So, yesterday I did a non-update post, today is an update post, I suppose.
Like I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm starting up therapy again, although in a different set-up than I've had before. I'm back with T, the last therapist I had during my Master's. I like her, and am so incredibly glad I'm not starting from scratch with a new person.
A few things are different. We're Skyping, and are only meeting twice a month (rather than weekly) since my current insurance gives me zero coverage for therapy and I'm paying 100% out of pocket.
Also, when I saw her before I was concurrently seeing a dietitian (who I LOVED and want back, but I can't afford her anymore). So D. covered most of the food and numbers talk, and with T. I talked more about just stresses, issues, concerns, and general life challenges. So now T is monitoring exercise, weight, etc more, which is a shift in dynamic. She has been surprisingly open about her own history with anorexia, and I always, always wonder if that's one reason she prefers to leave the food/numbers talk to D. when she can. But I have no qualms about her professionalism or the fact that she seems to have had a really thorough recovery (she just had a baby and I've never had any red flags that she's not over her own issues, unlike the first therapist I saw when I moved to Master's City).
We've had two sessions so far. One was sort of an update and "where do we go from here" session, and one was talking about how I hadn't adhered to the exercise goals we discussed in the first session. So there's that. I feel like being at my current weight has lost me the 'privilege' of talking about anything except food/exercise stuff. We always used to talk a lot about work stress, life goals (I was seeing her during the year I was applying to PhD programs), relationship stuff, etc, and I want that back. So I guess I have to get myself out of the weight doghouse first, or else it looks like I'm intentionally being avoidant about ED topics.
By the way, I was in Match City for about three weeks, and just got back to PhD Town a few days ago. I had a good visit with Match . . . our fourth anniversary is TODAY, and I feel like we're still getting better and better at this relationship thing all the time.
I really enjoyed Match and we have a good cohabitation dynamic at this point (a sign of how far I've come; when we first started dating I was still so food/exercise routine oriented that staying over for even a whole weekend would have been unthinkable, much less three weeks...). That being said, it was also nice to come back to my own space, run on 100% my own schedule, etc.
I have to be careful, though. PhD Town is at a pretty high elevation (higher than Denver), and for some reason my body goes into a monkish austerity mode for my first few weeks at altitude. My appetite shrivels up and dies to a degree that alarms even a veteran EDer, and I have trouble sleeping more than 3 hours a night. So that becomes a bit of a quality of life issue after a while . . .
Even when I'm not in altitude mode, I rarely sleep more than 5-6 hours a night when I'm alone. My body just refuses to stay dormant any longer than that. When I'm with Match, though, I can get 8-9 hours easily for a week+ at a time. No idea why.
Which is a good segueway to the fact that I'm increasingly aware of how much healthier I feel when I'm with him. I did gain a bit of weight back while I was there. When we're co-habbing I sleep more, I exercise less, and I eat more well-rounded meals (although I also drink more alcohol). I get roughly the same calories/day there, but at home I often don't feel like bothering to cook and for one meal a day I usually default to pulling out however many protein bars and yogurts (or, lets be honest, ice cream or cereal; I've never had hang-ups about junk food, just calorie totals) I need to meet my calorie mandate--a habit that used to drive D. absolutely nuts.
So now I'm home, left to my own devices, and am really trying hard to stay on track. I signed up to help a friend with some local fieldwork all week (the landscape and wildlife around PhD Town are UNBELIEVABLE), knowing that the times I'd be needed would interfere with my routine a bit and keep me from running before I should have. Classes start on Monday, so that will also give me something other than exercise to frame my day around. I guess it's sweet that I fall into healthier patterns when I'm around Match, but I don't like the image that creates of me being somehow dependent (NOT my style) and want to prove I can do it on my own too.
Feet/running update: They're slowly improving. I've run the same amount in the past month that I was doing in a week just prior to my feet going kaput. I'm trying really hard not to push it. As T. pointed out, if running is really that important for me and not ED-motivated, it's better to only run once a week or so and keep that going long-term than to "run yourself to death for a few months and then have to take several years off again." I concur, but it's tough.
So that's that, I guess. This is going to be a pretty intense semester, and I'm really trying to focus on keeping my priorities straight.
love y'all
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Slate Takes on Claims of 'Thin-Shaming'
So, I don't usually link to articles I see about the media wars, eating disorders in the news, etc, because I am afraid of triggering people and because it seems to just be a never ending issue (I feel like a treadmill analogy is appropriate here, but won't use it).
But I thought that Katy Waldman hit the nail on the head so incredibly well in this piece that I had to link to it. Clearly, Emma Woolf (the person who wrote the original op-ed post on the Daily Beast that the linked Slate essay discusses) is not over her eating disorder yet, and is doing some hand-waving (we've probably all done that, in our heads or in therapy, but not in this public of a sphere) about her views on issue about which a disease is still coloring her vision. That's my thought, at least.
Another thought, though, is that I'm probably not in a much different position from Woolf with the ED stuff right now: struggled for over a decade, doing better but not Better, fixing things but not Fixed. I won't claim that my views are 100% untinted by the ED at this point, either . . .
