- Day 10 - we enter the double digits of fasting by raddish
19 y
3,304 3 Messages Shown
Blog: Juicing for 30 - take 2!!!
Each day, this is getting a little harder. It isn't that I'm hungry, but I just can't stop thinking about food. It's really strange. I'm so focused on food. I watch tv, and there are people eating. I listen to the radio, and there are food commercials. Even now, I'm in an empty house, and the food is all around me. It's hard. I'm not going to break down, because I'm stubborn like that, but it is harder than I thought. What's strange is that even foods I don't eat are looking appealling to me! I haven't eaten meat in so long, but I see people eating a hamburger and it looks good! I'd never eat a cow again in my life, but I think it is just a memory of the feeling I used to get eating.
I have a long and complicated history with food. I was always a pretty normal weight in my teens, even on the small side, I guess. Then, I got pregnant when I was young, 18, and gained a massive amount of weight. That weight lingered for a year, before I decided to do something about it. I went on a lowfat, lowcal lacto ovo veggie diet and worked out a lot and was able to drop the weight quite easilly. In three months I lost like 30 or 40 pounds and looked great again! I felt better than ever. Then I got pregnant with baby number 2.
This time I was determined not to gain as much weight. I exercised the whole way through the pregnancy, and didn't gain exactly as much weight, but I still gained plenty. I felt pretty bad about myself, too. This is when I really developed a problem with food. After my son's birth I started restricting calories, and binge eating, a lot. It wasn't good. I developed a very unhealthy relationship with food, and my whole life spiralled out of control. I developed some strange health problems that caused me to have to get a biopsy on a lymph node. It was really scary and a real wake up call. I was only 21. I worked really hard though, again. I ate a lacto ovo veggie diet again, of mainly whole foods, and walked, and lost about 20 pounds, getting down to about 125. Then, after New Year's in 2000, I got pretty serious about running. I got down to 117. I weighed 114 when I was 14 years old. So, this was a very low weight for me! I looked and felt great, maybe even a little too thin. I was confident, and on top of the world. I found preschool programs for the kids and enrolled in college, full time. I had an academic scholarship and things were going great. But I started neglecting my health. It is in this time that I think I seriously damaged my thyroid.
I was going to school full time and taking care of two small kids, with a husband that was busy working all the time, and I let myself go. I didn't sleep, or exercise. I drank two pots of coffee a day, including a whole pot at night, to stay awake to study. I starting eating crappy food, including meat. I would be in between classes and picking up the kids, and stop at a drive through and eat a huge, greasy, nasty meal by myself in the car. This caused me a lot of shame, because I had been proud of being a vegetarian and knew better than eating this sort of crap. Needless to say, after a year of this, I'd gained 30 pounds.
This weight gain triggered all the bad feelings and tendencies I'd had after the birth of my second son to come back. I was under a huge amount of stress, we were buying our first house, I was taking 18 hours of honors classes, and life was just too much. The weight gain pushed me over the edge. I started to lose it. I had a nervous breakdown. It happened over the course of a few weeks, and went from bad to worse really fast. I stopped eating completely for a few weeks, in an attempt to lose weight. This wasn't a fast for health reasons, at all. I'm lucky I didn't hurt myself. It was a bad time. I was hopsitalized and diagnosed with a heavy sounding mental illness.
This was in the spring of 2001. My life hasn't been the same since. I left school. It was too much after the breakdown. I have tried and tried to lose that weight I gained when I was back in school, and couldn't. In the next few years I'd try every diet known to man. Atkins, the Zone, Jeny Craig, South Beach, e-diets, protein shakes, slim fast, copious amounts of exercise, training for a marathon - and nothing would take that weight off. Nothing.
I also had some more major life changes. My husband and I had marital problems and we almost seperated. We also had terrible financial problems. We had another baby. But I kept on. Then, in the spring of 2003, I decided I would do whatever it took to lose the weight I'd gained. I was still averaging around 150 or so. I started working out for over an hour a day. I wasn't eating anything at all most days, at the most a lean cuisine. I started taking otc diet pills, the ones with ephedra and all that other bad stuff. I started to get really sick. I did this for weeks, and the weight wasn't really budging.
My health really got worse. I had pain in my chest. It hurt to breathe. I was weak, and blacking out. I felt really bad. I ended up in the hospital, and there was a fear I had damaged my heart. I had a huge panel of blood tests, and my electrolytes were so out of balance I could have had a heart attack. That was when I was finally diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I believed me doctors and started taking all their medicine and hoped things would get better.
Then, I was in a terrible car accident a few months later, in the summer of 02. I had a serious head injury and needed a lot of physical therapy. I also had terrible PTSD that led to a worsening of my mental illness symptoms. It was a bad time. That fall I ended up trying another anorexic type diet and it didn't work and left me feeling worse. The next years are kind of a blur.
