I thought perhaps I would provide some context today. WARNING: I do list some of my weights, crazy diet specifics, etc., in this post, so it could be triggering for some people.
I am 46. I have an 18 year old son, and a 16 year old daughter. I was married for almost 24 years, though the marriage wasn't always easy! My husband was an alcoholic, and suffered from mental illness (depression, anger, quite possibly bipolar, none of which are made better by alcohol). He was never physically violent, but the last couple of years, he suffered from early onset dementia as well, which seemed to simply remove whatever filters he had. Despite all that, his sudden death just three months ago (cardiac arrest) blindsided us.
But let's go back farther, and start at the beginning. I am the oldest of three, with four years between my brother and I, and six between my sister and I. I was a pretty normal kid. I ate when I was hungry. I don't remember any issues with food when I was little. We grew a lot of our own veggies, my mom did her own baking (and I often helped), we had beef from my grandparents' ranch. Looking back at pictures, I looked healthy and fine (I'm the one on the right)!
When I was 10, my parents split up. My dad had us on weekends, and the first year or so, he was too depressed to care much. We ate a lot of toast and frozen pot pies. He also bought a lot of cookies for us. By the time I was 12 or 13, he would get these giant 5 pound boxes of "broken" or irregular cookies from a discount bakery, and I would spend weekends snacking on cookies. Eventually, I started cooking dinner at least one of the two nights, because when he cooked, it was awful, and he always insisted we finish every bite. There was also a tremendous amount of pressure on me to essentially raise my brother and sister while there, because my dad was a depressed alcoholic who had never been actively involved in our lives. I was the one that made sure they brushed their teeth, took them to the library, helped them with their homework, and so forth.
At my mom's, we continued to eat a lot of veggies, and real food, not just cookies and frozen things. Even when she worked ten hours a day, she cooked dinner, and we ate together. And she was still definitely the parent. So it was quite the dichotomy.
At this point, I was still really active too. I biked a lot, walked a lot, swam at the local pool every weekend, played outside, and all that.
Around the same time my parents split, I also started puberty. I was the tallest kid in my class in 4th grade, and had breasts, and hips, by the time I was 11. It was extremely awkward, and I felt so out of place. I was reluctant to wear a bra because I already felt resentful that I had to deal with this at all, and somehow that bra would make it real. I don't think that helped!
Junior high started out okay. I wasn't completely unpopular in 7th grade, and thankfully some of the other girls were developing by then too. I'm still not sure what happened between 7th and 8th grade, but I stopped being good friends with the nicer crowd I was part of, trying to be more popular, and somehow, without my weight changing significantly, I got picked on in 8th grade. I still remember, with a shudder of horror, the first time someone mooed at me as I walked through the breezeway. Keep in mind I was 5'7" at the age of 13, and weighed about 140. Hardly cow-like. Still, I took it as a sign that I was hideously fat, and that I needed to do something about it pronto.
In high school, I had my first boyfriend, but when that relationship broke up after just a few months, I lost my more popular "friends." Wisely, I headed back to my good friends, most of whom I am still in touch with! I also started finding anorexia fiction at the library, and thought that might be the answer to my hugeness that wasn't real. I restricted my food intake, which led to binging, which led to more restriction. I tried bulimia, but could never get the hang of it. Soon enough, I discovered the diet section at the public library, where I spent countless hours already, either by myself or with friends. I was enraptured by books that promised to make me skinny if I would just follow their directions. And skinny I did get. By the time I graduated high school, thanks to diets and casual drug use, I weighed about 120, which in retrospect was grossly skinny for my build.
When I was 18 going on 19, I had some traumatic events occur, which I am not ready to detail. Suffice to say, I was very depressed for a couple of years, and that's when I began putting on weight, up to 175 pretty quickly. I tried diets again, but could never seem to get below 155-160, no matter how hard I tried. And in between diets, because I was living alone from 20-22, I could, and did, eat whatever I wanted. At the time, that included a lot of candy bars and Chinese takeout. Going back and forth between extremes (600 calories a day! Raw veganism! Nothing but protein! Candy! Candy! Candy!) did nothing for either my health or my self esteem. I also stopped exercising, except when I exercised like crazy. Everything was an extreme.
