Paleo: Week 2 - An Update on my Relationship with Binge Eating

Honestly, week 2 was fine.  Until Saturday.  Saturday is the marker for a continued "un-doing" for me if you will, so I suppose I should start this there!

I had spent all week looking forward to my Saturday run and that morning I decided to revamp my playlist.  I love Fun's first album and "The Gambler" is a favorite song.  It's not a good running song, but it holds heavy sentiment and I thought that'd be motivating while I ran.  EH, wrong.  The song came on shuffle in mile 2 and I got so emotional and misty and frustrating by ALL MY FEELINGS I had to stop and walk.  I never walk in my distance runs so I knew this was going to make things rough and unless I walked a lot more I wasn't going to hit my goal of 8 miles.

Listening to that song reminded me of Josh's aFib episode in February and it took me straight back to all those feelings I felt that night I found him unresponsive on the bathroom floor and didn't know if I'd be a widow come morning.  It was so terrifying and I felt it all over again in this run. I tried to push through the feelings and use them to motivate me.  After all, in hindsight I truly believe this scare with his health is what turned my own life around and pushed me to work harder to lose weight and get active, so I wanted desperately to channel that thinking.  But I couldn't.  I ran feeling fearful and feeling the heaviness of the situation and then I had to stop after 2 laps and at 5.6 miles because I just was spent physically and emotionally.  And then I was frustrated I didn't do my 8.

And honestly?  Honestly that bad run has left me crippled.  I cannot get motivated to work out this week since that run and I know that is why.  I know deep down I'm afraid a solid run or being pushed physically doing T25 is time I could become overly emotional and reflective again and I could walk away from the work out feeling discouraged or defeated instead of empowered.


But why does that matter?  Shouldn't I embrace emotion?  Shouldn't I embrace the avalanche of feelings, work through them, and push on?  The problem is I've worked through these feelings.  There's no more work to be done.  The remembering now is just remembering the fear and how it all felt.  It's reliving the emotions.

The truth is I don't struggle with binge eating very much right now.  I still had my days or moments between mid June and the beginning of November when I was maintaining weight and just doing my own thing, but it wasn't like before and if I did binge, I'd find control the next day (or days) and I'd "recover" calorically from the heavy load the day before.

When my diet is extremely rigid I don't binge at all.  I can't.  In this process of losing weight this year I've learned an important thing… I binge eat to cope with what I cannot control: feelings and emotional reactions to situations outside of my control.  When I am on a strict diet, I am in control.  When I feel myself slipping or I feel temptation, I've learned it helps to go clean something because that is controlling my environment.  And speaking of controlled environment, I've learned I'm not as easily triggered to binge when my environment is within my control and predictable: a schedule, a clean(ish) house, a menu, a plan… When things are "play it by ear" or the house is in chaos I struggle more.  It's all mental.

The problem with feeling so emotional on a run is that the emotion cannot be controlled.  I cannot stop feeling this way no matter how hard I try.  And that makes me feel really terrible.  And while it didn't make me want to binge Saturday, I worry about falling apart a different day.  What if I run during nap time tomorrow, for example, and the emotions are still raw and out of control and I lose my mind and go crazy and undo all the work I've put in this month?

The thing about any psychological disorder, binge eating or otherwise, is that once you've learned all your triggers it's easy to become fearful of going anywhere close to the gun when you know it's loaded.  Most days now it's empty and locked away in a drawer, but after Saturday… it's loaded, baby, and I feel that.  And the CONTROLLING part of me hate how it's dictating my life right now, but the victorious part of me is saying, "wait, just wait… wait until your mind tells you you're ready."

And I think that's what I'm taking away from this week.  The key to a healthy lifestyle is diet and exercise.  And that's often the key to weightloss too.  BUT weightloss can still be achieved by a change in your diet OR a change in your activity.  So going into this week I know I'm being less active and while that bothers me and I do miss working out, I know I can make right decisions in my eating and still feel great and have success next week.  I think it's easy to get caught up in how you HAVE to exercise to lose weight.  You don't.  I didn't really for the first year of my dieting and I lost SLOWLY but I did still lose.  If you struggle like I struggle and you are hitting the gym or the pavement and you just feel awful mentally or emotionally and psychologically after your work out my (non-expert) advice is to just stop.  Maybe just like your muscles need days to rest your brain needs time to rest because IF you are like me, every day is more choice after choice in a mental-type battle than it is anything else when it comes to diet.

So having said all that, I'll share the official result.  I was down 0lbs.  This ate me more than it probably should have Sunday morning.  I obsessed about it literally all morning.  I felt bad for my husband because we'd talk about other things awhile and then I'd start talking about my weight again like a crazy obsessed person.  So after giving it a lot of thought I decided to stop Paleo and switch to the slow-carb diet which is basically like Paleo but you don't get to eat fruit or nuts but you DO eat beans.  Yay, sweet beans!  I missed them!  You also get a full cheat day with the diet which I took Sunday before getting started since I'd been strict Paleo to that point.  It's not that I didn't like Paleo, but I wasn't in it for the lifestyle and it wasn't helping me lose anymore.  I probably would have lost this next week, but I needed something new.  I also needed beans back and although I am MISSING fruit a whole lot I feel like the carbs and mass amount of protein I'm getting from the beans is helping me a lot with energy levels.  I'm anxious to see if it improves the quality of my NEXT workout.

So there it is.  All my feelings is a giant-sized post.  It helps me to come here (or more often to a journal and type it all out because I work through it in ways I can't when I talk to people or just sit and think.  I also like to believe I'm somehow helping someone else out there who struggles with emotional eating or binge eating or the need to control or anything like what I mentioned.  There's definitely a need for privacy in the Internet, but there's also a need for those of us who like to share how we lost 90lbs to be honest and real and open to the people around us who are just starting or maybe right where we are but struggling with all the same things.  Talking helps.

Thanks for listening.