(Not) In Treatment

When I get a chance, I like to watch episodes of HBO's show In Treatment. I have to sneak this viewing in when my husband isn't around, because he doesn't really like the show and calls it "depressing." This makes sense because 1) he's never had a great opinion of psychotherapy and 2) the episodes can be depressing at times. Maybe because I've dealt with depression for the majority of my life I'm somehow drawn to it. Is it because I relate to it so well? I like watching people revealing their inner thoughts to an objective person and often discovering things about themselves they didn't realize before. Yes, it can be sad to see someone falling apart, but I much prefer that emotional/mental drama than some 10-minute fight scene. Which is why I in turn leave the room when my husband turns on a Steven Seagal movie. Gag!

Psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors have played a major role in my life: I just realized I've had more therapists than significant others! I've definitely gone through longer periods in my life without a boyfriend than I have without a therapist.

At the end of May my most recent counselor retired. I was supposed to be referred to another colleague in her office, but I've yet to get a phone call to schedule an appointment. Yes, I've made a phone call to check in, about a week ago. I left a message on the new referral's voice mail, but haven't gotten a reply. I think I may call the person in charge today or tomorrow and see if I can't get any further that way.

This was a tough time for me to go cold turkey. For the last four years summer have been a very chaotic, trying time for me, and I've had major issues with anxiety attacks and difficult bouts of depression over it. Therapy was crucial for me because it was precious "me" time, where I was the focus for once, and I could vent and troubleshoot problem areas in my life. And this summer is no different: yesterday I had a pretty significant melt-down that left me feeling like a fragile, cracked piece of china.

But you know what? Looking back on the day, I actually saw it as a small victory. Instead of shoving down the feelings I was having, which would normally come out later in anger, anxiety and depression, I just left those feelings fly and let myself experience the emotions I was experiencing (frustration, hurt, helplessness). Even better, I didn't go out and comfort myself with overeating after the fact, either. I did go food shopping, but I didn't think once about buying any kind of binge foods. I stocked up on salad fixin's for myself; healthy, energy-packed snacks for my daughter so she can re-fuel after gymnastics practice; and fresh veggies for last night's dinner. Last evening I did find myself attacking my housecleaning with some unusual fervor, but better that than a tub of ice cream!

While it would be nice to have a therapist to tell all of this to, I guess for now I've got enough tools in my mental arsenal to keep me going. However, I've got a lot more summer to tackle, and it would be nice to have that "corner man" (yes, I'm using boxing terminology!) to advise me.

Been There, Done That

This past week Kirstie Alley has been the target, punching bag, object of ridicule, etc., because she came out on the Oprah show and admitted she regained the weight she very publicly lost. God bless her, I know what she's going through on several levels, although I consider myself lucky that I don't have paparazzi following me around calling me "fat a**." People are probably thinking it and muttering it to themselves behind my back, but at least it's not being yelled at me in airports or malls.

This came at an interesting time for me. I have another doctor's checkup this Friday, and I know it's not going to be fun. I haven't done well at all lately with the weight loss and exercise, and I totally expect to have gained when I step on the doctor's scale. I'm already trying to prepare myself for the fallout I'm going to get for it.

The sad thing is, when I get this way, even an upcoming doctor's appointment doesn't seem to give me the incentive to get myself into gear. "This way" includes major moodiness, prone to tears or anger, and a major lack of energy. Add a hectic schedule to the mix, and I'm reduced to getting the very basics done (work, basic housekeeping) and not being able to muster the motivation to attempt anything else. That means exercise for sure.

As far as eating, I do my best with breakfast and lunch to be a "normal" eater, as far as portion sizes and healthy food goes. It helps that it coincides with my most orderly and routine part of the day. After that, however, as my life goes chaotic, so does my eating. Definitely way too much night time snacking! I guess I should focus on that chaos=eating relationship and figure out how to combat that. Recognizing it is the first step. Doing something about it is the second. And sometimes that even goes well. At first. But then I lose motivation, the stressors of my life get the better of me, and I'm realizing more and more that I need help and support to keep it from collapsing once again.

I'm quickly coming to the realization that things really need to change in my life. It hasn't congealed into a formal plan, but I think within the next month or so, I have to come to some conclusions and make some real decisions. I'm sure Friday's appointment will contribute to that. And I have to realize that I can't do it all by myself. It's always been exceedingly hard for me to ask for help, but if I ever want to get some real progress in my life, it has to be done.

Out of the Ashes

“The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.”

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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."

A Fresh Start?

I don't know if it's the birthday, the beginning of summer, three weeks of using the Intuitive Eating hypnosis CD, my PCOS medication kicking in or any combination thereof, but this week I've finally, after months and months, felt like trying to try again to become a normal eater. For the past three days I've done my best to be more conscious about my eating, as well as catching up and reviewing IE material online. So far, so good.

It could just be that I've hit rock bottom, too, and there doesn't appear to be anywhere to go but up. The past few months have been a process of realization for me. Mostly that for the past year I had simply given up and didn't care anymore -- about tackling my eating issues or even working on non-food issues. Let's face it -- I didn't care about anything, including myself. Call it depression, a breakdown, whatever; but it has definitely been an emotional, physical and spiritual trough that has left me feeling pretty lousy about myself. I have realized that this is something that isn't going away and I have to cope with for the rest of my life, just like if I was diabetic, had cancer, you name it. I will always have a tendency for depression, and I will always have to be aware that food is my biggest form of self-medication.

Maybe this is all part of a process of metamorphosis for me. Perhaps this past year has been an incubation period, and if I'm lucky, I'll break free from this cocoon I've been in and emerge as a butterfly and not a gypsy moth. I know in my IE reading it's been stated that becoming a normal eater takes time -- even years -- until one is finally free of the old diet mentality or disordered thoughts about food and emotions and the new rational beliefs become ingrained. And in many of the cases I've read about there have been periods where there is a gaining and free-for-all period before reaching a saner, more intuitive state.

I know, it's only been three days, and in the past few months I've had a week here and there of "clarity," only to fall back into my old ways again. But like emerging from that cocoon, it takes work and effort to break through, and I'm beginning to accept the fact that this is going to be a long process. In fact, I may have to work at this for the rest of my life. But I have to remember that working towards something is better than giving up and doing nothing.

By the way, I never mentioned here that after a few weeks, my neck/arm pain has pretty much gone away. Again, it's something I'm going to have to continue to keep an eye on, but for now, thank goodness, I'm not in pain.