Sunday, March 27, 2011

Update

Posting here has been pretty sparse, for a few different reasons. First of all I've just been engaged in living real life -- life that doesn't just happen on the internet. It is so nice to have friends here to engage with; I am so grateful. Second, things have just been crazy here -- and not the good kind of crazy either.

My mental health has been tenuous at best for awhile. Depression is something I deal with, and when I am depressed I still often want to turn to food to help deal with the emotion and sadness. I fight very hard against this, but sometimes I give up on the food side of things. Now by giving up, I don't necessarily mean "I am going to eat this whole carton of (insert binge food of choice) and I don't give a shit!" (though I have done that a couple times in the last few weeks). I do, however, mean "Dealing with the food and tracking it and obsessing about it is too much to handle right now so I will try to make mostly responsible choices on my own." Well, apparently I either let the leash get too loose, or lost my sense of what was a responsible choice is or SOMETHING, because I was up about 12 lbs in the span of about 5 weeks. This week I tracked 6 days and lost 4 lbs, so that was a victory. Today started out rough, though, signaling that something in my brain/consciousness is not quite to where it needs to be yet. I will get there though, one day and decision at a time.

I have made the decision to get back into therapy. I really fought this idea hard, but I am absolutely convinced I need to be in therapy for now. The first session really sucked, but, again, I think I need to be there for now. I am optimistic that I will be able to fix my destructive negative self-talk and being so hard on myself. I am also convinced, though, that it will be difficult and is likely to cut into some very deep and painful places that I don't really want to go. But, for the sake of my mental health and long-term well-being, I will go there.

One of the things my therapist told me I needed to do was to identify a support mechanism for healthy living (I hate to just term this life transformation I'm on as "weight loss", as the weight is but a symptom of the underlying problem of disordered thoughts and behaviors about food).

I have written before about how I've considered joining Overeaters Anonymous. I finally decided this week to go -- and I was very surprised (in a good way) at what I found. I will have to write a separate post to sum up my experience. However, I will say that that the meeting I attended was great, and that I identified with pretty much everything everyone said. It was cool/odd/great to feel understood in a way that I never really have with respect to my disordered eating. I think that at least for now it is exactly where I need to be -- I will definitely keep going!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for giving the update. Glad to hear you are taking steps for mental wellness and figuring out any/all the underlying issues. So glad to hear you have some good friends now where you are. Community and friendship is so important!

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