A couple weeks ago I went to the gym with my brother, Tom. On the way there, he and I were talking about how I am progressing with my lifestyle change/way of eating/diet/whatever you want to call it. He commented that maybe I have to eat this way forever if I want to maintain a certain physique. He's right, of course. You can't lose weight by carefully watching every crumb of food that goes in your mouth and then expect to maintain that loss by going on the All Chocolate Donut Gem diet. That makes no sense. And as much as that is true, and as much as I know that monitoring what I eat is a big part of what I need to do, it's really more of a piece of a larger puzzle.
I have had issues with food since I was about 10 years old. I eat when I'm upset or bored. I go through cycles when I care so little about what sort of nutrition I am putting in my body that I just eat and eat and eat junk and treats and nothing healthy. The food, even the things I think I love, doesn't even taste good. Eating makes me feel worse, but I don't stop.
From mid-February to early June of this year I put on another 15 pounds purely by not caring what I was eating. Chocolate donuts for breakfast. School lunch or something even less nutritious a few hours later. After school snack (not an apple). Fast food for dinner. Stopping at Starbucks for a Latte and a cookie or something else with 700 calories when I was in Target. Basically killing myself with food. My clothes got tighter and my self hatred came out in full force. I was probably eating close to or even in excess of 4000 calories a day, some days.
The result of the kind of championship eating I was doing was losing my hunger and fullness cues. I would sometimes eat until I could barely swallow more food. Then, I would eat something else a little while later, when there was no way I could possibly be hungry. This is a big problem.
I knew something had to change, so when I started talking to one of my girlfriends about how a bunch of us were struggling to lose weight (although technically I was not really even trying), I had the idea that we should do a friendly competition. I know myself well enough to know that I am most inspired by to prospect of "winning" even if there is no tangible prize. I officially started my changes on June 8th. Back at the gym. Counting carbs. Counting calories (even though you really aren't supposed to when on the Protein Power plan). Taking those extra minutes to ask myself if I am really hungry before I put food in my mouth. Chewing gum or drinking something if that will satisfy me just as well as food. All the stuff that I'm supposed to be doing, I'm doing, yet that same problem is rearing it's head. My hunger cues are still ALL out of whack.
Rather than eating all the time, I will go hours without a bite. I will look at my food log and make the connection that maybe the reason I feel awful at 4:30 pm is that I have eaten 550 calories since 6:00 am and burned 340 of them at the gym. I am sure that I am feeling hungry, but my brain doesn't trust that feeling. And since I can push it down, or just take a nap (summer vacation!), it now takes effort to remember, "Oh yeah. You CAN eat. You need to."
I'm not trying to say that I've gone from being a binge eater to a borderline anorexic in two weeks or anything. I am saying that the hardest part of all of this is figuring out what my body needs and when it needs it. To continue with the progress I'm making, I have to navigate this unfamiliar sea of exercise and nutrition and balancing the two. I don't just want to be down to my "skinny" weight. That's not enough. I want to be healthy and strong and feel good. I want to be confident in a way it's hard for me to feel when I'm uncomfortable in my skin.
So, while my brother is right that I will likely have to continue eating this way, or some variation thereof, for the rest of my life, it's not the only battle I have to face. Like just about everything in life, it's more complicated than that... more involved. It's certainly not more than I can handle, but it's not as easy as just changing what I eat. I have to change a lot of things about how I live my life, and I think that is really the hard part.
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