Holiday Trip Eve

I'm heading out of town for the holidays tomorrow.  Lots of travel/visit (read: nonroutine) time, but I've been handling that better lately and hope that it will all be okay.  Will try to make it so.

I've been having a lot of largely inchoate relationship anxiety this week, and am trying to tell myself it's just because Match and I haven't seen each other in a few weeks and are both stressed about grad school decisions.  Sometimes I'm afraid that relationship stress is an easy target for my general anxiety to glom onto, and that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if I'm not careful.  Going to try to avoid that. He and I will have a pretty long visit over the break, and I really want to try hard not to let anxiety and other stuff ruin it.

I have been working really, really hard at forcing myself to be okay with the fact that I'm finally starting to put back on some of the weight I lost last year.  Still only about halfway to restoring all of it, but it's enough of a change that it's taking a lot of conscious rationalization to keep myself from freaking the hell out, especially since I haven't increased my food or decreased my exercise.  I think that what's happening, to logic it out, is that this year I'm not going to my field site in the tropics and losing weight 2-3 times a semester, so the gain isn't so much a ton of adding but a lack of that periodic subtracting just as I was starting to gain it back, if that makes sense.

The weight thing is interesting at this stage: 1) seeing the numbers goes up and really challenges my sense of control.  I HATE it when people reduce EDs to just being about control issues, because they're infinitely more complex than that, but I can't deny that it's at least a partial issue in my case (whether it's a cause or effect of the ED is up for debate).  It's my body and I hate feeling like it's doing anything without my "permission." And yet... 2) I really don't dislike how my body looks and feels right now, at least a good bit of the time (Fat Days still happen, but I guess that's par for the course at this stage).  I am noticing effects from the strength training, and I suppose there is some irony in the fact that I had to gain weight to get the best abs of my life, LOL...So I'm faced with admitting that I'm letting numbers freak me out without really paying attention to anything else, which is a recovery no-go.

In positive news, I arranged to start seeing my previous dietician after the holidays.  She definitely remembered me and seemed excited to be working with me again, which made me feel a lot better.  It will be a blow to my budget, but I really, really need to try to make as much progress as possible before I head off to the next stage of my career later this year.  Plus, I felt like at times she was even more helpful than my regular therapist, so it will be nice to have her advice again.

I literally spent hours today combing through my Facebook Timeline...talk about memory lane.
Definitely spurred an overdrive of introspection.

I hope everyone has a great Christmas, and if you don't celebrate Christmas I wish you happy Hanukkah, solstice, New Year's, or just hope you have a good week in general.  Love y'all!

Pot of Hot Mess

So I just got an official offer from what, at this time, is my #1 choice for PhD programs. I am resorting to this forum for extra squee because I have pretty much saturated everyone I know in real life with my obsessing over this stuff.

Of course, I can't just accept it and celebrate, because that would be far too easy and simple.  I still haven't visited a few of the others on my list, and will give each place a chance with due diligence.  It has taken me about an hour to get from "omg anxiety because this pot of hot mess in my thoughts about grad school decisions has just been stirred" to actual "hey I think I might be happy because this opportunity that I want so badly is actually mine for the taking."

Not sure if I've ever felt this degree of seesaw between anxiety and glee, but it's better than anxiety and crying, so I'll take it for however long it lasts!

'Tis the Season

Well, it's that season again. And no, I'm not talking about Christmas, Hanukkah, or Solstice.  Although the Solstice might actually be involved, since it involves the days becoming shorter and shorter.

I'm talking about S.A.D. season.  I was doing really well earlier this fall, but I have felt the shadow of the "winter blues" sliding over me pretty steadily for the past week or two. I am back to the point at which I find myself crying at least twice a day, sometimes for reasons that I don't even understand. Poor G. is really sweet about nuzzling me and sitting against me when I'm upset, but that just makes me feel guilty for not even being stable enough to parent a fucking dog without stressing him out too.

And I know that this isn't the worst of it; I almost invariably bottom out with it around the middle of February.  Plenty to look forward to.

