We spent the Memorial Day weekend in Manitou Springs with the kids. It was a great weekend - great weather, the kids had a blast, and D and I got to spend time alone today hiking after we dropped the kids off with their dad.
And, as always, I was haunted by the specter of food and my body. As D and I walked though Colorado's beautiful summer woods, I obsessed about how fat I looked and how much I wished I had my old body back.
Am I tired of this? Yes. Am I addressing it? Yes. Is it enough to change my body or my mind? No. And hopefully that just means not yet.
I have been binge free for nearly three weeks. I cannot get too excited about this for two reasons. First, I have not been eating well during that time. Although I have managed to avoid complete food meltdowns, I have eaten too much nearly every day since my last binge. And, second, because I am afraid to think it is a trend and then find myself right back in the midst of a food tornado.
I still do not fit in virtually anything I own, and I spend far too much time loathing my body. I am trying very hard to "eat like a normal person" and, in so far as a normal person does not binge, I am accomplishing this. In the last few days, I have even managed to "eat like a normal person" in the sense of not eating more (or, at least, many more) calories than I need to maintain myself at this weight.
I have set a goal for myself of continuing to hit a caloric goal of somewhere below 1800 cals. I have not set an exact number because that is guaranteed to set off a binge: if I have a goal, and I miss it, I will just decide to screw it and eat all the cookies in the world. I am marking my calendar with a simple check mark if I manage to hit the goal. I am not doing exact tracking (weighing and measuring food, for instance) because, again, that kind of specificity tends to bring out my worst all-or-nothing tendencies. I am doing my best to estimate and erring on the side of higher than lower.
I will also be putting a second check mark on the calendar when I exercise that day. I am nervous about this because, again, my all-or-nothing mentality surrounding exercise means that anything less than sixty minutes of truly sweaty activity is not my definition of exercise, and I don't want to sabotage myself by demanding perfection for the stupid check mark. I just want to move. A walk, a run, a swim, hike, bike ride: I want all of these to count and I do not want to dismiss any of those as not being "worth it" (which, of course, I define by calories burned) and then end up doing nothing.
We will see how this goes.
I have a few things coming up that I would like to enjoy, and that I would enjoy so much more if I was more comfortable with my body. We have a family trip to San Diego (D, me, my kids, his kids, his parents) in the middle of August and I have a high school reunion at the end of September. Of course, I really wanted to have dealt with my body stuff by the wedding and that didn't happen...
Focusing on the positive and not beating myself up is definitely a struggle for me. I am working on it, but most of the time I just want to scream: eat less, move more! It is not rocket science; it is not cancer or civil war or social injustice.
And if that helped, I would look and feel a lot differently.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Monday, May 23, 2016
Day Two
The aftermath. My husband (!) and I woke up this morning to discover that my older son (8) had thrown up extensively and dramatically all over himself and his bed at some point in the night. This was the result of his consuming 800 cupcakes, drinking as much soda as he could find, and running around with his friends during the post-wedding party. We also had a bounce house which probably did not aid his digestion. We also have no idea where my car keys are (the party was at our house, so it's not like anyone was driving my car).
Once we got everything cleaned up, I headed off to my psychiatrist for our third meeting. At the end of the meeting, based on everything we have discussed over our last few sessions, and after having taken my family history of mental illness and substance abuse, she tentatively suggested that I have been struggling with bipolar disorder. I was unaware of this, but apparently latent bipolar disorder can be catalyzed by hormonal shifts or surges (such as happens after a pregnancy). I am not ready, yet, to discuss my particular story after both of my kids were born, but suffice it to say that a bipolar diagnosis, while surprising on some level, was not completely out of left field.
In many ways, actually, it came as a bit of a relief. There are a lot of things that went on in the year or so after my older son was born, and then again in the first two years after my younger son was born, that were so wildly uncharacteristic for me, and that I have been punishing myself for, that to hear that I may have been suffering from a diagnosable condition made me feel like perhaps I was not the total monster I believed myself to be.
So, there is that and I will be learning more about that at my next appointment in about a week.
The "bad news" (the above was not good news), is that my binge eating is not necessarily linked to bipolar disorder. This means that I will have to address it separately, and that scares me because I worry about time. What if we don't get around to addressing it for a while, and I get worse?
