Falling on old (bad) habits is easy!

As I explained in my post on January 11, 2017, titled “Goodbye 2016 … and good riddance!” I struggled for pretty much all of 2016.  Only recently did I feel that switch in my brain activate and only now do I feel confident that I’m back on track.

When I don’t feel good (mentally or otherwise), everything suffers and I feel out of control when it comes to food.  That’s when I start falling back on old bad habits automatically: I stop working out as often, I start binging or just over eating on “healthy” foods, and I start gaining weight.  The only saving grace is that I continue to stay away from fast foods and sodas no matter how I feel.  But I do fall back on craving pastries and cakes, my unquestionable downfalls.  The weight gain alone, especially after all my hard work, is not only scary but self defeating and depressing.  In the past, the old me would succumb to the cravings with abandon because I’d think, “I’m already obese, who cares!  What’s one more pastry!”  Nowadays, of course, I realize what the point is and I’m screaming in my head, “STOP EATING AND GET BACK ON TRACK!!!!!” but it’s literally screaming in deaf ears because I know what I need to do, I just can’t seem to get it done.

In 2015, I lost about 90 lbs. after working closely with my then trainer Flaminia.  That was a great year for me.  Not only did I lose a ton of weight, but I felt happy, I was discovering the world anew (I’m a firm believer that this world is made for thin people), and I felt like I had a great future in front of me.  I also started this blog to share my success in the hopes I might be able to help someone else in the same dire situation which I had just left behind.  I described it all as an intoxicating feeling and it was truly amazing.  I wanted everybody to feel what I was feeling.  I was getting a lot of unexpected attention from people who hadn’t seen me in a while which confirmed there was indeed a new me and vindicated all my hard work.  

When 2016 rolled around, however, the year started out on a few negatives and continued to get worse for me.  Except for a few positives, 2016 was the antithesis of what I had felt in 2015.  Was the universe punishing me for having a great year in 2015?  How dare I think that life was going to be better just because I lost a few pounds!  

As time passed, I started feeling the “blahs.”  It crept up when I wasn’t paying attention.  We all have days when we feel down for no particular reason and I dismissed it as just a temporary condition, but it progressively got stronger and stronger with time until finally I had no energy, I lost interest in everything - including this blog, nothing gave me joy (except my animals which are always important to my sanity), and I completely lost that motivation I had felt the year before.  I no longer felt like life was great, I couldn’t remember what the intoxicating feeling I described was like.  With the blahs came what I kept describing as "fuzzy thinking."  Sometimes I felt my brain was going in circles and I had trouble making decisions easily.  I'm a very logical person and it was frustrating that I wasn't able to move forward with certain things.  Along with these two, the blahs and fuzzy thinking, came unrelenting boredom and depression.  I kept telling people, “I just can’t shake these blahs!”  

Something that added to my funky state was, surprisingly, the Presidential election's outcome.  The night of the election, I knew - just knew - that Clinton would win.  How could she not?  Of the two candidates, she was the logical choice because of her experience and knowledge of how the federal government works (it's a very unique animal and outsiders who walk into it have no clue).  It wasn't so much that I was a Clinton supporter, but of the two candidates ultimately provided to us, she was the better choice.  The night of the election, I kept waking up every few hours just to check the numbers.  When it was obvious that Trump was going to win, I was utterly dumbfounded and became utterly depressed, especially when Trump was elected by the electoral voters contrary to what the public wanted.  I couldn't believe how much Trump's win affected me.  A college teacher friend of mine told me that her students were crying in class the day after the election.  I understood why.  I, too, was walking around feeling like the world was coming to an end.  This feeling over the election completely blindsided me.  I'm not political in the least and never have been.  I'm that ignorant person who's interviewed on the street and can barely name the Vice President of the United States.  But, for some reason, Trump's election threw me into what I call my "election-depression fog."  Nowadays I can't get enough of what's going on politically.  If nothing else, Trump has made me less ignorant!  To me, our current administration is like watching a train wreck:  you want to look away, but you can't because you want to know what's going to happen next.

