Blame Jetlag for Any Incoherencies

Well look at what the cat dragged in....after a total of 17 hours sitting on planes and 7 hours roaming international airports, I am finally home.  Match picked me up from the airport and we had a great afternoon/evening (that crazy boy drove all the way down to get me even though he has to drive 12 hours tomorrow to move into his new apartment in his new PhD City).

Remember how I was eating intuitively and feeling free about food and all that?  And in the past I always was so afraid my weight would balloon if I quit counting calories and let myself eat as much as I was hungry for?

Well I DID make a lot of progress with the eating and freedom.  Honestly, I did.  Like letting myself have desserts (CAKE, y'all, that I didn't make or calculate!), having an extra granola bar if it felt like I was hungry before dinner, having much bigger breakfasts to fuel up for the day, eating salad that came with the dressing already on it, etc.

But in the process I still managed to lose a 'not catastrophic yet not insignificant' amount of weight over the past few weeks.  I literally had to struggle to keep my jeans up the entire time I was airporting over the past two days, and Match definitely noticed the change.

I think one factor was that although there were always vegetarian options at the place I was staying, they usually were a lot less energetically dense, and so I got full without getting as many calories as I might have needed.  I also may have gone a bit hypermetabolic, that seems to be common when I switch up food stuff.  Also, my body was having so many new bugs, climates, pathogens, etc thrown at it that my immune system and such were probably working overtime and using extra fuel.

So there is the scientist in me hypothesizing about causes.  But I do want to note MAJOR difference in how I processed the realization that I'd lost weight in comparison to past times when I accidentally dropped some pounds:

Previously, losing weight, even unintentionally, automatically put me in this twisted and nonsensical mindset that even though I hadn't needed to lose the weight, I couldn't let myself gain it back, or I would somehow ruin an intangible and honestly, in retrospect, rather sick achievement.  It felt like a lot of pressure and stress to preserve a change that I hadn't needed or even consciously tried to make.

This time, honestly and truly, my main reaction was that I can/should be more liberal with my food now that I'm back in order to restore that lost weight.  After being in the tropics for weeks, I am looking forward to making up for lost time in bowls of ice cream. ;)  Also, I don't want to lose progress with all the strength training I had worked so hard at, must keep those muscles!

And I can honestly say that that isn't just talk, so far I've followed through. Despite being stuck in a sessile state on various vehicles over various continents and oceans for the past few days, I've eaten at least as many calories as I usually do when I'm at home with my normal (and still excessive) workout routine.  I went out to dinner with my boyfriend and brother tonight and had a normal meal and a drink, something that very recently would have been unthinkable on a day when I hadn't had any formal exercise.

So that's that. I'm behind on blogs, but will be catching up.  Overall I was SO happy with what I learned on the trip, both professionally and personally, and it gave me so much hope for how I can handle food both at home and for special events in the future.

Undrugged

So it turns out that the issue with appetite and such had an underlying factor that I didn't realize until today. I've been increasingly nauseous, headachey, and just plain sick feeling for 2-3 days. If I hadn't had a BC placebo week since I last saw Match I might have been in full-on pregnancy scare mode.  Like you saw in my last post, at first I just attributed it to overexertion and an overwhelmed immune system. It wasn't like when I've been sick before in the tropics, though (yes, I mean barfy gasto-catastrophe, been there done that), it just felt like I everything I put in my stomach, even water, just stayed there bloating and sloshing and mysteriously inflating and doing all kinds of equally attractive/comfortable things to my body. Hence, yesterday I drank less than a liter of water (a BAD thing at this elevation and latitude) and way under-ate, since everything was so uncomfortable.

I had a migraine-level headache today and even a tiny breakfast caused me a lot of pain (I was seriously afraid I'd have to ask my prof to pull over to let me puke on our way out into the field this morning when all I had was 2/3 of a slice of bread in my stomach), when I had the light bulb moment that nausea and gastro discomfort were listed as a side effect of my malaria drugs.

