I must need excitement in my life. Who knew?

Last night at therapy, we talked about a few things.  My assignment from the previous week, which I did not fully complete, was to make a list of fun, exciting things I wanted to do.  It could be anything.  Crazy, fun, different, whatever.  We speculated that as I've settled into a fairly routine lifestyle, that maybe I'm craving some excitement, some rebellion, some crazy fun.  And what I've turned to is food, because it's easy and available.  And I can sneak it, which meets my rebellious need pretty well.  She asked me about stuff I like to do for fun, what makes me all giddy inside.  I thought and thought. 

I thought of a few things that I used to do, or that I really like to do, or that I'd like to do:

• Rollercoasters!  Wheeeee!
• Musicals.  I love musicals a ridiculous amount.  Ridiculous.
• Dancing.  I love to go dancing with my friends.  I never do this anymore, save a random wedding dance, which never happens anymore because almost all my friends are married now.
• Bungee Jumping!  Again, Wheeeeeeeeeee!  (I've never done this, but totally want to.)
• Dye my hair a funky color.  At least part of it.  Like purple highlights.  I have no idea why I want to do this.  I just do.
• Get my nose pierced.  Or, god forbid I ever get to a weight where I am comfortable with my tummy showing, I'd get my belly button pierced.  Slutty?  I dont' care!
• Get together with friends.  Often. 
• Pole Dancing class.  What the hell?  Why not?  I like to dance, and I have boobs.  So surely I can pole dance.
• Take a Bob Ross painting class.  I'd like to make Happy Little Trees ™.  Who wouldn't? 
• Swim in the ocean.  Now I realize this isn't going to happen a lot in Colorado. But maybe a good substitute would be going to the Res to swim?  I like to hang out outside, play games, play in the water, etc.  I'm going to have to work this in this summer.  Fo shizzle. 
• To be determined...  I'm going to be thinking about this all week.  I think I miss being silly and ridiculous.  I've always been that way.  A lot.  But as I settle into my buttoned up HR job I think the fun gets squished right out of me.  We are a pretty straight laced group.  I need to let my god damned hair down more.  

Tomorrow I'll post about the rest of therapy.  We have started creating a tool box.  This tool box (metaphorical right now, but maybe I'll bedazzle up a box and put shit in it for reals) is designed to give me other things to fall back on when I'm feeling that desire to overeat or binge.  When I'm seeing the advantages to the binge eating, I want to replace or eliminate the advantage.  The tools in my box (ha!) will hopefully allow me to find something else to do, besides eat a bag of doritos.  We came up with some good ones, and the other part of my homework this week is to think or more tools for my box (ha!).  

As a side note, tonight I skyped with my mama (happy birthday, mom!), sister in law Julie, and my sweet niece Raegan.  It was super fun!  I miss my sweet girl.  She's growing and changing, and I'm missing it.  It sucks.  I've been lucky with my other two nieces, because they live really close and I see them a lot.  I saw them nearly every week when they were little, so I got to see all the fun stuff and be part of it.  Miss Raegan can say "Hi Aunt Courtney" very clearly now, and my heart just seriously puffs up with love when I hear it.  Tonight she was wearing a sequined pink flapper dress with a pink sparkly crown and blue cowboy boots.  I love that girl so much I hardly know what to do with myself.  She's a perfect combination of her sweet hearted mama and my smart-assed tough guy little brother.  I miss her (and my family) so much that I'm all teary eyed typing this.  

All of this is to say that when I got off my skype call, I very clearly felt the urge to eat.  Like, even tho I'd finished supper about an hour and a half before that, I wanted to eat.  And I didn't want a friggin banana.  I wanted chips.  Or cookies.  Or a bag of something.  Fortunately for me, not only do I not have any of the aforementioned things at the house, but I also recognized this desire for what it was.  Eating to mask sadness.  And sadness might not even be the right word for the emotion.  But the longing to be where my family was, to be running around with my sweet girl playing dress up, and to be with my mama on her birthday.  I'm actually super happy I got to see them all tonight via skype.  I truly love technology!  But it's a bittersweet sort of thing, because I'm still eight hours away and it's two months before I have a trip planned home.  

