This and that!

First of all, I got a Fitbit Charge! I’m excited to get into using it, as it’s been a motivator for me in the past to compare myself to others. That sounds kind of awful, but it’s true! Not to say that I’m going to be shit-talking anybody that adds me on Fitbit, but… you can find me there! I was one of the unfortunate ones that had a skin reaction to the Fitbit Force. I waited just about a year and a half to get my reimbursement. They’re damned lucky I enjoy their products so much.

I’ve been really active… on INSTAGRAM. Ha! But for real, I very much find the fitfam hashtag on Instagram to be a great resource for inspiration. I’ve started adding a bunch of people – if you’re one of them: HI. I promise not to stalk you too much. 😉 It helps for me to see people in their day-to-day struggles, as well as those that have had wild successes and have managed to keep it off. IG is full of people with great tips – it’s like a huge knowledge bank!

I wasn’t going to go for a walk tonight, after a lazy-ass day at home. My partner suggested we go to a small local beach and I am SO GLAD that we went. I decided to do an odd sort of “During” photo… I still haven’t decided on what I’m going to use for my “Before” photo, since I allow so few photos of me to be taken to begin with, let alone full-body photos. Here I am in silhouette:

I told you it was odd, but that’s me – odd. I’m 26 lbs down. That’s something to be very proud of.

First weigh-in in a while

Drum roll, please…

BOOM! I’m down 3 lbs from last week!! It also means that I’m down TWENTY-SIX POUNDS, so I passed my second goal of losing 25 lbs, and I’m at nearly 11% completed of the overall weight I want to shed. YES. GO ME!

Last night I was laying in bed, literally ready to roll over and go to sleep and I thought to myself, aloud, “I should really go for a walk”. The barriers to this in my head were a few: It’s late (it was 10pm), it’s so warm outside (warm for the PNW, still warm!), and I’m so close to just being able to go to sleep. My partner heard me and encouraged me to get going. He reminded me of how awesome I would feel once I was done, and once again, he’s right.

I did end up having to take a break after a steep uphill section of the walk, but other than that, I crushed another 5.5km. Tonight is just as hot as it was yesterday, but I’ve promised one of my stepdaughters that I would take her to the rec centre and get her started on a training routine. It’s not that I’m an expert, I’m just good at looking up stuff online! She’s interested in doing some strength training and cardio to build up her endurance and stamina for the upcoming soccer season, in which she’ll be playing at a higher level than she’s used to.

When I did some research, it turns out that the local rec centre gym has a program for teenagers where they close down the gym early on Saturday night and have a trainer for 2 hours to help craft strength training routines for them, all for the price of a $3 drop-in fee! How amazing is that?

Binge eating – why?

A big thank you to Mary for the idea of a binge jar

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If you asked me while I was growing up if I had an eating disorder, I would have laughed you out of the room. My personality has always been boisterous and big (despite rampant social anxiety), and I thought that women (and the few men) that struggle with eating disorders were meek and little. How could I have an eating disorder if my weight had never dipped into the “normal” category on a BMI scale?

But what was I doing the majority of the time? Gorging on food.

I had a messed-up relationship with my parents from the get-go. Up until I was 11, I lived with my mother and my oldest brother. We were not well-off, and there were times where I remember going without food – and definitely remember going without significantly nutritious food for long periods of time. Think: lots of homemade bread, thin soups, etc. That did change when I was around 9 when my mom got a job as a nurse and our standard of living went up.

Fast forward to 11 years old, and I moved to a whole other country to live with my father and soon-to-be stepmother. All of a sudden, I was back to a lower standard of living. Lots of mashed potatoes, lots of beige food. Then a sibling was born and our standard of living increased due to my dad getting a well-paying job. There were now things in the house like individual cups of pudding, cookies, granola bars – typical little kid snacks to feed easily to a toddler.

Here’s where my disordered eating really reared its ugly head – I would eat whole cartons of pudding at a time – that’s 8 cups of pudding. Or I’d go through a whole box of cookies. I’d go as far as to burn the packaging in our wood-burning stove so there was no trace of what I’d done. My stepmother would confront me about missing food all the time and I would laugh and tell her she must be losing her mind. It escalated to a point where she installed a padlock on the pantry door. She told me that I couldn’t have certain things because they were for my little sister (a reasonable enough request), but I was stuck in the mindset of there never being enough food, and well, I’d better eat it now before it goes away, right?

It got to the point where I was even shoplifting food to have enough to binge on. I was very fond of eating tubs of cake frosting with a spoon in the graveyard near my house. I remember specifically thinking to myself, “This is so much fun!” but I would end up crying and panicking before returning home.

Looking back after years of therapy, I know that it was a reaction to how I grew up. Scarcity is no joke. Scarcity stings doubly so in a country with such an abundance of food. I’ve been classified officially as having EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), which has now evolved into OSFED – other specified feeding or eating disorder, with a focus on binge eating. It all clicked into place when my doctor asked about anxiety related to eating.

I’m definitely going to take Mary’s idea to heart and start a binge jar of all the activities I could do instead of binge eating, but how do I deal with binge eating now?

• Keep my hands busy. I’m a huge fan of knitting intricate lace shawl patterns, and you just can’t do that with a spoon in your hand or with Doritos crud all over your fingers.
• Drink lots of water. Lots. 3-4 Nalgenes a day
• Talk about my feelings – bored, emotional, tired, nervous… All of them are triggers for a binge eating episode. My husband is very understanding.
• Get out of the house without my wallet. This is one that I’ve been trying to rely upon more and more lately. It combines a good habit with trying to break a bad one.
• Most importantly: FORGIVE MYSELF if I do end up binge eating. This isn’t the end of the world, and no one will think that I’m a bad person for polishing off 12 yogurt cups.

It’s interesting to note that the little sister I mentioned is now 17 and going through some of the same issues with food as I was back then. Her issues are more on the restrictive side of things. I hope one day we won’t be estranged and I can help her through this.

Why bother?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately while wallowing in self-pity. It’s been 13 years now. When I was first diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, I was 19 years old. I was scared after having had a “period” that lasted for 6 weeks. I was sad, tired, and stressed. I weighed a little under 300 lbs and thought that I was as big as a house and that there was no way that I could get any bigger.

Wrong.

I’ll be the first to say that I think it’s perfectly well and good for other fat folks to be happy at the weight that they’re at, and agree that society should be leaving them the hell alone in their happiness. I, however, am not happy. My knees ache all the time. I have bursitis in my right hip. My bone density is very low, attributed to years and years of being obese. Last year when going on a cross-country trip I had to ensure that both airlines I was flying with would allow me the exemption of having two seats to myself – a long, expensive, and humiliating experience.

I now weigh just under 400 lbs. My heighest weight most-recently was 414 lbs. I remember the day I weighed in at that number and thought, “Wow. That’s a weight I was hoping to never see…” I was struggling to tie the laces in my shoes and just decided to wear flip flops instead. I was puffing and out of breath. I had just run my hands over my cheeks to determine whether or not I would feel comfortable going out for ice cream with my partner – stubble on a woman has a way of attracting a few glances, but stubble on an obese woman makes her a damned pariah. It’s not enough that she’s fat, but she’s sloppy too?

Why bother? Because I deserve better and I’ve been punishing this body that I live in for way too long.