I lost weight until September 2007 with no probs really. Then I went on a 3 week trip to New Zealand and gained 5 kg. I lost it again by Christmas but after that my weight bobbed around as I started to struggle with binge eating. The picture in my avvie was taken then. I didn't know how to handle the binge eating issue. I kept trying and I'd come on here and rave on for a while, then binge again. I got sick of myself talking about the same thing when I wasn't making any real progress with my actual weight. I'd eat well for a week or two but I was down to 70 kg (+/- ~3 kg), so a day or two with binges would cripple the loss. Also, about the time I left here I had a lot of incidental stress in my life. My mum moved from her home into a place in some units for old people near me, and didn't cope with the move well. I got caught up in trying to help my daughter prepare for a dance competition (which I stressed about a lot more than she did). Also, I started working in a temporary job that I found very challenging. And at some date in amongst all that I found myself coping with issues related to a friendship that had been bothering me for a while. It ended arse up and left me grieving and guilt ridden. I stopped coming here about then.

I didn't give up on my goal to be healthy, but I thoroughly lost my way. I found information thin on the ground but I did try to use whatever material I found about binge eating. I tried spasmodically to find a way to make it work again - usually with the most success during school breaks. Sometimes my trying was purely intellectual - just hunting for relevant information. Now and again I'd find something that I thought I could apply and work through it, but mainly I just learned more about what I was doing, and made some spasmodic progress with my emotional issues. I had a couple of patches where I lost weight but it was mainly all gains.

I found out fairly early on that CBT is the therapy for Binge Eating Disorder, though at first I hadn't had it long enough to qualify as having a disorder. Umm. You are supposed to have had the behaviours for 6 months before it's a disorder. So when I first got it, I could see that I didn't fit the criteria. Plus, the sites I saw didn't offer much in the way of strategies beyond seeing a professional. At that time I couldn't see the need. I probably could have been helped and recovered faster if I'd seen someone back then - but maybe not - it's not necessarily easy to find the right person to be a helper. Also, not long before I started posting here again I read something Steve quoted : [I]"for every one person who is clinically mentally ill in this regard, there are thousands who are sub-clinically fucked up"[/I] [url]http://weight-loss.fitness.com/541165-post66.html[/url] and I thought yep that's me. Sub-clinically fucked up. For some reason I found that to be a helpful idea. I guess I was clinically fucked up for a while but before that - not technically and now also - not really. I'm not sure how the way I ate in years gone by fits in with me being a binge eater. I recall patches of eating in a binge like way, but I didn't fight it or become so distressed about it, and I didn't try to analyze what I was doing. I did perceive trying to lose weight as stressful though - which it wasn't really when I first joined here, and which it isn't again now.

Recently, one on-line trail led to me to a [URL="http://www.livinglifetothefull.com/"]site[/URL] where they were offering on-line self help using CBT - not for bingeing - just for whatever was wrong with you that CBT might help with. I got so unreasonably cranky with the process while I was trying to register, that I took it as a sign of subconscious resistance against a change and registered anyway. I was cranky with every step I took on the site. No way could I relate to the example of they gave of how someone with anxiety might behave - until a lightbulb moment a couple of days later. And it did help. I think what I learned there was what I needed to know.

I'd already made some progress before that. My husband suggested we could do without having chocolate in the house, I agreed. A couple of days later I started writing about my weight again, though not here. Oddly, it turned out I started writing consistently again, on the two year anniversary of the first time I registered here, which was also a major turning point. Also, as far as I could tell from using my unreliable scales, I weighed about the same as I had back then. Had I paid myself out enough? I thought so. I can't say I'm over the binge eating now, but when I started writing again on November 28th, I went back to something like the stage I was at last summer, with good patches where I thought I was over it, and then be a relapse of a day or two - Christmas didn't help. However, it was different to last year in that overall I have lost weight. So far in 7 and a half weeks I've lost about 5 kg (11 lb), I think. It blipped up and down again over Christmas. Better than that, I've made heaps of progress with the anxiety that I figured out was the main underlying problem with my binge eating. So now with a combination of having fewer moments where I want to binge - partly from dealing with my life better and partly from eating better - and better strategies to manage any binges that sneak in there, I reckon I'm in promising shape. From my reading I believe it's right to notice and care about the frequency and severity of binges and see it as significant that this has changed, despite the fact that I'm still not fully over it.

