My Bad Behavior

Well friends, I feel like I am winning the battle but losing the war. I have been faithful to my sticker chart which is tremendous progress for me. Today was really great. After I dropped my oldest at school I did my walk outside in this beautiful weather while pushing my 2 year old in the stroller. Holy cow what a difference a little resistence and some hills make! I felt good though, and very happy to be outside. It might be easier to track my progress on the treadmill, but my basement is much less scenic and there's just a little less pleasure when you're doing all that walking, but you never get to go anywhere!

However, I have been highly stressed out lately. Some of it just regular life with two kids stuff (my oldest is testing her limits these days and my youngest decided she doesn't like to go to sleep when it's bedtime), but there's more to the stress, a certain kind of urgency that I have yet to pinpoint the source of. So my hair is fallig out and I've been stuffing myself with food. Even if I do well getting through a day, I tend to fall apart at night.

I'm not quite as hungry during the days since I started eating breakfast, but my eating obvisiously ignores all hunger/fullness signals. Fast food is my biggest vice and all it took was one taste of it before I fell into all out junkie mode. Let me paint you a picture....

My youngest is sick and very cranky. My husband gets home a little late. When he gets in I offer to take my oldest out (she's been getting nuts from hearing the little one complain all day). Of course we stop for a quick bite to eat since there was no formal dinner that night. My daughter eats 1 quarter of the personal pizza from Pizza Hut express and is more interested in the icee it came with (she snacked before we left the house). I, on the other hand, inhale the rest of the pizza. We make it home and my husband asked if we brought back any food. I offer to run out and get him whatever he wanted. He's been trying to eat healtheir these days, but tonight he requested The Baconator from Wendy's. Of course I couldn't go there and not get myself a little something, so even though I was full I ate another cheeseburger and a side of chicken nuggets. I was disguested with myself. I considered using my old behaviors to rid myself of the garbage I ate, but I held strong and forced myself through my workout that evening.

One taste of a fast food hamburger and that was it for me though. I wanted more. I NEEDED more. It's the end of the payweek though and so I had only 2 dollars left in my wallet. So what do I do? I STOLE some cash from the drawer I've been socking extra money away for a special trip we are taking the kids on this month. I had put an extra $5 in there recently to put towards gas and now I was sneaking it out of the drawer while my husband was playing with the kids and making a secret run to Wendy's on my way to return a movie. I can't even explain the shame I felt when it was all said and done. That night, after about a year and a half of staying strong, I finally succumbed to the urge of using my old behaviors to try to undo what I had just done.

So here I sit this morning, proud of myself as I add the newest sticker to my chart this morning, but really I just feel like it's all just a lost cause.

My Return to Order

Back to the daily grind!

Vacation was exhaustingly fun, as vacation with young kids usually is. All diet and exercise bets were off this week, though some of our activities required a lot more movement than I would have done at home! I really just wanted to give myself an emotional vacation from eating/body issues though and I feel it was a great boost.

I am ready to get myself on some kind of track. I realize that if I keep focusing on the big picture I will forget about all the babysteps that are required to get me there and thus set myself up for failure (as usual). I have a plan that I am going to set into action. It focuses on making small changes and building on those as I master each one.

As the week unfolds I will share my plan and goals and such (I'm still perfecting some details). It is good to be home and refreshed though, and feel like I can tackle what lies ahead for me!

My inner voices

One symptom of those with eating disorders is low self esteem. I am no stranger to this. I may hide it well sometimes,even to myself, but in reality I think very little of myself and my abilities.

Way before I ever became a "fat girl" I had a fat girl mentality. I put everyone's needs above my own, I was the support, the shoulder to cry on, the cheerleader for everyone else, but never once expected any of this in return. My interests included helping others attain their goals while I let mine fall by the wayside. I didn't know how to ask for help when I needed it so I suffered silently thinking everyone else's issues were more important than my own and wrote bad poetry to soothe myself. It was around this time of my life that I became bulimic.

This whole frame of mind got worse as I got older. When I made it to college, I had a chance to start fresh and find myself. Instead, I clung for dear life to old habits and lost myself even more. Instead of developing my own personality and interests, I latched on to my boyfriend and became an extension of his.

I forced myself to stay safely in an emotional cocoon by shutting myself off to anything beyond my boyfriend and handful of close friends. I was terrified of becoming my own person. What if I did something stupid, or no one liked me, or worse, I failed. My thoughts were, if there was even a remote chance I would fail at something I shouldn't bother trying.