So instead of shoveling food in my mouth, I took a few deep breaths, and acknowledged how I was feeling.  Then I got online to finish this blog post.  Writing about it seems to help me get it OUT.  If I can get it OUT, it seems better.  So I think today is a win, even tho I'm all weepy right now.  

Dinner Do-over

Last night I popped in a frozen meal.  I did this thing called Suppers 'n A Snap a while ago.  (Side note, which side of the n should the ' go?)  Basically, we prepped freezer meals.  It was awesome.  It cost $59, and I got 5 different meals out of it, which really works out to about 16 meals for the two of us.  Woot!  Well, one of them was this chicken concoction (chicken in a sauce of ranch dressing, mustard, and brown sugar) that they assured me tasted good.  I was skeptical.  Turns out I'm the smart one here.  In an effort to Eat More Produce, I seasoned up some frozen diced butternut squash, and popped in in the oven as well. 

Well, the whole god damned thing was a disaster.  The squash was NASTY.  Squishy, weird texture, and icky flavor.  The chicken?  Weird.  I don't even have words to describe it.  Had there been something tasty paired with it, perhaps I could have drowned it in enough ketchup to make it edible.  But it was not to be.  So we hucked it all in the trash can and went to Chick Fil A.  :D  Which did not disappoint. 

In other news, I also got outside for a run last night before supper.  Go me!  It was just chilly enough that I was never hot while I was running.  I am beginning to wonder, however, if I don't have some exercise induced asthma.  I was super wheezy last night, couldn't stop with this annoying cough, and couldn't get a deep breath to save my life.  I get this off and on, and I have diagnosed myself with exercise induced asthma.  I'm going to see my doc to find out if an inhaler on hand is a good idea.  It even came back a bit this morning after Spin!  So no good.  I am not a fan of wheezing. 

I'm also supposed to be able to start doing stuff with my wrist, like putting pressure on it (like while doing a push-up) next week.  However, it doesn't feel good when I even push out of a chair on it, so I'm not sure it's ready.  I'm going to go see that doctor on Monday to see what he recommends.  I can't do Krav Maga or Crossfit until I can do weight bearing/impact stuff with my wrist.  If I'm going to do the Warrior Dash in July (did I tell you all about that yet?) I gotta be able to use my wrist! 

Tonight is therapy again.  I still need to do my homework!  I'll post more about that later on... 

If you are what you eat, I am ice cream.

*sigh*

It was my birthday this past weekend.  As part of that, I made myself an ice cream cake, because GOD DAMMIT it's only my birthday once per year. 

I definitely overate on it.  Like, it's all gone already.  I did eat *mostly* just that on some days.  Which I realize doesn't do me any favors either.  But the cake is gone, and while I certainly can't say I don't wish I had more, I am glad it's not taunting me from the freezer. 

I had some successes this weekend and some failures.  Ice cream cake = failure for the most part.  I mean, I didn't eat it all in one setting.  Random snacking while we had company (typically a real trigger for me) = success.  Silver lining, I suppose. 

Once again, I need to go grocery shopping.  When we get to this point, I feel like the only thing to eat is cheese and potatoes.  Apparently we rarely run out of those two items.  Like tonight, I have no idea what we are having for dinner.  Probably cheese and potatoes followed by a clementine or two.  Bonus points for at least having some fruit around :D  Planning is my downfall.  I don't have kids, so it's pretty easy to be a shitty planner.  The only real consequences are to me and my hubby.  And we are both perfectly capable of getting in the car to go to Subway if the options at our house SUCK. 

Goals for this week: 

• Meal plan.  Stat. 
• Go outside and run, for fuck's sake. 
• Eat more produce.  Like 5-7 servings a day.  For reals, yo.  Of course, that will mean I eat 10 clementines and a banana today. 
• Try to not beat myself up for the indiscretions over the weekend. 

Oh, wow.