This is nothing new, but never easy either.  I think I'm just sick of it, because last winter it seems like it took me until the end of May to shake it--at which point it's really not S.A.D. anymore, I suppose, that was just the initial trigger and then even the returning sun and spring weren't enough to chase it away.  It just makes me feel kind of suffocated to think of spending 5-6 months of each year like this for the rest of my life.

I'm really trying not to let myself be a victim with it, though.  I think one reason it was so bad last year was because I was pretty socially isolated and was not in therapy. So hopefully this year will be better.  I'm going to be taking a class in the spring (first time in a over a year and a half!), which should help with the general feeling of purposelessness and loneliness. I took full loads the first year of grad school to get my credits out of the way so I could focus on my research, but I've found that I desperately miss the discussion/socialization aspect of being in class.

I'm also in therapy this year, which should help, I hope.

 I am sort of conflicted about therapy right now, actually.  I really, really like T., and feel like we connect well.  But I don't feel like I'm making any progress, ED-wise, for whatever reason.  I'm not saying it's her fault, because nobody is going to be able to achieve changes in my life except for me, but I don't know.  Sometimes I feel like she's playing cheerleader when I still need a coach.  Or a drill sergeant.  But then that makes me feel like I'm shirking responsibility for my own actions.  I am glad that I have her to talk to about everything going on in my life, but I still leave her office feeling unfulfilled a lot of the time.  If I bring up some place I'm struggling, she will do a lot of reassuring that I can overcome it, without us talking about specific strategies or goals to accomplish that.  I don't know, I'm going to stop because I'm afraid this post is getting too whiny.

I think I may contact my old dietician to see if I can take up appointments with her again, because she was very into helping me with the specifics of my exercise stuff, which has been the hardest ED issue for me to shake.  The only reason I haven't done it before now is 1) my insurance doesn't cover her and I be broke and 2) she works at the same practice as the therapist I saw my first year here, who was totally not over her own ED and didn't work out for me.

I also need to get a grip on the fact that I started with the strength training with the excuse (and honest intention, I swear) that I would use it as a way to build some muscle and gain weight in a way that wouldn't freak me out.  At first I seemed to gain the muscle by just changing my body composition, and not adding weight, but now I have added a bit.  Just a bit. But outside what I can attribute to normal flux.  All my clothes still fit the same, but I notice it on the scale and am working very hard, with limited success, on keeping up the "not freaking out" part of the bargain.  Suck it up (not in), Cammy.

This is pretty much just a mind-dump post, apparently. Apologies to anyone still reading. I'm feeling really demoralized and disempowered by a lot of stuff going on with my adviser right now, which I won't get into here.  Match and I had a bicker last night but are doing well overall.  This Christmas break will be our longest continuous visit with each other, so that will be interesting.

Anyway, general Eeyore post, I suppose.  I hope everyone is surviving finals and general pre-holiday craziness, love y'all.

Randoms on Starving Secrets

So I sort of just want to write a post so that the last unhappy one isn't on top anymore.  Last weekend was pretty bad, but things have been a lot calmer and more peaceful since then.  I just wish I understood my moods sometimes. I weigh the exact same this morning--to the ounce--that I did on Sunday, and yet my body anxiety is an order of magnitude lower.  Yeah dunno.

As one ever-astute commenter asked, which came first, the fighting with Match or the unhappy body image? I don't honestly know, sometimes it's a snowball type phenomenon and it feels like a chicken vs egg situation (wow, how many other cliches can I fit into one sentence?).  I think sometimes more than one type of stress can just hit at once and it the resulting emotions are exponential rather than additive. And yes, I'm a nerd, hopefully you knew that already.

One variable I could tentatively pick out regarding the god-awful body day, with no assurance that was actually causal, is watching 'Starving Secrets,' the new Tracey Gold series that is basically Intervention for EDs (even though Intervention does ED cases periodically also).  So I guess it's ED Intervention for the Lifetime Channel with an Ex-Child Star Host.

Objectively, I think that it has a lot fewer triggerpoints than many other things I have seen/read, but "triggering" is such an overwhelmingly subjective descriptor that it is rarely the same for any two people, or for the same person on any two occasions. I think the trigger factor often has a lot (not all) to do with what's going on inside someone's head rather than what they're seeing on the screen or page. I think that it was just a bad weekend for me to watch the show.

