Let's Talk About Weight

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I want to talk for a minute about weight. Please skip this post if you're triggered by mention of specific behaviors, numbers, etc. This is a very honest post about some eating disorder history along with where I'm at now. 

This blog started as an eating disorder blog. Not pro-ED but recovery and intake and how I was dealing with my life.

I struggle less with that now - I've been recovered for about 4 years. That said, I still struggle with a lot of vices and sometimes I just want to say whatever I think of with censoring it, and that's the purpose of this space. 

So let's talk about weight.

So you know where I'm coming from:

I struggled intermittently with restriction and weight throughout my teenage years - nothing too severe, nothing that really met any specific diagnostic criteria, just a lot of disordered behavior and thoughts.

In college I was sort of "orthorexic" but physically pretty healthy. 

In graduate school [about 8 years ago] I really began to struggle more. If I focused on weight the overwhelming stress and my vague suicidal thoughts faded to the back of my mind. I could calculate calories and not think about my fear of failure and it was a coping mechanism I clung to tightly.

I'm 5'4" and was about 123 pounds. Perfectly healthy and that's a good set point for me.

I restricted a lot through the first year of grad school and it got pretty serious as I approached summer. I lost 20 pounds pretty quickly, I lost my period and I was all the normal things - cold, tired etc.

It was time to start the next year of grad school and I shifted my focus to being "healthy" - so I ate minimal calories but more than before and trained for half marathons. I gained weight rapidly as soon as I stopped seriously restricting and that was really hard. I had all these clothes I suddenly couldn't wear and all my body checking was devastating and it was really really tough. 

I spent the next 3 years trying to be that small again while still being able to function and stay out of treatment. It was very Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Sometimes it was strict calorie counting. Sometimes undereating. Sometimes over exercising. Sometimes a strict meal plan that I found on the internet. I became vegan. I did a rotation in the eating disorder for part of my training and that was super weird because I really identified with all of the patients in treatment but I didn't want help and didn't feel "sick enough." I went to counseling for a bit because I started binging and purging but it wasn't a good fit and I was got scared about the danger of doing that and went back to over exercising. It was all about the weight and numbers but it was really all about avoiding my stresses. 

I don't know if I've ever really tried to summarize this period of my life before - it's hard to do. 

I joined Overeaters Anonymous for a while thinking it would help me eat healthy and not binge. I went to meetings for about a year. It's a really strange world and I found some women I really admired but ultimately it was a terrible fit for me. I wasn't binging because I needed to admit my mistakes and share them or whatever - I was binging because I was still starving. I lost a bunch of weight living on restriction and alcohol. I was tipsy a lot. 

I started the next phase of my training and maybe it was the dramatic change in location or stress or the pattern of my life or the security of my marriage but it just got suddenly easier. I don't think people outgrow eating disorders, but I started coping better, I was really ready to let those behaviors go, and I settled back in at 123-128 pounds, stopped weighing myself, stopped counting calories and just went about my life. I probably replaced it with a TV addiction, but that was ultimately less damaging to me both physically and mentally.

When I felt ready to try to get pregnant, I was so grateful for the progress I'd made, because it didn't feel scary to gain weight or have these drastic changes in my body. It was still weird, but I felt great during pregnancy. I gained a total of 27 pounds (healthy for pregnancy) and it was a lot easier to be healthy while growing a tiny human. 

I was only up 5 lbs from pre-pregnancy just 2 weeks after and I settled in at 10 lbs under my pre-pregnancy weight for most of the first year of my kid's life.

I've since gained a few since stopping pumping at work, but I'm still lower than my normal set point of 123-128. 

And I think I might be pregnant again, which means I'll go back up again. 

Weight is so weird. Sometimes I care so much and sometimes I don't care at all.

The hardest part is when I outgrow clothes I like. I have to put them away out of sight immediately or they make me sad. 

And that's all I wanted to say for now.

xoxo little birds