FATGIRLslim

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on my eating disorders – plural – for a while, but. It’s a hard subject to write about.

So much of what I can say could be taken negatively. I’m not sure if I could write it down properly.

But then COR Retreat, A Food Recovery Program, sent me this infographic about Food Addiction, and I thought… what better time to do it than now?

So, what is Food Addiction? I’ll let the infographic do the talking.

Click image for full size

I want to say that food addiction, for me, started in high school, but it didn’t. It started when I was younger, when I was being abused. I’d eat in secret, often using my lunch money to buy sweets from the shop around the corner on the way to school, leaving me enough money to buy the cheapest item on the lunch menu. I used to buy packs of sweets or mints or whatever, and I could never leave any. I had to eat the whole pack.

Say, for instance, now, I buy a multipack of crisps. Chances are I will sit and eat the entire multipack – not just the entire individual pack, but the entire multipack – in one sitting.

I cope with my feelings with food. Good mood? Food! Bad mood? Food!

When I was in college, I became an alcoholic, and started dealing with my feelings with alcohol, which was an even worse method than food. When my partner broke up with me at the start of this year, my first instinct was to go to the rum in the alcohol cupboard and take a drink. I’m mostly teetotal now, but things like that happen.

If I could be teetotal, or the food equivalent, I’d be fine.

When I was in high school, I used to sneak biscuits. I used to do whatever I could to sneak them – it usually amounted to hiding them under my boobs, and then eating them when the coast was clear, sometimes in the bathroom, sometimes in my bedroom. Sometimes I’d hide them in my school bag so I could eat them when I got to school.

When I got old enough to have my own room, I started eating in it. I hated eating where people could see me. It makes eating in public restaurants very difficult. I always feel like people are watching me. “Look at the fat girl eating, oh my god!”

Because fat people don’t have to eat to survive. We just shouldn’t eat where we can be seen.

About two weeks ago, I bought a special on a pack of biscuits. Kit-Kat, I think. £1 for something like 8 double-finger bars, and I said, “that’ll do me a wee while, then, with a cup of coffee.”

Would it hell. I had a cup of coffee that afternoon, and I had no Kit-Kats left by the end of the cup. I didn’t want to eat them all, but I couldn’t help myself, either.

The last time I had a binge, was about a month ago. I’d just had my Social Welfare money paid into my bank account, and I’d been to the shops and bought my groceries, so the fridge was full, and the cupboards were full.

There was nothing I wanted for lunch.

I walked over to The Co-Operative across the road, and I bought one of their Meal Deals: sandwich, snack, bottle of soda. They had things on cheap, too, so I bought a four pack of pork pies. A yoghurt. A pack of cream slices. A bar of tablet. A pack of crisps.

And, at the time, they were selling a 4-pack of Snickers for £1.

So I bought one of those, too.

This ties into my Food Addiction. I thought, “the pork pies will do me for lunch and dinner. The rest of the stuff’ll do me at least three days.”

I sat down, and I ate the lot of it. In one sitting.

Admittedly, it wouldn’t be called a binge if I hadn’t, but.

I couldn’t stop. It was like opening a pack of biscuits: I had to eat it all. I got halfway through it – I’d eaten the sandwich, the snack (a flapjack, I think), the bar of tablet, two of the pork pies, and I was looking at the rest going, “I could leave that until later.”

I didn’t, of course.

I ate it all. And I still ate something for dinner. I could have not eaten something for dinner – I still felt stuff at dinner time, but I ate something anyway.

I’m not entirely sure why I binge eat. I wasn’t starved as a kid.

I know there was that whole, “I have to put on weight so I’m disgusting so that I don’t get abused by men again,” thing, but now? Why do I do it now?

Now that I want to be fit and healthy and have relationships and significant others and I don’t want my knees to pack in on me, and I want a job and I want my backache to go away?

Why can’t I stop binge-eating?

Why can’t I get rid of the food addiction?

I know I’ve babbled a fair wee bit for this entry, and somehow it still just doesn’t seem enough, does it?

If you’re suffering from an eating disorder, please, get help. Don’t suffer alone. Suffering alone is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.

(Waiting for help is also hard. But not nearly as hard as suffering alone.)

-7lbs 24st 2lbs (338lbs/153.31kg) (-9lbs/4.08kg)

So that’s what it’s like to have a bare week.