It was less scary to watch life from the sidelines instead of living it like everyone else, but it was not nearly as fulfilling. I was sad and angry at myself for being this way and so I started eating to avoid dealing with those emotions. Only this time I stopped purging due to my boyfriend's concerns for my health (he was the first person I'd confided in about my eating). That's when I started getting fat. Eating not only dulled the emotions but also built a physical wall which I was able to use as an excuse to hide. I can't do ____ I'm fat! No one wants to be friends with you...or so the voices in my head would remind me.

I eventually married that boyfriend even though deep down I couldn't understand why he really wanted to be with me. He has been a continual souce of positive energy in my life and proved himself to be the best husband and father anyone can ask for. I am grateful, and yet feel like I don't deserve him.

It wasn't until I had kids though, that I was forced to dig deep inside myself. It's totally cliche, but they really do make me want to be a better person. Becoming a mother, especially for the first time, is HARD! It's scary, exhausting, emotional and if you don't do a good job the consequences are so tremendous. Yet, not only did I take that responsibility on, I also took on the role of supporter for other first time parents dealing with some hard times. Again other people's needs before my own (still didn't know how to ask for help myself) and yes helping them deal with their issues kept me from focusing on my own, but this time the outcome was a little different. Becoming a parent was without a doubt the single most important and difficult task I had ever undertaken. But I did it, and I did it well! I started to realize that even though something was hard, I was able to do it.

No one goes into parenthood realizing the awesome responsibility it holds. Even the most prepared people don't really understand just how it's going to affect them until they experience it (I thought I had it all figured out until I was put to the test!). It's probably a good thing that I had no idea otherwise I might not have thought I was able to handle such a responsibility. Not having the option to quit when things got hard made me realize that I am capable of so much more than I gave myself credit for, even if do struggle along the way.

So while the experience has been eye opening, one doesn't simply throw old habits to the wind. I am learning that I have more potential than I thought. It's still scary and difficult, but I'm also learning that some things are worth the risk and effort. But, the biggest thing that I've learned is that the only difference between me and the women who are successful in what they do is that they believe in themselves and that they deserve to be happy.

My husband always told me that when I was really set on doing something I always managed to make it happen. I suppose I just have reprogram the voice in my head to say, "it's hard, but you can do this" and "sure you're fat, but your health and happieness are still worth working for".

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom
-Anias Nin

My Gestational Diabetes

So I think it's time to give you all a little more insight as to what I'm all about. Yes, I desperately want to get these 50 pounds off my body. However that's not my only focus. I also want to get healthy, maybe more than than I want to be thin. I am a big fan of natural health and a firm believer that we are what we eat.

During both my pregnancies I developed gestational diabetes. That's when my study into health and nutrition began. Diet alone was enough for me to keep my diabetes under control and my babies healthy. That was my first hand experience that our diets and lifestyle (they made me exercise too) have a profound effect on our health.

When I went for my first appointment at the diabetes center, I was told by the nutritionist (who ironically was a lot fatter than me) not to worry as long as I follow the diet. She told me that most people who end up needing insulin do so because they don't want to be bothered to follow the diet correctly. That was kind of alarming, so I made sure to follow the program (and I do admit it got hard at times). I even took it one step further and started doing a lot of research on diabetes and nutrition. The fat lady at the diabetes center told me about eating the right ratio of protien, carbs and fat at each meal and about eating at certain times and such, but she still propagated an unhealthy way of eating. Somehow I just didn't believe that a Sausage McMuffin was a good breakfast for someone who has made themselves sick by eating crap. Oh, they tried to give me the line that it wasn't my fault that I developed diabetes. That somewhere in my family runs this disease and that's why I have it. And so as I ate my first Sausage McMuffin on the way to work I thought, that's a bunch of BS! Even with the predisposition to the disease, I wouldn't have developed it if I had eaten a diet rich in whole natural foods and went for a freaking walk once in a while. It was my diet of refined carbs and junk food and my couch potato lifestyle that made me fat and made my body unable to metabolize the excess amounts of glucose I was pumping into it.

That was just the beginning of my nutritional crusade. After each kid was born I got on my horse to lose weight. Last year I even had a pretty sucessful bout until I fell off the wagon. We'll get to that part of the story in time. I started slacking on all this, so I really let myself slide. I see a difference in my kids too. My youngest (who's now 2) is already developing my bad eating habits and I can't get her to eat any vegetables at all. My mom says paybacks are a bitch...apparantly I was like that as a child.

Anyway, I know that taking in less calories than I burn will yield a net weight loss. That's not enough for me. I am looking for a diet (lifestyle or whatever you want to call it) that will address my body's health concerns and not only allow me to lose weight, but also improve my overall health. So come back and visit if you are at all interested in a natural way of losing weight. I will share not only my personal story, but any valuable information I learn along the way! And of course I would love to hear from anyone else who has information or experiences to share!