hiatus (2).

September 7, 2009 · Filed under exercise, food, mood

I typo’d that title as “Siatus”. Sigh-atus.

During the past six months, I have

  • been back off and back on the sugar-wagon many times. Currently off, but it’s only been about 5 days.
  • started taking higher and higher doses of sertraline (Zoloft) because it stopped being effective. Several times.
  • decided to stop taking sertraline because it was getting fucking ridiculous.
  • started taking Cymbalta. Loved it.
  • stopped having obsessive thoughts about when my next sugar fix was going to be.
  • started having obsessive thoughts about when my next sugar fix was going to be.
  • started taking a higher dose of Cymbalta. Loved it.
  • stopped having obsessive thoughts about when my next sugar fix was going to be.
  • started having obsessive thoughts about when my next sugar fix was going to be.
  • started taking a higher dose of Cymbalta. Loved it. (see where this is going?)
  • realized that I was on an anti-depressant and I was still very fucking depressed.
  • stopped taking the Cymbalta.
  • put my doctor in a half-nelson until she gave me a scrip for Wellbutrin.

We’ll see how well this works. I am fairly confident that it will do great for the depression, but I’m not sure how well it’ll do for the food. Luckily, I got a nice reboot in the last week: Critter brought home a sweet little 24-hour flu, so I’ve barely eaten anything in the past 5 days, let alone sugar.

Oh, and I’ve started jogging. I’m not actually sure that you can call it “jogging”, however, because I’m not actually sure that both of my feet are completely off the ground at once at any point during my stride. So it’s kind of a jog-walk. But you know what? It gets my heart rate up higher than walking does and it looks like jogging (although nobody actually sees me because I wait until it’s dark outside) and I feel good about it, so who cares?

I’ve gotten up to jogging 3/4 of a mile, which was my 2-block-by-2-block route, and now I need to do a longer route. I’m probably not going to do that until I feel a bit better, though. I’m still dealing with vertigo from Cymbalta withdrawal and fatigue from being sick (and from Cymbalta withdrawal. And from insomnia from Wellbutrin acclimation. Oh yeah, and from getting up 15 million times in the night every night the past week from some combination of me/Sean/Critter being sick, Critter teething, or whatever. Oy).

Back on track soon. I can see the track from here, at least.

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punishment.

March 11, 2009 · Filed under food, mood · Tagged , , ,

Today in therapy (I love my therapist), I talked a lot about the binge eating cycle that I’ve gotten myself back into.  I eat. A few cookies, a little bit of chocolate, something. And then I feel bad/guilty for eating. And then I feel that I need to be punished for being bad. And so my punishment is to eat more. Finish the box, or the bag, or the carton. And I don’t enjoy that at all. I’m sitting there, stuffing M&Ms into my face, and I’m feeling physically sick.

One of the things I’m discovering is that, sure, it’s emotional eating, but there are fifteen bajillion different emotional reasons. It’s not just one emotion there. I don’t just binge when I’m sad. I binge when I’m happy, when I’m tired, when I’m frustrated, when I’m anxious, when I’m excited, and when the moon is waning gibbous. It’s almost like there isn’t a pattern… but there is. There’s a lot of patterns, is all.

I just need to deconstruct and unravel them. And then weave the scraps into something more useful and pleasant.

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hiatus.

February 27, 2009 · Filed under food · Tagged ,

It’s been a really long time since I wrote anything. Damn.

I’m off the wagon.  I need to get back ON the wagon. Sean doesn’t know. I am scared to tell him. I know that he doesn’t read this, so this isn’t some half-assed cop-out telling.

In good news, though, I started therapy.  We haven’t been talking about food issues, per se, but a lot of what we’ve been talking about touches on my food issues. Control, permissions, comfort, rebellion, punishment; it’s all in there.

I *heart* my therapist. Hope she can help with this food shit, because it’s getting old.

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comfort.

November 15, 2008 · Filed under food, mood · Tagged , , , , , ,

Everyone has their own very special comfort foods. I have a lot of them. Depends on what kind of comfort I’m looking for. Miss my mom? Something savory and creamy, like fettuccine alfredo. PMS? Peanut butter cups. General depression/angst/cloudy day? Ice cream.  I’ve had to work on reconfiguring my comfort food needs, because a lot of what I consider to be comfort food is now mostly off-limits these days. I have been eating much more in the way of salty snacks lately. This is probably sub-optimal, but it’s probably also better for me than eating lots of sugary snacks, so I’m going to let it slide.

