Weight Wars

Dear public, online diary,

today I thew up all over myself. It all started when I got the bright idea to enroll in a training camp for kickboxing. I overestimated my level of fitness and was quickly forced to call it quits early after I vomited outside in the dirt. Oddly, my first day went fine. I was tired and exhausted, but I was not having problems breathing. My second day was much harder, maybe my body hadn't had time to heal itself from last week. Or else it was the five cups of tea I had just before I went. I read somewhere that being over hydrated can be nearly as bad as being dehydrated. But maybe it was just some odd, anxiety fluke that made me burn out on the second day. Either way, I am going back but I am waiting until Wednesday or Thursday to return, and not just because I want  my body to heal; I also want to avoid the camp until I have overcome my humiliation.

Why would I do something like crash-binge exercise? Because I weigh 174 pounds at 5 feet, 2 inches and that puts me back into the obese category. Last year I was around 155 pounds. Now, one ex-boyfriend later, and a summer of sweet chocolate indulgence later, I weigh 20 pounds more. I did weigh 25 pounds more but I lost about 4 pounds since Friday, which might not be the healthiest thing in reality. I heard that 2 pounds per week is the high end of acceptable weight loss, not 4 pounds in 3 days.

Either way, I am tired of carrying all this extra weight. I am taking a lighter load in classes so this means that I have plenty of time to do push-ups, leg lifts, jump rope, and to play with my punching bag. I have waged a war on my own weight since the age of 22 or 23, when I started to gain weight due to a prescription drug named Zyprexa that I was put on during a bipolar episode.

I have watched my weight go up and down by as much as 60 pounds. At age 25 I was 135 pounds. At 28 I was 194 pounds. At 29 I was a 155 pounds. My life has become whittled down to nothing more than cryptic numbers jotted in my notepad--Monday, September 10th, 174 pounds, down 4 pounds, aged 30, 40 minutes of extreme exercise, 600 calories going into the work out, ate 1000 afterwords just to make the world stop spinning. Yes, I literally ate a 1000 calories. It is not as hard as it sounds. A simple combo meal from Wendys or Carl's Jr can set a person back by over 1000 calories! I am trying to remain on a 1200 calorie a day diet, but that should not happen on exercise days, as I learned the hard way. Little food in the belly after an extreme work out left me feeling woozy, dizzy, light-headed, weak, and on the verge of blacking out. I ran to the fast food joint and stuffed my mouth with salt, grease, and meat. No, not good, but it was just a quick fix to get me home without having to pull the car over to the side of the road in order to vomit.

I have decided that I cannot be happy unless I have a Master's degree, psychotropic medicine, pot brownies to soothe my migraines and anxiety, and a better body. Ideally, I would just always be happy without having to strive for anything, but that is not the way my mind operates.

Classes are going fine. I went on academic probation this semester because my graduate GPA dropped to a 2.8, which is well below the 3.0 minimum for Master's degree students. Luckily, I can raise my GPA this semester and take all the remaining courses for my program next semester.

By spring, 2014, I should be applying for my Master's graduation ceremony (and I will be more fit and skinnier).
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I Lost 1 More Pound and My History as Big Hips Woman

I lost one more pound for a total of 5 pounds. I am pleased. My big hips still have love handles, though.

I was reading this viral blog post about this girl who posted her picture on a blog. She was very pretty and heavy. Her blog post went on a tirade against people who have been mean to her because of her weight and how she is sick of hiding her body because other people don't like to see fat. In the photo she was in her bra and underwear.

My facebook friend posted it on her wall and I read the story. It resonated with me. I still remember strange men making comments about me being "too fat" to my face as I walked by.


*************Bio of Big Hips Woman**************
Unlike the blogger, I was never overweight as a child or young adult. I gained weight at the age of 23, but when I gained weight I gained a lot of it due to the effects of Zyprexa medication and a bad diet that I have had since my childhood.

Since then, I have been on a mini-crusade trying to get rid of the fat. At some points, I succeeded. About 4 to 5 years ago, I went on a crash diet and lost so much weight I went from a size 14 to about 130 pounds, or maybe a size 8. I never bought new clothes so I never found out exactly what size I turned into. Instead, I'd wear size 10 and size 12 pants with a big belt to keep them up. I lost a lot of weight but I did so by not taking the Zyprexa medicine and through a starvation diet. Naturally, being a schizo-affective with a propensity towards mania when unmedicated, I became floridly psychotic and was plucked from my daily routine of food obsession and food denial and locked in a psychiatric facility. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks and when I got out I just kept gaining it back, plus some extra.

