Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

It took me more than one week to come back to this blog, but since I’ve done much worse in the past, I probably don’t need to apologize. Besides, I needed the time away. I also needed time, a lot of time, to work on an oral presentation that I finally went through on Monday, and given my general state of exhaustion last week, finding the strength to do school-related activities was no small feat. I think the presentation went well. But it’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

In general (and perhaps also due to my young age), I think I can consider myself as kind of blessed in terms of health. Although the period when I was the most overweight made me quite miserable, I still wasn’t plagued with serious illnesses. My worst moments, I knew them in my childhood, when I caught every cold, otitis and other nose/throat-related ailments. Even this has subsided by now, and I suspect that the Power of Fruits and Veggies®­ had a lot to with that. Therefore, overall, I’m a happy camper.

But I have a Sword of Damocles over my head–one that I’ve always had, without being aware of it until now. The result of a genetic test I made in February arrived in the mail yesterday, and it’s official: I’m heterozygous Factor V Leiden. I already suspected it. I prepared myself to it (if you’re expecting the worst, then the worst cannot crush you as much as it could if you were full of hopes, right?). Now it’s simply been confirmed.

It’s a blow, alright. I had hoped no matter what that I’d pass through it. Tough chance. Now what?

Well, I can live with it. This is my decision. I can and I will live with it, and if it can be another reason to go on pursuing a healthy lifestyle, then I’ll take this positive side of things over all the negatives. The major change right now for me will be to go off my BC and take another one. Or not take any; it’s not like I really need it at the moment anyway. I just went on taking it for the really nifty benefits of not bleeding to death five days a months and cramping like crazy for three. If I lose this, I don’t need the pill for the time being.

I have no control over my genes, that’s a given. This said, there are things I can do. Moving, not living a sedentary lifestyle? I can bike to work and school instead of taking the bus, and have a walk after lunch and dinner, and go on exercising several times a week. That was on the program anyway. Controlling my weight, because obesity increases the risks? Already doing it. Mention it if I need to get surgery? Tell my doc to temporarily put me on blood-thinners if I ever have to fly for ten hours straight? Sure, I can do that as well.

For what it’s worth, I may not have any problems at all during all my life. It’s just a risk. A more important risk than for a normal person, but a risk, not an absolute given. I’m the only one who gets to decide if I want to let this make my life rotten with anxiety, or if I want to go on leading the life I’ve started to carve for myself.

Is there any need to say that I haven’t chosen anxiety? Remember the benevolent wolf…

I guess it’s a shame that it takes a health problem to make most of us realize what is good for us and what isn’t. But it’s the way it is. In the end, it alway goes back to our choices. So I’m seizing all the reasons to never let myself fall back into my old, wrong habits. Because now that I know for sure, and not only theoretically, that they could be akin to me playing Russian roulette with my veins, all of a sudden that McDonald’s meal doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.

• Factor V Leiden

I’m going to start writing this post by being straightforward: the ’stop restricting’ way is supposed to be paved with good realizations, but also with bumps. Yesterday, I ran into one of these bumps. Today, I didn’t. Saturday, Friday, Thursday, I didn’t either. I knew and had already accepted that it would be this way.

However, in doing so, I’ve realized something else.

It’s like I see it everywhere now. As if I couldn’t see it before because I was part of it, and now that I’ve taken a step backward, or aside, or forward (pick whichever you deem more appropriate), my eyes are wide open And somehow… it hurts.

It’s the guilt-trips, the guilt upon eating a cookie, the guilt of not having stayed on plan for a day, the guilt of not having been perfect, of not having followed all the Dieter’s Holy Rules.

It’s the abuse, the hate toward ourselves, calling ourselves “fat cows” in front of our mirrors, berating ourselves for a meal turned a little too heavy.

It’s the obsession, the obsession with the scales, the obsession of wondering if we might have weighed one less pound on that goddamn scales if only we had crapped or let out some gas right beforehand.

It’s the food, the food turned enemy, the food viewed in terms of ‘good foods’ and ‘bad foods’, as if it was a battle of morality when all it is, in the end, is fuel for the body.

It’s the days when we say “I feel fat”, use this adjective as an epithet, reduce ourselves to that simple word however laden with so many wrong echoes. As if “fat” was a feeling. As if we were unable to say “I feel lonely, sad, angry, whatever”.

It’s all of this and more. It’s all that heap of negative feelings linked to dieting.