I was talking to Sean during dinner tonight about food (no, really!), and how Christopher was eating pretty much everything we put in front of him (cheese, bananas, pasta, salmon, roasted red peppers, eggs), and how I was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to grow up being a picky eater (knock wood). I was a picky eater as a child, and I know it was probably difficult for my mom to deal with. Heck, I was a picky eater well into adulthood. I still am, but it’s not nearly as severe. I’ll try almost anything, as long as it doesn’t have strawberries in it. Almost.

Sean observed that a lot of my reluctance to try new foods comes across as fear to him. I thought for a moment, and realized that he was right. There is fear there. See, because I am such an emotional eater, just about every food I eat is comfort food, to some extent. If I try a new food, I might not like it, and if I don’t like it, I don’t get any comfort out of it. He’s learned to introduce new stuff to me slowly, and almost always when I’m in a relatively good mood to begin with. As long as I feel safe, and as long as there is something familiar that I can eat as a back-up, I’m comfortable trying new things.

I was talking to another friend earlier today. She has similar food issues with regards to emotional eating and boredom eating. She and her husband were enjoying an Ecstacy trip together, and she said something that really struck me: “I’m filled with joy, and I’m not eating anything!” Made me realize that I really need to get to work on figuring out where else (other than food) I can find reliable joy. As long as I’m on Zoloft, Ecstacy’s not really an option (not to mention, it’s a pretty damn temporary fix).

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jeans.

November 7, 2008 · Filed under body · Tagged , , , , ,

I had a big happy moment this morning.  I grabbed a pair of jeans out of the clean laundry pile, and put them on.

Without a struggle. These are a pair of jeans that I’ve been able to wear, but I would have to do the too-fat-shimmy to get them over my ass, and then the suck-it-in-and-lean-back-maneuver to get them zipped and buttoned. Today? I pulled them on. I zipped and buttoned them. I don’t feel like they’re digging into my waist when I sit down. I feel comfortable in them.

This is awesome. I actually can see/feel a physical difference in my size. It’s encouraging. Granted, they’re still a size 22, but eventually they’ll be too big and I’ll go buy a pair of 18s to squeeze into (and eventually they will be too big)…

I was looking down at my upper belly fat (I hate my belly fat, by the way. It’s sharply divided into two rolls. One is above my belly button, and the other below.) last night and I think my upper roll is smaller. I can’t wait until it’s gone. I told Sean, “This bit right here is my least favorite chunk of fat on me.” I think that’s why I enjoyed wearing corsets so much when I went out to clubs and such — they did an awesome job of hiding that particular bit of my fat.  So far, in other good news, the boobs don’t seem to have shrunk. Yay!

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halloween.

November 3, 2008 · Filed under food, Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

I’ve been avoiding writing about halloween for a while. I have the bare beginnings of a draft sitting in my draft pile that’s been there for weeks. I’d been dreading even thinking about the holiday, because it’s so utterly saturated in sugar.

Last year (and the year before, and probably the year before that (etc etc etc), I adored halloween. I looked forward to the mass of “fun size” candy, so many more varieties than there usually were. And candy corn! I could buy a tub of candy corn and eat the whole thing! Seriously, I would stop by Bartell’s every goddamn morning and buy a big bag of candy, and by the time I left work it would be entirely gone. That’s a lot of candy. That’s a scary amount of candy. Appropriate, no?

And so, I was worried about halloween this year. Every time I’d go to the grocery store, there they would be, staring me in the face. Bag after bag of candy. My favorite kinds. Kit Kats. Reeses Sticks. Dove Bites. 100 Grand. Twix. Old friends, lying there on the shelves, whispering “buy me! you know you want to…”

But I didn’t. Every time I walked past, I really wanted to. I wanted to buy two or three bags and take them home and hide them and eat and eat and eat. But I didn’t.

Sean asked me periodically, “what’s your plan for halloween?” I didn’t have an answer. I always replied that I was thinking about it. Really, I wasn’t. I was trying very hard to pretend that halloween didn’t exist. Well, the day before halloween rolled around, and I had to face the facts — we needed candy to hand out to the trick-or-treaters. I knew that we would be getting lots of them; our neighborhood is full of kids. So, I did the only reasonable thing that I could think of. I bought candy that I didn’t like to hand out. The plan was Snickers (I don’t like nuts in my chocolate), but the store didn’t have any, so I got Nutrageous bars instead. And then Jujyfruits, or whatever the hell they’re called. God, I hate those things. I didn’t stoop quite so low as to buy a bag of Necco wafers, however. I still have some pride. And… it worked. The candy was in the house for over 24 hours, and I didn’t have any of it.

However.