Yesterday, during a moment of frustration at work, I recognized a thought pattern.  I caught myself thinking about how it would be nice if I had a bag of jelly beans to eat.  I was very much picturing a big bag, brightly colored, nummy nummy.  I was kind of surprised by this very specific thought.  Although, if I think about it, it's likely been what's running through my head, but I had no awareness of it.  Apparently writing down a list of "advantages" to binge eating, and talking about each of them, helped me see that I was seeking out comfort in the form of small sugary rainbow colored candies. 

I actually stopped what I was doing, and thought "Oh, Wow."  So that is probably good. 

I felt myself, all day, still desiring to eat in a way that doesn't serve me.  I did ok until I got home.  I had planned on making some sort of treat for the following day, to take to work as part of our staff meeting.  We have a "rule" where if your birthday is the one close to the meeting you may/should bring a treat in to share.  Totally a reasonable thing, and I had originally intended on making an angel food cake and serving it with whipped cream and strawberries.  But my motivation to bake an angel food cake at 7 pm was, well, not high.  I had everything on hand to make cookies, and I can whip those up fast.  So I did. 

I ate too much dough, and a few cookies.  Although, I did not do as poorly as I normally might.  I gotta be honest, my chocolate chip cookies are some of the greatest tasting things known to man, so I don't even have an issue with having SOME of the dough/cookies.  But when it became mindless, or habitual, I eventually identified it and did manage to stop.  However I paid the price for this.  My tummy hurt when I went to bed, and I woke up with that acid reflux/indigestion thing in the middle of the night!  I had to take tums to go back to sleep.  :( 

Tonight is my next session with my therapist, and I think we'll talk more about the list we made on Sunday. 

One of the other things we discussed as an "advantage" is self-care.  Originally I didn't think this was something I do.  When I think of someone who eats for self-care, I think of the overworked mom, who gets no time to herself, and who has to do every single thing, all the time.  That is not me.  No kids, married to someone who splits chores with me, when we get around to them...  doesn't really fit the mold I had in my head.  But then we talked a bit more, and it came up that in my job, I deal with people who are typically not at their best.  I always joke that no one ever comes to HR because they are happy.  They nearly always have a problem.  Their own injury/illness, that of a loved one, a loss of a loved one's job, etc...  It is my job to care, to listen, to help, to solve problems.  She speculated, and I agreed, that perhaps when I feel overwhelmed by all of this, I eat to kind of take care of ME, instead of focusing my efforts on others.  I really identified with this, because sometimes I feel super sad for people, and I wish there was something I could do to help them thru a time of crisis, or fix whatever the hell is wrong in their life.  Right now, especially, I know about a lot of employees and/or spouses going thru terrible medical issues, some of them very life threatening.  And it sucks.  I hate it for them.  And on top of that, I start to feel like everyone is sick, and it's a matter of time until I, or someone I love gets sick and dies.  And I already covered how that works out for me. 

Next up on the vast list of advantages (who knew there were so many?) is the idea of potentially losing my identity or sense of community around being someone who is eating to be healthy.  I focus A LOT on food.  I think about it all the time (I'm thinking about it right now because those damn cookies are out at our front desk, and it's the time of day where I get hungry and my energy bottoms out).  She mentioned that people with an eating disorder (it feels weird to think that, because I think of an eating disorder as being anorexia) spend vast amounts of time thinking about food.  Like 80% of their thoughts/time, or some ridiculous number.  "Normal" people, whomever they are, apparently think about it like 15% of the time.  We talked about how my DH, god love him, is not obsessed with food.  He can happily work away at something on the computer and forget to eat.  That has never, ever happened to me, in my whole entire life.  EVER.  The concept of eating randomly is super foreign to me.  So, the guise of talking about food, dieting, eating better, etc is something I do.  If I'm thinking about it all the time, it makes sense that I'd talk about it as well.  I've formed relationships in person and on-line thru commiserating about this sort of thing.  I have weight loss buddies.  These are comforting to me, clearly.  The thought of removing myself from these communities as a result of moving past this (I hope, I hope, I hope) can be scary. 

