Trying to revamp my Health/Eating
After a giant piece of Oreo cake, a LARGE quantity of pretzel sticks, two helpings of chicken casserole and a nervous breakdown yesterday, I’ve decided to try and change my eating habits for good (both for the better and for the long term.)
I want to use this space to chronicle my daily ups, downs and fulls or empties. It’s no secret (or maybe it is?) that I have a long and storied history with emotional eating, dieting, anxiety induced eating/starvation, etc. I do not have, and likely never will have a good relationship with food (without the help of a mental health professional, which I can’t afford.)
But, that doesn’t mean I can’t try to normalize my relationship with food and my body on my own. It’s likely I will always have body image issues, but I can at least feel better and have more energy. Here be my (abridged) life story:
Growing up, I was always the fat sister. My father liked to call me his “little linebacker” which left an indelible mark. I never self identified as fat, nor do I think other people would have labeled me as such, but I was always a little chubby, particularly compared to my sister and my mother, both naturally thin.
High school brought added pressures, though I still maintain that the cruelty inflicted in middle school is what warped my brain. In any case, HS would be the beginning of the periods of binging and severely restricting that would rule the rest of my life. One day I would eat only half a peanut butter sandwich with water, salad for dinner, no breakfast. The next day, I would split fries with my best friend at lunch and have pizza with ice cream for dinner. I think my whole family generally viewed the weekend as “eat crappy/ whatever” time and I still can’t break that. I stayed slim, likely due the fact that I would reduce myself to one piece of food a day if I felt I needed to “lose weight” - I was around 114 lbs through all of HS (for reference, I am 5’2”.) Plus, my mother generally didn’t allow sugary snacks, and cooked us healthy dinners when she could. I was never active because I was TOO COOL to be a jock (god, what an ass I was.)
In college I gained 15lbs freshman year, mostly from ingesting nothing but chicken fingers and fries. I lost about 7 lbs by the summer before my sophomore year, but still wanted to get back down to my high school weight. I became more active in my sophomore year, going to the gym and doing cardio about 4 times a week, and limiting what I ate to what I felt were “healthy” foods only and coffee. As you can imagine, this was not sustainable and after I met my boyfriend, lived with 5 guys and spent a few years working my way through paying for off campus housing, I had gained about 25 lbs, and was the biggest I ever was.
I used WW to lose 20 lbs, and felt like I looked good, but was miserable. I agonized over every little calorie and piece of food and didn’t even feel like a person anymore. What’s more, I began to go back to my old habits of finding ways to severely restrict after I “slipped up” or ways around the system - eat a fat free yogurt with nutrasweet because it is only 1 point. Only eat 10 pts. a day to make up for binges. At this point, I was restricting myself to only about 600 cals a day, then ridiculously binging on the weekends ( sweet and sour, fast food, taco bell and fries, you name it - I’ve eaten it) Which, as you can imagine, has now made my metabolism so low that when I do try to eat normally, I gain a ton of weight.
That pretty much brings me up to date with my latest nervous breakdown. So, at this point in my life I’d like to document how a fast food junkie like me can attempt to eat healthfully, not scale obsess and add more exercise into her life. Just a heads up, I don’t cook. Well, that’s not true, I cook on weekends. I seem really lazy and stubborn, but I am just really busy (two nights a week I have school until 9 pm after working 8:30 to 5:30, the other two nights I work a second job from home that requires total silence and computer use until about 9 or 10 pm) And I know there have to be other people like me who just can’t sacrifice that time to make anything. So, I think my trials (and successes!) with navigating staying healthy in a jam packed life - did I also mention that I am trying to plan my wedding? - will be of use to other people like me who just don’t have time to cook yummy, healthy stuff every day.
Plus, I’m hoping writing down what I eat and my feelings on here will keep me more on track instead of doing “secret” eating or emotional eating. This is in no way a “diet”, because at 25 (26 in 2 weeks) I really want to stop dieting and start eating in an intuitive and sustainable way, and maybe as a side bonus get in shape for my wedding.
Of course, I’ll still have my inane celebrity/fashion posts on here, and people will still be able to groan and roll their eyes at that. But sharing my food experiences will hopefully help me stop having such an agonizing relationship with eating and body image.
