Greetings, self and all others reading this blog!
This blog is a project more than seven years in the making. It started with me, an insecure 17 year old on a mission to improve my body image by losing an ambitious 70 pounds or so. It has scarcely seen an update after that glorious day where I weighed in at more than 80 pounds lost of my starting weight and with a whole new outlook on life.
I started out thinking that, by virtue of being thinner people would like me more.I was right and wrong to a degree - there are those who would judge based on superficial attributes such as one's outward appearance, but the people I really, truly cared about were the ones who don't care what size I was. They were with me, through it all, and saw my plan followed through to the end.
I overstepped the boundaries I built.For years, I was so afraid to broach the boundaries of the healthy lifestyle I'd built, keeping away from sugar, from carbs, from many processed foods. Little by little, I let things slip away. I gained a pound here, two pounds there, and it added up to a problem that grew as my size did once again.
Perhaps we see ourselves as invincible - surely, if we have made it this far, our metabolisms should be able to handle a little treat here and there? "Just once" turned into a binge of overeating, where every meal became an event, prepared for well in advance - buying dinner, plenty of it, dessert for afterward, and loading up on all the accoutrements therein. Alcohol was a staple of my diet, which only fed my appetite for eating more unhealthy foods. In summation, it was all a little too much.
The story is a familiar one for me. I followed this cycle at least twice before, each tiem coming back around before it was too late. This time, I just pushed things too far. Too much stress fueled the overeating and likely contributed to the weight gain, and not enough sleep, paired with eating a large amount of food before bedtime surely did its part as well.
The morals I have extracted from these experiences are manifold:
- Always value your health above anything else.
- Once your control of your health starts getting out of hand, take care of it immediately. Like many other problems left to sit, your health problems find a way of multiplying, cascading until they've grown to many times their original size. 10 pounds and feeling like crap contribute to eating to feel better. Eating so much causes heartburn, and that combined with the stress I was experiencing likely caused a small ulcer in my stomach that really colored the way I looked at food. It did not stop my consumption, but only added to my worries. It was a snowball only growing larger by the day. Without halting it, I could have gone past my original starting weight, 7 years ago, and, with the new health problems I am experiencing, put myself in a trap where I could not conceptualize things the way they once were.