The other problem I noticed months ago is that my body temperature was completely out of whack and continued to get worse.  If I wasn’t freezing to the core (painfully cold), I was pouring sweat.  I dismissed it as having hot flashes that you hear women get during menopause although I wondered why I was getting them now when I had been in menopause for a few years already.  I could never get comfortable.  I was constantly checking the thermostat to see whether it was me or the temperature in the room was the culprit.  It was usually me.  It could be 100 degrees in my bedroom, but I had the heater on.  The next moment, I had the A/C on because I was roasting.  It was crazy.  I had to wear jackets when I went grocery shopping because I found it unbearable to be in a grocery store without one.  In fact, on one occasion, I forgot my jacket and I had to leave the store within minutes because I couldn’t stand the cold one second longer.  Women around me were wearing tank tops and shorts and I was wearing hoodies and shivering.  I couldn’t sleep.  Every night I’d fall asleep but would wake up within an hour or two drenched in sweat.  Often I had to change my night clothes and then I was too hot to sleep.  I’d lay there roasting until I was soon freezing.  Either way, I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night.  This made me very tired and irritable.

I knew I wasn’t feeling right but I didn’t know why or, more importantly, how to change it.  The blahs continued to accompany me.  It was then that I started to fall on old bad habits.  The old me is always sitting outside the door, waiting to come in at the slightest perceived invitation.  It doesn’t take much to invite her in, but it takes a great deal of strength and force to get her out again.  She’s the guest who always overstays her welcome and you can’t get rid of her easily.  With the blahs in my head, I had no strength or even desire to push her out.  I just kept plugging along day in and day out, waiting for that motivation to return.  I literally felt like I was waiting for something to click in my head to get me back on track.  Month after month, that click never came.

Although I still rode my bike regularly to run my local errands, I only attended spin classes sporadically.  It didn’t help that my favorite instructors were gone and I didn’t really like the substitutes, but that was an excuse because I knew I should just go.  It doesn’t matter who the instructor is, it’s exercise I needed to do. 

I stopped walking everywhere because I preferred my bike.  Inadvertently, my bike has ruined me for walking because the latter takes forever in comparison.  On my bike I can clock 10 to 15 miles in no time and run a bunch of errands to boot.  Walking, however, takes forever.  I can walk about 4 miles in an hour, and that’s if I’m walking fast.

Early this year, I stopped training with Tunde (my trainer after Flaminia moved to New York) because our schedules kept conflicting.  We were training 3 times a week, but she often rescheduled or cancelled at the last minute and it would throw my schedule off completely, particularly my planned meal times which made it difficult to stay on track.  I wasn’t getting anything done and I couldn’t plan anything either.  When it started happening regularly, I decided this wasn’t working for me and stopped hiring her.  It didn’t help that my financial situation this year is a lot worse than it had been either.  My medical insurance skyrocketed and my 401K lost money so suddenly I was clearing less every month.  It’s expensive to hire a trainer and I decided I needed to curtail my expenses for a few months until I paid off my property taxes, car insurance, house insurance, income tax debt, car repairs, vet bills, etc. etc. etc.  It seems that when I don’t have any discretionary money, that’s precisely when I start bleeding money as I keep incurring large unexpected expenses.  It seems I’m always breaking even if not in the red.

So here I was, living deep into the blahs, not exercising nearly as much as I had been yet eating more.  It’s no surprise that the result was I kept gaining weight.  In the summer of 2016, I saw 166 lbs. on the scale, a humongous accomplishment for me.  It was a weight I hadn’t seen on the scale in several decades.  But then my weight started to creep up until I gained about 27 lbs. overall.  When I hit the 180s, I kept thinking, “It’s okay, I’m close to the 170s.”  But when I reached the low 190s, I started panicking.  I vacillated between, “OMG!!!  I need to STOP EATING!” to “So…I’m heading back to my old self in every way.” 

Although people kept telling me they couldn’t see the weight gain on me, I certainly could.  Suddenly my size 10 clothes no longer fit.  Now I had a closet full of unwearable articles. This again?  I had gone through this so many times before in my life until I had a closet full in every conceivable size between 18 and 24, while still requiring even bigger sizes by the time I retired in the summer of 2011.  Thank God that I had procrastinated in taking to Goodwill the last bag containing clothes that had gotten too big to wear.  The bag was still sitting in my living room and I pulled several articles back so I’d have clothes to wear.  I didn’t want to go shopping for larger clothes so I was glad that bag was still there.  The anxiety I felt over the weight gain alone was driving me insane.  The more I worried about it, the more I binged.  The farther I got from my 150-lb. goal, the more anxiety I felt.  I was in the middle of that vicious cycle again.