. . . But I was still appalled by the insensitivity of some of the things she said, and how she seemed to paint the world of overweight women as such a rosy sisterhood. I've been in those staff lunches where people comment on what you are/aren't eating, but I never attributed it to "thin-shaming." It's usually a cominbation of people being concerned and our culture being obsessed with talking about food and weight. Waldman astutely describes what I agree is probably the situation with Woolf:
"Rather than being a target of thin-shaming, she’s really a target of fat-shaming—her own. She’s internalized the voice that flows so freely and viciously through her article, the one whispering that flesh is “bad” and bone is “good,” the one telling readers all about the moral degeneration of the overweight and the virtuous beauty of the petite. She’s the bully she should be worried about."
I do think I understood parts of Woolf's op-ed better than Waldman did, though, and anyone who has had an ED probably would. For example, when Woolf said "I think everyone should know what anorexia feels like," I honestly do think she meant that people really often have no idea how painful and sinister and soul-deadening the disease can be, not that she thinks everyone should try it on like a cashmere sweater. But still, I have empathy for what she went/is going through with anorexia, yet was really bothered by the piece. I was glad that Waldman seemed to try to validate that having an ED is a terrible experience while still not cutting Woolf slack for her waaaay off-target statements about the state of society's views on women's bodies.
Those are my thoughts, at least, from my gut reaction after having read the piece five minutes ago. I'm interested to hear what y'all think if you have time to check it out.
There are no low weights mentioned in the Slate article or Woolf's pieces, by the way.
Katy Waldman, via Slate:
One Woman's Crusade to Make the World Safe for Thin People
And for a spunkier take-down, there's always Jezebel:
Thin Women, I've Got Your Back, Could You Get Mine?
Snip: "If a day arrives when our streets and internets are plastered with signs that say, "GAIN WEIGHT FAST!" and, "Use this one weird trick to load up on belly fat!" then maybe I'll buy this bullshit that fat bodies are celebrated. When women start eating themselves to death to avoid being called "Olive Oyl," then maybe I'll agree that thin-shaming has comparable repercussions to fat-shaming. When families gather around the Cambozola loaf to watch The Lumpiest Gainer, then maybe we can talk about how oppressive body-positivity is."
But I thought that Katy Waldman hit the nail on the head so incredibly well in this piece that I had to link to it. Clearly, Emma Woolf (the person who wrote the original op-ed post on the Daily Beast that the linked Slate essay discusses) is not over her eating disorder yet, and is doing some hand-waving (we've probably all done that, in our heads or in therapy, but not in this public of a sphere) about her views on issue about which a disease is still coloring her vision. That's my thought, at least.
Another thought, though, is that I'm probably not in a much different position from Woolf with the ED stuff right now: struggled for over a decade, doing better but not Better, fixing things but not Fixed. I won't claim that my views are 100% untinted by the ED at this point, either . . .
. . . But I was still appalled by the insensitivity of some of the things she said, and how she seemed to paint the world of overweight women as such a rosy sisterhood. I've been in those staff lunches where people comment on what you are/aren't eating, but I never attributed it to "thin-shaming." It's usually a cominbation of people being concerned and our culture being obsessed with talking about food and weight. Waldman astutely describes what I agree is probably the situation with Woolf:
"Rather than being a target of thin-shaming, she’s really a target of fat-shaming—her own. She’s internalized the voice that flows so freely and viciously through her article, the one whispering that flesh is “bad” and bone is “good,” the one telling readers all about the moral degeneration of the overweight and the virtuous beauty of the petite. She’s the bully she should be worried about."
I do think I understood parts of Woolf's op-ed better than Waldman did, though, and anyone who has had an ED probably would. For example, when Woolf said "I think everyone should know what anorexia feels like," I honestly do think she meant that people really often have no idea how painful and sinister and soul-deadening the disease can be, not that she thinks everyone should try it on like a cashmere sweater. But still, I have empathy for what she went/is going through with anorexia, yet was really bothered by the piece. I was glad that Waldman seemed to try to validate that having an ED is a terrible experience while still not cutting Woolf slack for her waaaay off-target statements about the state of society's views on women's bodies.
Those are my thoughts, at least, from my gut reaction after having read the piece five minutes ago. I'm interested to hear what y'all think if you have time to check it out.
There are no low weights mentioned in the Slate article or Woolf's pieces, by the way.
Katy Waldman, via Slate:
One Woman's Crusade to Make the World Safe for Thin People
And for a spunkier take-down, there's always Jezebel:
Thin Women, I've Got Your Back, Could You Get Mine?
Snip: "If a day arrives when our streets and internets are plastered with signs that say, "GAIN WEIGHT FAST!" and, "Use this one weird trick to load up on belly fat!" then maybe I'll buy this bullshit that fat bodies are celebrated. When women start eating themselves to death to avoid being called "Olive Oyl," then maybe I'll agree that thin-shaming has comparable repercussions to fat-shaming. When families gather around the Cambozola loaf to watch The Lumpiest Gainer, then maybe we can talk about how oppressive body-positivity is."
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
'Destructively Fit'
Check out this article about 'Destructively Fit,' a new program that aims to train fitness professionals to recognize and provide resources for people that are taking exercise to obsessive and/or dangerous levels. I'm really glad that this component of EDs is getting more attention, props to Jodi Rubin for initiating the program.
Even though the Greatist is a very food- and workout-heavy website, I've noticed that they seem to pay more attention to overexercise than any other health-focused website I've seen.
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