Out. Of. Control.

I feel like I have gotten out of control with my eating lately.  Binge eating junk food regularly and constant promises to start over tomorrow.

Start over?  Hmmm.

Why does that blank slate still seem so appealing, even after all of these years of failed diets and disordered eating?

I think that my eating disorder has returned with a vengeance.  I'm trying to focus on other aspects of my life, more important things, like my education, and my dogs, and my relationship with Stacey, and my future as a [insert political science degree career here].  However, at the end of the day, I am a binge eater.  That's the current form that my disordered eating has taken.

Why do I binge?  To soothe myself.  To distract myself.  To take the focus away from the real problems in my life.

If I'm focused on how fat I've "allowed myself" to become again, my motherless future seems so far away.  If I'm worried about the number on the scale, I am not worried about the number of days until my dad gets married.  If I'm scolding myself for eating a box of snack cakes, I'm not scolding myself for not doing something on my to-do list.  And if I'm busy being physically uncomfortable, I'm not busy being emotionally uncomfortable.

So I know the reasons.  I just don't know how to stop it.  I can consult my anti-binge list.  But will I?  Why is it so hard to stop the bingeing?  

It sucks.  It really sucks.

I want to quit.  I want to lose this weight, instead of gaining more.  I don't want to diet, but I don't want to binge, either.  I want the cycle to end.  I need emotional healing.

How do I get that?

For now, I will post this rant of a blog post.  That totally counts as a step in solving the problem, right?  Admitting that I have one.  Well, I have one.

my Health Quest

As I have alluded to in my last few posts, I am going to start losing this grief weight.  I'm ready to get back to the comfortable size that I was before the world lost my wonderful mother.

pre-grief weight: 165

where I'm at now: 230-ish

I don't like the term "weight loss journey" anymore.  And one thing that I know for sure about the many successful weight losses I've accomplished in the past is that I have never been able to keep the weight off.  I'm an expert in weight loss.  Seriously, I could devise a plan to fit pretty much any need anyone has to ensure a regular weight loss for them.  

I know how to lose weight in healthy ways.  I also know how to lose weight in very unhealthy ways.  I know how to count calories, points, fat grams, etc., in just such a way to lose a pound a week, or how to not count calories but instead to eat only foods from a special list of healthy foods.  I also know how to lose weight while eating anything but only eating when hungry and stopping when satisfied.  I know how to starve myself and over-exercise. 

However, I know nothing about anything sustainable.  I have done all of the above methods and more, and yet I am currently very overweight.

I have even tried the opposite of dieting: being okay with my body as it is and just eating what I want to eat.  Saying goodbye to weight loss forever and just enjoying life without any more obsessive thoughts about what I eat or how much I exercise.

Unfortunately I am no good at maintaining my weight, no matter where it lies.  My being okay with my 200 pound body resulted in me becoming a 238 pound woman.  I have ceased to be able to listen to my hunger signals entirely, and have ceased eating healthy foods in general.

I was not practicing health at every size at all.  I was definitely embracing self love, body love, and body acceptance, but I was not being good to my body.  Emotional binges happened.  A diet full of pizza, chips, and snack cakes, and mostly devoid of nutrition, happened.

When it comes to keeping the weight off, I really struggle.  I know that I'm not alone in that struggle, so I hope that my blogging about this stuff is helpful to you guys!  

I need to figure out why I struggle so badly with it, in order to really make this the last time that I need to lose 50+ pounds.  

One reason is that I never fully resolved  my eating disorder.  I still eat for reasons other than hunger, and I struggle with binges, and all-or-nothing thinking.

I think that a good place to start this time is to come up with a few basic guidelines for myself.  Ones that I can stick to forever, since that seems to be my biggest problem: stopping whatever I did to lose the weight and going back to my old disordered eating habits.

Since this is not a short-term plan, it is not a weight loss journey.  I'm going to learn healthy eating and exercise habits that I can commit to for the foreseeable future, hopefully forever.  There will be a learning curve, and it may feel like dieting in the beginning, but my goal for this health quest is exactly that: health.

Weight loss will be happening, too.  I think that phase one of my health quest will be the weight loss portion.  It will look very similar to the weight maintenance portion, but with only a couple of more guidelines.  I think that this makes sense because I need to be a little stricter in order to lose the weight, but since I'm not going to plan to lose it quickly, I don't need to be super-strict.  In other words, what I do to lose the weight will be almost exactly what I will do to keep it off.  

So I have to figure out a way to lose the weight that I can stick with for a very long time, if not forever.

