Shamrock_4’s BodyBlog

So throughout the last three years I’ve been looking for different ways to break free from bingeing.  I’ve tried fad weight loss diets, diet programs with checkins, hypnosis, and therapy.  None of it helped.  The fad diets made the binge/diet cycle worse, and the diet programs just made me feel like a failure.  The hypnosis had NO EFFECT whatsoever on me, and in fact, the guy was a little weird.  Therapy helped a little for me to realize why I think the way I do, act the way I do, and etc. but that doesn’t help me with stopping eating.  It just helps me understand why I do it.  So ya, I got something out of it but not at all what I needed.

Then, I found Holosync.  I’ve only been listening to Holosync for about 8 weeks but I really think it is helping.  What Holosync is is a sort of meditation tool.  It uses binaural beats to bring you into a deep meditative state, slow your brain waves down, and sync your left and right hemispheres.  It gives you all the benefit of "yogi" type meditation but it doesn’t takes decades to learn nor hours of practice a day. 

What it does is raise your threshhold for stress and allows you to be able to handle what would have overly stressed you out before.  I know you’re thinking "Well, that means I still have the problems!!" and while that is sort-of true, it is also a little bit off base.  By raising your threshhold for stress, you can step back and look at the problem more objectively.  If you realize that it really is a problem, then it is easier to solve it because you aren’t so associated to it.  If you realize that you were just overreacting and it really isn’t that stressful anymore, Great!

They have an excellent customer support and excellent science behind everything.  It is not a quick fix though.  It is a lifetime fix.  And just like when it takes you ten years to gain weight, you don’t lose it in a week.  You take years to develop so much stress and problems in your life and it will take time to release them.

Holosync is made by Centerpointe.  Do a google search with those two words and it’ll be the first on the list.  I recommend it for everyone.  Good luck to everyone with their goals!

Ever since I began bingeing, I’ve wanted to get into better shape.  Even though I was happier, that goal never changed.  I also wanted desperately to STOP bingeing, but those of you that have gone through something like that know that it is easier said than done. So those were (and are) my two goals, and I wish and hope and want with everything I have to achieve them. 

About November in my senior year of high school (I am currently in April of my senior year of high school), it felt like the fog that I had been living in for the last three years of my life was finally starting to clear.  When I would binge it was more like I was doing it because it was a habit and it was what defined me and how I defined myself.  It was like I had obsessed over eating and food and weight for the last three years and it was just so hard to let it go because even though it was a bad big part, it was still a big part of my life.  So I now binge because that is how I see myself, but I don’t zone out, go into zombie mode, and can’t stop or control myself.  I see that as an achievement and a huge improvement.

Also, although I have so many things going great in my life and have so many people who love me, I have hated myself, my life, and my body for the last three years.  That has gotten better in the last couple of months, but I still don’t like myself.  I thought that I was heavy at a size 6 (even though I had a distorted way of thinking) and I am now a size 10.  Not great for the mental health.  I really really really want the great body, the muscular and lean body, the fitness model body, but I always seem to give up before I achieve that goal.  I want to stick it out for the rest of my life this time!!

 So anyways, since November, I have been able to think more clearly and more rationally about my goals.  It hasn’t been my depression or my eating disorder thinking for me.  And I have decided that I really would love to look great.  My body is the only thing in my life I am not happy with.  To my thinking, I am intelligent, athletic, pretty, have an AMAZING family, have a full ride to college, have great friends, and more, but I don’t like my body.  And I’ve realized that not liking my body really ruins my happiness.  Therefore, because I want to be happy, I need to have a body I can be happy with.

I still binge and so I haven’t lost any weight, but I have been trying to eat more food though instead of restricting a lot on the weekdays and then bingeing on the weekends.  I have only been doing that for about a week though so hopefully all goes well! 

I’ve also been running and lifting more regularly than ever before.  Right now I am sort of in a lazy spot ever since returning from across the country where I was visiting colleges, but I have signed up with a personal trainer for the first time in my life.  I have signed up with Cathy Savage Fitness.  She trains so many girls and they all look fantastic.  I hope she can do the same for me so wish me luck!!

Finally, in January of my junior year of high school, I was escaping my depression.  Like I said, I was still bingeing, but I wasn’t suicidal or in despair anymore.  I still wanted to get into shape though and wasn’t happy that I was actually gaining weight (and this time it wasn’t just in my mind).

I searched the internet for help and I stumbled upon Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.  It was the first time that I had read anything about getting in shape and not just the articles about starvation dieting to get scary skinny.  I thought it was great and had excellent info.  Plus, when I did a google search on fitness models, I LOVED what I saw!! I thought to myself "Those girls aren’t just thin, they are lean and damn sexy.  THAT is what I want to look like"

So I tried BFFM for a while but I was mainly just upping my food intake to normal levels instead of starvation levels.  I wasn’t really exercising consistently, but surprisingly, after gaining a little bit more weight, I leveled out and didn’t gain anymore even though I was eating massive amounts over what I was before and still bingeing on the weekends.  I think my metabolism must have kicked in again.

