Missing In Action!

Oh, this poor, poor spare emergency backup blog, being all neglected for lo these many months. So sad. But, alas, 'Raffi shall be lonely no more, for it is a new year, and you know what that means: a new set of calendar photos!

Cousins, January 2012

Cupcake, January 2012

I'm going to start posting the monthly calendar photos on the first of each month. Unless I forget, in which case I will post them when I remember to post them.

Also, we're restarting the diet effective today. This time my husband is 100% on board, so hopefully he'll help me stay on track (and I won't have to nag him too much to do likewise). We're still doing Lose It, because that has worked pretty well for me so far -- I mean, yes, I gained some weight back from my lowest point, and of course that is to be expected because I haven't been the least bit careful. No exercise, no tracking, nothing.

So, yes, we're jumping right back on the wagon. Right now we're trying to get our eating on track because in just a few weeks I start grad school and we want to be "in a good place" for that. We're going to try to fit exercise in somewhere, even if we just go back to the "dance like you're drunk at a wedding" plan. Wish us luck!

BTW, I will continue to insist until the day I die that this is not a "resolution." This is not something we're doing because it's the New Year and we're supposed to. Yes, I have lapsed some in my diligence, but as I keep reminding myself, I didn't gain all this weight in a few months, and it's unreasonable to expect me to lose it all quickly. I am still down 50 pounds from where I started, and that's a hell of a thing. I still want to get healthy and be healthy and stay healthy, which has always been my goal.

Journaling has helped me before, so I'm going back to it again.

12W12S11: Zero

I mentioned yesterday that one of the things that I am currently worried about is that I might be developing some kind of eating disorder from all this dieting I've been doing. I'm sure that my saying that was either (1) overlooked in the long, fairly detailed list of all the not-actual-things that I think are wrong with me, or (2) a kind of a "Wait, what?" moment for at least couple of people. In either case, I want to explain myself, a little bit.

The reason why I worry that I might be developing an eating disorder is because I'm pretty sure I used to have one. Sometimes I think I still do.

I was never officially diagnosed with an eating disorder; to be honest, I'm not even 100% sure myself that I ever actually had one. But I think I did. Whatever I suffered from probably doesn't have a name, but essentially it was this: from the middle of my junior year through the end of my senior year in high school, I basically ate enough to not keel over dead, and to not tip anybody off to what I was doing.

Now, those of you who lived with me or went to school with me at the time and may not remember things exactly the way I do. That's because I was deliberately trying to keep you from noticing that I was only eating about 800 calories a day, and fewer if at all possible.

Most days, I did not eat breakfast. I was "running late" or "too tired" or "already ate" or "not hungry" or whatever else excuse I could come up with for not eating in front of people. Unless I told you I was "not hungry," I probably wasn't lying; I was always hungry, but I was also always running late and always tired and technically I had already eaten something. It just might have been 12 or 24 hours earlier. If I got cornered into actually ingesting something in the morning, I would have a cup of hot Lipton tea with half-and-half and four sugars. It was always hot Lipton tea, always half-and-half, and always four sugars. If any of those variables could not be satisfied, I would just beg off, saying it wasn't "just the way I liked it."

Most days, I ate almost nothing for lunch. If I was in the school cafeteria, I might have a few bites of my sandwich, two or three corn chips, a graham cracker, maybe an entire slice of cheese if I was having a bad day and I couldn't shut up the rumbling in my belly. If I didn't pack a lunch and someone forced my hand, I'd buy a granola bar or some snack cakes from the lunch line, take a couple of nibbles, and then complain that something tasted "off," or wrap it up to eat "later" and then "forget" it at the table. If I went off-campus for lunch with my friends, I'd order the smallest, cheapest thing on the menu, eat no more than six bites, and then "accidentally" drop it on the floor, or share almost everything I had with others. If I had lunch in the choir or the band room, I'd bring nothing, and nobody ever noticed.

Most days, I'd eat just enough at supper time to keep anyone from being suspicious. A few spoonfuls of rice, a couple of bites of chicken, a handful of broccoli. I was always doing some kind of extracurricular activity or another anyway, swimming or drama or choir or newspaper, and my parents and my sisters were always running around somewhere else, so in the constant flow of noise and traffic, it was pretty easy to not be caught. I'd complain about not getting the last piece of whatever, or make a stink about there not being any cookies, while all the while I was secretly hoping that nobody started thinking that I was protesting too much.

Many days I couldn't hide or deny how hungry I was, so I would eat a meal or two like a "normal" person, as small as I could possibly manage, all the while silently (and not so silently) cursing and disparaging myself for being so weak, for giving in to my "baser" urges, and then not eating for two days afterwards. I would have days, weeks, months where I would find myself thinking, "If only I didn't eat today." When I managed to successfully get through a day without eating what I thought was "too much," I would go to bed thinking, "If only I don't eat tomorrow." The longer I could pull off not eating, the better I felt about myself -- not that I ever felt that great, or even at all good, even on my best day.