I know. We gain on weight easily. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here, as members of the blogosphere writing daily or weekly about what a challenge it is sometimes, or about our goals and victories. Nevertheless… do we really have to abuse ourselves? Do we really have to make it a battle of guilt, of worry, of negativity? Aren’t we worth our own self-love, not as something easy to do (because it’s not always easy to love one’s body the way it is), but simply in some of our words? Why ‘feel guilty’ about a cookie? It was a cookie, not another human being you shot down in the street. We’re not little girls (or little boys)

Oh yes, it’s not easy at all. I too have felt guilty. I’m still battling those feelings nowadays, because I’m so used to them, in spite of knowing they’re not appropriate, that I wouldn’t know what to replace them with. I just don’t want to tread that road anymore. I am not a piece of crap that deserves such emotional abuse, as inoffensive as it may appear at first. Neither are any of us.

Willpower, yes. Dedication, yes. Empowerment, hell yes. Not the rest. Not the insults. Not the hate. Not the abuse.

Sometimes, somehow, reading some of the things I read around here… My heart weeps.

I’m still not done with my binging problem, but in the past days, I took some time to reflect in depth about all of this. In a way, it was easy: I’m on sick leave for the week, so I had lots of time on my hands, and a real need to think of something else than “what, you’re not taking advantage of this week to do MORE homework? You stupid lazy girl!” (See, how I’m kind with myself. A-hem.)

So I thought. I also got Overcoming Overeating in the mail, so I read. And I thought again.

The truth is, since I’ve started ‘really dieting’–religiously counting calories, fat grams, etc.–things have gone down the drain. Voilà. There it is, and there it had to be said. I don’t know what got into me the day I started to do that.

When I came back to this blog in April 2007, determined to lose weight again, my motto was: “I want to eat like normal people do”. That was my big secret. I kept a food log, but I didn’t count calories. I weighed some foods, like rice and pasta, but I didn’t fret out about whether I had weighed 40g or 42g of dry rice. It worked, and I wasn’t even doing that much exercise, mind you! That’s also when I decided that I would try a vegetable several times before claiming I didn’t like its taste. That’s when I realized that I’m not such a big eater, actually, and that the glutton I was thinking of whenever I mentally pictured myself was just a mere shadow from the past.

The weight I lost? I lost it during that period, between April and June 2007. Naturally, painlessly.

Then diet mentality set in, insidiously. I moved, I decided to “do even better” by counting calories, logging everything into FitDay, weighing even my vegetables. Oddly enough, my problems with binging started some time in August, probably triggered by my birthday (I celebrated it three times in the same week, each time with different people). It didn’t stop there. It got gradually worse during the school year, and the more I tried to white-knuckle it, count calories even more thoroughly, berated myself for letting the binges happens… well, guess what? The more I did this, the worse it became.

Which brought me to this conclusion: apparently, diet mentality doesn’t work for me. Not to say that it set me on the course of an eating disorder that I barely suspected. After all, all I was doing was “eating normally”, right? All I was doing was “eating like normal people do”?

Except that “normal eating” very likely does not entail counting calories, nor feeling guilty about eating an apple because “it’s not the least caloric fruit”. And “being normal” doesn’t entail looking at a cookie as if it was the spawn of Satan. I mean, it’s just food. It does not hold any power, nor does it have to.

I’m going to be rude and say: fuck diets. Screw calories counting. I don’t ever want to look at a food and have its caloric intake pop first into my mind. That’s abnormal. That’s destructive. Maybe it works for some people, but after months and months of desperately trying, it’s clear that it doesn’t work for me. (Remember what I was saying, long ago, about having lost weight without realizing it ten years ago, when I first went to college? I didn’t count back then. I didn’t even attempt to lose weight. It happened because I was finally the one who could make her own decisions about food, and those decisions weren’t as silly as I feared.)

I’m not going to go gung-ho on pizza, ice cream and cookies. I’m not using these thoughts as an excuse, simply because I know it won’t be an excuse. Weird and preposterous as it may seem, I have to word this out loud: I will trust my body. For instance, the fact that I naturally, unconsciously started to eat less starches (not as part of a diet or a “must do” mentality: it just happened, is all) tends to make me think that my body is not the black hole I thought it was when it comes to food. Maybe it’s time I stop fighting it. It’s the rebellious streak, in a way: consider a food as ‘bad’, even unconsciously, and you’ll end up craving it.

There’ll be faux-pas. I already know it. I’m prepared to face them. But this time, I won’t berate myself and call myself names about them. I’m not in this world to abuse myself and my body this way. This behaviour has to stop.

I always have that stupid feeling that people think ill of me about that… like, “well, she’s fat, she must eat a lot, no wonder she’s such a wimp about not eating her oh-so-holy-breakfast first thing in the morning”.