Well, anyways, so my attempt failed (in a matter of speaking.  THAT attempt failed, but I have not) at getting into fitness model shape because I couldn’t let go of my bingeing, but I was still very interested in the fitness area and read up on it a lot more.

After stopping BFFM, I was just coasting along with my eating.  I wasn’t losing or gaining weight and I was getting a little more comfortable trusting myself around food.  Also, I was not obsessing so much about what I had eaten, what I was eating, or what I would eat.  It wasn’t like I would be eating cookie dough and at the same time be sad that it would soon be gone even though I still had a full bowl in front of me.  It also wasn’t like I was eating and thinking about what I was going to eat and binge on next instead of concentrating on the food in front me.  Also, I was on depression medication and therefore pretty happy, had quit the one sport that depressed me the most, and finally had some friends that I could trust.  It was great not to be at rock bottom anymore. 

My life coasted along like that until about November of my senior year in high school.

My bingeing was getting worse and worse and I was hating myself more and more.  That first year of going through my struggle with compulsive overeating just made me hate myself more and love life less.  I would go to school and put on the "happy face" but it was never the real me.  I even remember a friend telling me that I was the happiest person they knew.  In fact, I might even be the happiest person in the world.  I hated that comment because I knew the only reason he thought that was because I was hiding my real self and how much I was hurting inside.

I started only wearing baggy sweatshirts or baggy t-shirts.  I hated wearing tight fitting clothes, but I so desperately wanted to.  Sometimes if I could control my bingeing for about a week and had depleted all the water in my body so that I (to my distorted way of thinking) FINALLY looked lean, I would wear fitted clothing.  Those were the good days.  I was happy those days.  It might have been a short and false happy, but I was happy.  The bad thing was is that those days only lasted a short while and I would soon be bingeing again.

My second year of dealing with my eating disorder was even more horrible.  I was always telling myself I would lose even more weight, and I wanted to so badly, but I always fell off the wagon.  In fact, I had so much trouble staying on track and it was hurting me so badly inside that my mom decided to let me try LA Weight Loss even though it cost so much money.  I feel bad for wasting her money, but it didn’t work and I will never do something so stupid as pay money for a fad diet again.  When LA Weight Loss didn’t work, I didn’t even really want to start my junior year of high school until I lost weight because I thought I looked fat and everyone would notice, I wouldn’t get any attention from guys, and I wouldn’t have friends again.  And that thought was SCARY!  Going through life without friends was my second hardest part of life (second to my eating disorder) and I did NOT want to go there again!  Also, I almost didn’t go to my junior prom because I didn’t want to wear a tight dress even though I was only a size 6.

Around November of my junior year I was crying myself to sleep every night.  I had trouble managing my anger and would badly bruise my hands from punching walls.  I would throw myself around on the ground bawling because I needed some way to release the despair and just crying by itself wasn’t doing it well enough.  In fact, I even tried cutting myself once but was so ashamed that I never did it again.  I was contemplating suicide and just didn’t want to live. 

On top of the depression, my bingeing was still horrible.  I was bingeing so badly that my mom would hide food from me so that it wouldn’t be gone right away and my family would get mad when I would eat all of a dessert, cereal, sweet, etc before they had any.

Finally, one night my mom came downstairs and into my room during one of my lowest days and saw me just sitting in the corner crying and softly pounding my fists on the wall.  She came up to me and held me and, although I didn’t want to admit I was depressed, we decided to get a doctor’s appointment to put me on medication. 

I was put on Cymbalta and it helped a lot right away.  I almost cried again, but this time because I was so happy.  And not really because I was SO happy, but just because I was so used to being sad that it was SUCH a relief to finally be even a little happy again.  My bingeing didn’t get much better though, and in fact, I gained weight, but I was happier.  Although I was still caught deep in my hole, I could finally see a light faintly in the distance.

At the time I began gaining a little bit of weight, I was in basketball season and it was about January.  Once track season started in March, I had begun an all out assault on my body to begin losing the weight.

I started eating less and less.  I had a class with my school’s trainer and would hungrily devour all the information in her Prevention and Shape magazines.  There was a ton of information in them about 1200 calorie a day diets and counting calories all the time so I started thinking that less food was better and counting calories was a necessity.  I started eating about 1000 calories a day and that was at age 15!!  I would also go every day to track practice and sprint my guts out for an hour and a half as well as doing a short circuit of bodyweight exercises every night.  Not so good for the metabolism.