The Yahoo article that came out in November 2016 touting me as a success story was always in my head.  I felt guilty (and a fraud) that I was struggling, that I was gaining weight, that other people were comparing themselves to my “success” and here I was, failing - again.  I had to keep reminding myself that I was still over 110 lbs. lighter, but the little voice in my head did not hesitate to remind that I had actually been 140 lbs. lighter just months before and here I was heading back to the old me.  There’s a part of me that KNOWS for certain that I will NEVER go back to the 300s again, but the 200s are around the corner and that means obesity and defeat for me.  It reminds me of what I went through as I climbed across the 200s to reach the 300s many years ago.  After all that hard work, to gain it back!  Total defeat!  How depressing.

I was desperate.  I also felt slighted  After all my hard work and when life had gotten so much better to suddenly be feeling this badly?  It was so unfair!  Why can't the universe just leave me in peace?  I kept trying to figure out what had changed in my head between 2015 and now 2017 that made things worse for me.  Life is always throwing things at me so what has really changed?  In 2015 I still lived through setbacks, injuries, financial issues, mourning the death of my beloved pets, crappy neighbors, an old house that's falling apart around me, etc. - yet in 2015 I succeeded.  What had changed to make me lose my motivation and bring the old me back?

Whenever I told my doctors that I couldn’t shake the blahs and had no energy, their response was usually, “Hmm…” and then they proceeded to talk about other things.  I think they thought because I was keeping the weight down (despite the “minor” gain), that I was doing well.  I wasn’t.  I was frustrated.  I kept thinking, “WHY AREN’T THEY LISTENING TO ME????  THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME.”  It didn’t help that all my blood work, including my thyroid, always came back with flying colors: completely normal.  I’ve been hypothyroid (it under performs) for years but medication stabilizes it.  My thyroid was checked several times in 2016 and it always came back normal thanks to the medication I’ve been taking all along.

I was desperate.  I thought maybe my problem was the food I was eating.  Did I forget how to eat properly?  I sought the advice of a nutritionist and that turned out to be an utter disaster.  I’ll discuss what happened with that in a future post.  Not only was this disappointing, it cemented the fact that no one was helping me.

I started thinking perhaps I needed to see a psychiatrist.  I didn’t feel right in the head and I knew I had emotional issues that I never really dealt with and thought maybe my successful weight loss had been a short-lived fluke.  Maybe my emotional issues were rearing their ugly heads again and it was causing me to not feel right.  As I’ve stated throughout my blog, it seems to me that addiction is the symptom of already underlying issues in our psyche.  We use our addiction to self medicate, whether it’s drugs, alcohol, food, or some other self-destructive coping mechanism.  I knew I used food to deal with my issues and now I was thinking perhaps my weight loss success had been a fluke and the reason I was going back to my old bad habits is that I hadn’t dealt with those emotional issues. 

At this point I was willing to try anything to stop the weight gain so in late 2016, I started seeing a psychologist.  I’m a very analytical person and already knew what my issues were, I just didn’t know how to cope with them other than with food.  For me, pastries and cakes are the answer to unhappiness, stress, anger, frustration, you name it.  Any negative emotion and I’m reaching for the sweets.  It has to do with the sugar in certain foods that makes us feel better.  Sugar gives us a rush (increased serotonin, for example, a “feel good” chemical in our brains) and it’s addictive because we like feeling good.  Unfortunately, the more sugar we consume, the more we need to reach the same levels of feeling good.  Added sugar (versus sugar that occurs naturally in food) is horribly unhealthy, incredibly addictive, and gives us a level of rush that healthy foods don’t.  We don’t need added sugar to survive.  In fact, we shouldn’t have it at all.  If consumed in excess, we gain weight and start having other health problems, too.  It doesn’t take much to be excessive.  The topic of sugar and its effects on our bodies is too vast to discuss here, but I knew that whenever I wasn’t feeling right in my head, that’s when I always reached for my favorite cravings that are loaded with sugar.  I also knew that if I gave in and ate one serving, I’d be unable to control myself and I’d have the whole batch and would still want more.  When I’m not right in my head, I can’t stop myself from consuming these in great quantities.  