When I was 22, I met M. and we fell in love right away. We were engaged within days, married within months, and I was happy. He was a meat and potatoes kind of guy, who could eat endlessly and never gain weight. I still counted calories, wrote up absurd diets for myself, started running, stopped running, started lifting weights, stopped lifting weights.... always staying approximately at 170 pounds, and always feeling dreadfully fat. About 6 years into our marriage, we had our first child, followed 21 months later by baby number 2. I was exhausted, and now was stuck around 195. The diet binge cycle just continued on and on.
I started Intuitive Eating a couple of times over the last three or so years. Before that, I first tried the HCG diet, which called for sublingual drops of hormones twice a day, and only 500 calories. I lost 60 pounds fast, and gained it back even faster. Then, I spent a particularly grueling two years whittling myself back down to 160 by working out excessively (2-3 hours at a time, heavy weightlifting) and eating a very low fat, very low carb, very high protein diet, drinking a gallon of water every day. When my husband couldn't keep a job due to his erratic memory/behavior ( no diagnosis at that point, just issues I thought were only related to his drinking), I stopped having time to work out, and then the eating started. I found IE, the book, on Amazon, and thought I might as well look at it, but I kept putting off the purchase, thinking just one more diet would fix everything. One day I was at my beloved library, browsing the sale books by the entrance, and found the IE book for a dollar.
I devoured that book, and started right away, thinking my weight would naturally settle at something skinny. When that didn't happen ( the opposite did), I tried diets again. Whole30, which in my case was Whole5, back to my protein and green veggies 5-6 times a day for a week or so, back to binging. And back and forth, back and forth, a veritable seesaw of dieting and not-dieting. I even managed to turn IE into a diet, using the hunger-fullness scale like some sort of maniac. Am I hungry enough to eat? No, so I should wait, but not until I am too hungry, or I will want to eat everything. And am I full? I don't want to be too full. Am I really craving that cookie, or is that a sign that I am wanting some sort of nutrient I am missing? Maybe I am actually craving kale? Or chicken breast?
Several months before my husband died, maybe even as many as 6 or 7 months, I listened to The F*ck It Diet in the car during my commutes. And something in it made sense to me in a way the IE book didn't. So I ate. And I rested. I did not do any of the prompts, or anything like that, but I fed my body, and I let it rest. I stopped exercising like a maniac (5 am sessions of Insanity workouts, anyone?) or trying to force myself to exercise like a maniac. I ate the cookies when I felt like it. There was no hunger fullness scale, just hungry or full. Still, in some dark recess of my mind, I was afraid that this was my permanent body, all 205 pounds of it. And I so longed to be thin, because that would make me a better person.
On June 23rd, two days after his 51st birthday, my husband was hospitalized, and he died on the 25th. I can't talk right now about everything that was involved in this, so I won't. I didn't eat while he was in the hospital, and I only took brief naps here and there, terrified I would miss something. I barely ate in the week that followed, and then I ate almost too much, but never binged. At that point, I hadn't binged once since getting through that original pass through TFID. And I still haven't. Somehow, his passing made me realize that how my body looks right now doesn't matter as much as how it works. And I am fine with that. I had all my blood panels, screenings, and so forth done late last year, and except for a bout of pneumonia in December, which I am sadly prone to, I am healthy. And it's probably best if I tell you that truthfully, the how-I-look shift just happened in the last few days, and honestly, I'm not sure entirely why, but I'll go with it!
So I am eating. I eat when I am hungry, until I am full (I am eating a Kind bar as I type*). Sometimes I eat when I am not hungry, because it is something that looks particularly good. I do try to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, mainly because I like them, but also to keep myself healthy. I need to be okay for a long time because I am literally the only parent. I walk almost every morning. I go swimming with my daughter weekly. I hike with a friend regularly. I have started doing lunch time yoga at work once a week. And it all feels really good. I have finally stopped weighing myself, so I don't have that pressure either. I make it a point to wear clothes that I both like and that fit. My kids love that we just eat, the same foods, together. And they both like helping cook, plan meals, etc. It feels natural and normal, not like the years spent dieting and rebelling against dieting.
And that's my story.
*I didn't eat Kind bars for two years, while I was on my protein and green veggies 5-6 times a day, because they don't have a lot of protein, and they have (a little) sugar. I ate Quest bars, and One bars, which, by the way, are made in a lab as far as I know, and they are gross. But when you live on chicken breasts, egg whites, and green vegetables, almost anything tastes good. So I am really enjoying this dark chocolate, nuts, and sea salt Kind bar now.
