dropping off some emotional baggage in hopes of dropping some pounds.

C

carriewinter

New member
A few years ago I had amazing success using a diet program call the 6 week body makeover. In fact in November and December 2011 they chose me for their featured story! When you went to their website, I was the first thing you saw. It was one of the most amazing moments of my life. So that was almost 3 years ago. I wish I could say I was still that healthy and happy, but life happened and I did not deal with it well. I gained back almost 100 pounds of what I had lost. Over the last 9 months I have re-lost about 30 pounds of that and now I am feeling stuck. I am using the same concepts that I used before, so I decided to stop by their forum boards and find a little motivation. To my sadness, it became apparent that the forums have pretty much ceased to exist. So I did a search for free weightless forums and this was the first one I found that looks like there are actually people using it.
Now that you know how I ended up here, let me explain why I am here. I am stuck. I am frustrated. I am sad. I know how to lose weight and live healthy but I keep letting things get in my way. For starters, anyone who has ever been over weight or gone through a big weight change (loss or gain), there are some very strong emotional components that are involved. I need a place to open up and be real. I need a place where I feel safe talking about my emotions and how they are effecting my healthy and choices. However, it is very difficult for me to express my emotions to the people in my life. It scares me and makes me feel vulnerable. As odd as it may be, coming here and posting my private thoughts on a public places feels safer to me then telling my best friends how I am feeling. But that is because this is nameless and faceless. If you judge me for my thoughts, so what? I don't know you.

So today is the day I am hoping to get back on track again. I am planning out healthy meals for the week. I am going to work on slowly adding more physical activity into my day. I am going to work on better ways to handle stress and anxiety without turning to food for comfort. I know I can do this. I just need to find a way to remember that each and every day.
 
A little background about me..... I am 33 years old. I have been very obese most of my life. I remember weighing 99 lbs in kindergarten. I have been on so many diets all my life that I have very poor self-esteem. I am not one of those girls who proudly waves a banner and says I am big and beautiful. I feel ashamed of my body everyday even though I wish I didn't. I hate being fat but at the same time, I use being fat as way to push people away and to keep people out of my life. Yet then I get depressed when I feel like I am all alone and have no one. So then I eat because I am sad. The sadder I get, the bigger I get, the bigger I get, the sadder I get. I will tell myself that today is the day I am going to start over and do better and then by the end of the day, I am eating my emotions all over again. Then I am frustrated with myself for not sticking to my resolve. The more frustrated I get the more I eat and the less motivated I get, which makes me more frustrated....... See where this all goes? Around in vicious circles. My weight is not because I don't know how to eat healthy. It is not because I don't know how to cook delicious meals that are good for me. It is not because I am not able to exercise (although to be fair, I do have a slight disability that makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to exercise). My excess weight is because of emotional reasons. So I am hoping that if I can get out some of those emotions and find healthier ways to cope with them, I can start to get back on track again. And if I can start to get back on track then I will feel more emotionally healthy, and the more emotionally healthy I feel, the more physically healthy I will feel.....and then I am floating happily in a very different type of never ending circle.
 
You are certainly looking at this in a healthy and positive way. You have hit the nail on the head by citing that you need to improve your mental health and your self esteem before you can really hope to shift the weight for good. Identifying that, is, in my opinion, one of the biggest hurdles when trying to make real changes. Quick fixes are rarely "fixes", they are temporary cover ups.

Keep reminding yourself of how you want to strengthen and build on your positive emotions, and keep coming here for support and motivation :)

I like that you have openly and honestly admitted to 'eating your feelings'. A lot of the time people, particularly people without weight issues, attribute weight gain to poor education and lack of will power. Very rarely do people realise that over eating (just like with under eating...we all know that's a mental health issue!) is massively controlled by feelings of depression, anxiety, stress and low self esteem. Identifying these are important to healing, which will be important to successfully losing weight.

Good luck with it! And remember we are all here to encourage and support :)
 
Welcome aboard Carrie.

To some extent there are similarities between what you and I have gone through and what an alcoholic goes through. In some ways we feel like it's just easier to give up and crawl back into a cave made of pizzas. And sometimes when we feel our best efforts aren't getting us the results we want, the temptation is to chuck it all and go back to eating ourselves silly.

The difference is, unlike an alcoholic, we have to eat and unlike an alcoholic food is actually good for us and we shouldn't feel ashamed of enjoying it. I have never envied a skinny person who doesn't enjoy food; they miss out on one of the great joys of life. The key, as you know, is to eat the right amount and make sure you get enough of the nutrients the body needs to be healthy.

It's an uncomfortable situation for me these days, because I continue to be somewhat hesitant to give out advice on weight loss, despite obviously being in a somewhat unique position on the subject. What has worked for me could quite possibly just be a fluke that would work for me and no other person on the face of the planet, and so I'm always hesitant to say "do this." But I do think it's important to take a fairly accurate inventory of yourself (even if you don't like some of the stuff) and use that to come up with a way to tailor something that gives you the best chance of succeeding. If emotional eating is your big problem, then you have to come up with a way to address that, because I guarantee you that somewhere along the line you're going to have a bad day and start to feel down (everyone does). If you can figure out how you want to deal with that ahead of time you have a chance to cope when those times come.

Anyway, welcome aboard and good luck. And don't worry about anyone here judging you. Everyone here is super nice and supportive. Well except for me, I'm kind of a jerk. :) Take care.
 
