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in honesty...
This is one of those posts that would probably be considered triggering for those with body-image issues.
At the gym this morning, after yoga class: Ruminating on last week -- lots of yoga, lots of activity. Very sore all week. Ate lots of protein. And the weeks before -- more activity. Been taking pretty good care of myself.
This morning, I was sure that by now I must have built back up at least some of the muscle I lost before burning man. Small weight fluctuations are meaningless, I know, but over the last six months I have in fact been trending downwards -- wobbling around 150 instead of between 155 and 160. I'm kind of sorry I started weighing myself in the first place, but I kind of wanted to see myself bulk up, because I know I've been getting stronger.
(yes, trending downwards. I know what I posted the other day. I'll get back to that, I promise.)
Before burning man I dropped below 150 for the first time in nearly nine years. Given how well I ate out there and how active I was and how hard I've pushed my body since I got back, putting that muscle on should have been easy.
So I told myself as I stepped on the scale at the gym.
So ... HOW THE HELL AM I DOWN TO 146 POUNDS? This is not okay. This is me straying below that specter of an arbitrary number for well over a month.
Arbitrary number. Yes. I realize that. But it's a number which looms large in my mind. Because when I was 'on my way back up' it wasn't until I hit 150 that I could really keep the weight on without struggle. Below that, my energy would flag, my mood would tank, and I'd feel too tired to get out of bed and too depressed to eat. And the pounds would slough back off again.
It's an ugly pattern I repeated over and over again my first year or so out of college. As my weight has verrrry slooowly trended down in the past two years, that number has scared the shit out of me. The possibility that it'll happen again. Meaningless number, but the symbolism is too strong for me. My inner Scarlett O'Hara is throwing a tantrum. (What, doesn't everybody have an inner southern belle?)
The less sinister explanation for what's going on: In the last two years, since I quit my job, I've spent a lot less time on my ass in front of a computer and a lot more time moving around. My body is readjusting to a less sedentary lifestyle than I've had since I got out of high school. This is really nothing to worry about.
Except I worry anyway.
If you're not familiar with the ugly intricacies of how (many, hopefully not all) women's self-images interlace with sociology and economics, this is going to sound like an insane paranoid fantasy. Trust me, though -- it's not just me. With the habit of extremes I had (even moreso than I do now), during college I managed to get myself into an unusually obvious example of a pattern that for most people is more subtle and pernicious.
Depending on who I talk to, I describe that period of time in slightly different ways. The things I say are largely true. My motivations were pretty complicated, though, and some of them were unconscious. And I generally don't get into the details. So there's two distinctly different pictures I can paint of why I ended up weighing a hundred pounds by the time I graduated from college.
(that usericon, up there, was from around then. I was twenty-one or so, and weighed right around a hundred pounds. I got dizzy when I stood up. My cheeks were sunken. My collarbones protruded like shelves.)
Picture number one: I was poor. Damn poor. I was a charity case at college, on a need-based scholarship some would describe as a "full ride." Except that the seven thousand dollars a year that was left after school "fees" (like tuition, only it didn't fluctuate with how many courses you take) wasn't something you could live on in Berkeley in the early nineties. My father and I weren't speaking and my mother had her hands full and her pocketbook empty raising my sister.
There was only so much I could do to work to earn money to supplement my scholarship. They just reduced my scholarship the next year because they figured if I was working, they didn't need to give me as much money. For every $5 I earned, they docked my scholarship around $3. The expectation, I was told, was that I'd save at least two-thirds of each paycheck I earned during the summer to help support myself during the year. Every year I supplied copious documentation to prove that one-third of the money I earned wasn't enough to support myself for the summer. This would change the amount they'd give me, but not by a whole lot, and it would push out the date my checks actually arrived, since the 'audit' took fer-fucking-ever.
For the first two years of college I managed to spend less than four of those seven thousand dollars on rent. Then I found myself no longer in a romantic relationship, and it was a lot harder to split a one-bedroom apartment with another person when we weren't dating. I made that work for six months, and then had to find another solution.