Saturday, I went to that women’s health day at Swedish, which I wrote about previously. They fed us lovely box lunches. Mine included a chocolate chip cookie. No problem. It’s just one cookie. And it was good, too.

Fast forward to late afternoon/early evening. I’m hanging out with Sonja. She pulls down the bowl o’ candy (giveaway leftovers from both our house and Sean’s mom’s house) and grabs something. I think to myself, “hey, I should have something, too…” and I eat a little fun pack of M&Ms.

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon. Sean’s little sister Robyn is having a small birthday thing. We all go over to Sean’s mom’s place for cake. I eat chocolate cake. I stand there and stare at the chocolate cake. My mind is racing. Cake. I want cake. How can I get more cake? Maybe I can come over tomorrow and Bette will let me have more cake. She won’t want to eat it all herself. She’ll just offer it to me. Maybe I could go home and make a cake. CAKE. I want to eat it. I want to eat the cake. Please let me eat the cake. There’s got to be some way I can eat lots and lots of cake.

Holy shit. That, my friends, is the voice of a serious addiction.

It’s subsided since then, but it’s still there.

As a result of this weekend, I have a couple of new sugary-food rules.

  1. No desserts without Sean.
  2. One dessert a week, tops.

It’s scary how quickly my mind flipped back into must-eat-sugar mode. It’s like I turned into a sugar zombie, single-minded in my search for sweet sweet brains. It would be so damn easy to slip back into that space. This is going to be a lifelong struggle for me, and not only does that make me feel sad, but I also kind of resent it. Life isn’t fair.

Oh well.

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density.

November 1, 2008 · Filed under body · Tagged , , , , ,

I had my weigh-in Wednesday at the gym. Over the month of October, I lost a total of 2 pounds. TWO. This disappointed me. I thought I was doing better.

Well, today, I got confirmation that I actually AM doing better. I am at Swedish, at that women’s health day thing that I mentioned a few weeks ago. As a part of this event, I got some free screenings.

The first one I got was the awesomest, so I am going to go backwards. Sorry!

I got my finger pricked, and they tested my glucose and cholesterol.

Glucose was 90. I had eaten a bagel a little over an hour beforehand, so that was awesome.

HDL (good cholesterol) was 56. Anything greater than 40 is good.

LDL (bad cholesterol) was 113. Anything lower than 130 is good. I’m a little close to the edge there, so I should be a LITTLE careful.

Blood pressure was 120/62.

I did the body-fat percentage thing where you hold the little doohicky that is kind of like a game controller, and got my first happy of the day: I’m at 44.7% body fat!!  When I started this, I was at 47%. That’s serious progress! This really made my day, because I haven’t been feeling like there have been actual results from the working out, but here, I actually HAVE lost a significant chunk of fat. Go, me! I’m still morbidly obese, too (BMI 40.3)! Woo!

And then, I did the bone density scan. It’s an ultrasound through your heel, which was kind of cool. The technician who did mine looked at the results and said, “wow, that’s good. (pause) that’s REALLY good.” My T score was 2.03. Apparently, a “normal” score is anything between -1 and +1. My bones are more dense than approximately 97% of healthy young women’s.

I’m DENSE. This actually explains why people look at me and don’t believe that I actually weigh what I do; I probably weigh a bunch more than other people of my dimensions, because of how dense my bones are. Yay, bones! This also means that I probably don’t have to worry about osteoporosis, which is again, a big YAY.

In other news, my triceps are still hurting… and my trainer worked with me on Wednesday. Ow.

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chocolate.

October 16, 2008 · Filed under food, mood · Tagged , , , ,

I love chocolate. I seriously, massively, LOVE chocolate. I want to marry chocolate and have little chocolate babies. I want to elope in the middle of the night with chocolate and move to Chocolatistan and spend my days and nights lounging with chocolate by the side of a chocolate pool on the chocolate terrace while a chocolate cabana boy (or girl, I’m not picky) fans me and feeds me delectable bits of pure chocolate bliss.

That said, it has been over a month since I have eaten the tiniest shred of chocolate. That’s right, a whole goddamn month. I say goddamn because I am in a relatively pissy mood. At least, I was, earlier today. I am a PMS-monster, a raging beast full of wildly fluctuating hormones and very little rationality. RAWR. Get out of my way.

Sean and I were over at Henrik and Johanna’s house tonight for dinner and socializing and toddler-playing-together. I was cranky. Crabby. Crotchety. Henrik asked what was wrong, and I told him I was having very bad PMS RAWR GRR and he said the most intelligent and perceptive thing ever: “Do you want some chocolate?”