I am 46. I have an 18 year old son, and a 16 year old daughter. I was married for almost 24 years, though the marriage wasn't always easy! My husband was an alcoholic, and suffered from mental illness (depression, anger, quite possibly bipolar, none of which are made better by alcohol). He was never physically violent, but the last couple of years, he suffered from early onset dementia as well, which seemed to simply remove whatever filters he had. Despite all that, his sudden death just three months ago (cardiac arrest) blindsided us.
But let's go back farther, and start at the beginning. I am the oldest of three, with four years between my brother and I, and six between my sister and I. I was a pretty normal kid. I ate when I was hungry. I don't remember any issues with food when I was little. We grew a lot of our own veggies, my mom did her own baking (and I often helped), we had beef from my grandparents' ranch. Looking back at pictures, I looked healthy and fine (I'm the one on the right)!
When I was 10, my parents split up. My dad had us on weekends, and the first year or so, he was too depressed to care much. We ate a lot of toast and frozen pot pies. He also bought a lot of cookies for us. By the time I was 12 or 13, he would get these giant 5 pound boxes of "broken" or irregular cookies from a discount bakery, and I would spend weekends snacking on cookies. Eventually, I started cooking dinner at least one of the two nights, because when he cooked, it was awful, and he always insisted we finish every bite. There was also a tremendous amount of pressure on me to essentially raise my brother and sister while there, because my dad was a depressed alcoholic who had never been actively involved in our lives. I was the one that made sure they brushed their teeth, took them to the library, helped them with their homework, and so forth.
At my mom's, we continued to eat a lot of veggies, and real food, not just cookies and frozen things. Even when she worked ten hours a day, she cooked dinner, and we ate together. And she was still definitely the parent. So it was quite the dichotomy.
At this point, I was still really active too. I biked a lot, walked a lot, swam at the local pool every weekend, played outside, and all that.
Around the same time my parents split, I also started puberty. I was the tallest kid in my class in 4th grade, and had breasts, and hips, by the time I was 11. It was extremely awkward, and I felt so out of place. I was reluctant to wear a bra because I already felt resentful that I had to deal with this at all, and somehow that bra would make it real. I don't think that helped!
Junior high started out okay. I wasn't completely unpopular in 7th grade, and thankfully some of the other girls were developing by then too. I'm still not sure what happened between 7th and 8th grade, but I stopped being good friends with the nicer crowd I was part of, trying to be more popular, and somehow, without my weight changing significantly, I got picked on in 8th grade. I still remember, with a shudder of horror, the first time someone mooed at me as I walked through the breezeway. Keep in mind I was 5'7" at the age of 13, and weighed about 140. Hardly cow-like. Still, I took it as a sign that I was hideously fat, and that I needed to do something about it pronto.
In high school, I had my first boyfriend, but when that relationship broke up after just a few months, I lost my more popular "friends." Wisely, I headed back to my good friends, most of whom I am still in touch with! I also started finding anorexia fiction at the library, and thought that might be the answer to my hugeness that wasn't real. I restricted my food intake, which led to binging, which led to more restriction. I tried bulimia, but could never get the hang of it. Soon enough, I discovered the diet section at the public library, where I spent countless hours already, either by myself or with friends. I was enraptured by books that promised to make me skinny if I would just follow their directions. And skinny I did get. By the time I graduated high school, thanks to diets and casual drug use, I weighed about 120, which in retrospect was grossly skinny for my build.
When I was 18 going on 19, I had some traumatic events occur, which I am not ready to detail. Suffice to say, I was very depressed for a couple of years, and that's when I began putting on weight, up to 175 pretty quickly. I tried diets again, but could never seem to get below 155-160, no matter how hard I tried. And in between diets, because I was living alone from 20-22, I could, and did, eat whatever I wanted. At the time, that included a lot of candy bars and Chinese takeout. Going back and forth between extremes (600 calories a day! Raw veganism! Nothing but protein! Candy! Candy! Candy!) did nothing for either my health or my self esteem. I also stopped exercising, except when I exercised like crazy. Everything was an extreme.