I’ve kind of always wanted to do that: a week with no sweets and no junk of any kind (although I did get one sweet treat during the week when I used my Boots Advantage Points to buy a bag of Haribo Cola Bottles) and to literally just eat the food that was in the house.

Even when I went to Mum and Dad’s house on Wednesday, I didn’t have too much junk: a wee apple pie and two biscuits while watching the TV.

So that’s pretty much ruling out my actual food as the source of my plateau. Which means I’m eating more junk than I think I am, and not writing it down in LiveStrong.

Which is the more worrying thing.

I’m gonna need to nip that – I’d say “in the bud”, but I think by now, it’s a fully-blown flower – if I wanna get to goal any time soon.

Good to know, though, that my exercise isn’t going to waste after all.

Still going strong with FullFast. I think it’s really helped me this week, with it being such a bare week and all.

(I ran out of cereal last Thursday; my bread went mouldy on Friday; my milk turned sour yesterday – but I was lucky I remembered I had long-life UHT milk in my cupboard – and I’ve been eating chicken for the past three days!)

I can’t wait to go shopping and get some fish in. I’m gonna get some liver in, too, and attempt to make my own pâté. I’ve never done that before, but I really like pâté, and it’s a good Paleo thing.

Weird thing is, I don’t even like liver.

*laughs*

Before I got my new glasses last October, I thought I was imagining it when I thought that the sweat from my head was dripping down the arms of my glasses and onto my face.

But since I got my new glasses, I’ve actually noticed, physically seen drops of sweat rolling down the legs of my glasses, sometimes onto my cheeks and sometimes onto the bike.

Tonight, the air conditioning didn’t seem to be working – it wasn’t moving, at any rate, which usually means it’s not working – so it was hot as hell in the class. I was sweating after the third track, which never usually happens. It usually takes until One Direction’s One Thing, a push-up track (I think) five songs into the routine, when the sweat starts running down my face.

And the sweat was dripping down both legs of my glasses. It was ridiculous. It was dripping onto my cheeks, down my neck – best feeling in the world! – and onto the bike. I remember when I started, there was a guy called Dave – I think I talked about him a couple of times – who sweated like nobody’s business. The whole area around his bike was soaked in sweat, and I remember thinking, “I can’t wait until I make a mess like that!”

It’s not quite like that, but I do sweat onto the bike. I sometimes sweat onto the floor. I sweat onto my knees. It all depends on how my hair is that day, but…

I think it’s awesome.

Except for when my glasses sweat. That’s kinda weird, and gross.

I’m more than halfway through the first week of using FullFast, and so far, it seems to be working.

It’s a sublingual spray – meaning you spray it under your tongue – made mostly with herbs. When I do the review, I’ll do the whole ingredients, etc.

I’m not sure, yet, if I’m feeling full because I think I should feel full because I’ve used the spray, or if I’m feeling full because the spray’s actually working.

Either way, I seem to be feeling more full after my meals, when I use the spray, which is awesome.

(Of course, I’m Old Mother Hubbard right now, so I can’t snack on anything, which helps, but. Not being hungry helps. )

We’ll see how the scale looks on Sunday.

±0lbs 24st 9lbs (345lbs/156.49kg) (-2lbs/0.90kg)

If I’d realised, at the start of the year, that it was going to be one of those months for a few months, I think I’d have bought a load more Tony Ferguson shakes, had I been able to afford them, and gone back on the plan.

I’m sick of this up and down and plateau. I remember hitting a plateau when I was at Weight Watchers in Ireland where I was stuck around the 25st mark for a year and a half and it almost killed me. I was doing everything right; I was eating right. I was walking every day or doing my dance mat. And I was still stuck on this plateau.

I know, right now, that my food is not perfect. My diet has way too many bad carbs in it. But that’s what I can afford. I need a job, to be able to afford fresh fruit. (I know that Susie commented on one of my entries and made a good suggestion of frozen veg, which is just as good, if not better than, fresh veg, and I’m going to go with that.

But frozen fruit isn’t quite the same.

I just need to start eating my butternut squash or sweet potato chips/fries with my meals again, instead of cous cous. I get plenty of protein by way of chicken and fish (and some red meat, when I eat it), but at the moment, I’m simply eating way, way too many carbs.

I was also sent a sample of FullFast Food Supplement Spray to try. It’s supposed to help curb your appetite, so it’ll be interesting to see how this next week goes.

See if I can do the butternut squash/sweet potato thing. I’ve got three butternut squash in my cupboard, as well as a bag of sweet potatoes. So it’s not like I can’t. And if I get them all chopped up and ready today, and put them in the vegetable drawer, it means I can just take them out and put them in the oven when I need ‘em.

