Eden_Fire's Ups and Downs

[eden_fire]

I've been a lurker for a while, but I think it's time that I opened up with my own personal battles and I think this is probably the best non-judgmental space to do that! 

 

Basically, the past five years of my life have been spent in huge upheaval and it threw me into a bit of a mental tailspin. I've only just started to realize how bad I let things get, and how distorted my perception of self and surroundings has become. My 33rd birthday is coming up next weekend, and I don't want to spend another day of my life feeling like a victim to all the chaos. 

 

Oh man, where do I even start?!

 

I guess I can start at the beginning of the chain reaction, with my husband's accident - he was rollerblading without a helmet, crashed, and wound up with six different skull fractures, damage to the ligaments in his neck, and a severe concussion (his third). There was a long recovery to follow, during which he always complained about feeling a bit "off" but the doctors dismissed as vertigo. Then he got food poisoning...and never recovered. He just kept getting sicker and sicker. Again, the doctor told him to take some Immodium and shake it off. But his body wasn't absorbing the calories in the food he was eating anymore - it just went right through him. After almost having him die on me once, I now had to watch him starve right in front of me while the doctors wrung their hands. It was terrifying. So they tested him for Celiac disease, and he came back with the genetic marker for it. "Cut out gluten and you'll feel better," the doctors told him. So in the middle of all this, we gave ourselves a crash-course in going gluten-free, but it didn't help. He kept losing weight and was in a significant amount of pain. Finally, after a trip to the E.R. because there was blood coming out of an orifice that blood shouldn't be coming out of, one doctor finally gave him the time of day and did a CT scan of his abdomen. His entire digestive system was inflamed. "You need to go see a GI doctor," they told him. "The wait time in Calgary for a referral is six months." I looked them square in the eye and said, "He won't live that long. He needs to see someone f*cking tomorrow." So they got him in, did a colonoscopy, diagnosed him with Crohn's disease and put him on steroids and other heavy duty medications.

 

Crisis averted. I wish I could say that things improved after that point, but shortly thereafter, I was laid off from my job. Being the type of person who lives for my work, this made me question my entire self-worth. The economy was terrible at that time too - it wasn't just me out of work, but thousands of other people as well. So I would apply to job posting after job posting, with barely a sniff at an interview. It was incredibly demoralizing. My confidence tanked, my hair started falling out more than normal, my nails were breaking, I kept dropping things, I felt like crying all the time, and my energy and libido were non-existent. Oh yeah...and I put on weight.

 

For someone who has always been able to maintain her weight (plus or minus a pound or two in either direction) regardless of what I ate or how much I exercised, this was terrifying to me. I felt out of control. I felt like this was the beginning of middle-age spread or perhaps something more serious, so I had my doctor test me for everything under the sun but every single test came back negative. I saw two different dietitians, one who tried to get me to focus on "mindful and meditative" eating, and another who told me that I had a "near-perfect" diet (it's not) and that perhaps I should add some carbs back in (huh?!). 

 

Finally, my doctor said, "I think you're having delayed reaction to all the stress you've been through recently. The only thing left for me to test is your cortisol levels, but I can pretty much guarantee that they'll be sky-high, and unless you're showing signs of adrenal failure, there's nothing I can give you." She basically told me to find a therapist and join a gym. At first I was furious - "Seriously?! HOW many years of medical school, all the scientific advances in the world, and you can't fix me?!"

 

So yeah, it took me a while to warm up to the idea of talking to someone and exercising. But here I am! Okay, I'll cut to the chase a bit. 

 

Through talking to a good therapist, I've come to the realization that:

 

a. I struggle with anxiety and mood-swings. (Courtesy of the mental health issues on my dad's side...)

b. I am a dichotomous thinker. (Thanks, mom and cult-ish religious upbringing...)

c. Yeah, I'm getting older, life is changing, and I'm probably not dealing with it well. (emotionally or physically...)

d. I have an eating disorder of some sort. (Some hybrid combination of binge-ED, body-dysmorphia, sugar-addiction, orthorexia, and plain ol' food-obsession. It's messed up.)

 

Through exercise, I've come to realize that:

 

a. Nothing dispels my anxiety better than running on the treadmill with some good tunes on my headphones. 

b. Even though the scale tends to creep up a bit when I'm working out consistently, I look better and feel more confident.

c. The more I workout, the more perpetually hungry I am. ALL. THE. TIME. Seriously. Ravenous.

d. I am stronger than I think. (I can do three sets of eight "real" push-ups now! That's 24 freaking push-ups!)

 

The past couple days have been tough, and that's kind of why I decided to write this. I figure, "Surely I'm not the only one with struggles like this." Also, I know that writing helps me work through my emotions and process them rather than bottling them up. For a few years now, I've indulged the victim mentality that comes with keeping it together for a while and then finally falling apart. It's weird, it's like I gave myself permission to be broken, and then let myself sulk about it for too long and I got stuck. I don't want this state of mind to be my ever-present companion for the rest of my adult life, and I know that "mindset" is one of the most important Nerd Fitness tenets of knowledge. Until I master that, I know I'm not going to have any success in feeling better and losing weight, and it's high time I explore the connections behind the things that might be making my anxiety worse and habituating the things that lessen it's effect on me. 

[eden_fire]

Our office is celebrating Chinese New Year tomorrow, so there was a big basket of fortune cookies in the kitchen this morning.Apparently, fortune cookies have 3g of sugar each! I had no idea...they're so bland, I never would have guessed. But the fortune in my cookie said, "You are the symbol of strength," so that made me smile. Darn right. LOL

 

Decent workout at the gym last night. I've only got about an hour to spend there after work before I head home, so lately I've been trying to add a bit more structure to my workouts. I figure that if I can do a couple arm/shoulder exercises, a leg exercise or two, and a few sets of core moves, that's better than nothing. It's what I tell my husband all the time after all - "Even a crappy workout is better than no workout at all!" Strength training is still a little uncomfortable for me though, since I've always been a Treadmill Queen. I can figure out free weights and stuff, but most of the machines are still a mystery to me. I go to the YMCA by my house because I find that crowd is really mixed in terms of experience levels and age, so it's a little less intimidating than a hardcore gym would be. I put my headphones on and keep to myself, but most people will smile if I accidentally make eye contact with them. (My social anxiety probably makes me come off as such a standoffish b*tch. Which I'm not. Honestly!) 

 

Speaking of anxiety though, mine is sky-high at the moment. I've got so much going on in the next couple days and I'm fretting about all of it. There's a concert that my husband bought tickets to tomorrow, but it's in another city and I financially can't afford to take the time off. My sister-in-law is coming for a visit this weekend she's a chore to deal with. I've got a birthday party Friday night that I have to figure out an appetizer for. My house needs cleaning. I promised my husband I'd make him gluten-free snickerdoodle muffins for Valentine's Day this evening. And I'm trying to figure out what to do about my year-end corporate accounting situation. *deep breath* 

 

Just gotta focus on what I can control...