Losing Weight With Fitness Blender

I’ve been trying to work up the guts to share this for years. I tried to film it three different times and either couldn’t make it through the filming process, or couldn’t bring myself to watch and edit the footage.Aside from it being a hard & uncomfortable story to tell, I also struggled with the idea of publicly talking about the complicated history of my relationship with my own body because I didn’t want you to think that I was sick, or view me as weak. It’s the same reason almost no one in my life knew about what was happening over all those years. I view myself as a strong person, and this (former) secret isn’t consistent with my self image; this piece of me doesn’t fit into the rest of the puzzle.

Doctor and this story is purely about mypersonalexperiencein what it took for me to get to a healthier place in my life.

Getting it out and off of my chest in the most honest way possible has been liberating and I feel more free of the burden than ever.Sharingyour weakness oryour experience doesn’t makeyouweak, it makes you human. Taking shame out of the equation makes it easier to face the problem head on, and to make real changes in your life. I hope that you hear my story with an open mind and that reading about my struggle leaves you more accepting, understanding and tolerant towards the way you feel about the things you might consider your biggest weaknesses or personal battles, whatever they might be.

Our Own Before & After

It was not just one thing that started my obsession with my weight. As a child, I grew fast, and I was taller than everyone else, so I was “bigger” than everyone else and sharply aware of it. Listening to the way adults talked about their displeasure with their bodies, and images in the media certainly played a significant role. I have a very clear memory of sitting at my desk in my first grade class, looking down at my thighs in shorts, and thinking “My legs are too big. I am too big. I am fat. I will exercise. I won’t eat until I look a certain way.” I was seven years old.

In order to better tell my story, I have to tell you something very personal but essential to understanding the whole picture. I have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Not “I don’t like my food to touch” or “I don’t like it when my shoes aren’t lined up straight” - lots of people like to light heartedly poke fun at OCD, but it's usually because they don't understand what it is. It can be devastatingly life consuming. Thanks to a healthy diet and smart exercise, I don’t struggle as much with it anymore (healthy habits can have a significantimpact on mental health, too), but I have wrestled with it since I was very young. The Mayo clinic summarizes the disorder neatly into one sentence “Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead you to do repetitive behaviors (compulsions).” The disorder has changed fluidly with me my whole life but a lot of the focus fell on my eating and exercising habits, which only made me more of a candidate for eating disorders, obsessive dieting and exercising, and overall spiraling out of control when it came to body image and the way I treated my body.

Between the ages of 14-23I went back and forth between either overexercising, starving myself, orbinging and purging (sometimes acombination of all of the above). I had periods of being very sick. The number on the scale decided the tone of my entire day. I felt like my life was going to “start” once I reached a certain weight.

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I ate a highly processed “healthy” diet (the stark opposite of my current whole foods eating style); the calorie count and preset portion sizes of those pre-packaged meals, meal replacement shakes and snacks allowed me to track every calorie that I took in. Because of my OCD, I didn’t just tally up the calories of a meal and move on with my day. I would count, and recount, over and over again, often times until I’d eaten the very last bite of my plate. I would be out with friends, eating something tasty, “enjoying” good conversation, while adding and re-adding the calories in my head, over and over. I couldn’t turn it off. It was very uncomfortable and it robbed me of joy on more than one occasion. It ruled me. I would track my weight, track my calories eaten and burned, everything. This would happen throughout every meal, as well as through my whole day. This is just one example but when I say that the preoccupation with my weight ruled my life, I mean it very literally.

I was terrified of eating homemade or unmeasured dishes because I didn’t know exactly how many calories I was eating; it produced a nearly phobic feeling. I had many invasive medical tests over the course of those years, looking for reasons for terrible stomach pain. They suspected GERD, hiatal hernia, IBS, etc, etc.It’s important to note that once I stopped eating processed foods, all of these stomach issues completely disappeared - without any medication at all.