I caught myself writing this in a post on the 3FC forum earlier on. Well, to be honest, I caught myself after it was done, and decided to not edit it, because it got me to think. That’s Fat Girl Thinking in one of its incarnations, you see.

The story behind that: I was basically saying that I had a hard time this morning due to having a blood test to do on an empty stomach–and I don’t work well on a stomach that’s been empty for the last 12 or 13 hours (light dinner, as usual, and I generally don’t eat after 7-7:30 pm either). Having blood drawn in such conditions leaves me weak, with a spinning head, when I don’t simply faint.

And yet, all I could think of when it came to having breakfast was that I shouldn’t complain: after all, I’m just a fat girl, I should toughen up and not moan as soon as I have to delay a meal by one hour or two, right? No thin person would complain, because they are thin and therefore perfect. (Sarcasm much here, hm.)

Does that sound like a screwed thought? Yes? My take as well, now that I’ve reflected upon it.

Why do such things keep on crossing my mind from time to time? I don’t know. I’m not obese anymore, lots of people now tend to consider me ‘average’ and not ‘fat’, but I’m still plagued by such ideas. Maybe it’s because I’ve been overweight for so long that I just don’t know what it is to be average. Maybe it’s also because of my weird relationship with food these days–I binge, so the whole world must know about it and whisper behind my back.

Yeah. It’s indeed screwed up. And I’d better start looking for a way to stop these thoughts, because they really don’t help.

I’ve been mulling over this thought for the past days, and am wondering if I’m just kidding myself, or if this could actually be of help for the time being.

I haven’t reached a point when I weigh compulsively every day (once a week is fine enough), but I kind of have a weird relationship with my scale these days, in that seeing a lower number causes me to think that “it’s okay, see, you can lose easily as soon as you eat sensibly… so now you can go have that pizza”.

No need to say that “have that pizza” turns into a 4-days binge, and then it’s back to square one losing those pounds again. Pretty screwed-up way of doing things. And I wonder why I can never get past 132ish… Silly K.

Of course, I know I need some accountability–if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got fat to start with. But maybe it’s time to focus on a healthier kind of accountability. For instance, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that logging a day full of vegetables, fish, fruits, healthy oils and some complex carbs is a sign that I’m doing things right (contrary to logging a day full of bread, pasta and cookies). Or maybe I can just focus on how my clothes fit; I have a few pair of jeans that won’t let me gain two pounds before starting to get snug, so I know I can ‘trust’ them. I should probably also take measurements, see how that works; I don’t know why I’ve never really done it, probably because stepping on the scale is faster and easier?

The reason why I also want to stop focusing on numbers (scale AND calories) is because, let’s be honest… I am developing an eating disorder right now. There’s no way of denying it, you can see it from my posts, and I can feel it as well. Sure, I’ve always had a weird relationship with food, with all those money problems and eating cheap junk packaged food, with overeating at times… but binge eating? No. Never to that extent, never to the point of actually planning binges. I’m also tired of worrying about numbers, and then of having these weird thoughts about “being able to afford crap, now that you’ve lost again the weight you had regained again“–it’s like all this worry stresses me even more, and aggravates the problem at hand. It had never happened to me in the past, and I don’t want to let it spiral out of control.

Can this work, or am I just kidding myself once again? I know I have to resort to any tool possible right now, and “dieting”, being obsessed by my weight, is certainly not a healthy tool in that regard.

But…

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.

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I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or because I’ve made it so that my body is now used to clean foods instead of junk all the time. No matter what, it is a verified fact that when I’m eating well and in sensible quantities, I sleep well and am in better shape than when I eat crap. In itself, it is probably a good thing, since it encourages me to give priority to healthy foods. On the other hand, if I really go astray (eating one slice of cake a week is okay, eating one twice a day is not), I seriously regret it, and it can take several days, marked with tiredness and headaches, to completely go away.

I know I’m not the only one who reacts to ‘wrong’ foods this way, by going into some kind of sugar shock. Nevertheless, I still marvel at the way my body got used to having great foods like vegetables and fruits on a daily basis, and same with lean meats and fish or healthy oils. It’s almost like the poor thing had been waiting and starving for years in the dark, and the day I finally gave it what it needed, it started thanking me threefold by making me energized, as well as punishing me threefold by causing me headaches and feelings of sickness.

