I’ve written before about “growing up fat� and establishing particular eating habits, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you talk about childhood obesity.

One of the things that bothered me the most about being heavy when I was a kid was that my mom and my grandmother were constantly looking for “programs� to help me lose weight. They bought special food, ordered away for things off of TV, enrolled me in programs, and even sent me to a clinic 200 miles away from home when I was in middle school.

None of these things worked. In fact, I steadily gained weight from birth until I was 26 years old and finally topped off at a bit over 400 pounds.

I’m sure their intentions were good, but at the time I couldn’t see it that way.

I remember my mom, my sister, and I drove to California to go to Disneyland and one day in the car during vacation I hurled up my special diet food in the backseat.

I was probably 8 at the time, and I was taking part in a program where they weighed you and took profile pictures to show you how fat you were and how far your stomach protruded. Then they would weigh you regularly and take more pictures and compare them.

After the vomiting, which may or may not have been related to the food, I pretty much began protesting and saying that I wasn’t going to eat that food anymore or do that diet because it made me sick.

The hospital I was sent to right after I turned 14 was for adults only, and they had to get special permission to allow me in the program. There was a tight schedule and the program was located in a small section of a hospital that we weren’t allowed to leave, tagged with ID bracelets and monitored closely.

The program involved counseling, daily exercise, monitored meals, and many rules I found ridiculous. I wasn’t even allowed to bring books with me! I did sneak a novel in with me, but someone ratted me out and it was taken away.

So much happened there in such a short time, and it was mostly way over my head. The women that were in there with me were all much older, much more experienced, and mostly mentally unstable (My roommate had slit both her wrists and ankles).

I slacked off on the exercise but couldn’t really avoid eating less because it was tightly controlled.

While I was there my mother was in a near fatal accident in the mountains and taken by helicopter to a hospital after my step-father resuscitated her with CPR.

The program advisors didn’t want me to leave, and neither did my step-dad, who was given the authority to make decisions since my mom was in and out of consciousness. Instead, I was taken to visit my mom, with pre-packed special food, and then brought back to the hospital. Finally, it was only because the insurance refused to pay for my “hospitalization� that I was allowed to go home.

They weighed me again when I left and told me my weight. Apparently I had lost 6 pounds, but I was horrified because I hadn’t known what I weighed when I came in! I had thought I weighed much less, so the whole thing seemed ridiculous to me.

Although my particular experience was probably more horrifying than anyone had intended for it to be, the reality is that you can’t really force someone to take control of their health and fitness, they have to want it.

In fact, the harder they pushed, the more I ate as a rebellion and out of depression.

The worst part was that if I did decide on my own that I was going to try to eat less, get a little exercise, or be healthy people would notice.

They would offer me something, and if I said, “No, thanks� they would respond with, “Oh, are you on a diet?� I would try to avoid the topic or just say “not really� but inevitably people would notice. At that point they suddenly thought they were the Ration King of my food intake, telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat or making comments about what I’d eaten, or asking me what I’d eaten.

It would discourage or annoy me, and I would give up.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, on my own, that I decided to be healthy and didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t live with anyone at the time, so there was no one to notice if I was eating less than usual or not. By the time people did notice I was already set well into my healthy eating patterns, and I could honestly say, “No, I’m not on a diet. I’m just trying to be healthy.� The fact that I was losing weight was completely secondary to me at the time.

Sometimes my husband, with the best intentions, will say something about what I ate or what I’m going to eat. And although I know deep down that anything he says that might come off as judgmental is simply because English is not his first language, I still find that old reaction flaring up. It’s the one that goes, “Hey, I can eat whatever I want.� Only now I feel even more indignant, and I add on, “Hey, I’ve lost 200 pounds. I think I have a grasp on what I should and shouldn’t eat.�

Eating disorders are a tricky thing. It’s hard to tell if something you do or say will help people and motivate them, or lower their self esteem and send them back to the comfort of food, who is waiting for them with a smirk and a big bag of Doritos.