Sunday, June 2, 2013

Sleep Eating as Binge Eating

I alternate between losing 3 pounds and gaining 3 pounds. I went to see my psychiatrist and the intake nurse weighed me (with shoes on--important point there). I was one pound heavier, despite my diet. I blame it on not doing my boxing routine for several hours that week. 168 pounds on a tiny 5 foot, 2 inch tall woman. I believe that puts me in the obese category.

I am on summer break so I currently I am not in martial arts classes. I want to take either kickboxing or judo over the summer except I need to raise about 200 dollars to cover the expenses through August. Martial arts are excellent for keeping the heart active. It also makes me more flexible and agile. Even though I sometimes barely lose any weight, I feel the martial arts are more than just an exercise--it's like a life path of self-discipline and self-awareness. To accept physical pain as a daily routine can have emotional benefits as well. I learned to cope with stress by working out and focusing on my partner. But I digress...

So anyways, I am still fat. It has been 2 and a half weeks of summer break and I still have not made the scale budge at all. Usually, it takes only a week to see a pound come off. For me, three pounds disappear over night and then promptly return 3 days later. It is a vicious cycle.

I monitor my eating. Sometimes my mother brings home hamburgers and yes, I eat that. I then punish myself by eating even less the next day, but then she brings home pasta for dinner and yes, I eat some. She then gets very mad when I sleep eat during the middle of the night. I have this odd habit of half waking up in the middle of the night, feeling insatiably restless, getting out of bed, and going into the kitchen where I rummage in the dark and feast on whatever I can find. The past few weeks I have eaten this stuff:

2  pears one night
3 packets of graham crackers another night
1/2-1 cup of cold rice out of the fridge another night
1 bag of pre-popped popcorn that I didn't eat while awake but stuffed into my mouth at 3 a.m.
1 bottle of Ensure which comes with a whopping 300++ calories per bottle

On average, I eat 200 calories for breakfast, 300-500 calories for lunch, 400-600 calories for dinner, and an extra 300-500 calories in a sleep eating binge. No, this is not the ghastly 3000 calorie diet of other obese people. You have to understand that once you lose more than 20 pounds your body resists losing anymore weight. Once you eat less and successfully lose weight, you are doomed to restricted calories for the rest of your life! I can never go back to eating 2000 calories per day, which is the healthy requirement for other women. Having dropped from 194 pounds to 150 pounds in a span of a little more than a year, my body will gain weight if I eat more than 1500 calories or more than 1700 calories on a day of extensive exercise. If I eat more than 1400 calories I do not lose weight, I just don't gain any weight. I am trying 1200 calories per day with exercise but these nightly binges wreck my daily discipline. Currently, on a bad day, I eat 1800 calories a day, which is like 2500 calories for a normal woman who has not lost more than 20 pounds in the past 2 years. I still have not adjusted to the fact that I am not a normal woman's weight and that I can not ever eat like a normal woman. I have to work hard just to maintain this level of fatness. To be thin, it will take even harder work, obsessive diet control, and excruciating amounts of butt-busting exercise. Even with that control over my life, I still won't see results for a while.

I am drinking a Starbucks coffee with splenda and creamer. I already know that the creamer has about 50-70 calories in half and half. That is why I can only have a packet of instant oatmeal for breakfast, so that I have about 230-250 calories for breakfast. My snacks will include non fat half and half stirred into coffee and tea. I get quite a bit of calories from half and half stirred into caffeinated drinks. I don't know if that is a better option than eating a pear. Not that it matters, I don't have any pears lying around. Lunch...hmmmm...lunch will most definitely not be the left-over pasta from last night. Maybe I will have some boiled cauliflower, sauteed in olive oil and Indian spices. Plus, a raw tomato with olive oil and black pepper splashed on top. Or maybe I will just have some turkey with mustard on flat bread. For dinner? That's hard. A bag of popcorn as an appetizer, maybe 3 corn tortillas with melted slices of pepperjack cheese, and endless cups of tea with non fat half and half. For middle of the night--nothing. HA! Like that will happen. I have realized if I don't decide what to eat ahead of time I tend to eat things like the cold rice out of the fridge. I guess I should wean myself off nightly food by eating smaller and smaller amounts. So, for tonight, maybe I'll take a measured portion of popcorn to my room. Not the whole bag, just a little cup of popcorn.


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