I did a lot of cardio - way too much cardio; usually around 90 minutes but many times I would go for over 2 hours. Often more than once a day.I would run; run through knee pain, through stomach pain, through exhaustion, through my body asking nicely and then demanding that I stop.I would run at least 5 miles, at least once a day, at least 5-6 days a week, and once I was done with that I would move on to do cardio on another machine. Meanwhile I had music in my ears and my eyes fixated on the calorie burn readout; watching each calorie tick upwards. It was miserable. I would be so tired, drained, trembling, after those long sessions. When people I knew at the gym stopped me to talk, I would have trouble forming thoughts & putting sentences together. Sometimes the exercise made me feel better (even then exercise was a stress management tool for me, I just didn’t realize how badly I was abusing it and how much better it could be.)

Lean & Strong

With all of that exercising, I would have needed to eat a lot in order to keep up, but if I ate over 2000 calories in a day I felt like I had “blown it”. If I ate a mere 100 calories over that goal intake, it was game over and I was a total failure. 2000 calories a day was of course never enough for my obsessive overexercising, and I would end up eating thousands of calories very late at night because I was literally starving. Over restricting intake all day long, becoming very hungry and binging, and then feeling like I had failed, lead me into a binge and purge cycle that played a touch and go but predominate role in my life from the ages of 14-23. There were points in my life when I was very sick and weak because of the abuse I was putting my body through. Times when I felt so weak that all I could do was lie in bed. I was destroying my body and my health.

That was my main focus, even though in the meantime, I was technically fit, I was getting great grades and academic awards in college, I loved what I was studying, I had wonderful friends, and I was putting myself through two majors (psychology and sociology) in college by working at least one job (sometimes as many as 3 jobs). I should have felt good, and proud of myself. Instead I was preoccupied with my weight and feeling inadequate because I was comparing myself to others and I was disgusted with what I saw in the mirror.

One of the worst parts about it was how ashamed I felt - not just because I was ashamed and embarrassed by what I was doing, but the immense guilt I felt for struggling so hard with something that seemed so petty. There were people in the world with real problems, real pain, and I was so crippled by this struggle over something that I ultimately felt was something superficial and self-centered. There are so many crazy things happening in the world at any given moment that I felt stupid and selfish for struggling so hard with my ownself-imposed pain, for obsessing and ruining my health with something that just seemed to be related to superficial looks in the pursuit of a body type I thought I needed to emulate, but it was much darkerand more vague than that. Body shape and weight was the easy-to-explain source of initial distress, butitwasmore than mesimplyworrying about how I looked physically;I've never placed much value on the way that I look, or the way anyone else looks for that

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With all of that exercising, I would have needed to eat a lot in order to keep up, but if I ate over 2000 calories in a day I felt like I had “blown it”. If I ate a mere 100 calories over that goal intake, it was game over and I was a total failure. 2000 calories a day was of course never enough for my obsessive overexercising, and I would end up eating thousands of calories very late at night because I was literally starving. Over restricting intake all day long, becoming very hungry and binging, and then feeling like I had failed, lead me into a binge and purge cycle that played a touch and go but predominate role in my life from the ages of 14-23. There were points in my life when I was very sick and weak because of the abuse I was putting my body through. Times when I felt so weak that all I could do was lie in bed. I was destroying my body and my health.

That was my main focus, even though in the meantime, I was technically fit, I was getting great grades and academic awards in college, I loved what I was studying, I had wonderful friends, and I was putting myself through two majors (psychology and sociology) in college by working at least one job (sometimes as many as 3 jobs). I should have felt good, and proud of myself. Instead I was preoccupied with my weight and feeling inadequate because I was comparing myself to others and I was disgusted with what I saw in the mirror.

One of the worst parts about it was how ashamed I felt - not just because I was ashamed and embarrassed by what I was doing, but the immense guilt I felt for struggling so hard with something that seemed so petty. There were people in the world with real problems, real pain, and I was so crippled by this struggle over something that I ultimately felt was something superficial and self-centered. There are so many crazy things happening in the world at any given moment that I felt stupid and selfish for struggling so hard with my ownself-imposed pain, for obsessing and ruining my health with something that just seemed to be related to superficial looks in the pursuit of a body type I thought I needed to emulate, but it was much darkerand more vague than that. Body shape and weight was the easy-to-explain source of initial distress, butitwasmore than mesimplyworrying about how I looked physically;I've never placed much value on the way that I look, or the way anyone else looks for that

Fitness Tips For Weight Loss