Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

Everybody in our corner of the blogosphere knows that silence means falling off the wagon, and I decided that I’d still go on blogging even when things aren’t all rosy and positive. Well, alright, don’t expect me to blog about my bingeing problems every day either, because it’d be very boring in the long run and wouldn’t help anyway; on the other hand, reflecting on problems instead of on good things from time to time is helpful.

As you have probably guessed by now, the beginning of the week wasn’t good. I don’t think I’ve been in such a foul and angry mood in a long, long time, and I wonder if what I was fearing isn’t crashing on me now–too much work, too much homework, school, too much stress, and only 24 hours in a day to tackle it all. Too bad that this couldn’t have waited for two more years, at least by then I’d be over with school and wouldn’t have to worry about giving up two months before obtaining my B.A. (No, I won’t give up, I don’t want to! I’m just so mentally and physically exhausted that things are very, very rough right now.)

(I’m also aware that this post–a sort of message in a bottle, if you want–seems very different, inconsistent with what I was writing about last week. That’s probably normal. I am a cyclic person, and my moods generally tend to cycle rapidly, so I can be alright on Monday and hate the whole world on Tuesday. It’s crap, but it’s the way it is.)

So. Bad week so far, foul mood, being despaired, reaching for food to cope. And I’ve been wondering and trying to analyze that shitty situation. I gained on way in my childhood and teen years mainly because we had the wrong foods at home and I was clueless about portions, but I’m confident in saying that at the time, I did not reach for food as a comfort tool. Things weren’t different when I first went to college either. Food wasn’t my friend and only comfort.

A few years ago, I did something I should in retrospect never have done, and went against my nature. I put my own desires on the back-burner for someone else, I ignored what I wanted to do in favour of what ’society and people’ expected me to do. And in the process, I almost destroyed myself, looking at all my dreams sink one after the other, finding myself alone all day long and completely isolated, not even having anyone to talk to because they’d have told me that I was ‘making it up’ and crap like that. At some point, it even took a contact-become-a-friend on internet to tell me that what I was describing to her looked very much like depression. I never got a diagnosis because the doctor I went to basically stuck a finger in my ass saying “I know you’re bawling your eyes out in front of me and all, but you MUST have a thyroid problem, for sure, it’s the only explanation to your mood”. Yeah, riiiight. And that too I couldn’t tell anyone about, because all I’d have got in turn would have been “no, depression doesn’t exist, it’s just an argument for lazy people to be excused from making efforts in life”. (By the way, I do not condone that attitude. Clinical depression is something real, and not funny at all.)

The rest, you can easily guess it. I had to find a way of coping. That way was food. Not so incidentally, that period of my life is also the one when I reached my highest weight.

You’d think things are so much different now, and indeed, they are. I live my own life again. I have goals. I’m not the wreck I used to be. Unfortunately, I’ve also come to realize that food as a coping mechanism has remained, and I have no idea how to get rid of it. I know I didn’t need it in the past. Sure, there was stress, and a crapload of work in cram school, but I managed my stress differently. After thinking about it, it may have been, all that simply, because school kept me very busy, but I didn’t have a job all year long like I do now, only during summer, and as a result, when I was feeling down, I actually had the option to go out with friends and feel re-energized after that. (Now, I can’t: in my spare time after work and classes, I way too often have to work even more. If I see friends once every two weeks, it’s already a great thing.)

I don’t know how to remove that perverted use of food from my life–or I don’t know yet. Exercise generally tends to work, but not these days, I don’t know why (I’m more likely to hurt myself by doing too much in the hopes that it will drown my sorrows, in fact). I don’t especially like yoga, I still can’t afford to take much ‘me time’, and stuff like TV or reading make me feel like eating even more, especially TV. I want to find a way. I’m desperately trying, and I hope that I’ll find a solution, because I’m sure there are things I’m clueless about and therefore haven’t tried yet.

However, I need to be honest with myself. Yes, I have a problem with food. Yes, I’ve been using food as a coping mechanism against stress (what saved me is probably that I can take a lot of stress before cracking up, hence why I haven’t ballooned back to my highest weight and worse yet). And now it’s time to stop. I might have to do something I’m very reluctant to do, i.e. focus less on school work for some time, so that I can get enough psychic rest, so to say, to allow myself to do better again later on. It’s a dangerous bet: I could be up to the challenge again in two weeks, or this state of things could last until after my finals. It’s a bet I have to make, though. If I go on just pulling on the rope, it’ll snap, and who knows what will happen then?

There. There it is. Today was a good day. Yesterday was not. Tomorrow will be good as well, if I can have my way with it–and it’s either me or food, and I don’t want to let food win. And I need to make it so that there are lots of good ‘tomorrows’, again and again. Without resorting to junk just because my life is far from being easy at the moment.