Like MrVee said, don't worry about being judged. I've vented here for many years. I think the first diary I ever had here was just constant venting. Just a ridiculous amount of it. haha! But, oh well... it got me through and helped me out a lot. I also eat my feelings. The good, the bad, and everything in between. So, you're definitely not alone here. Welcome to the forum! :) Oh, and MrVee is a jerk. :D
 
There are a lot of us like you Carrie, we don't push our weight problems on the people in our lives because we know they won't understand. Just keep on working on it like you did before and soon you'll be a featured member here too :) Good luck!
 
Thank You everyone for your kind words. I forgot how motivational it is to wake up to so many nice emails in the morning and to see the words of others reminding me that I do not experience my trials alone in this world.
I have discovered over my successes in life, that I do best if I set several small goals for myself each day. So yesterday I set 3 goals. 2 related to improving my physical health and 1 related to improving my emotional health. First I should explain that I know that evenings, like most people, are my weakest link in my day. I tend to come home, watch TV, get bored, eat too much etc. During the day I am at work and I have a schedule, more routine and less opportunity to make unhealthy decisions. So many of my goals in the upcoming weeks will be focused on targeting better decisions during evenings and weekends. Goal 1- do something physical after work. I did not set a specific time length or any other requirements for this. I figured even if I took a leisurely walk around the block it was a step above doing nothing physical all night. Well when I got home, I looked around at my yard and it made me feel blue. My yard is over grown with weeds and parts of it had turned into a small jungle. I like my things to look nice, so it bothers me that my yard is in such poor condition. My roommate keeps telling me he is going to mow it, but it has been 3 weeks and I decided I was tired of waiting for him to do it. So I drug out the mower and the weed eater and set into the task (which I hate more than almost any other household task). An hour and half later I had the front half of the yard looking pretty dang nice. (I have a huge yard). Not only did I get plenty of exercise mowing and pulling weeds, but I got an extra jolt as I went running down the block screaming my head off when the dead branch I picked up turned out to be in fact a very live snake. Plus I may have invented a new form of toning cardio combo while balancing the weed eater in one hand and fending off the hoard of softball size mosquitoes that were waiting in the weeds to attach me. So I felt good when I got done and felt like I had accomplished something. Plus it felt good to walk outside this morning and see how nice my yard looked. I was planning on starting in on the back yard tonight but it has been pouring rain all morning so it looks like that is not going to happen. I may have to find a creative way to do something physical tonight if I can’t get outside. If worse comes to worse, I do have a treadmill I can dust off but that does not sound very motivating at all.
Goal 2- To cook a healthy supper with leftovers to take for lunch today. So I technically accomplished this. I had supper marinating in the fridge and all I had to do was throw it on the grill. Mission accomplished. I ate my supper and put the leftovers in the fridge for lunch today. So only one minor hitch. I spent about an hour and half longer working in my yard than I had planned, which means that supper was much later than I had planned. I have learned that for me, I do best if I eat small meals throughout the day. I eat a snack or small meal about every 2 ½ to 3 hours. If I go too long between meals, I start craving carbs bad and it is hard to control those cravings. I distinguish these as physical cravings because they are cravings driven by my internal processes and not “emotional cravings”. So after I ate my healthy supper, I ate like 8 slices of bread. At least they were plain and not covered in butter or anything. So then an hour later, I started feeling down on myself for eating all that bread, in addition to feeling like I had a brick in my tummy. So then the emotional cravings kicked in. I was feeling blue and like I had let myself down so I wanted sweets. I came really close to driving to the store to buy something but somehow I resisted the temptation and eventually it passed. So I do feel good that I didn’t lose total control. So goal for tonight- to find and cook a new healthy recipe.
Goal 3- This is my emotional health goal. I had typed out 20 affirmations that I wanted to say out loud 5 times before I went to bed. I have seen a lot of research on affirmations and positive thinking but I got to be honest, I felt kind of silly doing this. Hopefully that discomfort will fade and the affirmations will help improve my mood and confidence. Either way, I am going to keep doing them for at least the next week. I figure sometimes you got to stick with new things for a little bit before you can see the benefit? Does anyone else use affirmations or any other type of positive thinking tool that seems to help?
 
Welcome Carrie! I'm the same way with letting other things go when I am not taking care of myself. Getting the yard spiffy is a big step in the right direction and great exercise. Keep it up. Also LOL at snake sprint. Glad it didn't end poorly.
 
hello, I read that you have been on so many diets all your life that you have very poor self-esteem. I truely believe that a change in lifestyle is the answer and the food issue (or weight issue) goes from there. This is why i do not believe so much in all the different diets (as I can read from your comment) and therefore I don't see any reason for a poor self-esteem. So what you need to do is to listyour daily activities, manners, eating in front of the pc, drinking in the car etc, and this you need to change and so the eating habbits will change as a result.
 
The last few days have been fairly good. I have been feeling drained the last few days. I think I am going through caffeine and sugar withdraws. I keep reminding myself that the tiredness will go away in a few days and once it does I will feel so so so much better. I have to get all of that junk out of my system. But on the plus side, I am really excited that it is Thursday. I play on a dart league and tonight is our first night of the new season. I have been missing my Thursday nights out. The down side is that it leaves me very short for time after work and I don't usually have time to cook supper. So last night I actually planned ahead and made a big enough meal that I would have extra left overs. So I'm feeling like it is going to be a great day!
 
Glad to read that you are doing so well Carrie :) There are lots of similarities between you and I...I found them especially in your first and second posts. I think it was a great step to find a support network and you are moving in the right direction with diet and activities :) All the best!
 
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