I know there has been a lot of press and controversy over this show.  I think, as most people have opined, that there are some things that are done well and some that aren't.

• I hated that they revealed any numbers.  Yes the woman was skinny as fuck, we can tell that without you giving it to us quantitatively.
• One review that I read (sorry I can't remember which one, speak up for credit if you wrote it!) pointed out that they gave the weight of the woman with anorexia and not the young woman with bulimia. I'm not sure if it was a permission issue from the women themselves, or if they simply didn't think the weight of the person with bulimia was shocking enough. 

• You see what I did there? A woman with anorexia.  It bugged me that they were simply labeled "anorexic" and "bulimic" under their names like a title.  The behaviors are anorexic and bulimic.  The women are people with a disease.

• I was VERY glad that they didn't do any exploitative body shots.  I have seen some episodes of Intervention that included scenes with an ED sufferer in a state of revealing undress that almost certainly had to be staged for the purpose of parading her clavicles and ribs around.  Newsflash: at those low weights most people live in a state of bundling limited only by the necessity to bend one's arms.  If bones turn you on then go look at an anatomy textbook, and get some therapy on your way.

• I have to admit that I had an incessant fascination with Tracey Gold when I was a teenager.  I had been a huge fan of Growing Pains in middle school, and it wasn't until later that I found out she had had an ED--and by that time, when I was dealing with one myself, it made me feel some kind of ill-defined but powerful connection to her story.  I think I watched her E! True Hollywood Story episode every weekend for a few years of high school.
•  So I am not a TG hater.  But I hated the way they handled her involvement in the show.  She does voiceovers, visits to the patients, and then little feature spots where she's just sitting there talking.  The thing is, she does the "sitting there talking on camera" parts EXACTLY as if she is doing a voice-over, and is obviously reading from a prompter.  The irritation of this might not be clear unless you've seen someone doing this.  Voice overs are often kind of halting, dramatic, emphatic, whatever, because you don't have the person's face and body language to go by.  But doing the same narration style when we can see you just doesn't work. Especially when you're an actress and we know you know how to handle a camera. Sorry TG.

• I liked that they actually showed some of the treatment process. On Intervention, you invariably see the person dropped off at the treatment center and meeting the staff, and then it's suddenly 2-6 months later and you either see them being discharged successfully or you get a screen-text update about how they flunked out of rehab.  The most important part of the entire process--the healing and dealing--is completely glossed over.  I don't want video of every part of every therapy session, but I am glad that at least a good bit of time was given to showing just how complex it is to give up a lifestyle that you've been married to for years.

• One point that I've tried to hold onto as the take-home message from that first episode came from the last interview with the woman in recovery from anorexia, where she has (SPOILER ALERT) finished her residential treatment and looks amazingly more healthy and happy.  TG asks her how she feels about her weight, and she says that she's not always happy with her body at that stage, but that it is more than a fair trade-off considering the fact that she essentially just won her life back and is able to enjoy friends, family, and being her true self for the first time in many years.  Damn skippy, and a message that I'm really going to try to reassure myself with on future bad body days.

So those are my extremely random thoughts about the show. If any of you watched it, what did y'all think?  I don't want to imply that I'm saying anyone should or shouldn't watch it, btw, as with anything like this, Handle with Care if you are still struggling at all.

A Weekend I Could Have Done Without

Well I was on a roll with having a long stretch of good days and successes, and for some reason this weekend has been awful.  Today was one of the worst body image days I've had in forever, Match and I bickered on and off, and it culminated in a combo showdown/meltdown this evening that involved me literally crying until I threw up.  Glamorous, right?*

I know for a fact my weight wasn't higher today than it was yesterday, lower actually ( but well within the normal flux zone, promise); I wish I knew what exactly precipitates a Fat Day sometimes.

I don't think "feeling fat" was the main issue upsetting me, though. I think it was more of being totally frustrated, scared, sad, and angry that I still let the ED permeate my thoughts so much. Gth away from me, damn disorder...

Oh and one of my cousins had a random stroke today and the right side of his body is paralyzed. Having that happen to someone so young is scary as shit. Wish the world could just pretend this entire weekend hadn't happened.