Then we talked about boredom.  I get bored easily.  I always have.  It's probably why I can't seem to stop going to school for SOMETHING.  I tear thru books at a crazy pace.  I read tons of stuff online.  When I get bored, I am fully aware of searching for something to snack or graze on.  It's something to do.  I think this one seems like an easy enough one to remedy, it's probably just a matter of resolving to break the habit.  When I'm bored, even when I have something else I should be doing, but maybe don't want to (laundry, anyone?) I eat.  This advantage gives me something to do to assuage the boredom and to procrastinate a task I don't want to do.  Winner winner, chicken dinner.

The next thing on the list is control/structure.  I think/hope we'll touch on this more tonight.  I also know that tonight we are going to talk about some tactics or tools I can use for social situations.  I have a social situation this weekend that will be challenging for me.  My birthday is Saturday (33, baby!) and we are having my in-laws over for dinner and cake & ice cream.  Having tons of food sitting out and around will be very difficult for me, and I want to figure out what I can do to combat the urges and the almost unconscious actions that follow (eating).  I'm hopeful.  :)

One Positive Thing Today

Today I'm going to focus on eating more fruits & veggies.  A total no-brainer.  But as I looked back on my food intake the last couple weeks, I was astounded at how lacking I was in these areas!!  No matter what other eating behaviors I have, I really need more produce in my life.  It's at least something I can do to nourish my body while I'm figuring out all the other crap. 

So today, that is my one positive thing.  I'm going to take steps to make this happen today.  I brought in some raw veggies to munch on, I'm going to fill my Subway sammich up with veggies, and I think we'll have spaghetti tonight.  Which shall include sauce (mmmmm) and some sauteed onions & peppers (in mine). 

So even if I stuff a box of cookies in my mouth (I do not currently have any cookies, nor do I have immediate plans to obtain any) I will have at least given my body some good, nutritious foods, too. 

What am I getting out of this?

I met with my therapist today.  We were originally scheduled for Thursday, but we had to move the appointment to today.  I had pretty much one of the worst weeks of eating ever.  Lots of jelly beans, Lofthouse cookies, home baked cookies, chocolate chips, etc.  Nothing good came of it.  I've gained a couple pounds, and I feel terrible about how I look and feel as a result.  So suffice it to say, I had a shit-ton of stuff to unload today.

First off, she reassured me that in this process, I should expect to have steps backwards.  Sometimes it might even feel like more steps backwards than forwards...  but it's an expected part of this process.  That did actually help.  I was already doing the negative self-talk, where I'm unhelpable, etc.

So we kind of dived into the WHY behind my eating behaviors.  I am getting something from these behaviors, or I wouldn't do them.  If they weren't serving me in some way, I would have stopped them a long time ago.  We wrote out a list, with advantages on one side (the stuff I'm getting from it) and disadvantages on the other.  We didn't touch on the disadvantages, because we both agreed those would be easy to identify.  We started on the advantage list...  I had a hard time getting started, because it's kind of hard to wrap my head around there being an advantage to these seemingly self-destructive behaviors.  So to get me started, she tossed out some things that she's learned about through her own journey to recovery, and by helping others.

First, I identified that stuff tastes good.  That was an obvious, easy one.  I never binge on carrots.  Or baked chicken.  Or rice.  You get the drift.  So we talked about this, and something I noticed earlier this week when I was shotgunning jelly beans:  I am drawn to things like jelly beans, M&Ms, skittles, etc.  I love looking down at a handful of colorful happiness.  I'm very drawn to color, and I shared with her that one of my greatest comforts, and favorite things to do, is to sit in my sewing room, surrounded by the fabrics I have picked out, and moving them around, pairing them up, enjoying the sight of colors.  It's relaxing, and it just flat out FEELS GOOD to me.  I noticed this when I looked down at a particularly colorful handful of jelly beans.  So a visually appealing, colorful bunch of sweet tiny objects apparently makes me happy for some reason.

Moving on from there, I told her that since the last time we'd met, I had started to think about the idea of not binge eating.  And because I tend to binge eat, or emotionally eat food that I really like, I definitely felt anxiety around the idea of not doing that.  I can't really explain it, because I desire, A LOT, to have a more normal relationship with food.  But the thought that I'd no longer do this, at some point, definitely made me feel anxious.  Which completely supports the fact that I'm getting something from these behaviors.  It's not like if I give up binge eating M&Ms that I will never eat them again.  It shouldn't have to be an all or nothing endeavor.

