White Knuckles

I want to eat right now. All the wisdom says that when you want to eat, if you've already had a meal recently, you need to figure out why. I've never been good at pausing long enough to let my brain be quiet and figure it out. But here goes: It's hard to tell, but I think I might be a tad hungry. I had a fairly filling lunch, and I wasn't hungry when I started eating. Was it enough? Is my stomach just digesting? Will the _slight_ feeling of hunger go away or will I become ravenously hungry? And so what if I do? What does that mean? I think I am afraid of hunger, the way so many experts say we compulsive eaters are. But really, what's so bad about being hungry? I remember being hungry before meals a lot as a child, and that was a good thing. It's more fun to eat when you're hungry than when you're not. So I get hungry an hour (or two?) before I'm supposed to eat dinner. What does that mean? That I'm not cut out for this whole eating healthy thing, that I can't get it right, that I always either undereat or overeat. I never eat "just enough." I'm a failure. I think that's part of what goes through my head. But also the fear that I won't have access to the foods I need (or want?) when I do get really hungry. But so what? There's tons of food around, both in my house, at the grocery store three blocks away, at the zillion restaurants within two blocks of my house. I WILL NOT STARVE.

So what else is making me think I want to eat? Maybe part of it is actually reading OA literature and seeing how these people overate. I'm also anxious. Anxious that this won't work, anxious because I'm off sugar, again, for a couple days now. Anxious because I feel like I don't measure up and I'll be alone forever. But the thing is, I won't. What I'm doing now will help me get the confidence to surround myself with people when I need them and be alone when I don't. It will give me the confidence to get out there and meet people, something I've been really bad at. So I think that's what's bothering me. I'm not sure if this will help the white knuckle situation. I doubt it will. I'm going to try going for a walk to ease some of this.

One Day! (sort of)

I was actually able to get a day of healthy eating under my belt yesterday! It felt good, and I was glad I did it. Now I need to do it again today. So far so good. I've had oatmeal with strawberries and turkey bacon for breakfast so far. And lunch is going to be stuffed mushrooms.

It seems like every day is something a bit different but equally distressing. Yesterday I had a ton of things on my mind. Many of them food-related. Today my distress is about something else (though, as always, related). I have an ex-boyfriend, who I talked about before in this blog, who I broke up with in January. For a number of reasons, but primarily because I simply didn't want to marry him. He did want to marry me. For various reasons - many of them having to do with loneliness and the fear that I will never have a normal relationship because I'm too fat for anyone to like me - we have had a messy breakup. I.e., hooking up and spending probably too much time acting like boyfriend-girlfriend. He has slowly been trying to get back into my life on a more regular basis, which sometimes is good and other times (most of the time) seems like a really bad idea. I don't want it. I don't want a relationship with him. And I'm worried I'm leading him on. In fact, I'm pretty sure I am and I feel guilty about it. He has gotten back into the habit of wanting to talk every single night on the phone, which I HATED when we were together. And he wants to see me multiple times per week, even though I'm fine with maybe once a week. And I'm supposed to see him tonight and the once-per-week thing is seeming like too much. He said I didnt sound excited about it on the phone last night. My inclination was to make an excuse, but the truth is, I didn't want to be talking to him on the phone last night and I don't particularly want to see him tonight. But I said I would, and I also don't have any other plans as of right now, so I guess I'm going to.

I don't know. I'm very, very tentatively starting to think I might be able to conceive of putting myself out there in the near future and finding other people to date. The whole body composition scan thing helped a lot. Knowing I don't have 70 pounds to lose is helping me feel more confident, and I think I'll feel more ok with getting out there if I only lose 20-25. We'll see. But the (very small but growing) excitement about potentially meeting someone else is making this hanging out with the ex thing even less appealing.

Poor guy. It's not his fault.

Just needed to get this off my chest.

A Lack of Progress

After posting about my revelation today, I read through my blog. I started from the beginning and read all of the posts, trying to see how I've progressed.

