Mind over does-it-matter?
This is a bit rambling, sorry. There are a lot of thoughts that all sort of interlink, but I'm not mentally well enough to put them into a coherent narrative.
I've had a few things happen this summer that have caused me to become very depressed. The first and largest being Grace splitting up with me, which left me in quite a vulnerable state when the other things happened, and I'm currently quite seriously broken.
One side-effect of this that I wasn't expecting, is that after each shitty thing has happened, I've lost weight at a faster pace. Even after getting beaten up at the riots a few weeks ago, which meant I stopped going to the gym (and haven't started again yet), my weight has been steadily dropping. I'm starting to wonder whether this is a good thing, or whether I should be worried about it.
Partly this is because I'm very aware of eating disorder stuff, having been involved with a number of women who've been through it or were/are still fighting with it. Helen has beaten her food issues to a truce, but they're still very present in her thinking, and she's been finding it difficult watching me lose weight so quickly over the last few months. She asked me quite early on to stop talking to her about exercise/diet stuff all the time (it was on my mind a lot in the first month or two) as she was finding that quite difficult, which is most of the reason for the cut on these posts.
I swear I am still eating properly, even though I'm depressed - I'm eating at least breakfast cereal plus one large meal every day, which is one breakfast more (and, admittedly, a lot of chocolate less) than I used to eat before I started all this body-shaping stuff (I've spent most of my adult life only eating one proper meal a day, plus snacking the rest of the day).
So I'm finding it kind of weird that even though I'm stopped exercising, weight is still dropping off me at much the same rate as it was when I was exercising - or possibly even faster, I've lost almost 2kg in the last fortnight. I'm not sure how to account for that... I know being miserable can make you lose weight, but I assumed that was due to not eating. I am eating. Not super-healthily either, since I stopped exercising, although I'm still not snacking as much as I used to before I started this health kick, and I'm still mostly not drinking highly-calorific drinks.
Helen and I were discussing stuff recently and she said she found it hard to tell the difference between 'body shaping', and 'exercise bulimia'. I thought about it and said that maybe you could guess the former had slipped into the latter when someone gets below their ideal weight and keeps pushing downwards. She thought it was more about motivation than outcomes, which obviously makes more sense, but I was trying to find a pragmatic definition/test for someone else (her) to use looking at it (me) from the outside, when motivations are often unclear.
It's since occurred to me that although my nominal ideal weight is about 66kg, the fact that I'm under-muscled means that I'll probably have to go below that ideal weight to get my body-fat percentage down to an ideal/healthy level (which I suspect is key to my main goal of getting my stomach back into shape, as that almost certainly requires me to lose a large amount of visceral fat, which will probably be last to go). Obviously I'm still trying to build up muscle too, but that's a much slower process than losing fat, so I imagine I'll have more chance of hitting the body-fat goal first. So it seems likely that I'll end up trying to qualify for my own pragmatic definition of having an eating disorder. Which is a little unnerving.
The magic scales tell me that my body-fat has dropped from 23% to 18.4% since I started, which is pretty good going I think. They also tell me that my muscle percentage has gone up from 30.3% to 34%, which I was also quite happy about. Then I worked out the absolute weights represented by those two percentages - a shifting target given that my overall weight has been dropping, so each % point is worth less in kg now than it was at the start.
Obviously I am losing fat - I've gone from carrying around 17.7kg of fat to 12.5kg of fat according to those scales. However, my muscle percentage, when you work it out as muscle mass, shows that I have neither gained nor lost any muscle - it's stayed absolutely steady at 23kg (+/- 0.1kg) the whole time!
I'm not entirely sure that's true - I think the figures from the scale suffer from not being able to measure upper-body development - but that also makes me wonder if I might now be losing some of the upper-body muscle I had gained recently, and that's where the weight loss is coming from now that I'm not exercising those muscles (and not shovelling extra protein in my face 3 or 4 times a day).
Not really sure what to do about it anyway... my hand still hurts too much to lift weights, and I'm too miserable to want to go out to the gym (or anywhere) most of the time anyway. Maybe I should try to eat more protein still, even though I'm not exercising? I do eat tuna a lot, a tin every couple of days at a guess, and that's fairly protein-heavy.
Anyway. All of that above is where I am, or where I was. Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep and mostly thinking unhelpful thoughts about everything that's happened lately, I caught this pattern of words in my thoughts: "At least my weight is one thing I'm still in control of."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would define as an eating disorder. So now what?
