Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 27: A Retrospective in the Face of Doing it All Over Again (or The Exhaustion of Being Good)

Four years ago this month, I wrote my first blog entry in this series, Diary of a Fat Girl. I was pushing 200 pounds and profoundly unhappy about it ("it" being my weight, my size, my poor health, my lack of fitness, my habits, and the way I felt about myself). I had been big since puberty really, but hadn't become significantly overweight until several years of working across the street from a McDonald's and, most brutally, going to grad school half-time while still teaching. For a while, I had convinced myself that I'd rather be fat and happy than skinny and sad. I honestly believed that those were the two choices. For a while it was true, but eventually my weight got to a point where I felt totally out of control. I hated my body and no amount of positive thinking was going to overcome that feeling.

Over the next two years, I developed an array of better habits. I exercised most days, counted calories, became aware of portion sizes, stopped drinking full-calorie soda constantly, acknowledged and confronted my own emotional overeating, learned a ton about fitness and nutrition, and generally became very focused on health and fitness. I lost over 60 pounds, going from a size 16 to a size 6. I deadlifted my own body weight and ran a marathon. I got very into accomplishments, whether relatively small (moving from 20 lb dumbbells to 25 lbs in my bench press) or more significant (running a 5k without stopping for the first time ever). The accomplishments and their little endorphin boosts filled the void that was left after I stopped binge eating and, generally, lazing about like a sack of shit.

Then, over the summer of 2013, a lot of things changed that ended up being an unfortunate turning point for my health and fitness. After the marathon in May of that year, I ran an obstacle course 5k in June during which I either severely bruised or possibly fractured my tailbone (with no treatment other than pain meds and an inflatable donut seat, I didn't bother to get it checked out). In July, thankfully after my tailbone felt much better, I got married and went on a honeymoon to Mexico. In late August, I started a new job teaching at a large urban public school, a big shift from my previous seven years in a small alternative program.

I often jokingly blame my new teaching job, now two years in and counting, for my recent weight gain and poor fitness level. I say, "you know, before I started working here, I ran four days a week and fit into all my clothes." Har har, yadda yadda. And that's true...ish. What is more accurate is to say that before that summer I ran four days a week and fit into all my clothes. But that summer did me in. Wedding planning and preparation is relatively time-consuming, especially the week before the event. Then the Monday after the wedding, we went to Mexico where we stayed at an all-inclusive resort for a week. My food options there were limited and I drank probably 3-4 Cokes a day on top of eating french fries at nearly every meal. When we got back, it was the dead of summer and I was in the midst of a structure-less and routine-less vacation. I hadn't counted calories, purposefully exercised, logged meals online, or generally cared about fitness for weeks. According to MyFitnessPal, the website I used religiously to log all my food, I logged my meals on June 30th of that year, and then didn't do a damned thing until July 30th, a full month later.

It may take weeks and weeks to develop good habits, but it didn't take much time for me to shed them. I stopped counting calories, I exercised every so often more to maintain a bit of cardiovascular fitness than as any part of a larger plan, and I de-prioritized my health in order to free up time and energy for my upcoming new job. When the job began, it was just as hard as I imagined, and I spent many more hours at work and grading at home than I used to. Leaving on time to go to the gym every day was a beautiful fantasy, but it never happened. It also didn't help that I was going home every day via a bus and two trains, meaning that even if I did leave by 3 o'clock, I wouldn't make the gym until 4 at the earliest. Changing clothes and exercising would take an hour, then the commute home was another 20 minutes or more. All told, I would leave at 3 and not get home until 5:30, at which point I still had to feed and walk the dogs, worry about dinner, and then do the grading and planning I had brought home (an inevitability of the 3 o'clock exit). If I wanted to get eight hours of sleep, I had to be asleep by 9:45. Although exercise had been an important part of my stress relief and self-care for two years, I shed it in the interest of spending more time at work and maintaining my sanity.

Here is a graph of my weight beginning shortly after I ran a marathon and ending today. The overall trend is self-evident, but I find the various dips and peaks to be more interesting. I steadily gained weight over the summer of 2013 and continued this at a consistent rate (1-2 pounds per month) until the following spring, at which point I evidently decided to eat basically everything. By the last day of school, I was more than 15 pounds heavier than the first day. Half of my clothes no longer fit. Over that summer, however, I did manage to make some progress to get back to my healthier and happier state from a year earlier. I had dipped below 150 pounds again (a demarcation I arbitrarily consider to be important). Even while balancing my job and personal life and endless professional development (thanks RETELL!) and everything else, I was getting somewhere. Then I broke my foot.

I think I actually would have gained substantially more weight during my 6 weeks of immobility had it been easier to get to/from the kitchen. Honestly, it was such a pain to get food, cook it as needed, and retreat back to the couch with a plate...I just didn't bother half the time. I still ate, of course, but it was nutrition bars half the time, something that could go in a pocket and didn't need to be prepared. There was plenty of take-out, but mostly just snacks that were easy to carry. Still, I did little besides lay around during that period, and hence gained back the weight I had fought to lose over the previous summer.