This means I need to be careful. I wouldn’t be able to indulge at a wedding, for instance, and eat from the buffet and from the huge cake all afternoon and evening long. Not unless I want to be sick, that is. I know it’s not akin to what people who had WLS experience (I can fathom much more than that, from what I’ve read and experienced myself), but it’s still a fact. Fortunately, those aren’t daily occurrences, and I still remember my insulin crash or whatever it was from last summer too vividly to be willing to try eating too much chocolate again. The wrong thing in all of that is that I also know what foods I can stand, meaning I won’t be sick after bingeing on them, but I will still pay the price later on, at night, when I’ll find myself turning and tossing at 3 am, fighting with bad dreams and a very bad quality of sleep.

This said… I like the way things are all the same. It’s one more incentive to do things right. I also don’t doubt that someday, I will learn, and that the really wrong foods will be a scarce occurrence for good. After all, I don’t like being tired, cranky and drugged on painkillers (ah, sugar-induced headaches, you are the worst!). So what other choice do I have left, save from eating properly? (Or reverting to a diet full of junk food, but somehow, this doesn’t really appeal to me… I wonder why.)

When I think of it some more, I realize that my problem with food is twofold, in a much contradictory way:

1) I like food too much.
2) I don’t care about food.

And this might be the very core of all this crap.

1) I like food too much: I don’t think I really self-medicate with food, but I DO place food at the center of quite an amount of my activities. Watching TV, for instance, or reading–although these past months, my biggest problem has indeed been TV. I like having something to graze on while reading, but I like it even more when it’s while watching an episode of a series I like (and I don’t watch TV out of boredom: I don’t have a TV, only a monitor and a DVD player, so whatever I watch, I watch it because I really want it).

On the other hand, since I often eat my meals alone, not having anything to read or watch actually makes me wolf them down so that I’m not bored and can go do something else again. I’m not such a great cook that every meal is a mini-orgasm all by itself, and there’s no point in taking one hour to eat if there’s no one to share my dishes with.

2) I don’t really care about food. Believe it or not, if I’m entrenched within an activity like designing a website, updating a blog, gaming, or whatever else that keeps my mind and hands busy, food is the last thing I’ll think of. It is very weird, because you’d think that with all my talk of being tired of thinking about food so often, skipping meals would never happen to me. Well, it does. It does to such an extent, depending on the moments, that I even almost fainted one morning when getting up, wondered why, then realized I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before because I had been playing a game all evening long and simply forgot to have dinner.

It’s not such a lovely thing, though: it leaves me starving, which means that I’ll be more likely to grab fast-food or pig out on something that will fill me quickly, such as fat-laden foods, bread with cheese or a pizza bought in less than five minutes at the nearest supermarket and popped in the oven. In the same way, even though I’ve started cooking more in the past two years, I cannot say I love cooking, therefore I am not exactly bent on preparing delicious home-made meals, and I still have a tendency to rely on ready-made frozen dinners.

Like I was saying in a comment on Jonathan’s blog, although I am often ‘afraid’ of being hungry, this fear probably stems more from another kind of fear: that of letting genuine hunger allow me to eat foods that aren’t so good for my health. I’m not afraid if I know that a healthy dinner, all ready to be eaten, will welcome me at home after an unexpectedly long day. Of course, this never happens, since I live alone, but you get my drift. It’s all the waiting time that can do me in when I’ve reached the point of being ravenous, if I don’t have anything to distract me.

Ah, well. I guess a lot of us have a somewhat weird relationship with food. At least, being aware of it, and of how exactly this relationship is expressed, might be another key to help us do what needs to be done, instead of doing what’s only ‘convenient’?

Usually, I don’t dwell about it here, because it is not the purpose of this blog, but I also happen to suffer from a mild form of Tourette’s. Which has seemingly nothing to do with weight loss. Or had. Because while biking home yesterday night after having gone to the movies, I was struck by an odd thought.

Tourette’s tics are a compulsive behaviour, in a way. You can control them for a while, but the longer you try to white-knuckle them, the harder they come back with a vengeance at the end of the day. It’s not possible to “make an effort and control yourself!” (parents, please never say that to your child with Tourette’s, it’s destructive). It’s not something you can easily battle. And even once you reach adult age, when symptoms tend to be less noticeable in a good deal of people, it’s still there.

I then noticed a sort of parallel between my tics and my (fortunately not weekly now) binge episodes.

Of course, I am not saying that the two are to be put on the same level of ‘disorder’, so to say. The triggers and the causes are different. Tourette’s in a neural affection. Bingeing disorder is not, as far as I know. You can try to understand why you medicate with food and binge by psychological inquiry, while going to a shrink is seriously of no use when it comes to Tourette’s, because there is nothing to understand. Nevertheless, I still think there are odd parallels between them.

