Over-exercising

My mom was in town for the weekend and while it was great to see her (I hadn't since before going to rehab), a lot of issues tend to come up.

She's a compulsive exerciser like me and doesn't seem to recognize it as a problem at all. She's around 110 pounds at 5'4", but looks very underweight for her age. While she does eat, she runs 4 miles, plays hours of tennis, and takes an exercise class every day. Unfortunately, I'm afraid my parents don't get how their behavior may inflence their kids, and that it inevitably does.

Yesterday, mama didn't say anything about me not eating breakfast til 2 pm, running and then walking several miles with her. I dont know if I was testing her to see if she'd say anything or simply putting on the old competition hat and needing to always do more than her.

I hate this competitive nature. Especially now that I'm owning up to it as a possibility for why I ran 4 miles this morning and just ran 2 and am walking 3 more as soon as she left. I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's the only action I've found that reduces the horrible amount of anxiety that's built up over this weekend.

At least the view from my walk is lovely.

Plans

Plans are always just plans without action.

First, I planned to lose weight by not eating anything but cereal and fruit as a senior in high school. I planned to run 8 miles every day, in addition to intense soccer practices and tournaments for my competitive soccer team. I planned to avoid social situations and restaurants where eating is not avoidable. I planned to have control, be perfect, and look the part. After I succeeded in losing 20 pounds, reaching a goal weight of 104 right before college, I was skinny enough to raise some red flags around school and home, prompting my pursuit of thin even more.

In college, I planned to maintain my thin physique and even lost weight during my first semester as a freshman soccer player. 100. What I didn't plan for was the introduction of alcohol to my lifestyle. Alcohol took hold in a way I could have never anticipated, made me relax, and loosened my grip completely on controlling my diet and exercise. The more I drank, the less I cared. Until drinking because the norm and the feelings of fat, ugly, and out of shape set in.

What I also didn't plan for was learning how to purge. I learned to purge during college by trying it once. I was somewhat of a natural, or at least had the ability to purge food fairly easily. Having the wherewithall to purge changes your life forever. It provides a guaranteed sense of guilt for keeping anything down. This aspect of an eating disorder can make everything so much more complicated. You don't want to eat, but you know you can and have minimal consequences on weight - at the expense of heavy consequences on health and quality of life. Learning to purge set the stage for the rest of my life. I type this blog 7 years after learning to purge and the repetitive emptying of my stomach has resulted in an inability to hold anything down. I purge hands-free now, simply bending over and releasing. Try recovering from that, even if you want to.

I have always planned to start living my life without my horrifying habits and binding eating disorder. I've always thought I could shake it if I really and truly tried. In recent years, I have started to hate feelings of fear and anxiety that accompany every bite of food and obsession with burning calories through exercise. I desperately want to be like my friends and significant others, giving zero thought to planning meals, exercise, and calories. No more calculating and recalculating calories in and calories out. No more undereating, overdrinking, and obsessive exercise. No more obsession over deviations in life that cause deviation in plans.

I planned to get over my eating disorder in college as a Nutrition and psychology major, then as an intern studying to be a Registered Dietitian in graduate school, and then as a PhD student studying, you guessed it, Nutrition. But as life progresses through ebbs and flows, trials and tribulations, and constant stress and strain, the eating disorder and associated issues persist, flaring up and subsiding slightly, but always existing.

Sometimes, more often than not, facing your fears requires changing your plans. Day treatment was an attempt to change my plans by facing my fears, but it's not enough for me. On Monday, I start residential treatment for my eating disorder, exercise addiction, and alcohol abuse after relapsing heavily over the past week and a half. Today, I've run 19 miles, thrown up 4 times and keeping no food down, and weigh 98 pounds. I am ready for treatment and I'm ready to be healthy and happy. I am ready. I am terrified, but I am ready.

Anxiety

I have never taken medication for my eating disorder, anxiety, depression, or for any other psychological issue. I take ibuprofen when my hangover won't go away, or tums when the acid reflux from chronic purging flares up. Other than that, nothing. I think it's time to investigate the (non-addictive) options.

The more severe my disease gets and the longer treatment takes to "fix me", the more anxiety I'm prone to. One minute, I think my moods are becoming more stable with treatment, but then the next, something really small and insignificant sets me off. I have, admittedly, had a string of bad luck lately, but I think it's overexerting myself during the day and not following my meal plans when I'm not at treatment, that sets me up for extra anxiety. I feel like I'm constantly running on Empty and it's Exhausting.