I paid for weight training classes at the community college. I seriously worked out 3 times a week but the amount of weight I gained after dieting was too much and the exercise barely made a dent. I was in a class with only 2 other women. One had a tiny waist, bone-like arms, and huge breast implants. The other was a very thin, waif-like girl. Sometimes they would come into the mat room where I liked to hide doing my sit-ups and sit down along the wall, stare at me periodically, whisper and laugh. I don't care if they weren't talking about me, the looks on their faces and their obvious stares was enough to make me want to cry. Ironic that they were taking a weight lifting class but all they did was sit around, watch me and talk. Meanwhile, I was doing endless crunches and pedaling like a maniac on a stationary bike. Then came the horrible day when I ran into my old friend who had last seen me a few years ago when I was still about 115 pounds. She congratulated me on my baby. I felt ridiculous. "I'm not pregnant, just fat," I said. She apologized profusely but the damage had been done.

I continued with intermittent periods of intense exercise. I walked for hours every day for years but that never paid off. I would periodically run for hours but the weight wouldn't budge and my knees would ache for days afterwards. I would do yoga, lift a 10 pound weight, and I also took a semester of modern dance from the community college. This entire time I was doing manual labor and staying on my feet for 3-5 hours a day at my part-time job. Nothing worked.

Fast forward a few years: I was a returning student to the University. I  had just gotten out of "reintegration rehabilitation" for mental patients. It was an out-patient all-day 6 month bonanza of group therapy, art therapy, and lectures about how to deal with mental illness symptoms without resorting to drugs or relapsing. Through the whole thing there were catty females in the program who would chant obsessively that they didn't want to get fat. Luckily, they had no jobs or anything else to do during the day except to diet and depend on their men to support them. I notice that when people fail at the basic things in life like employment, education, and relationships, they always tend to fall back on the food thing. Anyways, I went to the University, concentrated on succeeding, ignored my food consumption, and gained 15 to 20 pounds. Hitting 194 was a bleak day for me. I dropped meat out of my diet and started monitoring how many calories everything had and I dropped to 181 in about a month and a half.

The next two years I exercised like I was training for a professional MMA match. I took judo twice a week for six months. On top of this, I used my stationary bike for an hour. I also used my mechanical rowing machine for at least 30 minutes. I walked for hours every day. By the end of my first year back at the University I had dropped 40 pounds and was 151 pounds. The next semester I took a modern dance class with many stereotypical dancer-type females. You know what I mean, the ones that took ballet in their youth and never took to a normal people diet. The type who think weight is a matter of self-discipline and not being a sloth. It was painful but I endured and danced and danced and got an A. Next, I dated an Arabian guy who kept feeding me deep-fried salmon, white rice, and potatoes. I gained 20 pounds.

I decided action must be taken, swift, brutal action. I enrolled in 1 hour of karate twice a week followed immediately by 1 hour of kick-boxing twice a week. On the weekends, I use a punching bag I bought for myself and  I still walk for hours every day. The result? The weight didn't budge until just now. 5 measly pounds. 5. Yes, 5 pounds. I'm 168 now, in the obese range. I am obese but I can flip you over my shoulder and throw you to the mat, I can do karate katas, and I can throw a nasty cross, hook, and a violent roundhouse. This isn't air-punching, cardio stuff, this is grab your sparring partner and flip them onto their backs. This is stand there and let your sparring partner lift you into the air so you fall on your back really hard, then get up and do it again. This is full-force roundhouse kicks on your sparring partner's command, your leg hitting pads as hard as it can. This is non-stop jabs, hooks, crosses, front kicks, roundhouse kicks, elbows, knees hitting the pads as fast and as hard as you can.

I've decided to keep up the martial arts routine, not because I am losing weight, but because I love it. I still want to lose weight, just so society will shut up about my body. Primarily, though, I want to lose enough weight to get into the main women's fighting division which is 136-144 pounds. That's where all dem tuff chicks are.I can't wait until I am up there taking real hits and giving real hits in a real competition. If I have to go on a parsley diet, or a 6 pm diet, so be it. I have so much determination that never showed on my figure, only in my eyes. One day, that slender sporty girl will be in the ring with me and she will suddenly realize that all those layers of fat were hiding hours and hours of training. That, just to be the weight I will be, I had to work five times harder than she trained for  and 5 times longer. She will realize that those years of being fat made me hard, made me angry, made me endure things she could not. I will tell her beforehand, "I used to be 194 pounds. I lost weight so I could sock you in the face a whole bunch of times. :)" And it will be true.

That is my bio as big hips woman. Thank you for reading. ~Electra