When I was 22, I met M. and we fell in love right away. We were engaged within days, married within months, and I was happy. He was a meat and potatoes kind of guy, who could eat endlessly and never gain weight. I still counted calories, wrote up absurd diets for myself, started running, stopped running, started lifting weights, stopped lifting weights.... always staying approximately at 170 pounds, and always feeling dreadfully fat. About 6 years into our marriage, we had our first child, followed 21 months later by baby number 2. I was exhausted, and now was stuck around 195. The diet binge cycle just continued on and on.
I started Intuitive Eating a couple of times over the last three or so years. Before that, I first tried the HCG diet, which called for sublingual drops of hormones twice a day, and only 500 calories. I lost 60 pounds fast, and gained it back even faster. Then, I spent a particularly grueling two years whittling myself back down to 160 by working out excessively (2-3 hours at a time, heavy weightlifting) and eating a very low fat, very low carb, very high protein diet, drinking a gallon of water every day. When my husband couldn't keep a job due to his erratic memory/behavior ( no diagnosis at that point, just issues I thought were only related to his drinking), I stopped having time to work out, and then the eating started. I found IE, the book, on Amazon, and thought I might as well look at it, but I kept putting off the purchase, thinking just one more diet would fix everything. One day I was at my beloved library, browsing the sale books by the entrance, and found the IE book for a dollar.
I devoured that book, and started right away, thinking my weight would naturally settle at something skinny. When that didn't happen ( the opposite did), I tried diets again. Whole30, which in my case was Whole5, back to my protein and green veggies 5-6 times a day for a week or so, back to binging. And back and forth, back and forth, a veritable seesaw of dieting and not-dieting. I even managed to turn IE into a diet, using the hunger-fullness scale like some sort of maniac. Am I hungry enough to eat? No, so I should wait, but not until I am too hungry, or I will want to eat everything. And am I full? I don't want to be too full. Am I really craving that cookie, or is that a sign that I am wanting some sort of nutrient I am missing? Maybe I am actually craving kale? Or chicken breast?
Several months before my husband died, maybe even as many as 6 or 7 months, I listened to The F*ck It Diet in the car during my commutes. And something in it made sense to me in a way the IE book didn't. So I ate. And I rested. I did not do any of the prompts, or anything like that, but I fed my body, and I let it rest. I stopped exercising like a maniac (5 am sessions of Insanity workouts, anyone?) or trying to force myself to exercise like a maniac. I ate the cookies when I felt like it. There was no hunger fullness scale, just hungry or full. Still, in some dark recess of my mind, I was afraid that this was my permanent body, all 205 pounds of it. And I so longed to be thin, because that would make me a better person.
On June 23rd, two days after his 51st birthday, my husband was hospitalized, and he died on the 25th. I can't talk right now about everything that was involved in this, so I won't. I didn't eat while he was in the hospital, and I only took brief naps here and there, terrified I would miss something. I barely ate in the week that followed, and then I ate almost too much, but never binged. At that point, I hadn't binged once since getting through that original pass through TFID. And I still haven't. Somehow, his passing made me realize that how my body looks right now doesn't matter as much as how it works. And I am fine with that. I had all my blood panels, screenings, and so forth done late last year, and except for a bout of pneumonia in December, which I am sadly prone to, I am healthy. And it's probably best if I tell you that truthfully, the how-I-look shift just happened in the last few days, and honestly, I'm not sure entirely why, but I'll go with it!
So I am eating. I eat when I am hungry, until I am full (I am eating a Kind bar as I type*). Sometimes I eat when I am not hungry, because it is something that looks particularly good. I do try to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, mainly because I like them, but also to keep myself healthy. I need to be okay for a long time because I am literally the only parent. I walk almost every morning. I go swimming with my daughter weekly. I hike with a friend regularly. I have started doing lunch time yoga at work once a week. And it all feels really good. I have finally stopped weighing myself, so I don't have that pressure either. I make it a point to wear clothes that I both like and that fit. My kids love that we just eat, the same foods, together. And they both like helping cook, plan meals, etc. It feels natural and normal, not like the years spent dieting and rebelling against dieting.
And that's my story.
*I didn't eat Kind bars for two years, while I was on my protein and green veggies 5-6 times a day, because they don't have a lot of protein, and they have (a little) sugar. I ate Quest bars, and One bars, which, by the way, are made in a lab as far as I know, and they are gross. But when you live on chicken breasts, egg whites, and green vegetables, almost anything tastes good. So I am really enjoying this dark chocolate, nuts, and sea salt Kind bar now.
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