The next place was more expensive. But much safer to live in than the last place (no more periodically having to find someplace to spend a few hours while they cleared the rioters away from my building). I was spending more than eighty percent of my scholarship on rent. I could have arranged to spend somewhat less if I'd taken the tiny studio apartment...but big chunks of the savings would have been taken up by public transit fees as I'd no longer be able to walk to class, and I'd again have the problem of living in someplace I didn't feel safe, this time living alone. I'm pretty sure I made the right choice.
Anyway. Most of the rest of my money went to books. I ate when I could convince somebody to feed me. I talked my mother into buying me big bags of flour so I could make my own bread. I learned that flour, water, olive oil, and baking powder made a damn fine biscuit-like base that I could wrap around whatever I could get my hands on.
I survived.
That was the economics of the situation.
Years later, somebody explained to me that soup kitchens don't work like college scholarship offices; if I'd gone and asked for food, they would not have made me spend three weeks proving I needed it before feeding me. This was somewhat amazing to me, and I do wish I'd understood that at the time. My mom could have helped more; my sister's braces weren't *that* expensive. I could have tried harder to make up with my dad.
I didn't spend anywhere near enough time puzzling over what to do with my problem. Simple problem -- not enough money to live on. I did what was the obvious solution to me at the time.
Why that was the "obvious" solution leads to the sociology of the situation.
Which leads to the second picture I will sometimes paint of my college relationship with food: I'm a recovering anorexic.
I got a lot of strokes for my plummeting weight. "You look great!" was the order of the day. If you've never been a waifish geeky girl in her early twenties in a big city, you may not understand what an enormous change that was for me. Suddenly I was cute and desirable and people *told* me that.
Given that, and the abundance of cultural messages encouraging women to starve themselves in order to conform to unrealistic notions of "beauty", is it any wonder that when faced with a budget shortfall, I chose not to eat?
In common cultural parlance, thin = rich & beautiful. I wanted to be both. This seemed like a reasonable solution.
That it seemed reasonable to me -- and to so many other women, then and now -- sickens and angers me.
A budding feminist consciousness, the threat of hospitalization for malnutrition delivered by a healthcare professional I trusted, and regular post-college paychecks got me eating again.
But first I had to talk to just about everybody I knew and ask them to please stop telling me I look so great so thin. A lot of people were perplexed. A lot didn't get it. A few of them understood. A few of them even went as far as to fuss over me, "are you feeling okay? You look ill!" when they noted I didn't seem to be eating. I appreciate that. For a year or so I exercised constant vigilance; whenever somebody who Didn't Get It commented on my weight, if I wasn't careful, my subconscious would quietly squelch any hunger signals and I'd forget to eat.
So, that's why I insist that I'm not losing weight when somebody compliments me on it.
Because I don't think it's something I want to be complimented on. If I had weight loss as a stated goal, maybe, *maybe* it would be reasonable for someone to congratulate me on making progress on my goals. After they made sure I was losing weight for some reason other than being culturally brainwashed, that is.
And no matter how hard I try to protect myself from the bombard of cultural messages about weight, some of them still get through. There are still billboards (though few in Seattle), and magazine covers and I regularly find myself looking around and noting that everyone in a room with me has expressed to me some time in the last few weeks dissatisfaction with their body and desire to lose weight. And that gets to me. It eats away at my determination to love my body enough that I won't slide back into anorexia. Because if you attractive, muscular people are unhappy with your shapes, what the heck must you think about mine?
In two years I've lost more than an inch in diameter on all but one measurement I've tracked. This scares the fuck out of me.
Brr.
Leaving this post public for now. I'll see how I feel about that in an hour.
At the gym this morning, after yoga class: Ruminating on last week -- lots of yoga, lots of activity. Very sore all week. Ate lots of protein. And the weeks before -- more activity. Been taking pretty good care of myself.
This morning, I was sure that by now I must have built back up at least some of the muscle I lost before burning man. Small weight fluctuations are meaningless, I know, but over the last six months I have in fact been trending downwards -- wobbling around 150 instead of between 155 and 160. I'm kind of sorry I started weighing myself in the first place, but I kind of wanted to see myself bulk up, because I know I've been getting stronger.