The weekend was not a complete disaster on the eating front. I did not eat well. I did not eat at meal times in reasonable amounts (either too much or too little), but I did not binge. Today was probably a D range day in this regard. I have not eaten much other food, but I did skip out on an in-law family outing (one that, in complete honesty, I would have skipped out on regardless) and came home and ate about five cookies left over from the wedding dessert bar. I am not qualifying this as a binge because it lacked the crazed, compulsive feeling and it was stoppable. I did, eventually, just walk away from the cookies. And, at least for the moment, the presence of the cookie box is not singing a siren song to me.
I am hoping that at my next meeting with my psychiatrist I can get a better sense of the bipolar question, and determine if that requires medication (perhaps not since it seems very distinctly triggered by postpartum and I will not be having any more kids).
Once we got everything cleaned up, I headed off to my psychiatrist for our third meeting. At the end of the meeting, based on everything we have discussed over our last few sessions, and after having taken my family history of mental illness and substance abuse, she tentatively suggested that I have been struggling with bipolar disorder. I was unaware of this, but apparently latent bipolar disorder can be catalyzed by hormonal shifts or surges (such as happens after a pregnancy). I am not ready, yet, to discuss my particular story after both of my kids were born, but suffice it to say that a bipolar diagnosis, while surprising on some level, was not completely out of left field.
In many ways, actually, it came as a bit of a relief. There are a lot of things that went on in the year or so after my older son was born, and then again in the first two years after my younger son was born, that were so wildly uncharacteristic for me, and that I have been punishing myself for, that to hear that I may have been suffering from a diagnosable condition made me feel like perhaps I was not the total monster I believed myself to be.
So, there is that and I will be learning more about that at my next appointment in about a week.
The "bad news" (the above was not good news), is that my binge eating is not necessarily linked to bipolar disorder. This means that I will have to address it separately, and that scares me because I worry about time. What if we don't get around to addressing it for a while, and I get worse?
The weekend was not a complete disaster on the eating front. I did not eat well. I did not eat at meal times in reasonable amounts (either too much or too little), but I did not binge. Today was probably a D range day in this regard. I have not eaten much other food, but I did skip out on an in-law family outing (one that, in complete honesty, I would have skipped out on regardless) and came home and ate about five cookies left over from the wedding dessert bar. I am not qualifying this as a binge because it lacked the crazed, compulsive feeling and it was stoppable. I did, eventually, just walk away from the cookies. And, at least for the moment, the presence of the cookie box is not singing a siren song to me.
I am hoping that at my next meeting with my psychiatrist I can get a better sense of the bipolar question, and determine if that requires medication (perhaps not since it seems very distinctly triggered by postpartum and I will not be having any more kids).
Day One
I got married yesterday. It should have been one of the best days of my life. Instead, I spent a great deal of the day hating my body and obsessing over how I would look in pictures. Opening Facebook was an exercise in self-loathing as it revealed picture after picture of a body I would prefer to believe I do not have.
Two and a half years ago, at 5' 6" I weighed roughly 130 lbs. Today I weigh 156 lbs. I gained most of this weight in a eight month period, which works out to about a four pound a month rate.
In order to gain at that rate, something really has to be going on. It is hard to eat the extra 14,000 calories a month one needs to consume in order to gain 4 lbs/month (3500 calories = 1 lb). The way that I have accomplished this is binge eating.
I wish I had the first clue why or how this started. I did not just wake up one day and make a conscious decision to eat all the cookies in Denver, though that is how it feels like it happened.
I met the man I married yesterday right before Thanksgiving 2013. Although my divorce from my first husband had only been formalized in October of the same year, he and I had been separated and living apart since late September 2012. During the intensely difficult period between June 2012 and November 2013, when my marriage fell apart, I moved out of our house, and tried not to panic that I had destroyed my two children' lives (they were one and four at the time), I did not turn to food. In fact, I barely even thought about it. More accurately, I thought about it as often as a normal person thinks about food; that is, I ate when I was hungry and the rest of the time thought about and did other things.