As to be expected, I started losing weight, and I was losing it fast.  I became even thinner than I was before high school had started!  I had the flat stomach and the thin arms, but luckily, since I am so mesomorphic, I still held onto some muscle.  

I loved feeling great in my clothes and, most of all, loved succeeding at something when I felt like everything else in my life was falling apart.  Although I had once again lost the most important thing in my life -sports (ya, I know, sad)- I had found something else I could cling to and something else I could spend my life obsessing over - my food intake.  I was counting calories about every half hour and going over my food intake in my brain all the time.  It was almost to the point of obsessive compulsive.  I got down to about 600 calories a day before my metabolism said "I quit" and I stopped dropping any more weight.

Well, after being at 600 calories a day for a while and not losing any more weight, I began getting depressed about staying the same size so I started wanting to eat again for both emotional reasons and because my body was so deprived.  I began bingeing uncontrollably.  It was almost as if my brain would shut off and I would just automatically eat and eat and eat.  I would eat until I felt like my stomach would burst and I would feel incredibly sick.  I would eat all the while thinking how much I hated myself for eating and berating myself because I was no longer succeeding at controlling my food intake.

I figured I would title this post "The Beginning" because this series of events is what led to my interest in fitness in the first place.  It started off as an unhealthy addiction and then a desperate obsession, but I think I can finally call it a hopeful beginning.

Thinking back on my life I’ve noticed that I have a very addictive personality.  I always cling to something in my life like it is a lifeline and I suffer greatly when I lose it.  It’s been this way ever since I can remember, and I feel as though I am almost addicted to my eating disorder.   But before I begin telling you that, I should probably explain what I mean.

I was always a very shy child and didn’t make friends easily.  I was also very bossy and independent as a child which CERTAINLY didn’t make things any better!!  Thank goodness I’ve learned to squash that little devil inside of me or I wouldn’t be able to hold a job for long!

Well, since my personality didn’t gain me very many friends, I had to find other ways.  The first one was tagging along with my very loveable and people-pleasing sister.  Everyone loved her, and therefore I got to play with other kids when they played with her.  I’ve realized over the years that because of this I both hated my sister and loved her.  She was my "in" to getting friends, but I hated that everyone always liked her and not me.  Anyways, going into first grade, our recess times were split and so I didn’t have her to tag along with.  So I was sad for a while and then moved on.

I soon found out that I am a pretty intelligent person and in my primary school, intelligence was something that attracted people to me.  Even if they just wanted to look at my test answers, I was getting noticed this way and was getting attention.  Then, around 4th grade all the other kids began thinking intelligent people were nerds.  So again, I experienced overwhelm and upheaval in my life and then I moved on.

This time I found sports.  Even looking back at pictures of me when I was about 8 years old, I naturally had a very mesomorphic body.  This really helped when it came to sports and I excelled at almost everything I tried (swimming is my exception, and boy, what an exception it is!!!).  This gained me attention as well.  In my school at this time, the ‘jocks’ were also the ‘popular kids’ and I loved this.  In fact, I tried so hard to fit in and so hard to be good that I almost went too far.  I became almost addicted to sports and became a competitive freak.  I loved it.  Around 7th grade, I went through a really rough time with these friends.  I now know that they weren’t true friends, but I wanted them to like me SO BAD back then and it was so hard when they turned on me.  So to try to hold onto them, I just tried harder and harder and harder to be good at sports and I came back in 8th grade as a candidate to move up and play varsity sports.  Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, but it got me a lot of attention which back then I really needed.

Then, in 9th grade, I was going through a horrible time with EVERYTHING in my life, and I began slipping.  I was late to practice, unfocused, and didn’t play that well.  I am naturally very hard on myself and am also a perfectionist.  Because no one is ever perfect, but I wanted so desperately to be, I would cry and cry after practice and games.  Finally I got to the point where I hated sports.  I began getting depressed and started snacking at night and in between meals.  Now, this was not normal at all for me, and led to a little bit of weight gain.  Coupled with going through puberty, there were a lot of changes happening with my body and I hated it.

I’ll leave you with that for now and tell you soon the extreme measures I went to to get the little bit of weight off and how that led to one of the lowest times of my life.  Right now I am trying to crawl my way out of that valley and I would love your support on my journey.

Hey everyone!  So this is my first post, and the start of my journey.  I guess I’ll have to tell you my story so that you understand my struggles as I go through them, but it is pretty hard to post it here on the internet for everyone to see.  I guess that’s the purpose of these blogs - to let everyone see them so that way I am more accountable if the whole world sees my struggles.  AHH!  What a scary thought.  This might be my first AND last post!    Just kidding.  Stay tuned to learn more about me and my average, everyday life.  Hmm….maybe I should have picked a more interesting punchline…..hmmm….or not.