Sounds like a plan.

I’ve been promising it for… months, I think.

I’ve gone through about four different banner images, and I finally- finally got one that I liked!

In a departure from my usual style, too. Which is what was causing all the problems.

The colour scheme, though, is taken directly from the original Fat Girl Slim website, back when I hand-coded everything in HTML every week.

It’s nice and bright and cheery.

I like it.

If you’re interested, here’s one that never made it:

It’s quite terrifying.

Last night, I managed to make it to my Spin class without too much pain and hassle. I had to use my walking stick for the last quarter mile, because my back started tightening up, and I really didn’t wanna get to The Water Palace, only to have to sit out of class.

(This is why I tend to leave for classes ridiculously early. I get to sit down, once I get there, and let the aching in my back subside enough that I can do my class.)

Halfway through class, though, when we were doing pullbacks, I just…

I simply couldn’t. I know that for other people, it’s probably easy to hold onto the handlebars and get their ass over the back of the seat, but after a minute, my back started saying, “You do know that you’ve been bent over for a minute now, right?”

My back and I have conversations like this all the time.

“You do know you’ve been standing up for five minutes now, and you haven’t taken your painkillers yet?”
“You do know you’ve been hunched over this sink for fifteen minutes now?”
“Hey, you know you’re lying in bed wrong? It hurts when you lie in bed like this!”

And so on and so forth. I try to appease my back as much as possible. Four different painkillers, and I’m trying to do exercises to improve core strength, so my back isn’t taking all the strain of the weight of my stomach and boobs.

But during last night’s class, I could have cried. I’m happy with Spin because it poses very little problems for my back. (My backside is another matter.) I still feel like I got a good workout in, although I wasn’t able to do what everyone else was doing.

Ditto the standing runs; my knees can’t take the lower body isolation too much. I’m getting a tubigrip for my right knee, which has gone from, “Ooh, ow, that hurts,” to, “Wow, I didn’t know that my knee was filled with sponge and SEARING PAIN.”

I said to Doctor David, and he confirmed, it’s weight-bearing related, and the best thing I can do is keep exercising.

But the amount of pain I’ve been in this past week?

I’ve felt like giving in to it, and giving up. Just holing up in my apartment and lying in bed and crying with the pain, or sitting on my couch and eating myself into a stupor.

But d’you know what?

I’m not gonna.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that.

That’s what got me into this goddamn mess of searing pain. I know my eating habits could be better. I have an eating disorder; it’s not an easy thing to change.

But I’m trying. I’m not giving up. I’m not going to go back to lying in bed and eating an entire tub of ice cream every night after dinner while I watch DVDs.

D’you know what I’m gonna do?

I’m gonna go to my classes. I’m gonna work through the effing pain, even if it kills me – and sometimes it feels as though it might.

I am going to lose this weight, because I am sick of being in pain. I am sick of the way my body is screaming in agony because of what I’ve put it through.

I’m done with hiding in my room.

No more giving up.

I’m not giving in.

I have no idea why this didn’t actually post on Sunday. I’m very confused. My apologies…

+6lbs 24st 9lbs (345lbs/156.49kg) (-2lbs/0.90kg)

Well, that’s what happens when I don’t go to classes, but eat the same amount of food, I guess.

As I mentioned, I was having back problems this week, so I actually didn’t get to any of my classes. I went to Sunday’s Spin class, and my back was fine getting there, but halfway through class, it started getting really tight and painful.

I have no idea what’s going on with it. It’s pretty damn annoying, let me tell you.

And so is the weight gain. As I didn’t track my food this week (bad week for mental health, too; I just didn’t feel like doing anything other than playing my video game or lying in bed cringing with pain) I don’t actually know if I ate enough to constitute a 6lb-weight gain, but I feel like I didn’t.

Oh well.

Back at it this week.

I know I only posted yesterday about doing Dance Factory and everything, but to be honest, by the time it came to bed time, my back was playing up something terrible.

I’d managed to wash my dishes last night after my Dad disconnected my old washing machine (new one literally just got delivered as I started typing) and left the drain opened so all the water kept running out; I threw a bucket under it, washed my dishes, and my back kept on…

Twinge-ing.

It’s still doing it today.