It should be noted that at this elevation malaria isn't really an issue, but the Health Department automatically prescribes the meds to anyone traveling to this country. It was cheap, so I got it “just to be safe.”

So I took a poll of people that work here, realized none of them take malaria meds and that here it's considered to be worse for your health to take them than to risk mosquito bites. I skipped my morning dose of the med this morning now I feel like an ENTIRELY different person, it's amazing. I probably drank about 4 gallons of water today, and tried to be extra liberal with my food to make up for a few days of deficit.

I have a serious case of Full Pregnantlike Tummy right now after an extra good dinner (they made all my favorite things the night I was building my strength back up, score!), and you know what? I am totally, truthfully, liberatingly fine with that. I can go to bed un-nauseous and un-hungry for the first time in days, and I know I'll have the energy to enjoy a trip we're taking tomorrow.

I am so, so over living life running on fumes. I just refuse to do it anymore.

Lessons from the Field

Hey lovelies, I hope everyone is doing well. I'm in the field for about another 10 days, and haven't been thinking much about the ED stuff lately. I felt a little adrift and purposeless the first few days as I was still meeting people and getting oriented, but then things got super busy here. I've been going around tagging along with several different people on their projects in order to get to know the area as well as possible before I come back to collect my own data next year.

I think I actually ended up overextending myself—going out into the field from 6 AM-noon, getting a workout in, cramming down lunch and then heading straight back out into field until dark, another workout and dinner, then maybe a night excursion or something else until I finally crash under my mosquito net. The workouts were really more of a default than a conscious anxiety thing, I think, at least, as there were days when we went out on a trip and I didn't have much formal exercise time and still did fine with eating. I'm just not quite over my tendency to default to using that to fill spare time, I guess, something to work on.

Anyway, I have also not been counting calories, which is a HUGE deal for me. Seriously, I never thought I'd get to that point. I can't take all the credit, since in many ways trying to keep strict counts here would just be impossible as I am so unfamiliar with the way they prepare the foods. But I have been a bit proud of how well I've handled that. 

 I think a result of the lack of calorie counting, however, is that I've been drastically undercutting my calorie needs most days, honestly unintentionally. I took time to try to estimate it a bit today, and realized I've probably been coming in under my usual cals even when I've been exerting myself quite a bit almost nonstop, even though I truly haven't been hungry most of the time. Oops. I think I've mentioned this before, but I tend to lose my appetite at high elevation, and I'm in the elevational range right now at which that tends to affect me. Plus we eat self-serve style in a dining hall, and I am a bit self conscious about going up for seconds. So I once again fail at intuitive eating, but at least for more innocent reasons this time?

The accumulation of hyperbusyness and the appetite issue, plus lack of sleep due to the many critters that chorus throughout the night here, plus being exposed to a host of new bugs and pathogens, means that my poor immune system just couldn't take it anymore and I've been really sick today. Which makes it even MORE difficult to eat any amount of food; lovely cycle, that one.

I'm trying, though. Took an easy day today with minimal time out in the field (the climate is INTENSE here, yo), and used it as a chance to catch up on some reading and blog posts. I'm eating as well as I can although everything except tea makes my stomach freak out right now.

I think I've learned some things about my patterns from this so far. One was the default tendency to fill time with exercise. It doesn't even feel like a choice to think about or decide, it's just what I do. So I need to work on taking time to ask myself if that is REALLY what I want to have to show for that hour or whatever, rather than working on something else.

I sometimes do find that I eat less than enough at meals (if it's something I don't like, which happens when the menu is planned by other people) and then supplement with bars and such later, and on days when I do that I am more likely to start obsessing about calories again, just because the numbers are there on the wrappers and allow me to do arithmetic gymnastics in my head. When I go back home I'll be back in a position of cooking for myself, of course, and all the measuring/calculating that entails, but I'm hoping this experience with at least partially turning it off will help me to ease off the tallying in other situations too.