My conclusion? I really haven't. I feel like I've bounced from one weight-loss or anti-headache effort to another, without ever being successful or sticking with them long-term. If I were reading my blog, I would think "wow, this person seems a bit delusional." She doesn't learn. She tries things over and over again and never manages to stick with anything. She just ends up eating every time.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's just that I've read other people's blogs and felt some sort of superiority over these people because they didn't seem to realize that they were, in fact, not making any progress. they just kept going right back to the food. Except feeling superior is ridiculous. Because that is EXACTLY what my blog is like. Hm.

A Revelation

Do you ever have the problem that you feel like you need to write and you feel like putting things down on paper (or screen, as the case may be) will help you sort out your thoughts, but you have so many thoughts and so many topics that need sorting out that you don't know where to start? Or you don't know which one to choose because if you tried to cover all of them you would be writing for the rest of your life? But it's hard to separate out the topics because they're all, really, tied together?

I'm having that problem right now.

but I'll try to tackle one of them right now because it's the topmost in my mind and can help give perspective on future posts, assuming I get around to them.

I've been thinking about going to a nutritionist for, well, years now. But most of that thinking went along these lines: "What the heck can a nutritionist tell me that I don't already know? I know I'm overweight, I know what I need to do to lose weight, there are a million sensible food plans out there that I could follow, but the trouble if figuring out HOW to get myself to follow them and a nutritionist really can't help with that." But the drumbeat of "go to a nutritionist" has been getting louder the last couple of months as I've been attending OA meetings, where getting a food plan from a nutritionist is expected at the very least, and more likely required.

So I finally made an appointment with one and went in with an--admittedly--bad attitude, particularly given some bad things I had heard about my chosen nutritionist the last couple of days. She didn't quite live up to all the hype about how bad she was; she seemed to concentrate a bit too much on addressing my migraines in ways other than food, when I really wanted her to give me a food plan that would allow me to lose weight, and she didn't actually end up giving me a food plan in the first visit but instead told me I would have to come back for that. I was peeved, to say the least, and decided not to go back.

Three days later I am hopelessly mired in my eating, still confused by food plans, unable to see straight ahead in terms of where I was supposed to go and how I was supposed to eat. I called her back and made a follow-up appointment. At this point, I figured, I had already invested a fair amount of money, so I might as well go back and get the food plan from her. Little did I know that what I would learn in the upcoming visit would be so interesting.

When I got there, she performed a body composition test, something I had never had done before. Now, I had always suspected that I was unusually muscular for a woman. But my father, who is a doctor, had told me that that shouldn't matter in terms of weight loss and than you should still shoot for the lower end of the government's recommended weight range for your height. For me, that would mean 125 pounds. I didn't quite listen to my father and decided on a goal of 135 pounds, which would put me squarely in the middle of the range. It's a number that I have been focusing on as my "ideal" weight for my entire adult life, and given my struggles with food, it would not be an exaggeration to say that learning that this number was off--by a lot--shifted my world view.

The body composition scan told me that I have 140 pounds of muscle and bone and 60 pounds of fat a ratio of 70% muscle to 30% fat. Which means that if I had zero (0%) body fat, I would still weight 5 pounds more than my former "ideal" body weight. I'd also probably be dead. Assuming that I wanted to reach the recommended body fat percentage for a 31-year-old woman of 21%, I would need to weigh 178 pounds. Yes, 42 pounds more than I thought I was supposed to weight.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I currently weight 200 pounds, and I thought I had close to 70 pounds left to lose. Turns out? I only have 22. And at my skinniest, when I know I looked and felt good, I was probably still close to 180 pounds.

So given this revelation, what does that mean for me, my attitude, and my weight loss? That first day, it really did feel like my world view had shifted, like this attitude that I had had of myself as being a huge fat slob was all wrong. It was a great feeling (though also slightly sickening to think of all the time I've wasted thinking that way). Also, the burden of having to lose weight shifted a bit. I was no longer facing this massive, seemingly impossible uphill slog. Instead, it was a much smaller hill I had to scale, and it made it seem less daunting.