(yes, trending downwards. I know what I posted the other day. I'll get back to that, I promise.)
Before burning man I dropped below 150 for the first time in nearly nine years. Given how well I ate out there and how active I was and how hard I've pushed my body since I got back, putting that muscle on should have been easy.
So I told myself as I stepped on the scale at the gym.
So ... HOW THE HELL AM I DOWN TO 146 POUNDS? This is not okay. This is me straying below that specter of an arbitrary number for well over a month.
Arbitrary number. Yes. I realize that. But it's a number which looms large in my mind. Because when I was 'on my way back up' it wasn't until I hit 150 that I could really keep the weight on without struggle. Below that, my energy would flag, my mood would tank, and I'd feel too tired to get out of bed and too depressed to eat. And the pounds would slough back off again.
It's an ugly pattern I repeated over and over again my first year or so out of college. As my weight has verrrry slooowly trended down in the past two years, that number has scared the shit out of me. The possibility that it'll happen again. Meaningless number, but the symbolism is too strong for me. My inner Scarlett O'Hara is throwing a tantrum. (What, doesn't everybody have an inner southern belle?)
The less sinister explanation for what's going on: In the last two years, since I quit my job, I've spent a lot less time on my ass in front of a computer and a lot more time moving around. My body is readjusting to a less sedentary lifestyle than I've had since I got out of high school. This is really nothing to worry about.
Except I worry anyway.
If you're not familiar with the ugly intricacies of how (many, hopefully not all) women's self-images interlace with sociology and economics, this is going to sound like an insane paranoid fantasy. Trust me, though -- it's not just me. With the habit of extremes I had (even moreso than I do now), during college I managed to get myself into an unusually obvious example of a pattern that for most people is more subtle and pernicious.
Depending on who I talk to, I describe that period of time in slightly different ways. The things I say are largely true. My motivations were pretty complicated, though, and some of them were unconscious. And I generally don't get into the details. So there's two distinctly different pictures I can paint of why I ended up weighing a hundred pounds by the time I graduated from college.
(that usericon, up there, was from around then. I was twenty-one or so, and weighed right around a hundred pounds. I got dizzy when I stood up. My cheeks were sunken. My collarbones protruded like shelves.)
Picture number one: I was poor. Damn poor. I was a charity case at college, on a need-based scholarship some would describe as a "full ride." Except that the seven thousand dollars a year that was left after school "fees" (like tuition, only it didn't fluctuate with how many courses you take) wasn't something you could live on in Berkeley in the early nineties. My father and I weren't speaking and my mother had her hands full and her pocketbook empty raising my sister.
There was only so much I could do to work to earn money to supplement my scholarship. They just reduced my scholarship the next year because they figured if I was working, they didn't need to give me as much money. For every $5 I earned, they docked my scholarship around $3. The expectation, I was told, was that I'd save at least two-thirds of each paycheck I earned during the summer to help support myself during the year. Every year I supplied copious documentation to prove that one-third of the money I earned wasn't enough to support myself for the summer. This would change the amount they'd give me, but not by a whole lot, and it would push out the date my checks actually arrived, since the 'audit' took fer-fucking-ever.
For the first two years of college I managed to spend less than four of those seven thousand dollars on rent. Then I found myself no longer in a romantic relationship, and it was a lot harder to split a one-bedroom apartment with another person when we weren't dating. I made that work for six months, and then had to find another solution.
The next place was more expensive. But much safer to live in than the last place (no more periodically having to find someplace to spend a few hours while they cleared the rioters away from my building). I was spending more than eighty percent of my scholarship on rent. I could have arranged to spend somewhat less if I'd taken the tiny studio apartment...but big chunks of the savings would have been taken up by public transit fees as I'd no longer be able to walk to class, and I'd again have the problem of living in someplace I didn't feel safe, this time living alone. I'm pretty sure I made the right choice.
Anyway. Most of the rest of my money went to books. I ate when I could convince somebody to feed me. I talked my mother into buying me big bags of flour so I could make my own bread. I learned that flour, water, olive oil, and baking powder made a damn fine biscuit-like base that I could wrap around whatever I could get my hands on.