Gaining weight alone comes with a ton of baggage that weighs me down (pun intended) spiritually, emotionally, and mentally.  I started to feel anxiety about the weight gain and struggled to keep it from getting even more out of control.  Many years ago when things were bad for me at work, in my personal life, and financially, I gained 60 lbs. in one year.  I was not about to let that happen now, but then again I couldn’t stop eating.  The motivation I had felt for most of my journey was gone.  I knew I was falling on bad habits, but I couldn’t control it.  I was disappointed in myself because I had “150 lbs.” emblazoned in my head as my ultimate goal and just 16 lbs. away from that goal a few months ago, I sabotaged myself and was now far away from it.

To anyone looking in at my life, I was on top of the world.  But then again, they’re not in my head.  They don’t think what I think, they don’t feel what I feel, they don’t have the problems I have, they don’t have the worries that worry me, they don’t have the stressors that stress me out.  It infuriates me when people who think they know what’s in my head tell me how I should feel, what I should think, or what I should be doing.  The audacity of telling someone these things who didn’t ask for their opinion in the first place!

Once the blahs were in full force, incredible boredom set in.  Because I had no energy or interest in anything, plus "fuzzy thinking," I didn’t have it in me to change things to stop being bored.  I know that exercise helps because it brings on those feel-good endorphin chemicals, but I felt tired and lethargic.  I had no interest in exercising.  Besides, as I stated a million times before, I hate exercising so it’s easy for me to just give it up completely.  The only distraction I had was food which has always been my crux.

Eventually, a doctor (my psychologist, in fact) suggested that perhaps my thyroid dose wasn’t high enough.  She herself is hypothyroid and explained that sometimes “normal” isn’t normal for everybody.  In her case, she told me she has to go to the higher range of normal so she needs a higher dose of medication to feel right.  Perhaps I did, too.  It was then I started to try different doses (working with my regular doctor) for my hypothyroidism.  Unfortunately, it takes about 6 weeks for a new dose to take full effect so I had to try one dose, wait 6 weeks, then try another dose and wait another 6 weeks to see if there was an improvement.  Eventually, my body temperature finally normalized.  It turns out that your thyroid affects everything, including mood, logical thinking (my "fuzzy thinking"), body temperature, and an array of other things.  Who knew such a tiny gland had so much power.

I had also tested Vitamin B12 deficient during 2016 and was on supplements for months, but my body wasn’t absorbing it so a doctor added folate which he said would help my body absorb the B12.  He also prescribed B12 shots every few months.  It took pretty much all of 2016, but I finally tested normal on my B12 levels.  Having vitamin deficiencies cause havoc in our bodies, too. 

Once I got my thyroid in check and my Vitamin B12 was normal, I started to feel much better.  All along I’ve continued to see my psychologist who's helping me cope with my specific emotional issues which has benefited my overall well being.  When you learn to cope with things in a healthy manner (i.e., not with addictions) and you feel good mentally and physically, it’s easy to succeed.  Well, it’s easier, not necessarily easy.

Today I feel much better than I did in the past year.  I've been productive, my "fuzzy thinking" is gone and logic has returned, my motivation and energy are slowly returning, and, most importantly, I’m finally back on track with food and have been losing the weight I gained.  Of course, it only takes me a week to gain 10 lbs. but months to lose half of it so I have a long way to go...again.  I say again since this is weight I already lost before.  But that’s okay, I’m heading the right way finally.  I also realized that my self-imposed goal of 150 lbs. is unrealistic for me.  It’s ironic that I didn’t set any goals on myself when I plodded along in my journey and I did just fine, but once I succeeded, I started putting goals on myself and that never works for me when it comes to my weight.  I was putting too much pressure on myself to reach 150 lbs. when the 160s worked fine for me.  I should have been happy at 166 lbs., but we always want to be thinner than we are, don't we.  It’s never good enough.  Right now I’m just happy that I feel better, that I’m back on track, and that I'm heading the right way.  I’m hoping I can reach the 166-175 lbs. range again, but right now all I can do is worry about just doing better. 

There’s a lot to be said about “when it rains, it pours.”  It’s so true.  A lot of negativity surrounded me in 2016 and things out of my control affected me greatly physically, mentally, and medically.  Now things are getting better and I can take care of myself again.  I get mad at myself when I lose my way.  I see it as wasted time having to fight just to return to where I had already been before, but that’s life.  I guess the best we can do is to keep moving forward and when we end up going backwards, we need to push harder to get back in front again.  It’s easier said than done, of course, but what’s the alternative?  To give up?  And then what.  I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but for now, on this day, I’m doing much, much better.