When I got the message that my machine was due to be delivered today between 3pm and 6pm, I KNEW that meant it would be delivered when I was meant to be at Spinning, so I asked Mum and Dad if they’d house-sit for me, wait for it to be delivered, and then install the damn thing while I was out.

What happened, instead, was this:

I cancelled my class, because even sitting down, my back is hurting me. Standing up to make my lunch earlier (throwing some chicken pieces on a wrap with my Paleo mayo and the last of my salad), it was tightening like a bastard.

There was no way in hell I was walking to my class, doing my class, and walking back.

Not tonight.

It’s probably because I ran out of Morphine SR and Tramadol at the weekend. I went for four or five days without Morphine, and three days without Tramadol. I ended up having the worst nights’ sleep I can remember, because I kept having to turn over to relieve the pain.

And it’s just… it’s not quite settled down yet. My back’s still sore.

I’m hoping I’ll be fine by Sunday, because I really don’t want another £4 of charges for cancelling classes (I got £4 for cancelling Wednesday night’s Spin and Body Combat; I was gonna try Body Combat again, but oh god, ouch, my back. I couldn’t even think about – like today – walking up there, let alone doing class and walking back.

I’ve got an appointment to see Dr. David on Tuesday morning. I know he can’t up the amount of painkillers I’m on, but maybe he can give me another prescription for Robaxin.

I just don’t want this to set me back again. I need to be exercising, getting stronger and fitter.

I don’t want my body to fail me, after I’ve failed it for so long.

Do you remember, four years ago, when my Dance Factory Mat broke? I swore I’d get another one, or a DDR mat for my XBox, or something.

If anyone was feeling generous, I’ve got a wishlist set up on Amazon with health things – I need a Kinect, first and foremost, but anyway, moving on:- here. *shameless*

For my birthday this year, my Mum was kind enough to buy me another copy of Dance Factory – with the mat! – and today’s the first day I’ve:

1. Not been playing any other video game;

2. Had enough electricity to run a TV and PS2 and not worry about running out;
3. Not been going to a class and
4. Had a CD of my own to dance to.

I made up a whole playlist, 15 songs long, and I then deleted said playlist from my iTunes for some reason. When I boot my PS2 up next time, I’ll take a note of what’s on the CD and post the playlist. It’s kind of awesome.

Anyway. Like I said, it’s 15 songs long, about an hour – intentionally – and here’s my stats:

If you’re on “fitness” mode, it lets you enter your weight. I remember, last time I was playing this, I was too heavy. I just put in the maximum weight (350lbs, I think) and that was that.

Now I’m 339lbs, and it’s fine! That’s cool! It should have calculated everything correctly!

Obviously it’s not as strenuous as Zumba®. I only started sweating near the end, but it’s still calories burned, and something I could happily do on off days, or when I’m bored, or when I feel like annoying the shit out of my downstairs neighbours with the squeaking of my floors.

Hell, I could take the PS2 and the mat back to my parents’ place, and let my Mum have a whack at it. It’s easy enough to follow, and I think she’s missing having the Kinect from when my little sister and brother-in-law were living with them.

But yeah. Almost 900kcal in an hour, dancing to awesome music (Katy Perry, 30 Seconds To Mars, Usher, Lady Gaga, and I know it ended with THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, because how else can you end an awesome playlist of dance?) and having fun.

This is why I go to classes. It’s way more fun than any other option. If exercise wasn’t fun, I’d have quit a long, long time ago.

-2lbs 24st 3lbs (339lbs/153.77kg) (-8lbs/3.63kg)

There! Got myself moving in the right direction again.

Considering how my weekend went (fat weekend at my big sister’s house while I house-sat and pet-sat), I’m pretty happy with a 2lb weight-loss.

There was popcorn-with-butter! There was a little tub of pâté that I used on my sandwiches, and then ate on Thins! 175g that I finished over two days!

(I do like pâté, it has to be said.)

But I still went to my Spin class on Sunday. I also burned 300 calories doing a dance thing on the XBox Kinect, which is awesome, but needs some better songs.

(I was gonna do The Biggest Loser Extreme Workout, but oh, my god, the controls are so wonky on it that it took me about five minutes to get into the main menu, so I gave up on that pretty quickly, and just danced my pounds away instead.)

At least I didn’t have one of my Back Attacks™ when I came home. Usually, after staying at Linda’s, that’s when I have one. Something about different pillows or different mattresses and then coming home to my own, usually triggers an attack, but yay! No attack!

And a sweet 2lb weight-loss, too, to get me back into the 330s!