So, Thursday my mom and I leave for our 1,500 mile road trip
to PhD Town. I am anxious to get out of this stressful household, and to get my
mom out of it too, even if just for a week.
But I’m also anxious, of course, about food/exercise stuff
on the trip. I am still feeling oogly about the weight gain (although I haven’t
gained any more over the last week, though, have actually bumped down a teeny
bit), and three days of sitting on my ass seems like a recipe for another
freak-out that gets everything off balance.
Last year I went into this trip at essentially the same
weight I am now, but was already planning to restrict later in the summer, so I
sort of had a “well fuck it, I’ll fix it later” attitude, and that worked
according to plan -- I ate relatively well on the trip, then restricted for the rest of the summer and got down to precisely my goal weight, which I maintained the whole fall semester. This year my hold on sanity is too tenuous to let myself
repeat that approach. I guess just acknowledging that is progress, but I don’t
really have a solid grasp on another healthy approach, so I’m just wigging out.
That’s how I roll.
Aside: H. won more
points for Psychologist Cynicism during our session today. We were talking
about the ways that being nutritionally depleted affects my thinking, and I
mentioned that I literally felt like I was going crazy a couple of months ago, due to the confused-anxious-inchoate swirl of obsessive thoughts and fear and
desperation that comes with severe restriction. When I told her that Match had
told me “there’s no such thing as crazy.” H. replied, “No, you were pretty much
crazy, but you’re fixing it.” Hahahaha. I think she has a knack for figuring
out who can handle that kind of humor and who can’t.
This will come as a shock to everyone, I’m sure, but running
more miles per week than ever before in my life appears to be aggravating the
same old stress fractures that forced me into a running hiatus last fall. Funny
how that works. Actually not funny, actually really scaring me.
I’m going to scale back the weekly mileage and really try to
keep myself fueled for healing purposes. But damn I hate this. Today H. and I
also talked about how my weekly mileage threshold (after which I start racking
up injuries like Chuckie Cheese tickets [god did I just age myself, is CC still a thing?]) seems to be a lot lower than other
people’s – it’s not super low, but training for even a half marathon would be
too much per week. This is where H. reminded me that perhaps if I weren’t also
exercising X hours every day, with no rest days, and periodically starving
myself, my body would let me run more miles without breaking down. This is why
she gets paid the big bucks.
I’m also becoming hypermetabolic this week, which means hot
flashes in the middle of an oppressively muggy summer and constantly feeling
hungry even though I’m eating a lot more than I was as my daily routine for the
vast majority of this year. Maybe this is what it feels like to be pregnant. I
know that having a fast metabolism is technically seen as a good thing, and I don't want a slow metabolism, but I hate the pattern of feeling hungrier
when I finish a meal than I did when I started it. And a lot of times it’s what
I usually call “body hunger” – my stomach isn’t empty and growly, and I don’t
actually want to eat more (meaning, it’s not just raging appetite/munchies), but there is
some sort of energy need that signals itself in a way that’s hard to describe.
Or at least that’s how I think it works, for me. Anyway, I’m not always sure how
to handle that – I worry about slowing down my metabolism if I don’t feed it,
but then I worry that my body is just tricking me into gaining more weight, etc
etc. Dunno.
That’s my update for now.
I hope everyone is having a good week!
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