The way I eat now is nowhere near as strict as it was two years ago. I don't want it to be. I don't want something that will fall apart on me the moment I have to adapt to different circumstances. So I don't worry about measuring my food strictly against the plan I started with. Also I don't exactly count calories either. I have a good rough idea of what calories I'm getting from last summer when I tracked them. Now I just sort of know what's ok and what's better and try not to stress about the whole thing. I have an idea that counting carefully might not be good for a binge eater. Different eating disorders have a bit in common and some people think the way to deal with them should be similar too. Just at the moment I don't even think much about food and I like that. I just try not to go too long without it, and to eat a high fibre carb (not too much though), some protein and some vegetable every time I do eat. When I started again, while I was still teaching, I would eat a piece of fruit mid-morning and have a mini-meal when I came home. Now it's more like 3 meals, and sometimes something extra between lunch and dinner. I try to take notice of how hungry I am to decide how much to have, and I've stopped trying to make myself eat a bunch of vegetables regardless of how awkward it is. I still eat enough, but I'm trying to control my tendency to go overboard with things and to NOT eat past the point where I'm hungry (no matter how much protein it says to have on the old plan and even if the mountain I'm eating, is vegies :) ).

I'm exercising right now more as an attempt to control my stress than to help my body. I know I need to step that up, but I don't want to start freaking out about how I can't fit it in properly. I just want to keep pushing towards developing an early morning exercise habit so that I can start doing something I can maintain.

I'm weird I suppose. My weight is not that far off the beginning weight I had when I started here, but I don't feel like I'm at the beginning at all. I feel like I'm already working on maintaining a decent weight rather than losing it. I believe if I get myself properly oriented towards that and get my mind in order, I will naturally lose weight. That's how it's been so far. I have no idea how far down that will take me. For now and in the future, my focus needs to be on not binging. If I get back to 66 + 5 kg and can't go lower than that without binge eating then that's probably where I'll stay!

Sorry folks for yet another long post ... I'm starting to think that's turning into another overindulgence.

Anxiety and binge eating (II)

Lots of things make me irritable. I just spent this entire afternoon, trying to deep breathe and relax my muscles to NOT build up tension in my body and I still swore at the woman who tried to pinch my parking spot (she didn't hear me), and stomped around the kitchen in a fury when my husband stuck dog meat in the bowl I had next to me and was about to use to cook cabbage in. But I feel good now ... Really good. I absolutely am making progress.

I am feeling exceptionally positive right now.

I keep thinking that all the things I know about binge eating now, must have been things I already knew before. Possibly, I could go back to what I wrote a year or more in the past, and find all the things I know that relate to it, already written down. I do keep coming across things that I have previously looked at, which seem to be pointing straight to what seems like a revelation now. But I don't remember having these thoughts before, and I don't remember seeing anyone else say what I think now. Again, as with my own words, others have said things that point straight this way - but I didn't hear what they said as meaning this exact thing. Maybe it was because I didn't think of myself as having a problem with anxiety and maybe it was because I didn't recognize that I even had a problem with binge eating until around this time last year.

Here's the anxiety and binge eating summary (so far). I can influence the amount of anxiety I have a lot. I can try to change the issues that stress me (useful, slow and difficult), and I can try to deal with the issues that come up in a way that doesn't increase my anxiety (useful, quick, repetitious). I can do things that reduce it. When I reduce it enough the binge eating goes away.

:) That's a short story so short that it seems almost untruthful to me because so much is left out. Still it seems like a revelation to me just now.

Binge eating and anxiety

I'm really happy now. I feel I've made more progress with taking control back from the binge eating, and the process I'm using to do that has benefits all of its own, whether I binge eat or not.

Did I talk about this before? That's the downside of keeping a spot where half my ideas are out there and half (more than half), in draft.