I survived.
That was the economics of the situation.
Years later, somebody explained to me that soup kitchens don't work like college scholarship offices; if I'd gone and asked for food, they would not have made me spend three weeks proving I needed it before feeding me. This was somewhat amazing to me, and I do wish I'd understood that at the time. My mom could have helped more; my sister's braces weren't *that* expensive. I could have tried harder to make up with my dad.
I didn't spend anywhere near enough time puzzling over what to do with my problem. Simple problem -- not enough money to live on. I did what was the obvious solution to me at the time.
Why that was the "obvious" solution leads to the sociology of the situation.
Which leads to the second picture I will sometimes paint of my college relationship with food: I'm a recovering anorexic.
I got a lot of strokes for my plummeting weight. "You look great!" was the order of the day. If you've never been a waifish geeky girl in her early twenties in a big city, you may not understand what an enormous change that was for me. Suddenly I was cute and desirable and people *told* me that.
Given that, and the abundance of cultural messages encouraging women to starve themselves in order to conform to unrealistic notions of "beauty", is it any wonder that when faced with a budget shortfall, I chose not to eat?
In common cultural parlance, thin = rich & beautiful. I wanted to be both. This seemed like a reasonable solution.
That it seemed reasonable to me -- and to so many other women, then and now -- sickens and angers me.
A budding feminist consciousness, the threat of hospitalization for malnutrition delivered by a healthcare professional I trusted, and regular post-college paychecks got me eating again.
But first I had to talk to just about everybody I knew and ask them to please stop telling me I look so great so thin. A lot of people were perplexed. A lot didn't get it. A few of them understood. A few of them even went as far as to fuss over me, "are you feeling okay? You look ill!" when they noted I didn't seem to be eating. I appreciate that. For a year or so I exercised constant vigilance; whenever somebody who Didn't Get It commented on my weight, if I wasn't careful, my subconscious would quietly squelch any hunger signals and I'd forget to eat.
So, that's why I insist that I'm not losing weight when somebody compliments me on it.
Because I don't think it's something I want to be complimented on. If I had weight loss as a stated goal, maybe, *maybe* it would be reasonable for someone to congratulate me on making progress on my goals. After they made sure I was losing weight for some reason other than being culturally brainwashed, that is.
And no matter how hard I try to protect myself from the bombard of cultural messages about weight, some of them still get through. There are still billboards (though few in Seattle), and magazine covers and I regularly find myself looking around and noting that everyone in a room with me has expressed to me some time in the last few weeks dissatisfaction with their body and desire to lose weight. And that gets to me. It eats away at my determination to love my body enough that I won't slide back into anorexia. Because if you attractive, muscular people are unhappy with your shapes, what the heck must you think about mine?
In two years I've lost more than an inch in diameter on all but one measurement I've tracked. This scares the fuck out of me.
Brr.
Leaving this post public for now. I'll see how I feel about that in an hour.
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I joined the local Y yesterday, I have to schedule a metting with their free trainer for early next week. And it's entirely possible I will be hard pressed to get across my goals, because weight loss just isn't on the list.
I miss strength training. I'd like to do yoga. I'm going to ask if they can find a tai chi instructor. Lifting weights felt good. One of the worst fall outs of my broken ankle last year was being on bed rest, then no weight bearing, then weeks and weeks of wearing The Boot. By the time I recovered, my workout partner had bailed on me, feh.
I don't care what I weigh. I care how I feel.
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It's a frightening feeling knowing that if I put on some weight, as I'm surely going to do now and again (being a devoted non-dieter), I'll feel less...special, I guess. Less special to people who are really important to me. This despite what I believe is right and true, which is the big big suck.
OK, this isn't a group therapy session.
I hear you.
Um. On the other hand, I rather enjoy encouraging people to eat, when that's what they *want*. It feels like taking care of them. If you'd like that, I'm happy to oblige when I can.
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Yeah. that, exactly.
I also like feeding people. I go out of my way to do so.
