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.

Finals Over, Diet Begins

Every finals week I start to binge eat. I cannot stop. I will literally sleepwalk out of bed and rummage through the kitchen in the dark and stuff whatever there is into my mouth and crawl back into bed. I woke up once with little graham crackers packages littered all over and crumbs in my bed. Then, the guilt, the all-consuming remorse, the weight gain, the looming diet in my near future.

Well, finals week is over. I failed pre-calculus. The professor posted a message online saying that it was very common to have to take his class twice. That did little to quell my feelings of failure. I had just gained about 3 pounds during finals week. To fail AND to gain weight. No. Bad. The rest of my classes were A's and B's, but that class dropped my cumulative GPA significantly. Now, it is summer, I am not working, I have a lot of free time, and my primary goal is to lose weight.

In 2011 I weighed 194 pounds and I was at my heaviest. In 2012 I weighed 155 pounds, having dropped around 40 pounds in a year. Then, I dated some guy who liked to fry all his dinners and he was always making me dinner---I gained 15 pounds. Then, we broke up and I felt completely dumb for letting him stuff me full of deep fried salmon just to be polite about his cooking. Never again, I vowed. I enrolled  in martial arts classes, but alas, I still gained weight over midterms and the dreaded week of finals. Now, at 167, I am back to being at the borderline between obese and very overweight on the BMI chart. 

At 167 pounds my pants fit, which is not good. I was starting to get used to the loose waistband and the need for a new wardrobe. I am determined to lose at least 20 pounds before the end of August. I did it before, I can do it now. 

My diet since I got out of class about a week ago has been dramatically altered from my high caloric finals-week-diet. Now, I drink a lot of tea and I wait until after 6 pm to have a normal sized meal. By "a lot of tea" I mean somewhere around 6 cups during the day and another 3 cups of green tea at night. I always put a bit of fat free half and half or almond milk in each cup, which does add calories, but that 10 calories per cup (or 100 calories per day) is equivalent to a small, single snack. I run on chai (tea). 

For example, today I had 3 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 plain flour tortillas for breakfast, and a large diet Coke from McDonalds. It is 1:30 pm and I kind of feel full. I have no desire to eat more flour tortillas, even though my relative just finished making delicious home-made tortillas from scratch. 

Dieting is an old friend for me. I think to some extent it is healthy, but then again, maybe having 2 tortillas for breakfast isn't healthy and also those are pure carbohydrates. For lunch I will have a nice tomato and cheese sandwich on flat bread, followed by 5 cups of tea with fat free half and half. Maybe some shots of espresso after that...who knows? If you're trying to lose weight, see a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am just a desperate, unemployed graduate student with little money and little control over my life. I am only relaying this information because I want this blog to be as honest with the reader as I can be. I know that obsessing about weight is never good. I applaud those women who are free from the self-disgust I feel. I also know that I have body issues, food issues, and overall issues. This blog was started to show the real human behind mental illness (I am schizo-affective who gained a lot of weight taking the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa). Now that it has been a year, I still want this blog to be honest, even if that means showing my ugly bits. 

To some people, summer is a time to relax. For me, it is the time when I exercise daily and limit my calories. Sometimes, summer also involves getting involved with some guy and maybe even smoking marijuana now and then. I would prefer not to smoke marijuana or get involved with some random guy for three months, but that has been my pattern for the past 3 years. Maybe I will sign up for classes at the dojo near my house. :) Cheers to summer, kickboxing, espresso, tea, and you!!

4 pounds lost in 4 days; 50 more to go

4 days ago I weighed 172. This made me sad. Last semester I weighed 152. This semester I took 2 martial arts classes twice a week, for a total of 4 hours. Regardless of how much I exercised, I still gained 10 pounds on top of the 10 pounds I gained over winter break. That's a total of 20 pounds since November.

This isn't my first extreme weight gain or weight loss adventure. I have been plagued by my weight since the psychiatrists put me on Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic with massive weight gain as a common side effect. I only made it worse by not modifying my pre-Zyprexa diet of junk food. Before Zyprexa I could eat what I felt like but afterwards, I had to learn the hard way that my body craved more food than I needed and needed twice the exercise due to the chemical effects of the pills I took.

My first semester returning to University in 2011 I gained so much weight I was 194 at my fattest. By mid-2012 I weighed 151 pounds. I lost over 40 pounds in a year by eating less than 2000 calories a day, moderate exercise, a lot of walking, and a semi-vegetarian diet (some fish, some chicken, a lot of half and half).

Even now, I'm 24 pounds lighter than my worst weight. But that is equivalent to 50 pounds heavier than my weight at age 23: 118. Now, nearly thirty years old, I am fearful that I will go back to 194 pounds and that I'll never reach my goal of being 125-130 pounds.

I decided to really get serious. Yes, maybe it is because I have fallen behind in my computer programming class and I have a deep-seated insecurity about my grades to the point where body obsession is a preferred mode of escape, but whatever, I'm going to lose weight.

I started a 6:00 pm diet. By this I mean that I get to eat an entire meal after 6 pm. Why 6 pm? Because I tend to stress out at night and this is when I am at risk for binge eating and midnight snacking. I know nutritionists say that eating heavy foods at night makes you gain weight, but I have no self-control after 7 pm anyways, at least this way I may lose some weight by trimming down on my day-time calorie consumption.

Here's how I lost 4 pounds in 4 days

9 am: drink a Kellog's Special K protein shake (180 calories)
10:00-3:00 pm = classes on campus with only one hour break. Spend this one hour sipping on coffee (80 calories).
4:00 pm = getting hungry. Good thing I brought another Special K protein shake (180 calories)
5:00 pm = one last Americano from Starbucks with a lot of half and half and splenda (100 calories)
6:00 pm = time to feast. I am at 600 calories total for the day. I get to eat 600 calories for dinner, for a total of 1200 calories. This can be a moderate serving of pasta and maybe one slice of bread, a couple of home made tacos, a Subway sandwich, 2 slices of pizza, 1 jr cheeseburger from Wendys and 5 spicy chicken nuggets, or 2 tamales from the Mexican restaurant.

I did that for 4 days and I've lost 4 pounds. In fact, I think I ate like 1600 calories on one day and still lost a pound.

I am only doing this because I am in the obese range on the BMI. I would never suggest this 6 pm diet for anybody not in the obese range. For those who are in the obese range, I still wouldn't recommend this because it may be crash dieting and that is super dangerous. That being said, I want to lose weight. I will accept the fatigue, the headaches, the lethargy, the scattered concentration, and the stomach growling so long as I lose the weight.

I was going to delete this blog post right now, but I did promise to tell the truth on this blog, no matter how uncomfortable the truth might be. So here is the ugly truth---I am losing weight. I will live off Roma tomatoes, I will lose weight if I have to pump pure caffeine into my veins to keep myself from collapsing into a deep, hungry sleep, I will lose weight. I will.
HIGH WEIGHT= 194
CURRENT WEIGHT=168
GOAL WEIGHT=130
If I can't succeed in graduate school at least I'll leave a size 8.