I was actually taken aback, because I hadn’t thought of that as an option. I guess the self-brainwashing that I’ve been doing is working. I accepted a small square of some lovely dark 70% and was blown away by the taste and feel of it in my mouth. I still felt cranky, a bit. But I was starting to feel a little bit better. The four of us stood around for a few minutes discussing really wonderful chocolate (and sampled another bar that Henrik had), and then said our goodbyes and headed out.

As Sean and I were driving home, we talked. I realized as we were talking that I did not want to binge. Here I was, right in the middle of some of the worst PMS crank that I’ve had in ages, and I didn’t want to stuff my face. This kind of freaked me out. If I didn’t want to binge, what did I want to do? I don’t know. But it didn’t have anything to do with donuts or Tim Tams.

About halfway home, I felt a kind of quickening in my blood, almost like my heart racing, but not exactly that. My pulse was only slightly elevated. I realized that I was actually experiencing and noticing the physical effects of the theobromine in the chocolate I’d eaten. It was amazing. I hadn’t had any chocolate in so long that I’d completely lost my tolerance for it, and the effect from two small squares of premium dark chocolate was so utterly blatant and noticable.

As I sit here 45 minutes or so later, the physical effects have subsided, but I am having a nice, soft mental and emotional glow. Not unlike the feeling (albeit on a much smaller scale) I remember from taking Ecstacy, actually. Come to think of it, the onrush, the initial physical effects — that could also be compared to the initial physical onset of the Ecstacy high.

I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced chocolate as a psychoactive substance, before. It’s astounding. I feel pretty damn wonderful right now.

The trick at this point is to avoid chocolate until this time next month.

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love.

October 15, 2008 · Filed under body · Tagged , ,

While reading Jezebel, I discovered that today is Love Your Body Day.  From their site:

Do you love what you see when you look in the mirror?

Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work hard to make each of us believe that our bodies are unacceptable and need constant improvement. Print ads and television commercials reduce us to body parts — lips, legs, breasts — airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards. TV shows tell women and teenage girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that 80% of U.S. women are dissatisfied with their appearance?

Women and girls spend billions of dollars every year on cosmetics, fashion, magazines and diet aids. These industries can’t use negative images to sell their products without our assistance.

Together, we can fight back.

.

I don’t love my body, but I’m trying damn hard to respect it. This change in eating habits, this change in exercise habits, that’s all a part of it. Eventually, I’ll get to a point where I can look in the mirror naked and say “WOW”, but that’s going to be a long way off.

The interesting thing to me, is that I don’t really want to look like those airbrushed and photoshopped fashion models. I want to continue to look like a real person, albeit a thinner and healthier one. I am not attracted to super-skinny women (girl bellies are even sexier than cleavage, sometimes), and I think that most of the supposedly “beautiful” Hollywood stars are kind of odd-looking, because of all the plastic surgery.

Boy, that sure sounds like sour grapes, doesn’t it? I honestly don’t think that it is; I think that my personal aesthetic is probably a lot more realistic than most of the country’s.

[post = short, as I really wanted to get something up after this brief hiatus. also: I have about 3 other posts I’m working on right now. Having my father visit threw off my rhythm, and I’m finally getting back into the swing of things.]

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memories.

October 4, 2008 · Filed under food, mood · Tagged , , ,

My father and his wife are in town visiting his grandson. This is difficult for me; he and I have always had a somewhat strained relaitonship for various reasons which I don’t really have the energy to get into right now. Suffice it to say that I’m stressed. And when I’m stressed, what I really want to do is curl up with a nice big pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Can’t do that.

Okay, okay, technically I can do that, but I’m not letting myself do that. Instead, I’m busting into tears on the way home after picking Sean up from work, freaking out in the kitchen, and then hiding out in the bedroom with the laptop while Sean and Critter play in the living room.

I was thinking earlier about high school. About how, once I had my license, I would stop at the store after rehearsals to buy those aforementioned pints of ice creamy goodness. About how I would sneak them up to my room when I got home and eat them furtively. About how, when I didn’t have enough cash on me to do that, I would instead mix up a bowl of confectioner’s-sugar-and-water “frosting”, and sneak that up to my room for the furtive eating.

I think there was a lot of “nobody loves me. I guess I’ll eat, because it tastes good and it’s not like anyone will notice and/or care if I gain fifteen million pounds” in my actions. And the problem is, I was kind of right. I went from a size 16 up to a size 22 during high school. My mom noticed, I’m sure, but she never said anything. I can kind of understand that; she has dealt with her own weight-related demons for her whole life, and she probably thought that if she said anything, it would destroy whatever shreds of self-esteem I had left. I wish she’d said something. I might have gotten off of the path I was on a lot sooner.

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