And it's dinner party season! If I ever get the crap out of my dining room I need to start having dinner parties again...wanna come over and have a ridiculously over-engineered meal? :) I expect it'll be November before I oust enough crap from my life to fit in that level of cooking again, but that's several *months* of dinner parties before spring!
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I've lost about 40 pounds in 4 months and it's stress all the way.
I am simply too stressed to eat.
I *know* I needed to lose weight and I know the loss if getting me handfulls of compliments, but this is not a healthy way to go.
It's nice on occasion to see that there are folks with non perfect weight loss.
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I don't look at other people the same way that I look at myself.
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most people don't. :/
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I sort of get it that you are tracking your measurements partly so you won't slide back into anorexia, but I'm struck by how what you are saying sounds very much like what I hear from people who think their bodies are trending toward too big instead of trending toward too small. They see a certain number and it scares the fuck out of them, even though they are active and physically they usually feel OK.
What do you think would happen if you stopped weighing and measuring yourself?
FWIW, I don't think the strength of muscles and the physical mass of muscles have much correlation.
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Yeah. On one level I feel "justified" -- the only data I have for "what it feels like to be an adult under 150 pounds" is "awful". I don't want to feel awful again. But that's not really rational; I have no real data as to what other things contributed to my feeling awful then.
Part of me wants to find somebody who'll pay attention *for* me. Somebody who can tap me on the shoulder and say, "um, I think maybe things are going badly. Perhaps you should pay attention?" Because I know I wasn't rational when I wasn't eating. And I'm afraid I won't notice.
[ What do you think would happen if you stopped weighing and measuring yourself? ]
The latter, I'd stop getting clothes that fit. ;) (seriously, I have exactly two sets of measurements for my body -- one from may 2002, and one from now. in both cases I was having clothing made.) The former, I dunno. For awhile it was very exciting, to watch my body change shape and my mass stay the same. That had never happened to me before.
I started paying attention to the scale when I started doing more yoga and less weightlifting. The weights were easily trackable; I could tell when I was slacking off. If I carve out the time in my schedule to lift more regularly this may feed the urge to keep track of something.
My hope is that writing about it means I'll be paying better attention and I'll be able to catch myself before my weight goes into freefall. The wellbutrin is probably helping, too.
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From what you've said about your food intake in the college days, it sounds like it wasn't particularly balanced or nutritious - more a case of "whatever you could get". I think this would probably have contributed quite a bit to the feeling awful. You might now find that you're okay at a little under 150, provided your food choices are well-balanced. What you eat can make a huge difference to how you feel.
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That makes sense. But if your goal is to feel good, then perhaps it makes sense to track how you feel more than how much you weigh. On the other hand, I guess sometimes one can talk oneself into believing one feels good when one doesn't. Maybe that's something that another person might be able to help you with - by asking you the right questions about how you really feel, questions that wouldn't let you get away with distortions.
I hope that writing and wellbutrin help too.
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Much of what you said about college experience sounded familiar. It wasn't anorexia for me, it was a stress related no-binge purging EDNOS while getting myself through uni after being booted out of home.
I monitor with numbers too, but I try to remind myself that the numbers are numbers I've chosen after a lot of hard work, and they are good numbers for me. If I ever change those numbers, it will be for me, not for anyone else.
Structure helps me, don't know if that's my sub side talking, but I refuse to feel guilty about using a structure. I just try remind myself when I fall ouside my range that I have the tools to get back to my what is good for me and again, it's my business and no-one elses. Defensive probably, but as so many people are "experts" about what women should do, I think it's a sane reaction.
I am 64 kilos/162 cms. I went to the doctor yesterday and he said to me, you can probably lose 4 more safely, but your face will look drawn. First off, I already said I was happy where I was and didn't ask advice about losing - I was there because of a flu infection. Secondly, it's bizarre to have the old "your face or your arse" choice migrate from women's magazines into the doctor's surgery.
This plus some stuff with a partner recently makes me want to quote that kid in the Simpsons family therapy episode as a response to any and all weight related comments, ie, "Why don't you all shut up?!"
Anyway, I hope you manage to get back to a more comfortable place with it. It's loopy out there.
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