“The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.”Six months. It seems both like a long time and hardly any time at all. Where was I all that time? Good question. Under the wet, heavy blanket of my depression, a blanket soaked with a good deal of stress, burn-out and mental exhaustion from a variety of issues going on in my life.
When I saw my general practitioner in January and he looked at the sorry state I was in, I tried to explain that I spent the majority of the past year fighting depression. His frank reply: "You've been battling depression most of your life, haven't you?" And I couldn't argue with that. I've had anxiety problems since I was 10, and suffered my first serious bout of depression around 14 or 15. It's been a lifetime of struggling.
I apologize to those friendly bloggers who left messages over the past six months. I left off here so positive, and I was nowhere near that mental state and couldn't collect myself enough to even explain. I wasn't only cut off from blogging, I was cut off from myself.
And in that process of cutting off, I ate. I must say, thank goodness, that it wasn't the compulsive, crazed binge eating I was doing at the end of my dieting days -- that was a scary time of hoarding binge foods, sneaking off to eat this "contraband" and mindlessly consuming it until I was often physically ill. I think the combination of the information I've learned from studying Intuitive Eating and the Wellbutrin I was taking kept me from that extreme.
Instead, it was just a "f#!*-it" attitude. I ate whatever I wanted and didn't think once about health or nutrition; it was all about comfort. I made lousy choices all day long. And exercise flew right out the window; other than housework and a little snow shoveling I was living a completely sedentary existence, escaping into TV, movies and reading books from the library.
I guess you could say my doctor's appointment was my wake-up call, my "hitting bottom." I finally realized the dark place I'd fallen into and knew I had to do something to pull myself out of it. I was in a sorry state and not just emotionally. My weight went up, and so did my blood pressure (it didn't help that I was fighting off a panic attack about the appointment before I even walked in the door, plus almost hitting a telephone pole on the icy roads getting to the office!). Fortunately it wasn't dangerously high -- yet -- and my other test results came back okay. My doctor wasn't mean, but he woke me up to the fact that I'm not getting any younger, and the time is quickly coming where my body won't be able to tolerate the excess weight, lousy diet and sedentary lifestyle without serious consequences.
So then I got home, cried, and tried to figure out what in the hell I was going to do with myself. The doctor brought up the idea of Lap-Band surgery, and I actually considered it for, oh, a day. But I realized once again that my problems have little to do with the size of my stomach -- it's about the beliefs in my head combined with my health issues, which include hypothyroidism and PCOS. I don't know if I'd put the depression in the mental or physical column -- it definitely runs in my family, but is that nature or nurture? The same thing goes with my body -- both sides of my family are made of up stocky, German and Eastern European ancestors. But is that genetics or the way our families ate and dealt with food? In any case, it adds up to the fact that I'm never going to have a body like a runway model. I don't think that's a negative belief, just a realistic one.
Putting all that aside, I looked at what were realistic goals and what I could tackle without making myself crazy(ier).
Dieting in the typical sense is out for me. I caught myself in the first couple weeks after the doctor's appointment falling into some dieting mentality (restricting too much, wanting to weigh myself obsessively, etc.) and quickly falling into an anxiety attack. I was lucky in a sense that I had an appointment with my therapist that day, and I was able to talk about the extremes in my thinking. This past year it's either not caring about anything (i.e. depression), or obsessing to the point of anxiety. And my question that day was, how do I find the balance in between these two points?
The biggest things were getting my blood pressure back to a healthier level, which tied directly into getting more physically active again. My doctor gave me a very basic walking program, and even though it seemed ridiculous to start off at 5 minutes a day for the first week, I realized that was my extreme, black or white thinking rearing its head. I looked at it in different, more positive ways: instead of being intimidated by a program that looked really hard and difficult, this was something that sounded very easy to do, and I'd be more apt to doing it because it would be over quickly! But more importantly, those 5 minutes a day would enable me to establish a habit. And it worked. I slowly crept up to 10 minutes a day, and now it's 15.
As fate would have it, a week after my appointment I once again became captain of my church's team for our local newspaper's fitness challenge, which wraps up with a 5K/10K walk and run in June. You keep track of your exercise and weight loss which are converted to points that are added in with your race result. In our case those points go towards a competition with other churches for a "Pastor's Cup" trophy. All of this benefits various charitable organizations in our area. This is my third year as captain of our team, and there is something to be said for having a chart to keep track of your exercise to keep you motivated to keep it up.
As for the food and eating? I'm doing my best with IE and its basic rules: eat when you're hungry, eat what you want, eat until you're satisfied. I am making an effort to make healthier choices, but only those foods that I really like. There have been some instances that I don't make the healthiest choice, or else there's nothing else available, but I took them in stride and didn't attach any bad feelings or guilt to them. I have had a couple instances of stress-eating, but they were limited and did not snowball into a feeding frenzy. I think it's because I was conscious of my actions, which cut down the intensity of my need for it.
Tomorrow I go back to the doctor to find out a) if I've lost any weight and b) if my blood pressure has gone down. While I've tried to stay away from the scale these past six weeks, I did take a peek this morning, just so I'd be prepared for tomorrow's appointment, and it appears I've lost somewhere between 10-15 pounds. I just hope the blood pressure has gone down, too.
I'm not getting too excited about the weight loss. My main focus right now is not about that. My main goal right now is taking care of myself, and that means physically and mentally. I can't go back to sacrificing my sanity for a smaller dress size, yet I can't sacrifice my health, either. So I'm doing my best to achieve balance -- balance in what I eat, balance in putting movement in my life, and balance in finding satisfying "me" time in the midst of working, housekeeping and being a wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend.
My biggest concern right now is the fear of the return of that blanket of depression. Even though I'm feeling better now, how long until it once again takes over and takes all the joy out of life? I'll end with another quote from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra:
"Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."
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