I have come up with a couple of lists to help myself to get started on this health quest:

What I’m willing to do forever:

1. Take semi-regular progress pictures of my body.
2. Track calories/nutrients one day a week.
3. Exercise regularly, for fun, in ways that feel good to me, and in convenient quantities for my life.
4. Train for racing events regularly, one big event annually.
5. Cook healthy and delicious meals at least once a week.

What I’m not willing to do forever:

1. Track my food every day, or even most days.
2. Weigh myself at regularly scheduled times or dates.
3. Stick to a strict exercise schedule (outside of training schedules)
4. Keep certain foods in our out of my diet, outside of personal preferences or any future medical reasons that may come up
5. Obsess about food, exercise, weight loss, or my appearance.

Looking at these lists, I realize that there is definitely weight loss sustainability potential in me.  I just need to design a good health quest plan that keeps both lists in mind.

The first thing that I plan to do is to start eating healthier foods MOST of the time.  It will be a struggle at first, since my palette has become very unsophisticated lately.  Healthy stuff just doesn't taste good to me anymore.  I need to retrain myself to like good, healthy, foods. 

Basic guidelines to help myself along for the first couple of weeks:

• Track food on My Fitness Pal a few days a week.
• Start exercising in the morning again, that way it's OVER and done with, and I remember how great it feels to move first thing...
• Eat this basic healthy diet: oats for breakfast, salad for lunch, delicious cooked meal for dinner, and snacks of fruit, veggies, yogurt, pretzel sticks, popcorn, nuts, and dried fruit; one junk food option a day.
• Don't focus on this stuff too much.  Just keep it in mind when it's time to eat or exercise.  Otherwise, think about more important things, such as school (final semester begins next week!), Stacey, chihuahuas, etc.

The first few weeks of getting back into healthy behaviors will be rough.  But I'm hoping that within a couple of weeks, I will adjust and enjoy the health benefits. 

And I plan to mix it up.  I won't be eating the same oats and salads and cooked meals every day.  I plan to get into cooking more, and to experiment with new varieties of oats and salad recipes, as well as new recipes for dinner.  The daily junk food snack will help me to remember to stay out of all-or-nothing thinking.

P.S.  I have a Twitter account for this blog now! Please follow me: @Leah_NOS 

2014 Thoughts, Plans, and Life Changes

Please see my 2013 recap post to see how I've done this year!

Now it's time for me to let you guys in on the many life changes coming my way in 2014, as well as describe more about my overall plans in regard to food, exercise, EDNOS recovery, and weight loss.

First of all, the life changing events!!!

For the first time in a very long while, the life altering events are positive.  :-)

I'm about to begin my final semester at The University of Memphis.  That's right, the first change is that I'm going to have a college degree finally.  I even am going to make that "before 30" cut off date that I strived for when I went back to school at the beginning of 2011.  YAY!!!

On May 10, 2014, I will have a bachelor's degree in political science.

After that?  Originally, many of you may remember that I planned to immediately go to law school.  That has changed.  I have decided to take some time off from school.  I am not 100% sure that law school is the right decision for me right now, so I figured that the best way to decide would to be to work as a paralegal for awhile.  So that is my plan, to secure a paralegal job in New York City.

The next big step after graduation is securing a job post-graduation.  The job hunt will begin in February, when I begin sending out my resumes.  Hopefully I will be able to secure a job before we move to the city, but if not I can work at a paralegal temp agency for awhile.  But I'm pretty confident that a good job is out there for me.  :-)

So next, Stacey and I are going to be moving to NYC, something that we've been planning to do for years.  Some time between graduation and our lease ending (end of July) we will be New Yorkers.  I'm very excited about that.

And those are just a few of the many changes coming to my life in 2014.  It has the potential to be a very good year.  A very stressful year full of changes, but very good.

Weight/Diet/Exercise plans for 2014?  I do plan to lose the grief weight.  I'm in the process of figuring out the "how" without going back to dieting or reverting back to any EDNOS behaviors.  The fact remains that I really want to get back to a healthier size for me.  And another factoid is that I'm currently not engaging in many healthy behaviors.

A post about my health quest (the "official" title of whatever I end up doing to lose the weight and get healthy) will be coming soon.  :-)

For now, I just want to say thanks to all of you who have been reading the blog for awhile, supporting me through this often difficult time.  And also say a quick "hello" to anyone here for the first time!  HI!!!
You are all appreciated and loved by me.  Thanks for being here.  If anyone needs to talk to me, please feel free to message me on my Facebook page or to email me at leahthekindweightwatcher@gmail.com.  I will answer you (so long as you aren't trying to sell me something).

2013 Recap/Review...

What is there to say about my 2013?  I'm sure that many good things happened.  I'm sure that many bad things happened, too.  I'm mostly numb with depression at the moment, so it's tough to write about my life.  But I will try...  I will share some positive things and accomplishments that happened in 2013.