Some time right around the start of 2014, my relationship to food took a dramatic turn. By May 2014, I had gained twenty pounds (approximately five pounds a month, or an extra 17,500 calories per month). My older son celebrated his 5th birthday in June 2014. His birthday cake was left at my house after the party, and I ate nearly 2/3 of his cake by myself in a matter of hours. This was the first time I truly registered the scale of my consumption, but even then, I told myself it was an odd, but surely non-repeatable experience. In the months preceding, I was binging, but I really thought of it as controllable: I was just having these unusual moments, but I would get it together and it would go away.
Since May 2014, I have lost and gained the same 5-8 lbs over and over and over again. Each time follows the same predictable pattern: I will binge, experience the usual disgust, self loathing and despair that comes with eating past the point of discomfort; I will promise myself that tomorrow I will get my life back; the next day, I will start logging my food and counting points or calories, and I will exercise nearly every day. This will last from anywhere from a few days to two weeks. Inevitably, I drive to Whole Foods and buy just one or two chocolate chip cookies. And, inevitably, those two cookies cascade into a caloric waterfall, and all of the good work I have done in the preceding days is undone in a single binge.
In the last few months, I have made myself throw up three times. I have tried several other times.
I am tired. I am tired of hating my body. I am tired of hating myself for my lack of discipline, my weakness, and my failure. I am tired of thinking of nothing else but food (or its absence) and my body. I am tired of missing out on so much of my life because my thoughts are consumed by calories and adipose tissue and how much I hate my stomach.
About two weeks ago, I fell apart and called my primary care physician. In tears, I tried to explain to her that I needed help. She gave me a list of psychiatrists, and I made calls. I am desperate to believe that this will finally be the end of all of this.
Two and a half years ago, at 5' 6" I weighed roughly 130 lbs. Today I weigh 156 lbs. I gained most of this weight in a eight month period, which works out to about a four pound a month rate.
In order to gain at that rate, something really has to be going on. It is hard to eat the extra 14,000 calories a month one needs to consume in order to gain 4 lbs/month (3500 calories = 1 lb). The way that I have accomplished this is binge eating.
I wish I had the first clue why or how this started. I did not just wake up one day and make a conscious decision to eat all the cookies in Denver, though that is how it feels like it happened.
I met the man I married yesterday right before Thanksgiving 2013. Although my divorce from my first husband had only been formalized in October of the same year, he and I had been separated and living apart since late September 2012. During the intensely difficult period between June 2012 and November 2013, when my marriage fell apart, I moved out of our house, and tried not to panic that I had destroyed my two children' lives (they were one and four at the time), I did not turn to food. In fact, I barely even thought about it. More accurately, I thought about it as often as a normal person thinks about food; that is, I ate when I was hungry and the rest of the time thought about and did other things.
Some time right around the start of 2014, my relationship to food took a dramatic turn. By May 2014, I had gained twenty pounds (approximately five pounds a month, or an extra 17,500 calories per month). My older son celebrated his 5th birthday in June 2014. His birthday cake was left at my house after the party, and I ate nearly 2/3 of his cake by myself in a matter of hours. This was the first time I truly registered the scale of my consumption, but even then, I told myself it was an odd, but surely non-repeatable experience. In the months preceding, I was binging, but I really thought of it as controllable: I was just having these unusual moments, but I would get it together and it would go away.
Since May 2014, I have lost and gained the same 5-8 lbs over and over and over again. Each time follows the same predictable pattern: I will binge, experience the usual disgust, self loathing and despair that comes with eating past the point of discomfort; I will promise myself that tomorrow I will get my life back; the next day, I will start logging my food and counting points or calories, and I will exercise nearly every day. This will last from anywhere from a few days to two weeks. Inevitably, I drive to Whole Foods and buy just one or two chocolate chip cookies. And, inevitably, those two cookies cascade into a caloric waterfall, and all of the good work I have done in the preceding days is undone in a single binge.
In the last few months, I have made myself throw up three times. I have tried several other times.
I am tired. I am tired of hating my body. I am tired of hating myself for my lack of discipline, my weakness, and my failure. I am tired of thinking of nothing else but food (or its absence) and my body. I am tired of missing out on so much of my life because my thoughts are consumed by calories and adipose tissue and how much I hate my stomach.
About two weeks ago, I fell apart and called my primary care physician. In tears, I tried to explain to her that I needed help. She gave me a list of psychiatrists, and I made calls. I am desperate to believe that this will finally be the end of all of this.
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