Reasons Not to Develop an Eating Disorder

I definitely just wasted $90 & 2 hours.

I limped into the orthopedist's office, wrote out a very detailed medical history, as well as a fairly well-substantiated hypothesis as to why my stupid ankle's been hurting, and, after taking a couple of x-rays & playing too many games of "Hanging with Friends" on my iPhone, the doctor walked in, pressed my ankle with his thumb (which hurt), and then said, "You're probably right."

So....stress fracture. Woo. Anyone ever had one of those? They're tiny little sub-hairline fractures that are often un-diagnosable because they often don't even show up on x-rays. They usually only hurt when you're doing whatever activity it is that you injured yourself doing, but if you let them get bad enough (like I did), then you'll feel the pain all the time and/or more intensely.

If I'm right, then this is my third stress fracture. Why do I think I'm right? Well, besides all of the symptoms aligning with the diagnosis, stress fractures numbers 1 & 2 occurred during the aftermath of Part 1 of The Story I Haven't Told You Yet. Let's just put it this way: Stress fracture #1 occurred about a year after I had reached my low weight of 97 lbs at 5'5". I was running cross country, and I landed funny while hopping up onto the sidewalk from the road at the end of a run. That's all it took to make me spend my very first District competition on crutches & cheering my teammates on from the sidelines. The following year, I tripped on a sprinkler head & had to sit out of Regionals.

Why would such seemingly trivial incidents result in such ridiculous injuries?

Osteopenia.

Basically, by being an anorexic (or whatever the eff I am) and not only under-eating, but denying my body of the nutrients that it needs to maintain things like bone density, I have given myself pre-osteoperosis. The good news is that osteopenia can be reversed. And I guess I did that when I started eating better through the first half of the decade. But relapse number 1 in 2007 (which is Part 2 of the Story) and Relapse number 2 (which you now all know about) must have re-reversed that trend...and while I'm up 25.5 lbs, and I've been eating much better AND taking all sorts of necessary supplements to aid in my recovery, I'm apparently still at risk.

So let my stupid, stupid, useless injury be a PSA for the rest of you. Don't fuck your body up: eat food.


Speaking of which...I've been contemplating making a life change, but I don't know if my digestive system will be able to handle it. I stopped eating red meat in the spring of 2001...but I don't know if it's worth trying to reincorporate it into my diet. I don't really want to eat it, per se, but I feel like I'm missing some of the vital nutrients that I could be getting from having red meat every few days.

I don't know...it's worth considering, I suppose.

Anyway. Now I'm just pissed at myself, I can't work out today, AND I have to work until 10 tonight. Le sigh. Off I go...

Kaila

Whining and Dining, or, Why I Can't Eat in Restaurants

Hello friends.
It appears that my close acquaintance ED is trying to creep back into my life.
And, just like the ex-boyfriend you didn't want to see in public on a day when your hair was frizzy & your sweatpants were on, ED showed up and caught me by surprise--naked and wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

You see, I had to go out and buy a new pair of pants. My old ones no longer fit over my thighs or my ass. This is not a good thing.

So I stepped on my scale on Friday morning, and apparently I now have 20 pounds to lose if I want to get back to my happy weight. I haven't been this heavy since I left Columbia University in December of 2006. 

At almost 150 & a size 10 in jeans

Me, crushing Patrick with the freshman fif--uh, twenty-five.

So what does this have to do with eating in restaurants? 

Well, let's start with a show of hands: how many of you are familiar with the principles of or actually practice Clean Eating? 

I got onto the Clean Eating bandwagon almost two years ago now, when I was doing some research on Jamie Eason. I ended up picking up a copy of Oxygen Magazine, which sounds like it has something to do with that obnoxious women's television channel, but is actually a fitness & muscle magazine for hardcore gym rat women. (It's not as hardcore as Muscle & Fitness Hers, which is another of my favorites, but I like it because it does have a ton of really great nutritional articles on top of being unapologetic about pushing resistance training and muscular bodies for women.) 

Can you believe this woman is over 50??? Tosca is a huge, huge inspiration.

Oxygen is published by Robert Kennedy, and his wife, Tosca Reno, is an over-50 fitness model AND the author of the Eat-Clean Diet series. Now, while the English major and former magazine copy editor in me wishes that her editors would be a little less forgiving in publishing her articles & books as written, I think the principles & science behind eating clean are too important not to talk about. 

So do me a favor: either leave this blog for a second & go to your pantry or, if you're reading this at a red light on your mobile device (for shame! pay attention to the road, silly!), pull up at your local Publix & go to any aisle not in the periphery of the grocery store. Then I want you to pull out any packaged food & read through the list of ingredients. Check to see if there are a) more than three ingredients listed, b) any ingredients whose names you cannot pronounce or c) simple sugars or starches in any incarnation. If you could answer "yes" to at least one of those things, then the food you're holding is not clean. 