1) I had that internship.  From January through May, I lived in Nashville, working at the capital with state legislators.  It was a great experience in some ways.  One way is that I learned that I never want another roommate that is not Stacey, ever again.  My roommates were a special kind of Hell on Earth for me.  And my immediate superior at my internship was pretty evil, too.

However, the people who actually count loved me, including some good contacts for my future, such as a couple of House representatives and the House counsel, one of whom told me that I will always have a job there if I want it.  I don't want it, but I'm grateful for the offer!  And I'm thankful for this experience that will look amazing on my resume when I start sending it out in a couple of months.

2) I trained for and completed a half marathon.  Yep.  This happened.  All in 2013.  It seems surreal to think about it now, in retrospect.  I'm not sure at the moment where my future in running will lie, but I'm happy to have accomplished this  goal.

3) I stayed in school.  After my internship, which counted as school credit, I took two Spanish courses over summer "break" and then busted my hump to do well this fall semester.  I improved my GPA a bit from the crappy semester of fall 2012 (going back to school right after Mom died was simultaneously a big mistake and the greatest accomplishment of my life so far).  My GPA is still nowhere near as awesome as it was before Mom's death, but then again life has changed so much that it's hard to care too much about that.  And now I am five months away from graduating!

My plans for post-graduation have changed so much this year.  I will blog about that soon...

4) I studied my ass off and took the LSAT.  I did terribly.  But I tried my best, and I freaking did it.

5) I became a hospice volunteer.  It has really helped me to rediscover the giving part of myself that has been pretty foggy since Mom's death.

6) I went to my 10  year high school reunion. Holy crap, that was fun!  But I will never EVER drive from Memphis to Omaha again.

7) I turned 29 years old.  Though I didn't want to celebrate my birthday, Stacey got me a delicious cake.  And I ate it!

8) My weight problems took a back seat.  I lost weight, then gained weight, then decided to focus on EDNOS recovery rather than weight loss, and renamed my blog and Facebook page, then gained more weight, then finally decided that I want to lose weight again.

I'm ready to get rid of the grief weight and get back to where I'm comfortable, which is around 165 (technically 11 pounds overweight) and a size 14 to 16.  Right now I've gotten heavier than ever (I was 23 pounds heavier than my original start weight - I've lost 5 pounds in the last week by just watching what I eat a bit).

Here's my new "before" pictures:

I'm not beating myself up over this weight gain.  I'm 75 pounds heavier than I was before Mom died.
It's emotional weight.  I'm not mad at myself.  I'm compassionate with myself.  I love myself.  I love my body, even at this size.  I'm not going to use self-hate or body-hate as motivators to lose it, because I don't have those things anymore.

Instead I'm going to use my desire to be healthy, and use my love for myself to motivate me to get comfortable with my body again.  I'm not comfortable this big.  It has gotten in the way of a few aspects of my life, and I'm ready to be done with that.

I'm still focused on anti-dieting and EDNOS recovery, so this may be a slower process than the times that I strictly dieted, and I'm okay with that.  I'll post more about my weight loss plans (how I'm planning to lose it and keep it off) soon.  For now, just know that I'm not doing anything crazy.  Just focusing on eating healthier.

Anyway, 2013 was my first full motherless year.  It will forever be remembered that way for me.  I've been extremely depressed for the bulk of the year, and almost all of the year has been filled with self doubt, stress, fear, and sadness.

I'm very proud of myself for the things that I managed to accomplish during this trying time.  I am not giving up on myself.  I'm keeping on.  2013 was not the best year ever, but it could have been much worse.

2014 is going to be crazy!  Stay tuned for that post soon...

rut.

I've been in a bit of a rut these days, as far as eating and exercise go.

My rut has been about two specific life situations.

The first is the TERRIBLE cold with flu-like symptoms that I got at the end of October.  I was so miserable physically for three weeks that I didn't even kind of exercise.  And it's been hard to get back into a routine, even though I've been nearly 100% for about a week now.

The second is school stress.  So many projects, assignments, exams, and papers all happening at once. This happens the last month of the semester every time, so it's no surprise.  But it is still stressful every time!

Stress has actually made me less hungry for once, which is an exciting change of events.  Not in a disordered eating way, just in the fact that I feel more normal now.  Apparently, "normal" eaters get less hungry during times of stress.  They literally forget to eat.  And that has happened to me a couple of times this week.

The only problem with my forgetting lunch is that by the time my growling stomach reminds me that it's 5 pm and I haven't eaten since 9, I overeat to compensate.  I become a crazed grazer, where nothing satisfies me until I'm super stuffed.

