I’ve struggled with my weight for much of my adult life. I was very active in as a kid and through my teen years, and with only a few exceptions of the low-fat lifestyle trends of the 90s, I didn’t think all that much about what I ate. I started pretty steadily putting on weight in college, but for much of my early 20s remained only about a size or two bigger than I was when I graduated. I wouldn’t call myself a yo-yo dieter, but an slowly-moving, unmotivated yo-yo is a fairly apt description of my weight after 26 or 27.

Three years into fertility treatments, the scale isn’t too kind to me. It started to tick up when I started Clomid, then exploded during the transition from IUIs to IVF. Much of this was related to the hormones pumping through my body. It is also more literally tied to eating ice cream to dull the feelings of unsuccessful cycles, miscarriages and feeling like I’m completely broken. I can own that. All total I put on about 35 pounds in these three years and, in October when I met with the doctor offering a second opinion, was the heaviest I’ve ever been.

Over the course of that conversation, the new RE suggested that because of my weight, I was probably producing poor quality eggs, resulting in poor quality embryos, leading to lack of implantation. I wasn’t shocked by this assessment, but I was taken aback. This wasn’t a factor on the table with my Peyton Manning doctor. He never once said to me that I should consider putting the spoon down. I’d certainly read a bit online about BMI affecting egg quality, but if I’d asked and my doctor didn’t think it was the reason for three years of ultimately unsuccessful treatments, then it probably wasn’t… right?

In the moment, I left that RE’s office feeling absolutely deflated (like Tom Brady’s footballs… [I’m just going to keep running with these weird football analogies, so roll with it]). It was a deep cut to hear that my weight could be preventing me from achieving success. He’d told me that to take me on as a new patient, he’d want me to first lose 20 pounds. Twenty pounds caused by Clomid and ice cream and Estrace and pizza and watching everyone else become a mother.

Over the last four weeks I’ve used every ounce of brain space that I once reserved for progesterone dosages and ultrasound appointments to retrain myself to eat. Knowing myself well enough to know follow-through isn’t my strongest quality when it comes to a new routine, I joined one of the medically-supervised weight loss clinics that seem to be popping up on every corner. The staff has been supportive and has helped me address the areas of emotional eating that are the biggest triggers and challenges for me. I feel better, and I’m doing really well on their program. I’ve said goodbye to sugar (again), and have actually started to like the taste of Greek yogurt. I belong in a Dannon commercial.

I’m going to tick that 20 pounds off and keep going until we’ve pulled together the financials for another stim round. I can’t be the thing standing in my way of being a mom, so I’m not going to be.