On The Continuing Journey

So... here we are.

It's been four months since my last post and much has happened that has contributed to my neglect of self-care. I have struggled with recurring depressive episodes, really, incredibly, mind-blowingly heartbreaking and tough things at my job, and let's not forget... I just plain haven't cared about health and fitness as some personal and positive life changes have been so blissful, I haven't worried much about it. A perfect storm for fat to return to my stomach and ass (and NOT in the good way).

Oh well. It happens right?

I am not one of those people who can just not care about it for a couple of months and it not affect my body. I have a lifetime of issues associated with food and exercise that have made gaining weight incredibly easy for me, and though I wish it weren't the case, unfortunately, my relationship with food is unhealthy so if I am not consistently aware of what I am eating over a period of several days, fat will begin to creep on quite quickly. In short: until I figure out how to not binge eat or overeat, I will have to be mindful of my health and fitness endeavors constantly. I can't just slack for a few weeks and jump back in without my body changing - no, when I go down... I TAKE THE WHOLE DAMN SHIP WITH ME.

All that being said, the past two months... I REALLLLYYYYYY haven't cared. I have eaten and drank whatever the eff I wanted, and the effects of that has meant I have become too lethargic and tired to work out. Ohh baby, you can imagine I really messed up big time here as I am literally a chubby hamster caught on a wheel of despair of my own making.

And yet, all is well.

It's okay because life is a series of ups and downs, gains and losses, victories and failures... it is a beautiful journey that hasn't ended for me yet. I have been doing the difficult and challenging work of reframing what has happened to me these past few months so that my "all or nothing" mind can accept my body once again. As I said on my Instagram, I smashed the scale against the wall... so I don't know how where I am at weight wise, but I can feel it when I put on my clothes - I can see it in pictures and my family has made nice passive-aggressive comments about it. (thanks guys.) Despite the fact that I have gained weight, and I have lost a lot of my momentum, I have not failed. 

Because let's be real... this... this is always going to be a life long battle for me. I will constantly be at war with my disordered eating, with fear and negligence of fitness - this is a part of me, but it does not define me. And this is a battle I intend on winning right now.

So despite not being my lightest weight - despite not having eaten well, clean, or whole in the past few months - and despite having lost a lot of stamina and strength.... I will pick myself up again. Because I am so much stronger than I could have imagined. Look at far I have come! This is just another pitstop in journey... another mountain to climb... and I just continuing the journey. 

_

I am committing the next month to finding balance and renewing a healthy relationship with food and fitness. My start date is today (October 26, 2016) even though I have technically been eating clean for the past four days, and my end day is Thanksgiving! (Nov 24, 2016)

I am committing to the following in order to reset myself again because I am not doing a Whole30 this time:

-Gluten free
-Under 50g of net carbs each day
-No alcohol
-No weighing myself (not that I can- no scale!)
-Develop practices to self-love and self-care and post them to keep myself accountable


Cause there is no room for negative self talk.

Let's do it.
Let's achieve our goals.

struggling with disordered eating

So let's get real about eating disorders.

I am not diagnosed with an eating disorder of any kind, and I am still learning about what qualifies and how to identify if you have one, and I am not saying that I have one; however, I struggle with disordered eating habits. 

Before I began my health journey, I clearly struggled with eating habits that were not beneficial to my health or lifestyle. Food had become a sedative and a way to deal with depression and cycles of sadness and dissatisfaction in my life. I remember how good I felt while eating, how for a moment, things felt better if I had something delicious in front of me. I would sometimes eat until I became sick. Afterwards, I would feel terrible. Sometimes I would throw up or be so full, I would have to lay down for a while. It was a terrible way to live that really impacted my quality of life.

When I began my health journey, I was really attracted to the balanced food and health lifestyle that Whole30/paleo eating had provided my life. I learned about my body's relationship to food and how much of it begins in the mind, and a lot of begins with healing inner wounds and the places in us that cause us to overeat or have an unhealthy relationship to food. I was able to maintain several months of a really peaceful, balanced relationship with food.

However, toward the end of last year, I noticed that I had developed another unhealthy relationship with food. This time, it was on the opposite end of the spectrum. I had become obsessed with seeing the number on the scale dip lower and lower - especially on a daily basis. I noticed that if I barely ate, or ate just one meal, I could lose up to a pound a day. I would go week's with only eating once a day. I lost the last twenty pounds doing this. 

It was causing my friend's to become scared. I would obsess and go on and on about how frightened I was of eating too much. If the scale didn't move, or God forbid, go up... I would starve myself all day. I would go out with my friends and choose not to eat and just watch them. I would go to the gym and spend a couple of hours walking ridiculous amounts or biking. It was an addictive feeling - the high of going to bed hungry, my stomach gnawing itself in my sleep. Feeling so tired and worn out from exercising on barely any food...

Eventually, it became such a problem, I started another Whole30 to try to balance myself back out. But I would fall back into the same unsafe eating patterns.

About a month ago, I had another depressive swing. I was at my lowest weight of 156lbs. I was posting constantly on @paleobeyonce. I was still so unhappy with how I looked and how I felt - I would grab parts of my body and try to pull it off of me. I was so disgusted with myself. I wanted to know why no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't be thin like the rest of my friends. 

Eventually, this lifestyle became too much for me, and I started to lean toward the other end of the spectrum again. I ate whatever I wanted again. I drank whatever I wanted. I completely avoided exercise and ate whatever food tasted good even though I am sensitive to certain foods. It provided that same high that I was addicted to feeling, but on the other end of things. I started eating bread daily, and it made me incredibly sick every time. I was at a work conference, and I ate lasagna and immediately afterwards, I threw up in the bathroom. My body just couldn't take it.

