Day Five.

My eating habits are horrendous.

When I was in grade school and overweight, part of the problem was that my mom was never home to make me nutritious meals (she apologizes a lot for that). My typical mealplan from age 6-9 was the following:

Breakfast
-Some sort of dessert disguised as cereal. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Cookie Crisp and Lucky Charms.

Lunch
-Some sort of processed carbohydrate disguised as a lunch entree. i.e. Macaroni Cheese(?) and Lasagna(?).
---*(?) notes my uncertainty of the culinary nomenclature

Dinner
-Some sort of meat in a bag, pasta dish, and frozen vegetable side in no disguise at all, prepared by my brother. I actually looked forward to these meals, as a kid I loved all of those things, even the meat pouch and bag sauce.

You see that there is a pattern here, no? I also wasn't really playing any sports or getting any exercise either. I suppose you could consider that I was on a basketball team at somepoint but that didn't really count because I never did anything on the court. Also, the league claimed to be co-ed but they only put one girl on each team and I was the fattest of them all. Oh, and I hated basketball. <---Ah, there it is. At the time, I think I was more willing to lick the floor of a subway than to run up and down a basketball court only to be ignored and not passed to. I should mention though that for what it's worth, I wouldn't pass to me either. I sucked. Vicious cycle for the fail.

At around 8 or 9 my mom quit her job working for Hades, he was a very very evil man keeping his employees as prisoner and it was so ridiculous that my mom, CFO, was threatened at gun point once for not filing someone's earnings. I don't think those two things were directly related and I was pretty young but it was insanity. So she kind of made this huge transformation with me being home so much more, giving me a lot of attention and motivating me to eat better and exercise. I was so excited to have her around more and her cooking is awesome, it's a shame she had to wait so long to show the family her talents. She actually has an amazing blog of her own that is all about her incredible cooking. You should check it out!

http://carolbentley.wordpress.com/  wooo!

Anyways, I started tennis right around then and from there I got much much thinner and happier. Happiness had specifically from playing tennis eventually diminished though and I started music but I have 360 more blog posts to fit all of that in to my story.

Moving forward a bit, I was varsity captain of the tennis team at my high school. I had stopped competing in tournaments for the most part but kept up the sport for my school and my own recreational interest. I was about 160 pounds and 6'1" when my mom suggested we go on the Atkins Diet together. Little did I know that this decision would change my outlook on food and health in the worst ways for many years to follow. I will explain the Atkins Diet in more depth at some other point but I will mention its effects on me (before deciding on 'effects', I had 'tolls', 'drawbacks', 'the price I paid', 'taxes', 'horrors', 'haunts'...you know it'll be bad).


1. "Starvation Mode." Atkins put me into starvation mode until further notice. From depriving myself of sugar for all 4 years I was on it, though on and off the last two years, I developed an instinct to horde and binge on all sugary foods. My cravings are more intense, seemingly impossible to sate.

2. "Low self-esteem." I feel bad about myself when I eat....anything. It doesn't matter what it is, I feel bad about it. It stresses me out and then it overwhelms me so much like how my house gets cluttered and scary when I'm stressed, I eat stupid amounts of food at stupid times for stupid reasons.

3. "No exercise." Until this blog I just avoided exercising because I had always thought I lost weight by changing what I was eating. This is total horse shit, I was thinnest when I was playing tennis and NOT dieting.

4. "Sick--mentally, physically." Atkins makes you lose weight fast if you do it right, the pounds truly just shed away. Having that power though? To just lose so much weight so quickly? To manipulate your body into doing so? I got greedy with weight loss. At some point last summer I was consuming 800 calories a day on Atkins by eating lettuce and then filling up my stomach with vegetable stock. I was going through an extremely traumatic event in my life at the time but nonetheless, that is psycho. I started fainting with low blood pressure spells and the doctor I saw shortly after that said I was severely anemic (I used to be but I guess I aggravated it) and hypoglycemic. Atkins was kicking me while I was already down.

5. "Giving up." I gave up trying to be thin after I got counseling for my trauma so I settled into eating whatever I wanted and not exercising. I gained 15 pounds and lost a lot of self-worth.

Do you hear how sad all of this sounds? The scary part is that I am thin. I am CURRENTLY thin. Here's the thing, world--I have been sizes 8-14 and loved myself through them all but I am happiest when I feel lighter and healthier. But you all must see how edgy my outlook on self health is, right? It's not normal, that's for sure. By the way Dr. Atkins, you were probably a nice a guy but if I could have ever had the chance to meet you, I would have flipped you the bird. <---not a rational statement

The good news is that I have finally found my cure and that is exercise. This blog is helping me in more ways than I can explain. Today was the best day in months.

Stats:

-1800 calories
-6 cups of water
-10 minutes bike, mile run, 6 flights stair run, 10 push ups, and lots of stretching.

360 days to go.

-B.B