So then we really got into the heart of the matter.  She said many women eat to kind of just check out.  At first that didn't feel right to me (for myself) but as I talked a bit more, I heard myself saying words like "distraction" and "avoiding" so it became obvious that while I don't just zone out while I'm eating, I'm very much doing it to check out from certain feelings.  As we were talking about this, I could feel myself nearing tears.  She asked what it was about, and all this stuff came pouring out of my mouth, kind of to my surprise.  Anxiety around losing people I love, and how I worry, incessantly, and it is a hard thing to escape from.  I talked a bit about my past, which had a significant loss in it, and how this past year I very nearly lost my little brother.  I'm FUCKING TERRIFIED of losing the people I love.  There are many people whom I worry about, but the three that recur for me the most are my husband, my brother and my mom.  That doesn't mean I don't fear losing other people, but those three definitely crowd my thoughts.  It didn't help when my little brother nearly died.  The worry and anxiety is all consuming for me at times.  I can be doing something else entirely, and be overcome with it.  The worry is peppered with gratitude for the fact that I get to keep him in my life, but the worry never really goes.  I have told my hubby on more than one occasion, that I hope I die before him, because I can't even entertain the thought of how I'd cope with that.  And losing my mom would pretty much rip my heart out.  I don't know how to live in a world that doesn't have these three people in it.  So as I bawled my face off, this all came spilling out.  Apparently this bothers me from time to time.  When she asked me if I thought that eating gave me a way to stop the always present hum of worry, it really rang true.



She mentioned that in college, some of her worst binge eating happened when she was procrastinating school work.  Let's suffice it to say that I identified with this.  While I'm not taking a class this eight-week term, I finished one a few weeks ago, and I am fully aware that I eat to put off doing homework.  School is easy for me, and I always know I can put it off until the last minute and still get it done, and still get an A.  So even tho I know I should get things done before the deadline, I never, ever do.  If the deadline is Sunday at midnight, you'll often find me completing my work at 11:45 pm.  It's just how I roll.  We also talked about how I procrastinate difficult conversations, or tasks I don't want to do at work, etc.  It's really an all-purpose procrastination tool.

She asked me "If you woke up tomorrow, and this eating issue was gone, what would you have to do/face/talk about, that you are avoiding or procrastinating now?"  And while I don't yet fully have the answer to that, I hope to figure it out.

It's time for me to go to bed, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.  We talked about more than just these reasons, and I'll write more about these tomorrow.  I'm processing a lot of this stuff right now.  And my "homework" between now and Wednesday when I see her again is to finish my list, and think more about this stuff...  I'm not sure I could NOT think about it even if I wanted to.

Outdoor running rocks.

Ah...  spring seems to be here, at least temporarily.  And I'm loving it.  I have run outside the last three days in a row!  Love Love Love Love.  In addition to this, I've given myself permission to run only a few miles. Lately, I've wanted to run 4-5 miles at a time, and when I didn't really feel like running that far or have time for that, I just opted to not run.  I felt like if I couldn't go for 4-5 miles, then it wasn't even worth going at all.  Which is total and utter bullshit, but it was what I was doing.  So, I've decided to just make it ok to only run 30 minutes, or whatever. 2-3 miles HAS to be better than a big fat 0.  This has vastly improved my likelihood of running.  And sometimes, like yesterday, I told myself it was ok to go out for 3 miles, and I ended up doing nearly 4 because it felt good.  Plus, my neighbor has been up for running...  and having a buddy always helps.  Much more fun to me.

What I'm not loving is my eating patterns.  I bought a bag of easter candy (jelly beans) and ate most of them at work.  It was like I couldn't stop, and the idea of throwing them away to get rid of them make me anxious and pissy.  What is wrong with me?  Why did I even buy them?  I know good and well what is going to happen.

The good news is that I have plenty of fodder for my therapy appointment on Thursday.