best soups you will ever taste in your life. This is the way she learned how to cook way back in the day when there weren't many ingredients to choose from. When veggies were not available in the corner market, and the cheapest thing to make was rice and beans.

So you get my point, i started over eating, unhealthy eating, and over indulging when i probably hadn't learned how to walk yet. You know the saying, old habits are hard to brake.