It's getting more and more clear to me that my eating has been impelled by anxiety - that is anxiety at the level where it's a bit of a disorder. I don't know what that level is called - a level where a professional might help, and yet isn't necessarily required?

So anyway, I've been working on doing things in my life that help deal with sources of anxiety for me. For example, I'm getting a lot more order in my home. This helps! However, that sort of path isn't as new to me as the other tack I'm taking, which is to accept that some situations will occur that are liable to trigger anxious responses in me, regardless of how I try to control my life - so I need to try and zap the anxious responses in myself as the stress comes to me and have a way of handling that stress, so that it's not feeding the anxiety I've had.

I followed some on-line trails a little way back which led me to a CBT (Cognitive Based Therapy) site. I wasn't looking for something about anxiety because I wasn't paying much attention to the fact that I had a problem with anxiety. I just was aware that CBT is the therapy often suggested as relevant for eating disorders, and I saw a link to this site which helps people try to get some self help from a CBT perspective for whatever ails them. The site wasn't about weight loss. At the time I visited I barely took in what they were saying, but I paid enough attention to influence what I've done since.

I took a few things from the site.

1) If I'm suffering from anxiety I'm liable to irrational thoughts.
(Who me? I thought - and then the next time I was writing here, I wrote one down. It wasn't exactly a thought, more like the translation of my feeling into thought, and then I could see just how irrational it was.
It was this thought: If I stop worrying something bad will happen. I understand that there was some logic involved in what started that feeling, but I also get it that by itself, that idea just won't hold up. When I wrote this down a bunch of stuff fell into place. I had been told before, that this is what people think when they are suffering from anxiety, and that they need to just stop thinking that. This was some time ago, when I was also very anxious, without realizing that I was. OK. Last time that information turned out to be correct. This time it did too.

2) If I'm suffering anxiety I may be irritable and cranky with other people and push them away from me, despite the fact that I need their support.
(Who me?) I'm one of the good guys aren't I? If I'm cranky it's because I'm extremely provoked by a succession of provoking incidents and provoking people!!
OK. Maybe I am irritable.

3) If I'm anxious, doing relaxation exercises a couple of times a day might help. Yes. They only relax me while I'm doing them, but apparently afterward they will help keep the general level of stress I feel at a lower level - like the lower stress will linger a bit.

Geez I was resistant to that idea. My response was that I didn't want to drop my guard and let less anxiety in, because I had to stay anxious to protect myself. Also, I didn't need to listen to a relaxation exercise, because I was already very good at relaxing my body very fast whenever I wanted to, but I just didn't want to. So I didn't concentrate on the exercise. LOL. I did hear something about flowers though.

So I don't know if focusing on the physical relaxation components and doing them slowly might offer me something extra or not, because by now I always speed through it, always am amazed at how limp my body has become and how automatic the responses are now and always feel that it's very pleasant. So I did it that way - my own way. And I added some flowers to the end of my routine - because I do like flowers. It was nice. I did it some more sometimes because I liked it.

And then I really did become too busy and caught up in Christmas and it's stresses, and various commitments - and I followed up other issues on-line, and I was reluctant to put a heap of extra time into the anxiety/binge/weight area. So I guess I found some materials I'd need to shore up a bit more of the path ahead of me - but actually I wasn't pushing forward on the path itself - I took a couple of steps backwards. Small back steps though, because I wasn't sweating them. Yeah, I ate worse, yeah, I was showing anxiety - but knowing I could see where to get more of what I needed to deal with those things kept a lid on how bad it got - plus you know - I really was starting to realize that stressing less - even stressing less about what I needed to do to control my bingeing and weight issues, really was paying off, so I kept not stressing about it as much as I could.

Stress comes though. Stressful situations crop up. That is totally unavoidable. Not everyone finds the same situation causes the same level of anxiety though. That point is the one I've been working on and making progress with in a new way.

I haven't felt motivated to do relaxation exercises twice a day. I don't know whether I ever will. I've done some though. That was better than none.

Also, more recently I've done my instant relax repeatedly, whenever I've thought it might be a good idea. I guess this is a bit like deep breathing, which is hardly a secret technique for quickly lowering physical stress, however, it's more than that for me, and I don't think I could do it as effectively as I do now, if I hadn't practiced it slowly, many times in the past.

