Krila

Thank you all for the responses! The problem is that I don't really have a set goal yet; I'm quite new here. At this moment, I'm trying to gain just a bit of muscle because I'm skinny fat at the moment (5'5", 113 lbs) and while I am trying to eat as much protein as possible, I feel that added sugar will result in more fat gain than necessary. The reason that protein bars appeal to me is because I tend to work really random shifts (I work at Starbucks) and sometimes I need something to hold me over. If I do end up cutting out protein bars, I might switch to nuts (which I also really enjoy) but it's not the same protein hit. The protein bars I usually frequent are Clif Builder, and they have 20g of protein.

I'm debating on cutting out protein bars from my diet since they are somewhat sugary and I occasionally I eat too many. The only reason I've refrained from doing so in the past was because I don't tend to eat enough protein. I'm slowly working more meat into my diet but I still never reach my protein goal unless I throw in a protein bar somewhere throughout the day. What's your opinion? Are the worth the protein, or should they be avoided?

I love this thread Dornish recipes are an awesome idea

Hi guys, it's nice to meet all of you I'm glad to find a community that is accepting of people from all sorts of backgrounds. I've been on other communities where users have discouraged my use of fitness forums because of my current situation, but I truly hope that won't be the case here. I'm eighteen years old, a student in university, and I have recovered from an eating disorder that I suffered with for a few years. I don't know if I ever really had a healthy relationship with food, even as a child. When I turned fourteen, I was about 167 lbs (and that's pretty large for a fourteen year old) and stood at 5'5". I don't know what triggered me exactly. There never really was a concrete moment that signified the change. I went from eating 3,000+ calories a day to about 1,000. The feeling of losing the weight at first, it's addictive, I think a lot of people know the feeling. But in the end I took it too far. I became scared of food unless I deemed it to be "pure". I sufficed on fruit and vegetables and believed that I was being a healthy vegan, and I got addicted to being that person. I ended up quite underweight, somewhere under 105 lbs; I'm not really sure because after that point I did continue to lose weight, but my scale was taken away so I never got an exact number. I began to do an outrageous amount of cardio, especially on days where I believed that I ate too much. Since I have hypermobility syndrome (my knees don't work the best, but my fingers are super double jointed! It's my favorite party trick) because of that, I mostly stuck to ellipticals because they take a lot of pressure off my knees, and I would do that for as long as I could every day. Even though I was so underweight, I was never satisfied with my body. When I first starting losing weight when I was overweight, I got so many compliments from friends, family members, total strangers. But the compliments stopped coming when I became underweight, and they began to turn into concerned comments. I brushed it off. When a friend would say, "Dude, you're getting so thin..." I took it as a compliment even though I was well aware that they didn't mean it as one. Eventually, the heart pains started to happen. They'd wake me up in the middle of the night, or they would happen while I was running on the elliptical. Sometimes they would just happen even though I wasn't doing anything strenuous. My mother finally convinced me to go to an eating disorder clinic, and the doctors there ran an EKG reading on me. They told me that it was precautionary, since a lot of my behavior was dangerous. Once the readings came, the doctor looked at the result, looked at me, and said "Yeah, you're going to the emergency room. Today." So I stayed in and out of hospital treatment for a while. The worst part about being forced to eat is that I never had any control over what was IN the food. It wasn't even the calories that bothered me by that point. I had a weird obsession with clean eating to the point where nearly nothing was deemed safe to eat by my own standards. (Oh dear this is getting long I'm sorry) Well, this was all about two years ago, give or take. Where I'm at now is strange. I gave up the vegan ways, but I still try to keep my diet as healthy as I can without going overboard. My biggest issue now diet-wise is getting enough protein. But my heart pains are gone, my weight is better, my bloodwork is clean. By all physical accounts I am recovered. So that's one leap in the right direction! Naturally... The body image thing still is with me, and I am not sure if it will ever leave me. But I'm dealing with the cards I've been given. Maybe I won't ever be entirely happy with my body. I'm trying to find a way to cope with that. I keep hearing that weight lifting is one of the best ways to help with self-esteem. So I'm around 115 lbs or so (I know that's pretty low but I don't intend on keeping it that low), but I think the weight I gained during recovery was mostly fat or something... I'm not trying to sound too negative here, after all I'm very glad to feel better and not be sick anymore. I guess I just was disappointed by how things turned out. I have just started to poke my nose into weight lifting. But to be honest, I know I'm not giving it my all. I'm genuinely concerned that I'll end up looking bulky. And no, I promise you, I don't mean the "oh no I'll look like a bodybuilder/she-hulk/etc. if I lift a single weight" What I mean is, if I do end up gaining muscle, I know I'll gain fat with it too. So I won't see any muscle I'd gain, I'd only look chubbier if that makes any sense? If anyone has any advice for beginners to weight-lifting, I'd love to hear it I'm trying my hardest to get into it and be consistent. I'm always going to have the desire to be thinner, to be "pure" or whatever that feeling was that I had. But here's the thing. I SAW what that did to me. You see photos of models and they're always photographed to look beautiful, but above all, HAPPY. I wasn't happy when I was sick. I wasn't happy confined to a hospital bed with a cycle of nurses assigned to watch me 24/7. Yes, there were of course days when I was sick where I'd look at myself and be proud of what I was doing. But my life became that single image, and that alone. Health issues aside, my eating disorder cost me my life. It BECAME my life. I don't want to be that person anymore. I'm not sure of who I want to be yet. But things are looking up! Thank you for reading this unnecessarily long introduction, and I hope we can reach our goals together (Ps: If any of you are into asoiaf, hit me up, seriously I can talk about it for forever. Favorite series of all time)