Anyone else ever marvel at how it is both great and disturbing that one can come across as pretty normal and cheerful in some forms of social media (thinking Facebook mostly) even when they're actually having a shitty time of it?  I think I tend to do most of my real venting on  Twitter, where I'm pseudonymous (although a lot of the people I interact with on Twitter actually do know who I am), rather than on Facebook where my entire family, high school class, a bunch of professors and colleagues and students, etc etc, would be exposed to my real moods.  It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with people doing more and more socializing via the web is that it's so easy to skirt around your actual state of mind.

Anyway, just glad today is over, sincerely going to try to start the week off better tomorrow. The only way out is through, right?



*Trust me that it was an involuntary result of emotional physiology, NOT a purge.  I've never in the 13 year history of my ED purged food intentionally, throwing up actually kind of scares me.

Steve Jobs and Disordered Eating

I'm listening to the Steve Jobs biography on my iPod (appropriate coincidence, I know) right now, and to be completely honest it is largely boring me stiff.  The majority of it actually functions as a biography of Apple and every product they've ever produced.  I'm a Mac user and fan, don't get me wrong, but Isaacson seems not to have left out any detail of every bureaucratic machination that went into the development of every single product of Apple and Pixar since the early 1980's. Blah.

But since I have a pathological aversion to not finishing any book that I've started, I am through 20 of the 24 hours of the thing so far. And I'm sure that now that you're through two paragraphs of this post, you are wondering why the hell I am talking about this here.

One thing that is strikingly obvious to me is that Steve Jobs had serious Eating Issues that started as a teenager and lasted until the end of his life--which may have occurred earlier than necessary as an indirect result of his diet.  There are frequent mentions of his "crazy diets" and "binging and purging" and "routine fasts", but the fact that these could result from an actual eating disorder instead of just his inherent eccentricity is never addressed.

I'm neither a psychologist nor a physician, so maybe I'm overstepping myself here.  I won't claim to be able to diagnose someone from reading a book written about (and not even by) them.  Disclaimer complete.

Since his death, there has been some press coverage about how Jobs delayed surgery to remove his cancerous pancreas, instead spending 9 months trying out "alternative therapies." And so he's painted as just another crunchy Californian, playing hippie. The linked article opens with the question, "Was Steve Jobs a smart guy who made a stupid decision when it came to his health?" But in reality he had been an extremely ascetic and extreme eater ever since he was a teenager, and the real issue appears to be not that he was implementing weird diets to treat the cancer, but that he was just refusing to give up long-ingrained patterns.

If you read some of the details in this book (which is pretty honest, neither specifically vilifying nor lionizing him), it's clear that a big handicap in his cancer fight was his absolutely inflexibility about food and eating.  He directly disregarded the advice from doctors about special nutrition measures to take after having part of his pancreas removed--which can affect how your body processes protein, in addition to affecting other aspects of digestion.  Some of the people interviewed for the book remember his wife cooking him elaborate meals and giving up her own veganism to encourage him to eat the variety of foods he needed to recover and maintain his health, while he just sat at the table with his wife and kids, not eating anything at all rather than break his personal dietary "rules."

(By the way, it's well-known that chemo and other cancer treatments can cause loss of appetite, but from  the chronology and episodes related by friends and family that are featured in the book, it appears that when he finally did start chemo, it just exacerbated an ongoing problem with his unwillingness to eat).

Pancreatic cancer is serious (although he had one of the less acute forms), and I'm not at all claiming that he would have survived it if he'd just eaten a damn steak or trying to accuse him of anything.  I can't say for sure if he was bulimic or anorexic or orthorexic or anything else, but watching the pattern of his seemingly unshakeable behaviors--which eventually did telescope into a life-threatening situation-- whatever you define them as, is interesting to contemplate.

---> The point I'm trying to make is that it's fascinating to me that what seems to have highly possibly been such a blatant eating disorder was never addressed as such.  Instead his asceticism is painted--almost admiringly--as a result of his uber-Type-A personality.  I can't help but wonder how it would have been recognized/discussed/spun differently if he were a woman. Or an athlete. Or if he weren't so rich and easily passed off as indulging in eccentric, overprivileged fads.  Or if he had lived long enough for the long-term effects of eating only apples or carrots for weeks at a time to become apparently on an otherwise cared-for body.  We'll never know, and I'm just musing now.