What does that mean for my food addiction? Honestly, I don't know. The more weight I had to lose, the more I seemed to get depressed about how hard it was going to be and how long it was going to be before I felt comfortable enough to put myself out there, date etc. Which only made me eat more. Knowing I had less of a battle ahead of me did give me hope for my future. But it's not like this revelation all of a sudden made me stop stuffing food in my face. I binged the next two days after I learned that. Why? I don't know. Habit? Sugar addiction? Still needing to process everything? Who knows.

I will say that today, so far, I have been, precariously, doing well. I am following (more or less rigorously) the food plan prescribed by the nutritionist, and I am enjoying the food. Let me repeat that. I am enjoying the food. I had some very good tasting oatmeal with turkey bacon this morning, and lunch was a big cobb salad. I am also having one of my favorite stuffed portabello mushrooms recipes tonight for dinner. IT feels like maybe, just maybe, I can do it today. I'm still feeling slightly peckish after my cobb salad, so I'm going to have an apple now.

I can do this today. I can. tomorrow will have to deal with itself.

Ugh

I'm so confused right now. Upset, frustrated, scared, angry, apprehensive, nervous. I'm supposed to (or at least vaguely) do something with some people today and I'm resentful that I feel obligated to. I said they should call me and "I'd see." I didn't commit necessarily, but I think that was assumed. I'm resentful that I feel like I committed and now I'm mad at myself for backing out and guilty about it. But I don't owe this person anything. He thinks I do. I don't, but I think I might be allowing him to think I do. I'm backing out because I'm so upset, in such a black, panicked, depressed mood. My eating disorder is in rough shape, and I'm reading about eating disorders. I've gained weight and my clothes don't fit. And my thighs rub together and chafe. And I don't have the right shoes because I injured my foot and no jogging shoes fit without giving me blisters. The pair I have might be too late to return, because I've been in such a fog of food, so I might have spent $125 for no good reason and ended up with a pair of shoes that don't work. I can't believe I've gotten so fat. And yet all I want to do is go out and get food now. And I've put off doing the thing this afternoon but said I might do dinner with them. Which just makes me look like a fat pig, but I can wrap my head around doing dinner better than I can walking really far in flip-flops with my legs chafing.

Ugh Ugh Ugh.

OA Confusion

I've been doing OA. Or at least going to OA/HOW meetings. It has been interesting and has given me a lot to think about and made me take a closer look at how I function right now, not how I want to function or should function. It's interesting. I will try to write more about it in the future, but right now I want to get off my chest an incident that happened this morning. A person whom I had met through OA a number of years ago but did not know well needed a ride to a HOW meeting this morning. I was tired but made very sure that I got to the metro station to pick her up on time. And she wasn't there. And she didn't show up (I thought) for the next half hour, despite me circling the block several times, parking, wandering around looking for her, getting coffee etc. I eventually gave up, feeling a bit annoyed but mostly compassionate for her, concluding that she must have been having a really hard morning. I didn't get a call from her. I went ahead and went to the meeting, which went fine. I then heard from her about 3 hours later when she left a voicemail asking where I had been. I called her back and we chatted about what had happened. I still have absolutely no idea how we missed each other. None. We were, apparently, both at the same area at the same time, but totally didn't see each other. She also waited for a half hour. Anyway, I feel like I did something wrong. Like I should have waited longer or looked harder for her. I know I should have brought her phone number with me (and she didn't have mine either, so that was a mutual problem), but I don't know why I feel guilty. I guess because I had promised that I would drive her to this meeting and I ultimately failed to do that, despite trying to. I'm hoping writing this down will make me feel a bit better. I know, logically, I did nothing wrong and really did try. But I still feel bad. Because I know she needed/wanted this meeting. Anyway, we set a more definite meeting place for next week and are going to try again. I hope it works better!