Being here has also REALLY eased my transition to being more vegetarian (no meat except fish). There is always a veggie option at meals here, and the meat option is usually a mammal (beef, lamb, goat, etc), which I not only cut out years ago but truly have never had a taste for. When my mom was pregnant with me she would get really sick every time she ate red meat, and apparently I have maintained that opinion of it into adulthood. Giving up poultry was my last big step into vegetarianism, and that one was hard because it was such a default (discussed here), but it is served a max of once a week at this site, so it has been really easy to get out of that ingrained habit of having a meat as the last course of every main meal (usually lunch).

So that's the food update, I guess. I have no idea where my weight is, I'm pretty sure I haven't gained any, and yes I guess I still do think about it, but baby steps, right? Despite the bumbling with intuitive eating without calorie counting to guide me, I do feel like I've handled this way, way better than I ever could have before, and it's encouraging.

I find myself with a lot less interest in the whole ED thing overall lately, actually. I hope that doesn't come off the wrong way. Eating disorders are awful diseases and are totally legit, serious problems, I'm not questioning the validity of that at all. I just find myself thinking about them less and wanting to spend mental energy on them less and less as I'm making progress and getting excited about all the other things coming up for me. I definitely still have symptoms/issues to work through, but I think I'm starting to see them as quirky habits/behaviors more than anything else, and that makes it somehow seem more manageable to me, I wish I knew how to explain it better. A habit is less intimidating to quash than a disease, I guess, even though I know that an ED is unquestionably an illness. I think that even though I tend to default to those habits given the opportunity, I've become really good at being adaptable when I have to, and that helps me to set a good example for my future self and gives me a good deal of hope. As long as I don't let that shift in focus to allow me to let slippage occur without taking it seriously. I know I still have an ED, but feel like it's becoming a smaller and smaller slice of the pie chart of my life.

Okay I wonder how many people I offended/alienated with that last paragraph, really wasn't my intention. :( I love y'all.

Heya

Hey everyone, just a quick update from the field.  This place is AMAZING, now I wish I could stay all summer instead of just through the end of the month.

As far as my research goes, I couldn't have found a more ideal spot.  So excited about the possibilities.

I'm not getting as much face time with my PhD adviser as I'd hoped, since he's busy with an undergrad field course that is here right now, but oh well.  I do wish he'd done a better job with arranging ways for me to get around, but so far I've been successful in being self sufficient with asking to tag along with people who are going out.

The people are all very friendly, but at a place like this there tends to be a typical chip on the shoulder about new, untested people.  So I don't entirely feel like I'm part of the group yet, but I think I'll get there.

Food is actually going great.  The options here are very vegetarian-friendly, and overall healthy enough to feel "safe".  I'm also drastically loosening up on calorie counting, since so many of the foods are unfamiliar and I don't know how they're prepared, it's so hard to estimate that I just gave up.  Really trying to be intuitive; I tend to do better with that in the field than at home, historically.

There IS an exercise room here, thanks to a big grant from a prestigious university a few years ago, and I've been using it but for nowhere near the amount of time I spent on formal exercise at home.

So that's that.  To be honest I'm way, way behind on blog reading, but I'm thinking of y'all and hope everyone is doing well.

made it

I'm here, I'm safe, I'm exhausted, but I'm mostly relieved things have gone so smoothly thus far.

Figuring out how much is "okay" to eat when leaping time zones has been so confusing I have to admit (and perhaps celebrate) that I sort of gave up trying to calculate it. I just had a 14 hour day instead of a 24 hour one PLUS being cooped up on planes not sleeping for the past two nights, and could torture myself all kinds of ways with it.  Now that I'm here, I'm more worried about what is safe to eat microbe-wise than anything else, so that's that for now I guess.


can't keep eyes open, love y'all.

