Baby Steps To A Healthy Relationship With Food

TRIGGER WARNING: Eating disorder stuff.

 

Here is the honest truth about what I did in the last month.

 

It was really hard.

 

The Game On Diet probably isn't hard for people who don't have health problems. If you don't have heart problems you can put low fat shredded cheese on everything and call it a day.

 

However, I have Stage 3 Hypertension.  I have to keep my sodium count under 1500mg.  I wasn't at first because it seemed like too much change at once, but then my weight loss stalled and I was forced to look at the cause.

 

When I lowered my sodium second week, my diet became very boring.  Plain broccoli. Plain sweet potato. No grains.  Low sodium everything. My days off consisted of ice cream, vegetarian dishes, and the occasional salty snack. I haven't had pizza in weeks and I used to be a daily pizza eater.

 

Soon I learned to love my salady meals, even when my coworker said it looked like horse feed.  Fruit salad and ricotta cheese with nuts. Strawberries and spinach with flaked chicken breast and olive oil. Eggs over medium so I could dip broccoli in egg yolk instead of toast with sliced banana.

 

When I first started the program, I was exercising 25 minutes a day with a short Zumba program on my iPad. Then I started adding slow walks a few times a day. Those slow walks became fast walks, and I eventually added intervals to those. Then I started taking daily 90 minute fun walks to artists like Don Henley, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson to keep pace.

 

There was one point during the diet where I was quite bitchy and desperately in need of the chocolate Hershey miniatures my husband was currently devouring a few feet away from me and I had to banish him from the room.

 

That's when it got really hard.

 

I ate alone a lot. I didn't want to be around other people's food.  I didn't want to be seen desperately stress-eating broccoli because I was upset about a math problem or some petty argument.  I felt embarrassed that I had to eat five times a day, because you can't really hide that and I didn't want anyone to see me eating.

 

And therein lies the problem. I'm so, so easily triggered into old unhealthy behaviors.  I remember how I used to skip lunch and dinner then go home and eat in secret in my room. My mom would find gross molded hidden food in my bedroom all the time. I had nutritionists and doctors worried about me, trying to convince me to eat.  They even told me that I would get fat if I continued to starve and then binge, and I didn't listen.  I would hang out with people as long as they weren't eating, because the appearance and sound of chewing freaked me out.  It is something I've never been able to fully heal from.

 

I started to try my best to eat at least one meal with Greg a day, even if it was just five minutes.  Just so I could see his smile.  Just to have a nice experience.

 

I decided there had to be a way to distract myself from all the ways my stupid brain wanted to torture me.

 

So I focused on my teammate.  I checked in with her and formed a bond.

 

I reached out to my friends.

 

I picked on the other teams, sending them razzing messages, teasing them with photos of giant cupcakes.

 

I cuddled with my cat and my loving husband.

 

Sometimes I just sat on the couch and cried for a while.

 

And of course there was always the comfort of walking or running.  I can't explain the feeling of just being in nature, looking up at the trees and the stars with every step, dancing my feet along the pavement with every breath.

 

I'm getting a lot of compliments on the physical change just ten pounds on my tiny frame made. I really am proud of that as a representation of what I'm trying to do.  It bothered me that I had excess weight, but what bothered me more was that I wasn't taking care of myself. I was seriously at a breaking point last month and I was truly hurting. Things are more manageable now.  I traded in pain from water retention and inactivity for what I thought was going to be excruciating pain from working out. But it wasn't. My body feels strong now.  And as I keep doing this my body will be stronger and I will work very hard to create a healthy relationship between myself and food.