Then another piece in the puzzle (scale in the wing?), came to me within the last couple of days.

I have deliberately pushed myself to do something that I thought would be worthwhile, but involve some stress. The reality of it maxed my stress in a major way. I guess that was part of the reason I did it. I felt anxiety whenever I thought about going back to a forum I'd been a part of and thought going back might help me neutralize it. Well, it did, but not instantly, not before it raised my stress levels through the roof. It was full on, throbbing pulse in my neck, sick feeling in my stomach - massive. Even writing that is bringing the physical symptoms back a bit. So for that, I used some repeats of the quick exercise. During one day, I did it so often, frequently just using part of the process that it started to get a bit automatic, and without thinking, I did it when I got a kid stress attack. Bingo. It was the magic scale.

I started looking for that one before I started this blog. I'd seen the habit I had of imagining the chocolate as the stress came in, or grabbing for it as the stress came in. Was it obvious to you that I needed a stress reducing habit to replace it with? Not to me, not then. I just saw that I was trying to balance some pain with some pleasure, and looked for an alternative pleasure I could imagine or obtain which wouldn't make me fat! Occasionally I'd have ideas of what that might be. I even got excited by the thought that I could use a focus on the beauty around me, photography, art, this blog. I thought well, I couldn't necessarily enjoy those things at the time I had a hassle to deal with, but I could insert the idea that I WOULD enjoy them in the evening or weekend, instead of thinking that I would eat chocolate. This kinda worked a bit. At any rate, at times I would move past the instant thought of food when I got stressed. However, I was still getting stressed. These past couple of days I realized that if I insert the destress routine while I'm being bombarded, if I have the idea that the right way of reacting to ridiculous behaviours by children is to be physically unemotional (despite recognizing the behaviours for what they are), then the stress gets deflected before it gets started. I simply have less stress by not letting the events trigger physical stress patterns within me, or by releasing that stress as soon as I notice it.

I'm sure this post is a mess. But it's a mess about a good important thing. I really feel like this is a piece (a scale), I needed.

I always felt that I would get to this spot one day - I felt like I was moving toward it - but I did not know what was the thing in this place. That's very strange really, because at the same time, I don't think I've said one new thing. I don't see much at all that hasn't been said before or that I didn't already know. Only, when I get the mess sorted out of the words here - I really do think - for me - this IS NEW.

Also, when I link it to binge eating, to the way it makes my impulses to eat badly just fall away, then I truly think it is saying something I do not believe I've seen everywhere else.

Maybe it's too new. Maybe it won't stand the test day to day? Remains to be seen. It's working. That matters. Whereas once, I could have lined up three bulldozers worth of whatever mental push I had against a binge and the binge would have marched through them, now if I get it early enough, I can exert a pinky push and it goes.

Plus there's the Holy Grail - the ideas that will interrupt a binge once it's started - turning on destress patterns in my body.

I so am not going to try and link this to hormones tonight! Of course it does. I fully recall that that stress hormone, whatever it's called - cortisol? promotes eating. Why did I not understand this in the way I do now, before???

Am I imagining that this is a new idea to me? I know I often think I'm realizing something new then read what I wrote years ago and find out that I already knew it then ..

Okay, this is just another scale I know. Nothing works by itself - but what a scale.

BTW - "kid stress attack" = sudden uncontrollable gush of stress to the head, provoked by unforeseeable infuriating behaviour on the part of a kid.

Posting / Creating drafts

It looks like I barely visit here. I haven't posted here as much as I intended to, but I've written a lot more here than I've posted. I love that actually. I love being able to go to just one place that has patches of my ideas that I thought were ready to put out here, and also being able to come here to just keep other relevant information and to just blurt out whatever is on my mind without having to consider whether it's something to publish or not. That's all in one place. Very cool.

I want to shift this blog though. Ever since I decided that, it's had an impact on what I do here. A negative, do less impact. I know it will take a big patch of time and a head of steam to make the move and right now, what I have of that I'm turning towards ordering and making the most of my every day life.