Today, for example, I had a 150-calorie bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, ran 11 miles, and went out and about with P to look at houses. After house hunting around 4:00 pm, I had half a veggie sandwich (no cheese, no fat, etc), then nothing else. I ended up purging the sandwich while walking the dog for 5 miles, mostly unintentional, but it left me with no fuel at all. I also ran into an ex-boyfriend on the walk. I return with a lot in my head, but nothing in my stomach. The other half of the veggie sandwich goes in and I promise myself I'll keep it down. But, my clumsy and careless self has other plan as I spill roasted tomato vinaigrette all over P's suitcase which contains a white and a light blue suit shirt. Completely ruined. The stains will never come out. I'm a failure. I freak out, overreacting completely, and the sandwich comes back up.

It's a nightmare of a night so far and I'm not looking forward to going out with friends now. I'm going to drink too much, compromising my integrity and my relationship. I'm going to fail. Every day that passes affirms that I do, indeed, need residential treatment. I'm falling back into restrictive habits. I'm falling off the I'm getting better and I'm happy about it! train. I hope it's not too late for me...

Weekend Struggles

During day treatment, also called a partial hospitalization program (PHP), for an eating disorder, there's a lot of free time. Residential treatment centers allow no freedom to patients - you are constantly monitored, constantly scheduled to be somewhere, have no time to yourself thus no opportunities for slip-ups. In day treatment, we leave the treatment center at 2:30 pm on weekdays and since I'm on a leave of absence from school, I'm left to do what I please. The same is true for weekends.

It's an easy scenario to fall completely off track. Yesterday was Saturday and looked something like this. Wake up at 9:00 am. Make a sugar-free chai latte with almond milk, 45 calories, and eat a tiny handful of peanuts, no more than 50 calories, and do work even though my dissertation stipend has been suspended for now. At 11:30 am, run 10 miles at a 7:00 minute mile pace. Come home energized and feeling great with an awesome lunch restaurant in mind, since I haven't stuck with my meal plan at all today.

Instead? Drunch has been planned in my absence. Drunch is drunk brunch. The restaurant offers brunch food and very cheap mimosas. There are 4 of us and we drink 4 bottles of champagne and 2 fireball shots a piece. I eat 4 sweet potato fries and half of a caprese sandwich, picking out the mozzarella and reducing it to tomatoes, basil, balsamic vinaigrette, and the restaurant's (thankfully) thin wheat bread. 

Drinking does two things to me. It reduces my appetite to nothing, giving me an excuse to be full on booze and not hungry.

Alcohol also reduces my desire to come across as normal with my eating habits - essentially making me not give a shit that everyone sees me restricting.

At 4:00 pm, we are finished with "brunch". My boyfriend (I'll call him P from now on to make him seem more real to you readers), takes us on a tour of our neighborhood to house hunt. He is going to buy a house soon, which is very exciting, and a fun way to spend the afternoon with our two friends, who get really into it. After, everyone is tired from day drinking so we nap.

I wake up at 9:00 pm with a hangover. I pick at snacks... popcorn, peanut butter crackers, cereal... all of which come right back up. Purging is so easy when you're hungover and eating food with liquid. I don't even use my hands anymore, making it such a destructive, addictive, and impossible to overcome habit in recovery. I go back to bed. At 2:00 am I wake up again. The hangover still exist, but has quietly subsided. I prepare a bowl of oatmeal. Eat it. Vomit. Not pretty. I crawl back into bed, a sad and defeated mess. P cuddles me up and we fall asleep until now.

This is not a good day for me. I did everything wrong. Overexercising, drinking til near blackout, severely restricting food intake, and purging anything I ate in the evening. While I am proud I did not engage in binge/purge like many previous weekends, I am still very disappointed in this. I am already facing additional Boosts at treatment this week to speed up weight gain, something I've literally had nightmares about this weekend, and drinking/not eating/purging the weekend away is not going to help with weight gain.

Where do I go from here? In recovery, I am trying to learn from my mistakes and create action plans for future similar situation. Next weekend, I will say no to drunch, and instead voice my opinion about where I would like to go, what I would like to do, how impossible it is for me to "just don't drink that much". I have already figured out that scheduling meetings during the week around 3:30 pm or 4:00 pm for school or the various projects and activities I'm involved in helps reduce engaging in symptoms after day treatment, so I will continue with that. 

I will not consider this weekend a complete failure. I do recognize a very small, and mostly insignificant in the scheme of things, successes.

• I only ran 10 miles yesterday. Most days, this number is more like 15-16.
• I ordered a caprese sandwich with sweet potato fries because that's what I wanted to eat in the moment. Didn't eat much of it, but still ordered what I wanted, not a salad. 

Small steps, people. We can do this.