It may be because of the compulsive aspect–that need to have the tic now, the need to have that food now. It may be because of the false feeling that if you can have that tic just one more time, or have that food just one more time, then everything will be okay and you will be at peace, not feeling the urge to make that gesture, not having that craving anymore now that you’re ‘done with it’. This is totally wrong, of course: the craving will come back the day after, and the need to express the tic will come back just as well (usually before one night has passed, to be honest; “within minutes” would be a more appropriate term). And the way I see it, a bout of bingeing, finding oneself unable to stop eating, is strangely akin to having restrained my tics for too long and falling down into a spiral of repeated tics for a few minutes or sometimes more, until I’ve ‘let all that stress out’.

I know I cannot get rid of my binges the same way I try to minimize the tics occurrences. In the latter case, cutting on caffeine, or exercising often, as well as avoiding processed foods, help a lot–the crappier my diet is, the worse my tics become. It’s not so easy with bingeing, because avoiding junk food most of the time doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t get the urge to wolf down a whole pizza all by myself in ten minutes tomorrow morning. And exercising is good to relieve the stress in both cases, but it’s still just a temporary fix to this condition.

I guess that’s the essential difference. With Tourette’s, I don’t need to understand anything about it. It just is, and the only medical solution is out of the question because of the side-effects (being lethargic is not something I want nor can afford), so I have to live with it. Now, self-medicating with food is another matter; there is likely a reason behind it, especially since it has started so suddenly, and I wonder if all the changes in my life–being alone again, without much money, unable to have a rich social life due to work/school, etc–weren’t potential, believable triggers. For the time being, I have to try and fix that all by myself, unfortunately.

Anyway… Thinking about it this way, through such a weird comparison, is somehow helping me. At least, it’s the feeling I get the more I think about it. I don’t mean that I’m going to consider bingeing as fate, something unavoidable like Tourettes; it’s just that it sort of falls down logically into my way of being, my compulsive self. And the same way I can try to keep my neural disorder under socially acceptable check, I can also do my best to find other ways to keep the silly desire for food at bay.

I know, weird ideas tend to cross my mind too often for my own good. But I found that train of thought interesting.

Is it worth it? All these sacrifices, giving up on foods we like, forcing ourselves to exercise, and everything else–is it really worth it?

I had to answer to such a question a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, my answer was: yes, it IS worth it.

Granted, it’s not easy every day, and there are moments when I too feel like whining about how ‘unfair’ it is that I can’t have my cake and eat it, that I’ll gain weight too easily compared to other people, and so on. However, all in all, when looking at the big picture, I won’t say that my attempts are living a healthier life were–are–not worth it.

Is it worth getting tired because I have to exercise after a long day of work/school? Yes. I’d be just as tired if I didn’t exercise, and perhaps even more, because not eliminating stress this way would cause me to get a bad night of sleep.

Is it worth getting rid of foods I like, such as cookies or pizza, to focus on ‘diet foods’? Yes. After all, liking pizza doesn’t mean that I don’t like vegetables either: there are plenty of ways of making the latter even more tasty and enjoyable. Besides, in my opinion, it’s not diet food, it’s just called ‘eating sensibly’.

Is it worth doing those ’sacrifices’? Well, it all depends. If I want to consider these as sacrifices, then I’ll feel deprived. If, on the contrary, I try to consider all the positive aspects first, then it seems more normal and more enjoyable. I wasn’t feeling better when I was out of breath at barely 25 after climbing a flight of stairs, or when I felt sick after eating too much of that ‘favourite’ greasy food of mine. Wanting to think that this was better would be diving deep into an illusion. It wasn’t. It was just another way of being miserable.

My motivations aren’t really of the aesthetic kind. I don’t have even the slightest potential of having a model-like figure. I’m short, stout, with square jaws and shoulders, and no matter how much ‘dieting’ I do, I will never be ‘feminine’ or ‘beautiful’–in terms of society’s current standards. But I can be healthy and athletic, I can have a good night’s sleep every night due to being well-fed and not over-fed, I can keep at bay for just a little longer some illnesses that run rampant in my family. Moreover, by making those efforts, I can be beautiful in MY own eyes, and feel at ease in my body. Isn’t this what’s important, in the end?

So what’s eating a slice of pizza every two months instead of the whole thing twice a week, if it allows me to have that? Not such a sacrifice, I say.

Don’t doubt for a moment that it is worth it. Maybe we have to be a little more selfish and take time for ourselves to do so. Maybe we have to change things for a whole family instead of for just one person. Maybe it’s very hard in the beginning, and gets harder again in difficult periods.

But it is still worth it.

Our lives are worth it.

We are worth it.