I don't really know why, after recovering from my broken foot and getting my shit back together in general, I just decided to eat everything I got my hands on. It's a behavior that's been evident and pervasive for me for about six months now, something I recognize but struggle to curb. It's as though my pre-fitness psychology saw a window of opportunity and it possessed me like a demon.

For whatever reason, I kept measuring everything. When I decided to fill the largest cereal bowl in the house with Cap'n Crunch, I would always measure it. I knew I was eating four cups of cereal with two cups of milk. I knew that to the gram. But it didn't change my behavior and I never logged it either. I'm sure my husband had more than one instance of wondering why I would carefully measure a bowl teeming with three ounces of Doritos. I honestly have NO idea why I kept measuring. Maybe it was satisfying in a ritualistic way. Maybe I thought that measuring meant I would kick myself back into good habits. Maybe I was afraid that if I stopped measuring, I had really given up.

Over the past few weeks, I've been feeling the same way I did all the way back in 2011 when I finally decided not to be a piece of shit. I'm 40 pounds lighter than I was then, but I don't feel -40 pounds, I feel +20 relative to my lowest weight. I got very used to being smaller, and it's not something I'm willing to let go of. Much of it is vanity: I like to look good, I like to wear smaller clothes, I like to fit into smaller things. A little of it is also practical: I am *not* going to go buy a bunch of bigger clothes after having given all of mine away to Good Will. I refuse to go in that direction. There is also a fair bit of ego and pride. A lot of my identity over the past several years has been based around being the girl who used to be fat. When the topic arose in conversation, I would say anecdotally, "well, I used to be like 200 pounds" and people (especially my students) would respond with very satisfying "shut up"s an "no way"s. Now, I don't say that, or at least not while still expecting the shock. It's no longer that difficult to imagine me at 200 pounds.

A month or two ago, two things happened. First, Dan bought me a FitBit Charge HR, a fitness tracker that I wear on my wrist. It was a long-delayed birthday present, and I kept telling myself that this was the thing that would get my butt in gear. That didn't exactly happen, but something did: I signed up for a few road races. There was a 10k at the end of May, which I completed, and there's a half marathon in September (at Salem Willows! Goddammit I love Salem Willows). Now, with only about 10 weeks until the half marathon, I have real work to do. Even with all my breaks (figurative and literal), and falling off the wagon that I already fell off of, I have still been able to run 2 or 3 miles at a go without too much trouble. But there's a big difference between a weekend 5k for charity and a half marathon. I haven't run anything close to that distance since the marathon in 2013, it it requires real training.

My hope is that this is the thing that helps me find the motivation I've been lacking. My training is going to be far less effective if I don't bother with any sort of nutrition. I also will need to make sure I do my best to increase strength and try to maintain muscle mass, so I'll need to hit the gym 1-2 times a week between runs. I hope that, by deciding to do one thing properly, I reactivate the attitudes and habits that I had so carefully groomed over the two years during which I was actually healthy and fit. The funny thing is that I don't enjoy running as much as I enjoy weightlifting, but since I'm not looking to compete in weightlifting, there are no dates and deadlines. I can say, "I want to do a chin-up by October" until I'm blue in the face, but it's totally made up and I know it. At least with road races, the parameters of the event, including the date, are outside my control. And I paid an entry fee. That's real money, dammit.

So here I sit, having gone to the gym this morning and logged all my food for the first time in ages. There is Buncha Crunch in the cabinet and I want to eat it. I'm not hungry. Like, at all. I had lunch two hours ago and it was perfectly filling. In fact, it was super fatty and should leave me feeling plenty satisfied for another couple of hours. But I know that goddamned Buncha Crunch is there and I know how good it feels to eat it. Especially without caring how much I eat. Indifference can be very tasty.

But I'm not going to eat that fucking Buncha Crunch because I have real fucking work to do. And it's more than fitting into a dress or hitting my macros or coming in under a calorie goal for the day. This is about taking control of my life and my body; it's about deciding that disordered eating is not the defining facet of my life. Tomorrow, I'm going to go for a run. And the next day I'm going to go to the gym. And the next day I'm going to run again. And the next day I'm going to rest because those days are also important. But then, goddammit, the next day I'm going to go for another run.

Although I am anxious about diving back into my healthy habits whole-hog, going from total apathy to maximum focus in a single day, I worry much more about what this means in the long term. Sure, I can do this for a week, or a month, or maybe even the whole summer. But what about in September, when I have brand new students and a brand new curriculum (to me) and I'm back to bringing home grading most nights? What happens when I have to jam my exercise into smaller and smaller available blocks of time? What happens when I decide that stress-eating isn't a terrible alternative to staying stressed? Can I really maintain my motivation and determination indefinitely, when being good forever is so exhausting?

I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how this will go. But I went to the gym today. And I've eaten sensible food so far with the intention of doing so all day. Four years ago, it was immensely helpful for me to consider my relationship with food to be akin to a drug addiction. One day at a time, just make the decision not to use right now, worry about tomorrow tomorrow. I'm even rereading the book that put me on the right psychological path. Maybe, just maybe, if I can get my mind right, I can get back to work. I guess we'll see.