Here we go...

Hey lovelies, how are you? It's been a while now, last week was a WHIRLWIND.  I had to wrap everything up with my thesis stuff, move out of my apartment, and make a road trip up to my parent's house on Wednesday only to turn around and make another road trip for a family reunion weekend on Thursday.  Got back last night and spent today in mad packing mode because I'm literally flying to the other side of the world tomorrow.  After two straight days of airplane travel and another day or two of bumping around tropical roads to get to the research station, I'll be in the field for the rest of the month, but I WILL have at least some access to the internet, so I'm hoping I'll still be somewhat in touch.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I'm trying so.so.hard. to handle this transition as a way to switch over to being more of a Normal Person. I did really well with eating the same things as everyone else and not freaking out over lost gym time at the reunion this past weekend.  It helped that a lot of my family are very healthy (without dieting) eaters, and we were in a really nice area for going for walks and such.  I was really able to relax and just enjoy being with my family. I think back to how many gatherings and holidays were totally consumed with food/exercise anxiety, and all I can really do is shake my head and pity that girl.

Then today I had a Girl's Day Out with my mom to get last minute gear for my trip, and I enjoyed it so much.  I used to solider through those depleted and totally incapable of enjoying the time out because I was so stressed about disrupted routines, honestly too worn out and stressed to even make conversation at times.  Now we can have fun, shop all morning joking and having a good time, go out to lunch, get smoothies later, etc, and all the fun Real Daughter stuff I always wanted to be able to do.  All the stuff I used to hate myself so much for not being able to do.

Sat down tonight for a family dinner, which I quit doing at about age 13 when following strict food routines starting trumping family time for me.

I am trying, y'all, I just want to make this transition and come out the other side more like the person I've wanted to be for a very long time.

I am still very nervous about how this trip will go.  Interestingly, I'm less worried about gaining weight (if there is anything I know how to do, it is how to not gain weight, lol...) but about losing fitness from all the work I've been doing with strength training and running.  So I suppose if I have to be anxious about something it is better that than freaking out about my weight potentially ballooning, but I would by lying if I said it still didn't have to do with body image to a large degree.

I've just got to keep reminding myself that going on this trip, starting real work as a scientist in this place, is something I have literally dreamed about since I was a kid.  I can't let the ED fuck it up for me, I just can't.

Soooo....here we go.

Fresh Page

Moving day! I have left that city behind FOREVER.  It feels so liberating, I can't even articulate it.

In preparation for a nomadic life over the summer and a very long-distance move in the fall, I drastically, dramatically, ruthlessly downsized my belongs so that my household fit into two carloads of stuff (I took one now, the other is in storage and my mom will come get it for me while I'm overseas next month).

I have to admit, getting rid of it all actually felt very freeing.  I like being mobile and self-sufficient, and I felt like it all facilitated that.  Plus I figured my karma might need some boosting, so it felt good to donate stuff (I actually think the Goodwill people got tired of seeing me).

Guess what did NOT move with me?

This dude:

This will be my first time scale-less (well, excluding fieldwork sessions) in years and years. I am a little freaked out because sometimes I think weighing in has a grounding effect on me by showing me that I'm not necessarily heavier on Fat Days. But D. really pushed on the importance of killing the daily weigh-ins, and I felt like now was as good a time as ever to dump the scale.  It probably would have gotten all uncalibrated in the move anyway.

I did a ton of thinking on my 6 hour drive today, and I want so badly to start a fresh page when I get to PhD city in the fall, to leave a lot of the old habits and routines behind in the dust with that scale.   Easier said than done, but I really want to give it a shot.

:(

Way, way sadder than I expected about ending my time with D.  I have never had great experiences with dietitians in the past, and I'll 1) miss her as a person (she is badass) and 2) am also very unhopeful that I'll find another person offering the type of support and insight that is such a good match for my needs/personality.

At least I made it to my car before I cried.