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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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!!