This entry was originally posted at http://denny.dreamwidth.org/732378.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I've had a few things happen this summer that have caused me to become very depressed. The first and largest being Grace splitting up with me, which left me in quite a vulnerable state when the other things happened, and I'm currently quite seriously broken.
One side-effect of this that I wasn't expecting, is that after each shitty thing has happened, I've lost weight at a faster pace. Even after getting beaten up at the riots a few weeks ago, which meant I stopped going to the gym (and haven't started again yet), my weight has been steadily dropping. I'm starting to wonder whether this is a good thing, or whether I should be worried about it.
Partly this is because I'm very aware of eating disorder stuff, having been involved with a number of women who've been through it or were/are still fighting with it. Helen has beaten her food issues to a truce, but they're still very present in her thinking, and she's been finding it difficult watching me lose weight so quickly over the last few months. She asked me quite early on to stop talking to her about exercise/diet stuff all the time (it was on my mind a lot in the first month or two) as she was finding that quite difficult, which is most of the reason for the cut on these posts.
I swear I am still eating properly, even though I'm depressed - I'm eating at least breakfast cereal plus one large meal every day, which is one breakfast more (and, admittedly, a lot of chocolate less) than I used to eat before I started all this body-shaping stuff (I've spent most of my adult life only eating one proper meal a day, plus snacking the rest of the day).
So I'm finding it kind of weird that even though I'm stopped exercising, weight is still dropping off me at much the same rate as it was when I was exercising - or possibly even faster, I've lost almost 2kg in the last fortnight. I'm not sure how to account for that... I know being miserable can make you lose weight, but I assumed that was due to not eating. I am eating. Not super-healthily either, since I stopped exercising, although I'm still not snacking as much as I used to before I started this health kick, and I'm still mostly not drinking highly-calorific drinks.
Helen and I were discussing stuff recently and she said she found it hard to tell the difference between 'body shaping', and 'exercise bulimia'. I thought about it and said that maybe you could guess the former had slipped into the latter when someone gets below their ideal weight and keeps pushing downwards. She thought it was more about motivation than outcomes, which obviously makes more sense, but I was trying to find a pragmatic definition/test for someone else (her) to use looking at it (me) from the outside, when motivations are often unclear.
It's since occurred to me that although my nominal ideal weight is about 66kg, the fact that I'm under-muscled means that I'll probably have to go below that ideal weight to get my body-fat percentage down to an ideal/healthy level (which I suspect is key to my main goal of getting my stomach back into shape, as that almost certainly requires me to lose a large amount of visceral fat, which will probably be last to go). Obviously I'm still trying to build up muscle too, but that's a much slower process than losing fat, so I imagine I'll have more chance of hitting the body-fat goal first. So it seems likely that I'll end up trying to qualify for my own pragmatic definition of having an eating disorder. Which is a little unnerving.
The magic scales tell me that my body-fat has dropped from 23% to 18.4% since I started, which is pretty good going I think. They also tell me that my muscle percentage has gone up from 30.3% to 34%, which I was also quite happy about. Then I worked out the absolute weights represented by those two percentages - a shifting target given that my overall weight has been dropping, so each % point is worth less in kg now than it was at the start.
Obviously I am losing fat - I've gone from carrying around 17.7kg of fat to 12.5kg of fat according to those scales. However, my muscle percentage, when you work it out as muscle mass, shows that I have neither gained nor lost any muscle - it's stayed absolutely steady at 23kg (+/- 0.1kg) the whole time!
I'm not entirely sure that's true - I think the figures from the scale suffer from not being able to measure upper-body development - but that also makes me wonder if I might now be losing some of the upper-body muscle I had gained recently, and that's where the weight loss is coming from now that I'm not exercising those muscles (and not shovelling extra protein in my face 3 or 4 times a day).
Not really sure what to do about it anyway... my hand still hurts too much to lift weights, and I'm too miserable to want to go out to the gym (or anywhere) most of the time anyway. Maybe I should try to eat more protein still, even though I'm not exercising? I do eat tuna a lot, a tin every couple of days at a guess, and that's fairly protein-heavy.
Anyway. All of that above is where I am, or where I was. Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep and mostly thinking unhelpful thoughts about everything that's happened lately, I caught this pattern of words in my thoughts: "At least my weight is one thing I'm still in control of."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would define as an eating disorder. So now what?
This entry was originally posted at http://denny.dreamwidth.org/732378.html. Please comment there using OpenID.