Anyway, just something I have been thinking about, thought just bring it up.  I think it hits home for me because I have made so many "stupid decisions" regarding my own health in relation to my ED, and it's really thought-provoking to try to imagine what would happen if I had to have a major surgery for a major disease that would majorly overhaul all of the routines and rules I still cling to.  Even at the depths of my ED, to be honest, my diet wasn't as extreme as what Steve Jobs seems to have subjected himself to for years, and I'm not even a vegetarian now.  So honestly think I'd do whatever it took.  But the very fact that I'd have to even wonder about that sort of twinges my conscience.

By the age of 21 I had pretty much destroyed my knees and had to give up running for life, after never taking a day off for years despite stress fractures and other problems.  It didn't make any more sense at the time than it does in retrospect, but I did it nevertheless.  Maybe that was what it was like for Jobs, who knows.

Lucky 7

Hey there, I hope everyone had a great holiday!  I was looking forward to it, and was not disappointed. It was the most time Match has spent with my family (I've spent a lot more time around his), and everyone got along great. He and my oldest younger brother especially hit it off, which was nice.  The weather was beautiful, which means we got to play football and go for hikes, which was awesome.

I know Thanksgiving is officially past, but since this whole holiday season (yes NOW it is legitimate to have Christmas decorations and music and food! It annoyed me back in October, though) is about appreciating people and life etc, I have a random "lucky 7" list of things that the holiday reminded me to be grateful for:

1)  My boyfriend's family, who treat me as one of their own, except possibly even more special.  They have always just had boys (Match is one of three brothers, one of which doesn't seem to date and the other of which has an Evil girlfriend no one can stand), and so they are pretty thrilled at the novelty of having girl around. Thus, I get indulged at every opportunity. For example,  M.'s dad made a big deal about winterizing my car for me, installing some new gadgets, treating the windshield and tires, etc etc. He also cranked his thermostat up about 8 degrees for the days that I was there because he knows I get cold, and he stocked his fridge FULL of fresh fruit (as a single man he almost never buys produce for himself) because he knows I like it.  As if M. didn't spoil me enough all by himself...

2) My family, for being smart and fun and friendly and affectionate and awesome in general.

3) This wonderful region that I live in, which is extremely beautiful in the fall.

4) One word: Zinfandel.

5) My dog, who is incredibly well-behaved and the best personality fit that I ever could have found for myself.  His age is starting to show more and more, and I find myself contemplating his mortality more often these days.

6) I promise that I will never TMI y'all with details about my sex life, but indulge me some Girl Talk for a second, because I think there is something about recovery (for adults) that is not discussed enough: the fact that being physically healthy enough to have a libido again is not the same as being mentally "together" enough to really appreciate your body as something that is sexy and attractive and strong and just plain fun sometimes. I think it's easy to not even realize/remember what you're missing from intimacy until you get to that point...honestly, is there any bigger of a mood killer than stressing about whether a certain position makes your belly pooch? Or anything more rewarding than realizing you've just spent an entire evening having fun and being admired and pleased and not giving a shit about any of the other stuff? Anyway, I guess that's the main thing I wanted to say about that. Now that I've used the word "sex" and "libido" in a post, my search string stats should get a lot more interesting this week.

7) My first thesis draft is turned in, my qualifying exams are done, my PhD applications are all submitted...I be wrapping this up, yo.  Just 6 months left in this town (which I hate) and at this school (which I HATE) until I get a couple more letters behind my name and move on to the next era of my life. I can't wait.

I won't say I was entirely relaxed about food the entire holiday, but I think I handled that part well all things considered. Especially since on holidays my family tends to eat the main meal as sort of a lunch and dinner combined in the mid-afternoon, which always throws me off.  One thing Match does that helps me a ton is that if I let him know I'm hungry and need to eat, he will get a snack too because he knows I can't stand to be the only one eating.  One small but significant new victory for me is actually telling him when I'm hungry between meals, instead of either sucking it up til the next meal or finding a way to escape by myself for a few minutes to eat a granola bar without anyone seeing.