At this same work conference, I ended up looking at myself in the mirror. I made a snide comment about my double chin, and a friend I was rooming with looked at me and said, "Emmie, does a day go by where you don't say something about how you look?"

It suddenly occurred to me. I am obsessed with myself. I am obsessed with how I look because I have been programed to believe this is the only thing I offer the world as woman. My value is placed in how thin I can be while still possessing a thickness in all the right places. And I had lost all sight of why I began this journey in the first place - to be the best, healthiest, happiest version of myself. I am not doing this to please anyone or meet some unrealistic expectation - the only person I have to live with the rest of my life, is myself.

All that being said, I am admitting that I struggle with disordered eating and pretty distorted body image issues. And I need to shift my focus to addressing these issues... again. But this time, with grace and love for myself. So I am hoping to shift my social media presentation to a most holistic and honest approach to living a healthy life on every sphere of health. 

Does anyone else relate? Does anyone else have tips?

I am going to start another Whole30 tomorrow. My focus is going to be on eating three meals a day, and dealing with my relationship with food. AND I AM GOING TO PUT THE SCALE AWAY FOR REAL. Because the scale really is a lying bish.

Let's achieve our health goals together!

the story

Honestly, it isn't a "Before & After Story." I guess I am starting to resent that particular phrase because the whole expression denotes some sort of 'worse' vs. 'better' mentality or it communicates a fixed event in time that all things either relate to as 'before' the event or 'after.' This isn't a "Before & After Story," but just a story that is still being told, or as Natasha Bedingfield would say, is still 'unwritten.' I am not living my 'after,' nor do I despise my 'before,' I am learning that all pieces of me, at all times, are wonderful and equal parts of what makes me who I am and who I will be. That being said, this is, I guess... "The Story:"

Showing more of my "Beyonce" side.

My name is Emmie, or you may know me as @Paleobeyonce on Instagram. (Trust me, I regret choosing that name to do this day, but hindsight is 20/20.) Roughly two years ago in late March of 2014, I began a journey that I assumed would progress as most of my other health endeavors would - I figured I would lose about 20 pounds, feel great for just long enough to feel like it was okay to go back to my old lifestyle habits for a little bit, only to go back permanently, gain it all back and then some. You know, it was a little two month long game I liked to play with myself whenever I had a burst of energy.

I haven't been at a healthy weight since middle school. I couldn't point to some event or circumstance in my past that led me to become unhealthy, but if I had to guess, I would say it was a vicious cocktail of clinical depression and transitioning to high school as an "average and plain-looking girl" just at the moment puberty struck. There we go! And over the years, I continued to pack on the pounds until I reached my heaviest weight the year after I graduated college.

Because I had been overweight for all of my adult life, I was just used to it. I was used to the existential dread that was clothing shopping and pool parties and boys... I was used to being the Melissa McCarthy of the group... the DUFF... the funny and loud but fat one of my friend group. I was used to assuming that boys wouldn't find me attractive unless I was some sort of fetish for them. I was used to the sinking feeling of looking at magazines and women on the TV and then wanting to vomit when I caught sight of myself in the mirror.... It is the same story so many women experience. There is a real phenomenon that I lovingly refer to as the "Fat Girl Mentality." And for the life of me, I doubt it will ever go away.

You can physically sense my discomfort.

However, in March 2014, something changed for me. I don't know exactly what it was... and I don't think I ever imagined that it would lead to something more permanent and real, but for what felt like the millionth time, I had that "a-ha" moment when I decided to change my lifestyle.  I started a Whole30 that actually stretched into a Whole60, and by the end of those two months, I had lost about 40 pounds. I felt AMAZING. I had reached the weight that I always seemed to reach when I tried to lose weight: 185 pounds. It was the lowest weight I had known since my early high school days, and it was an amazing accomplishment. What was even more amazing, unlike every other diet and lifestyle change I had tried before, I didn't gain it back within the next few months. In fact, I kept it off for over a year, and as each moment of maintaining that weight went by, I became more accustomed to this "new me" and grew braver, throwing out some of my old "fat" clothes and choosing confidence over self-hatred.

After about of year of maintaining that initial 40 pound weight loss, I decided to invest even more of myself into holistic health eating and living. Slowly and surely, after a Whole100 and tons of new adventures, I lost another 28 pounds, putting me at the lowest weight of my adult life. (Literally, I found my journal from freshman year of high school where I recorded my weight, and I weighed ten pounds less than I did back then! WOW!)

68lbs lost, so much gained!

So, yes, I am in just as much shock about the changes I have undergone as the next guy. I feel remarkably different than I did for most of my life. Physically, I have had many of my health problems disappear with a healthy lifestyle. For most of my life, I struggled with depressive episodes, insomnia, IBS, irregular menstrual cycles, terrible joint pain, and anemia. I rarely have flareups or issues with any of these conditions now, unless of course I indulge on foods that irritate and inflame the body. Also, physically, I have been more fit and able to engage in fun activities than at any other point in my life! I have, in the past year alone, taken up weight lifting, hiking, running and biking... it has been so amazing to see the things that my body is capable of!

I am still on this journey. I will be for all of my life. But every day of this journey has been worth it, and I am learning more and more about myself and choosing a fuller life everyday. This isn't a "Before & After Story" about weight loss, this is just "The Story." And I am still writing it. I still have a ways to go to reach peak health both weight wise and lifestyle wise, and I will keep aiming for more. I invite you to be a part of this story with me, and I will share what knowledge I have gleaned over the years... Note: knowledge, not wisdom. ;)

Let's achieve our goals together! 

Thanks for listening,
Emmie