Something that I made this week.  It's inspiring me so much these days!
P.S. Any Buffy fans in the house?  ;-)

It's not a good thing.

And my choices have not been the healthiest.  All I crave at that starving point in my stressful day is pizza and chips, followed by chocolate.  It's kind of crazy...

Anyway...  I'm sick of this rut.

There are still three weeks left until the final final is final, and I refuse to continue down this path.

How am I going to get out of this rut?

As far as eating goes:

• I need to remember to eat lunch.
• I need to have some healthy after school snacks on hand, like cut-up fruits and veggies, and Wasa crackers with salsa and hummus.   Yogurt and cottage cheese also need to make a reappearance in my fridge.  
• Pizza and chips can stick around too, because I'm an ex-dieter, but I think that if I remember to eat lunch, I will be less likely to crave only those things.  (Of course, if I'm wrong about that, then I will probably still be satisfied with less than an ENTIRE pizza and an ENTIRE bag of chips if I am not starving!)

Exercise...  I think that the only cure for getting out of this particular rut is to just do it.  My body loves movement, my heart craves cardio workouts, and my head always benefits from the stress-reducing endorphins.  I just need to remember this.  I also need to remember that it's okay to go for a run even if I  only have thirty minutes, or if I know that I won't be able to run again for several days.  No more "all or nothing" exercise routines!

The only good thing about this rut is that my body is finally CRAVING healthy food and exercise.  So I'm going to cook a healthy dinner tonight, and I finally went back to the gym yesterday for a treadmill 5K.

I'm officially one of those awesome people who brag
about their running on their car!  :-)

Have you ever been in a rut?  

How did YOU get out of it?

a picture of my Grandma

This is a picture of my dad's parents, known by me, my brother, and my cousin Shannon as "Grandpa and Grandma New".

This is several years ago, when they got married.  I forget the exact year...  But my dad was born in 1960 and he was their second child, and all three of their kids were some time after this picture was taken, so I'm thinking 1953 or so.

Anyway, I have been told by pretty much everyone who sees pictures of Grandma that I look just like her.

And I agree for the most part.  Except for her thick nearly black hair and her ability to tan (probably because she was 1/8 Cherokee, and my Native American-ness just can't compare to hers), I look a lot like her.

My point is, I'm happy to look like Grandma New.  She is a beautiful woman.

Good bye, labels!

In my quest for complete EDNOS recovery, I decided that it was important to figure out exactly how much of my vegan, then vegetarian, then pescatarian eating was truly because that is how I want to eat, and how much of that is my wanting a label to define my eating besides "out of control".

There are many wonderful reasons to eat vegan, vegetarian, and pescatarian.  Seriously.  I've studied all three eating styles a lot, and they are all amazing in their own special ways.

I am stepping away from those labels.  I need to find out whether I ate those ways because it was truly right for me, or if I ate those ways to maintain a certain amount of control over my eating.  Did I go vegan to lose weight?  Did I stay vegetarian and then switch to pescatarian to stay "special"?  Do I really and truly want to eat like that?

These are the questions that I am working on answering.  For now, I have no label when it comes to my eating.  Unless you count "recovering from EDNOS" and "ex-dieter" as labels.

So what does this mean for my diet?

It means that I am experimenting with cooking and eating meat again.  For now, I'm still eating mostly vegetarian.  I still believe that a mostly plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat for me, and conducive to giving me the ultimate fuel for my runs and other workouts.  Plus, I just really love to cook vegan meals!

And when I cook meat, I usually choose fish.  But I cooked and ate chicken for the first time in several years a couple of days ago.  Just to see if it felt right or wrong.  It was organic, free-range chicken from Whole Foods.  I plan to buy any meat that I cook from local farms and Whole Foods, just so that I'm not supporting factory farming, something that I am still very much against (that much I know for sure).

I have realized that all or nothing thinking can apply to this aspect of eating, too.  Just because I'm not vegetarian anymore doesn't mean that I have to eat meat every day or even every week.  It just means that I no longer avoid it at all costs.

So when will I be eating meat?  When I cook it myself, or when a loved one cooks it for me.  I will not be ordering it when out to eat, because I don't see the point in that.  I have learned to eat vegetarian or pescatarian while out to eat.

Mostly, I will still be cooking beans, tofu, vegetables, and fish.  But I will occasionally now cook chicken.  I'm not comfortable eating mammals, and I doubt that will change. And that's okay.

And no, I'm not going to grasp at the newly acceptable "flexitarian" label.  I am label-free for now.

(Be-tee-dubs, I am not saying that labels are wrong for everyone.  I understand all the different needs to label oneself and one's eating style.  I just don't think that they are healthy for ME at this point in my recovery.)  

Do you have a label for your eating style?  

Why or why not?