80% of fitness is eating clean. That's not to say that you can sit on your ass all day, but as long as you eat nothing but egg whites, you'll get thin. You have to combine a super-tight diet with resistance training and high intensity cardio in order to gain muscle, lose fat, or just get truly fit.

I cook all of my own food. I sometimes spend up to 7 hours on my days off preparing chicken breasts and ground turkey and tilapia and sweet potatoes and oatmeal and quinoa and egg white omelets for the week. I eat tons of vegetables and low GI fruits.  But because I've completely damaged my metabolism (more on that another day), I'm still packing on pounds. 

I also eat 6 meals a day, each at 2.5-3 hour intervals. So going out to eat is really difficult for me. Not only don't I have control over how the meals are prepared or what meals are even offered, my timing gets thrown off, and I usually end up having to wait long past my mealtimes and then getting so ravenous that I'll eat anything and everything in front of me. 

In the last four days, my grandma left for Chicago, one of my sisters came home from college for the weekend, one of my sisters left for a trip to Poland, and my family celebrated father's day. All of those events heralded the communal partaking of food...which was difficult beyond belief for me. 

Now, there's NOTHING wrong with eating clean. In fact, that's how we all SHOULD be eating, all of the time. But in today's culture, those of us who DO eat clean are considered abnormal. I don't even enjoy eating out anymore anyway...there is too much salt and fat & sugar in prepared foods, and I can even taste the difference between a salty restaurant dish and one I prepare myself. But either way...

Eating out means a loss of control--and eating disorders are all about maintaining as much control as possible. Eating disorders can arise (or at least mine partly did) out of a feeling that the rest of the world was nothing but chaos. If we can control the way our bodies look & feel or the way our food is prepared or when or how....then maybe we can avoid spinning totally out of control. 

So this is why I don't eat in restaurants. This is why I have trouble spending time with my family. This is why I don't go on dates. 

It's not a fun place to be. But when I try to go out of my comfort zone, the old panic sets in...and now that the scale AND my pants are telling me some ugly truths, it's even harder to let go and just try to be normal for once. 

So there's that. 

Anyway...more later. I'm off to work. 

Kaila

Anxiety and ED

I am not, nor have I ever really been, a social creature.

Those of you who have been hanging out with me at the Dub or Fat Cats, et al. for the last few months may be shocked to learn this, but I have terrible, terrible social anxiety--and while it wasn't so bad a few months ago, it's coming back strong.

I don't have a problem when I'm at work or in a "home court" kind of setting--a setting where I know the schedule in advance and boundaries have been established in terms of time, place, and eventual meal plans. But when things are up in the air--or when my schedule or meals get interrupted, I panic.

It's especially bad at night, when I've already eaten all of my meals for the day & then have to go out...or if I have to go out before I can finish eating.

I know it's mostly because of ED.

ED is my frenemy for life. He makes me feel like I'm in control, because he lets me add a little structure to my day. And even though I'm not necessarily limiting calories--hell, I'm eating 6 meals a day!--I'm still a slave to ED's idea of how my life needs to be run.

On top of that, I'm still trying to get the hang of not being on my own all of the time. As a child, I preferred books over people, and to this day, when given the choice I will stay home by myself instead of doing any of the millions of much more fun things that I could be doing with other people.

The problem is that, because I've been pushing myself so hard lately--ever since I started hanging out with the awesome band members & fans of Panic Disorder (aptly named, at least in my own personal case) and then my wonderful, but ridiculously social coworkers--that now I'm actually falling back into that desire to never leave my house after dark again.

This happened when I was going through the depression/ED/insanity in NYC last summer, and I don't know what to do now that it's happening again. The problem with going out and trying to work through it is that a) it doesn't work, b) my whole day/night/next day gets thrown off, and c) it makes me a not-fun-to-be-around party-pooper.

So there's that.

Today's workout was late, since I stayed out later than I should have last night and then overslept my alarm. I know that, for some people, waking up at 7 am is a crime against god, but I prefer to be up before the sun, get my workout done before the gym gets full of people who want to stop my workout to talk to me about everything except why they're not actually working out and just socializing and therefore ruining my morning, and then get on with my day...

Dynamic Warm Up
Super Set 1: Woodchops (8x3x2) & Planks (90 s) -->raised weights on woodchop
Super Set 2: Offset Dumbbell Squats (8x3x2) & Standing Alternating Dumbbell Shoulder Press (8x3x2) -->raised weights on squats & shoulder press
Super Set 3: Single-Leg Dumbbell Deadlifts (8x3x2) & Machine Assisted Chin Ups (8x3)
Super Set 4: Alternating Lateral Lunges with Dumbbells (8x3x2) & Two Point Single-Arm Dumbbell Rows (8x3x2)
Cool Down

Anyway. Sorry to dump that on all of you out there in internet-land, but I needed to write it. I'm going to go run errands and wait for the A/C guy to come and fix our air conditioning before the roof caves in....

How does this HAPPEN???

Kaila