EMMH part four - Overeating

 I've got to say, it really sucks how exercise and a routine and eating well can help so much with mental health - why, you might ask. It does sound counterintuitive. After all, wouldn't a mentally ill person do anything they can to get better? Well, yes - but when I personally am feeling down, I have no will to do what I need to. With the utmost honesty, I think it was the solstice that helped me get back into some acceptable stuff.

So, we're here to talk about overeating, right?

Well, since I was small, I used to eat all that was given to me, then seconds, and then the dessert. I don't actually recall this conversation, but my mother does: when I was really young, my grandparents would tell me how good a kid my cousin was, because she would eat a lot, and she was such a puffy child and so on. Well, one day, the story says, I ate eight wiener sausages. Eight. Not even as an adult would I eat that many. But ever since I can remember, it had been like that. When someone would cook for me, I had to show how much I liked the food by eating as much, or possibly even more than humanly possible. When I was feeling lonely, I would go out in the kitchen and eat whatever I could find - and I was feeling lonely very often, I just didn't notice when I got older, because of how used I had gotten to just eating it away. I was threatened I'd get diabetes when I ate a bunch of strawberries with sugar. When I was out in the town, walking with my grandfather for example, I'd beg him for a chocolate bar, saying I was hungry. I was too small and have no idea what it was good for - was I testing that he was listening to me? was I bored? I only know I wasn't actually hungry.

This actually made things very hard in the beginning. I knew I was eating a lot, but that was when I knew to stop: when I physically couldn't eat anything else. I didn't even notice how full I was. One day I went to a mall, had a salad, a soup and an entire KFC menu with half a liter of coke. That resulted in me feeling so full I thought I would explode. I was millimeters away from throwing up, and yet somehow i couldn't, maybe because I didn't want to. I survived though, and I wish I could say that point had been the switch, it wasn't. 

Each time I tried calorie counting I would eat something, log the calories and feel not full enough - also, not hungry anymore, but I thought I'd get hungry too soon after, so I'd get incredibly frustrated. I tried reframing things, and though it didn't work for me, maybe it would work for someone else, or perhaps a therapist will tell me why it didn't.

I had a system of sitting down in the kitchen with my prepared meal, then putting everything away, except for this little black notebook I had. I would write the date, time and name of that meal, then what I was eating, and how I was feeling when I sat down to eat. Then I'd eat, agonizingly slowly: I'd take a bite on my fork, chew it like 20 or 30 times, and I had to set down my fork for chewing, so I'd take the next bite after I swallowed. At the end, I'd note down if I was still feeling hungry, and how I was feeling otherwise.

This didn't work for me, I think because of how much effort it needed. There was also no reward in it.

I was doing this, along with calorie counting and... circa a 1500 calorie allowance, in the beginning of 2020. It was going really well, I lost about 3,6 kilos in January. In February, things started to get messy for me, and when the lockdown started in March, I had already given up on the weightloss thing.

My only companion throughout the lockdown was food. I'd order some delivery, get to talk to a human for a bit while grabbing it, then eat it and put all those messy feelings away. I wanted to numb myself, because of the pandemic situation. I'm gonna sound super emo here, but I legitimately felt pain for each and every death, there were times I thought I'd trade my life for everyone else's, but, of course, this is not the Bible, I could not do that. So I couldn't deal with my feelings, either with being locked up and bored and stressed, or later with the pain and loss I felt for total strangers.

And this might minimize the presence of my partner in those times. He didn't feel that significant to me then, but of course he still helped a lot. I genuinely believe that without him, I wouldn't be here. Maybe I wouldn't be dead, but I'd be totally fucked. So yes, it is a shitty thing to say that food was my only companion, and I'm not gonna make excuses for that, it is how I experienced it then.

When I lost my job, everything went off the rails entirely. I've said this, I'd just lay in bed, eat and sleep. I didn't take my trash out, I would try looking for jobs, but wouldn't succeed, and everyone just kept bugging me about jobs jobs jobs. My father took me to a psychiatrist, and I genuinely don't recall what we said then. I do know we mentioned my eating, or my weight, asked me something that I'll very crudely put as "why are you so fat?" And I told her it's what a good kid does. And she said, no, a good kid eats enough, not too much. I looked at her and said "that's not the message I'd been getting". My own therapist says I'm suppressing these memories because they would be hurtful, because I want to adore my father and him putting me in that situation would not let me do so. And I genuinely don't know if it's this, or my general fucking disdain for life back then, because I barely recall anything. Maybe both. I was back to my highest weight, at around 115 kilos. And no new year's resolution or willpower or job prospects actually got me out of the cycle of eating all the stuff ever. My house was full of delivery bags and boxes.

For KM, I wouldn't train in my uniform, because it felt awful on my body. I could barely tie my belt. My pants kept flipping down and letting my stomach pour out. And the jacket part almost didnt touch over my stomach. Once I had a... I don't want to say panic attack, maybe it wasn't as strong, but a real emotional crisis, I simply couldn't make myself go to training because I knew I would have to put those clothes on and it made me hate myself. When I finally did end up putting it on, I had the same crisis in the changing room, and the way I finally got through it was hugging each item to my chest and recalling all the wonderful things I'd done and learned, the great moods I'd felt while wearing it.

And how did I decide this was actually overeating, if it was the normal amount for me for so long?

That is the best question of the universe right now, and the only reason I'm writing all this down. The answer feels quite simple: after starting the training program, I was somehow automatically getting different impulses. I thought I would have to control myself, because I'd have the appetite for everything, including the kitchen sink, and that somehow didn't happen. Sure, I do end up craving carbs sometimes, and eating a 750 gram pizza is a legitimate food option to me, but so is a salad or a smoothie or a protein shake. Chocolate still makes my life hard, but I've had a bottle of soda in my apartment for a few days and I only drink a few gulps of it, I don't have to restrain myself, I don't crave it at all. This is not to say I don't have my moments: when I get extremely angry, for example, I still want to stuff my face until I pass out. As we can see in my Drama post, when I came back from my father's place, I found that my landlady had been here and cleaned some of my stuff, which put me through all sorts of responses, ranging from shame to anger. I ended up ordering KFC: 8 chicken strips, large fries, half a liter of coke, a wrap and a sandwich. And I ate it all. I'd never felt so full in weeks. After intuitively having smaller portions for so long, it felt very similar to the almost throwing up experience.

I couldn't do my training properly that day. It was four hours after I'd eaten, and I still felt so uncomfortably full from all of it that I couldn't move. During that time of training did I realize that that amount was more or less what I'd normally eaten in a day, after which I sometimes went and trained (with very similar results energy-wise), and sometimes just laid in bed, hating myself. So, obviously, that was too much. Not only in calories, but in volume.

I'm really hoping that this is like how Steve Zim's program is described, that you have to keep trying and trying, and then once it all pops into place and you start getting results. I'd be lying if I said that the facts that the workouts are getting easier, that my belt is getting looser, that my weight is going down didn't have a positive impact on my moods. I'm still not sure what I'll be doing after my Insanity timelines are over, because this is just the beginning. I started at around 112 kilograms on the 20th of March, and today morning, five weeks and two days in, I weigh 106,4. I am enormously happy. I did this. I was in a place where I thought there was no way to recover from, and I'm getting out of it. My goal weight is 60 kilograms, which was already far away when I weighed 80, or 90, or 95, so when I was 115, it seemed like an alternate universe. But I am finally learning healthy patterns (of eating. I really hope I'm not overexercising), after 24 years on this planet. These patterns are very malleable at the moment, though. I can't and won't live in fears of weddings, family dinners or sudden frustrations. I just don't know how to cope yet.