In spring of 03, I tried a raw foods diet for the first time. It helped me a lot of if I would have just stuck with it, I wouldn't be where I am today. But, instead, I got a job at Starbucks and began to abuse caffiene and sugar again. I gained back all the weight I'd lost on raw foods plus more. I'd say my average in 03-04 was 160. I decided to get treatment for my mental illness, went to a new doctor for that, and started taking whatever pills they gave me. I felt better, but started gaining weight. That made things worse. I was just on this roller coaster! It was terrible.
At the same time, I'd try a diet, get down to about 150, stop, balloon back up to 160, or even 165, then go back down for a month. I was in the 150s for summer of 05, and then got up to my all time high of 175 in September of 02.
This was it for me. This was the point where I decided my life needed to change. But I started by making small changes. I decided to go vegan, more from my love of animals than anything else, and to see what happened with my weight. I lost weight very slowly, and very steadilly. I was down 10 pounds by December, 17 by March of this year. I probably would have been fine with this slow and steady loss if it weren't for one thing.
My sister's wedding. She's having a huge, very formal, dress military wedding in May. I'm her Matron of Honor. The way I look now, I can't stand to see myself. I can't stand it all. I can't be in pictures like this. I haven't been photgraphed since 2000, really. So, in January, I did something really stupid. I ordered my bridesmaid gown several sizes too small. Basically, I ordered what I worse when I was really thin. There is no way to change the order. There will probably be no way to fix the dress if it doesn't fit.
In March, it hit me - the end of May was coming up FAST! I wondered what to do. My vegan lifestyle felt good, but I was really pulled back to raw veganism. It seemed like the answer. I lost a lot of weight the first week or two, but then the weight loss stalled and I even gained back two pounds. I don't know how. I felt doomed to stay in the 150s forever. I mean, it was a hell of a lot better than the 170s, but still. I was very unhappy. I saw this information on the juice fasts, and really thought that might be the thing for me. It promised a lot of weight loss, quickly, plus healing. I need to undo the damage I did all these depressed years. I stopped taking all my prescriptions a few weeks before I went raw. I decided for once and for all I was going to detox this system and see if I could really heal myself.
So, I was 149 when I started on day one. I was 147 on day 7, 142.5 on day 8, and today, day 10, I'm 142. Making it to the 130s, where I haven't really been in years, since 2000, will be HUGE for me. I have faith I'm going to get there. I was a little sad when I weighed in today and had only lost half a pound in two days, but I am trying not to get down. I wonder if my pattern might be to hold steady for a few days, then dump a bunch of pounds at once. I don't know. I do know this, that all these last 22 pounds I want to lose were put on in sadness, neglect, and shame! My body knows this. These last 20 pounds especially, I think, are going to be hard to lose. I think they want to cling to my body and keep me down. I know that my fat stores are holding so many toxins, and so much baggage. I want, more than anything, to be free of it.
If I can make it to my goal of 30 days, I think I will lose more than weight. Each pound that I lose will represent a pound of heartache that I have held onto for years. Each pound I lose will be a meal I ate in shame in my car. It will be that half a pizza I ate after going of a diet and feeling bad. It will be the coke and candy bar I used to help me make it through the day. It will be all that and more.
I wrote this out to remind myself why I am doing this in the first place. As you can see, my history with food is long and complicated. Everyone's is, I believe, especially if you are overweight. But this is going to be the chapter where I close the book once and for good on the old me. I am reclaiming the new my, that is burried under 22 more pounds of fat and wants to come out and see the world again. I am reclaiming the optimist, the go-getter, the fearless, proud, strong person I used to be. I want to rember years 01-06 as my five lost years of my mid-twenties, a mistake never to be repeated, a struggle whose lessons about health and wisdom were learned. I want to move on.
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raddish
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- Brainwashing by RedFizz
19 y
1,462
Concerning the bombardment of food images, watch Supersize Me. It will help put things into perspective about the research that goes into making sure you will buy that food. Did you know that the golden arches are more recognized than the cross?
Another good source while you are fasting is "Fast Food Nation: The Darkside of the All-American Meal" by Eric Schlosser.
I am not affiliated with any of these. I am another faster (who just opened my own blog) who is doing research while I fast. These are probably scare tactics. But, hey, if they are scare me to do the RIGHT thing, what's the harm?
Good luck! (Just make sure you are staying healthy!)
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RedFizz
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- Peace by SunsEarth
19 y
1,252
Peace Raddish:
Your tale sounds all too familiar...only mine started in early childhood. Please, please, please concentrate on healing starting at your energy source (some call it spiritual). It isn't about weight. It's about addiction and hiding from self. Food hides fears. I'm definitely not one to judge because I've been through it, please don't replace food addiction with weightloss/scale addiction. Try to work on ridding yourself of all addictions. I've given up on judging myself by the scale...it's useless. I judge myself by the divinity I reflect...understand? I personally think it's best to focus on being healthy which includes --exercising, eating properly, and being free in the mental. Focusing on weight deters us from dealing with what is real.
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SunsEarth
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CureZone