I had headaches all the time, I was irritable, grouchy, emotionally unstable, manic and then morose. Just about always miserable, not matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise -- it was convenient, perhaps, that this happened when I was in my teens, what that sort of outward behavior was common, expected. At one stretch I managed to go for about 4½ days without putting anything in my body that wasn't water; at the end of it I ended up with the worst migraine I ever had, backstage on opening night of the fall play my senior year, seeing colors and hearing sounds that were most definitely not there, trying to not pass out or throw up and still remember my lines. I ended up drinking a milkshake so that everyone would leave me alone.

I've been in and out of therapy for the last twenty-odd years, since I was about sixteen, and this is something that I have never, not once, told any of my therapists. Somehow, and I still don't know how, I managed to keep myself disconnected from the disorder, whatever it was. I didn't binge and purge, so I wasn't bulimic, and I didn't completely not eat, so I wasn't really anorexic, so on some level I had myself convinced that nothing was really wrong, even though I knew it was. When my habits changed and I gained weight and got fat, I would complain about and analyze all the things I did wrong to end up like that. We talked about my overeating, my emotional connection to food, my dependency on carbohydrate-based endorphins, but I never, ever told a single therapist that I used to intentionally, voluntarily, purposefully let myself starve.

I don't know if anyone in my family or any of my friends ever knew. If they did, we never talked about it. Like a stereotypical addict, I tried to hide my behavior. And as it turned out, I was never super-skinny, not like any other anorectic I've seen before or since. The weight I was when I graduated from high school is actually a healthy weight: 135 pounds is totally fine for a person of my size. A five-foot tall woman who weighs 135 pounds could probably stand to lose a few, honestly, but it's definitely not anywhere approaching obese.

And 135 pounds is my goal weight. Because it is a perfectly healthy weight.

I mention all this because, as I said yesterday, I am worried that I am starting to fall back into bad habits again, habits that I need to work really hard to avoid. As I get closer to my goal, my daily calorie limit gets smaller, and I am getting more and more eager to drop more and more weight faster. Something I am doing, and I don't really know what it is, is triggering for me. I catch myself thinking: "If I just skip lunch today ..." or "If I just do this workout again ..." and I have to, literally sometimes, pinch myself. Stop myself. Remind myself.

These behaviors, these attitudes, are not healthy. I know this. Healthy people, physically and mentally and emotionally healthy people, do not hate themselves for having to eat. They do not find themselves negotiating with their own brains that it is perfectly okay to eat a banana for breakfast, that one banana will not lead to an endless loop of shame, that it will not start a downward spiral of doom and gloom and unending negative self-talk. A banana is not a "gateway drug," and it won't make you start eating constantly, all the time, never stopping except to sleep, like a shark.

Healthy people just see a banana. Bananas are good; they're full of B vitamins and potassium and fiber and vitamin C and all kinds of good things that help prevent cancer and hypertension. They're yellow and happy, the color of sunshine, and they taste of the tropics. Bananas are ... bananas. They are not the enemy. I have to almost force myself to see this, sometimes, instead of seeing 90 calories that maybe I don't really need to be eating.

Because I know this: I do need those calories. I also know this. After a lifetime of having a messed-up relationship with food and my body, I need to find "normal." I know that "normal" is different for everybody, and I need to find mine. Sometimes I think it is too late, that I waited too long, that I will never look like the image of the "perfect me" that I have in my head, that I will never stop looking like the "imperfect me" that I still feel that everyone sees. I don't really look at myself in the mirror much, and that is okay with me, because I am still at a point where I know I don't like what I see. I need to ease myself into liking myself again, or at least tolerating myself again. Perhaps tolerating myself for the first time.

This is why "the numbers" are such a fixation: calories, weight, pant sizes, bra sizes. Numbers are absolute. I just need to keep reminding myself that my absolute number is not going to be, cannot be, will not be, will not ever be, zero.

P365: Day 7

When I was a senior in college, on my way back to school after Thanksgiving break, I was in a multi-car accident. I was with my friend Sharon, and we were in my teeny little 1989 Horizon, a blue tin can on wheels that got more than 300 miles on a full tank of gas, even with a backseat full of leftovers and sweaters and Tastykakes and presents from our boyfriends back home. Björk was in the tape player, "Army of Me," and we were singing along, loudly and most likely off-key. It was very late in the afternoon, past dusk, almost to dark, and then suddenly all I could see in front of me, for what looked like miles and miles, was vertical fireworks, all of them red, screaming red everywhere, as far as my eyes could see. I stopped, but the SUV behind me didn't, and we were pushed into the cars in front of us, bouncing around like a pinball until we ended up against the barrier, a flipper stopping us from crossing over into oncoming traffic in the southbound lanes.

What I remembered most, after the accident happened, were two things: that stupid HMO billboard on the side of the interstate and the bright red glow of taillights. For years afterwards, literally years, I would tense up whenever I saw the incandescent evidence of someone in front of me braking. My hands would clench into fists, I would suck in a breath, and I would automatically duck a little bit, trying to protect myself from crashing that never came. It made me a terrible passenger for more than a decade, not that I am much better now. But for the rest of my 20's, whenever I would approach Binghamton on I-81N, no matter what time of day, no matter what time of year, even if I had been dead asleep in the car for over an hour, I could sense where we were, like some kind of personal Bermuda Triangle, and I would panic. I knew that stupid billboard with that stupid apple was there, and I would brace myself for impact, already seeing the screaming of taillights, fireworks of my fear.