Month: August 2019

So my last post might’ve seemed a little bit negative, and it was. At that point, I was feeling very down about things. But I’m posting again to say that since then, things have got a lot better. Somehow, I’m now on day 5 without a feast. Which is the longest I’ve gone in quite a while. What’s changed? I don’t know. Maybe that crash the other day caused me to reassess and resteel my resolve to beat this motherf***er once and for all.

I’ve definitely been doing everything I can to ensure I don’t go hungry for too long – no skipping meals, no compensating, just eating.

Last night my wife decided we’d have a packet mix risotto for dinner, which is a bit of a deviation from our normal Tuesday night meal. Six months ago this probably would have freaked me out, but now? I couldn’t care less. I covered up the macros with my thumb when I looked at the cooking instructions, and managed to completely avoid reading them. The last step was to stir in a teaspoon of margarine – and I didn’t skip it.

I’ve had dessert every night (last night it was warm chocolate brownie and ice cream; on Sunday night it was cheesecake!). Lately, eating one dessert has often triggered the desire to eat many more, but somehow in recent days the Dmitry voice has been fairly quiet.

I’ve also been doing my best to let his thoughts pass through my head without reaction too. For example, I often find myself preplanning meals way before they happen (like I’ll be about to have breakfast, and will start thinking about morning tea, or some other subsequent meal, and how the day’s gonna snap together) and I’ll simply tell myself to forget about that, and worry about it when the time comes. Of course, I bring food to work to make sure I do have those snacks available, but as I said, there are plenty of shops nearby to work too, and often people bring food to work; today I didn’t bring sweet stuff, but fortuitously a colleague bought chocolate cake. And yes, I ate a slice 🙂

I think that doing this is helping to ease the food focus, which is helping to ease the scarcity mentality, which is helping to limit the desire to eat the entire contents of our pantry. But still – it’s only been 5 days. I’ve gone this long before, and relapsed into old habits, so I don’t want to get ahead of myself. However, I am cautiously optimistic.

My Fitbit is on eBay, and will sell in the coming days.

I am getting better, slowly but surely.

On a related note, a timely post from Tabitha this morning:

Getting your weird little OCD traits to work for you in recovery

Lots of this stuff rang true for me. I started writing a bit about it, but time is short right now, and I decided I couldn’t do it justice at the moment, and I want a coffee. A milky, frothy one, from the bakery. Because that’s how I roll now.

I’m feeling pretty discouraged at the moment.

This week started badly. Binged in front of the F1 on Sunday night. Actually gave up on watching the race, because I was struggling to stay awake and ridiculously full. Had a fairly big all-day binge on Wednesday as well. Today (Friday) I ate all the food I’d packed for work by 10:30am, plus some extra cake and biscuits, then made sure I ate plenty at lunch and afternoon tea as well.

Being depressed about how I’ve been eating is leading to a vicious cycle of eating more to try and not feel depressed and I’m beginning to wonder how much of my eating these days is actually ‘extreme hunger’ and how much is just me feeling totally depressed and empty inside, and wondering if it’s all worth it, and if I didn’t have a wife and daughter relying on me, would this be a good time to ‘take the open door‘?

I want to talk about positive things. Learning guitar. I bought one. It arrived Tuesday and I’ve had a couple of brief attempts at working through some beginner lessons. I want to talk about the correlation between eating disorders and an over-fixation on health and body image, my loss of identity (apart from fitness) since having a child, and how learning guitar is an attempt to reinvent myself, and find other means of evaluating my self worth.  But of course if I fail at learning it, this might backfire.

It does seem as if it is taking less food to actually feel satisfied and stop a binge. Maybe that’s progress, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve been making an effort to eat so much more earlier in the day, that I physically can’t fit much more in.

I hate to think what I weigh at the moment – it’s been two weeks since I last stepped on the scales. I think I look fat, and I think the tightness of most of my clothes is exacerbating that feeling. Maybe I need to go back to wearing more baggy clothes so I don’t have to deal with the constant reminder of how much weight I’ve gained.

And now it’s after 10pm, sitting here bloated after a big dinner, half a tub of gelato, countless biscuits, cakes, chocolates, chocolate brownie and hot chocolate drinks, I know it’s gonna be another hot, sweaty night of shit sleep and aggro with the wife and daughter and dog and I’m wondering when all this is going to end, who will I be when it does, and will I be happy with the person I’ve become?

I posted this on my Insta this morning, but as I’m trying to keep this blog kinda anonymous, I won’t link and will repost with a bit more detail here…

It may not be obvious but the difference in size and weight between these two bags is enormous.

I got the bag on the left in June 2017 in my Avatar Nutrition days. It’s an Innovator 500 by Six Pack Fitness. Let’s be prepared, I said. I loaded each compartment with different varieties of snacks, my own tea and coffee, protein powders and shakers, cutlery, as well as my standard lunch and the other foods I planned to eat for the day. I was gonna hit my macros come hell or high water!

I’ve been carrying this bag to work every day for two years. For the last few months or so I’ve not eaten anything out of it except my standard lunch. And it’s so big and unwieldy… I have to stop and wait for people in the hallway so I don’t bump into them with it, and given that I also carry a backpack with my laptop and other equipment in it, it’s a pain in the bum.

The stupid thing is, my lunch is only in it from the kitchen to the car, then the car to the fridge. I’m office bound most days, with access to a fridge, microwave, and a fair few shops within walking distance. So it’s completely unnecessary, but yaknow… habits.

Today I downsized and put my lunch into this smaller bag instead – it’s maybe a quarter of the size and weight. It might seem like a pretty minor thing, but this is another (small) step in the process to fixing my relationship with food. The smaller bag is so freeing – and ya know what? Food is just food. Meals don’t have to be perfect. If I’m hungry – I’ll go buy something. And in fact, I plan to – because shop bought sandwiches taste so much better than what I make at home, and actually, I might feel like a burger.

Don’t let food become a chain around your neck. Don’t let a fixation with your body size and shape ruin your life. I did, and I regret it so much. So many arguments at mealtimes, yelling at my wife and daughter because I was hangry, avoiding social and family events because the food didn’t suit me, or (worse) attending and starving myself because I refused to eat sausages because OMG SO MUCH FAT… or compulsively walking day in and day out to try and burn off the calories and make sure I stay lean.

It was a pale imitation of a life and it’s one that I refuse to live any more. Food is good. All of it. It’s there to be enjoyed. My body is the least interesting thing about me. It really is – and the benefits of eating enough food to fuel my body are evident in my energy levels, my gym performance, and my overall happiness.

That’s not to say I want to get fat again, or that I don’t care what I eat. And it’s true that I’m bigger than I want to be right now. But this is all part of the process of attaining balance in my life, and some sort of peace with food.

I refuse to diet again until I am confident I can do it without turning into a monster. Til then, I’ll just have to live with how I look. It’s really far less important than how I act and how I feel.