First off, I should preface this by acknowledging that when i was a teen, I had a pretty aggressive eating disorder, so if that is triggering in any way, this is your warning.
As a teen, I took myself (probably a bit too) seriously as an athlete, student, and just well.. person in general. I had a sort of all-consuming relationship as well with someone emotionally abusive, that I didn’t necessarily have the tools to handle. I think I saw weight and just my own body in general as a physical thing that I actually had direct control over. I was always thin growing up, you know, the type of thin where people are always like “heh heh.. have a burger.” At 17, I quickly went from a healthy, natural, 135, to a not so healthy 115. For reference, I was 5’9” and female. I was a track and field sprinter, and I remember constantly passing out after racing and feeling cold all the time. Yet everyone around me was constantly raving about how awesome I looked and how jealous they were of me. This just fed whatever demon was inside of me and telling me that what I was doing was really good.
As I got older, I recovered from this mostly on my own. I didn’t have the resources and money to get professional help. I did a year of college track, and ended up weighing about 145. Looking back, I was definitely ripped as hell and probably in the best shape of my life, but I had a really shitty male coach who expressed his “concerns” about my weight gain. The next year, I quit track and focused on my studies at another university.
I got a bit older, and eventually accepted natural weight gain, but those tendencies of restriction and food-centered thought never really went away. I tried my best to take care of my body, but went through brief spurts where I was going back to restricting to some extent.
Flash forward to 2020: I was a college senior, about to get married and start law school. The pandemic hit and everything just went to complete shit. I lost a bit of weight for my wedding, and I was like 145 when I got married. After that, everything in my life just went completely to shit, which I think most of you can relate to. My law school classes were completely online, which basically resulted in me sitting at a tiny desk in our apartment all day every day. At one point, I hadn’t showered for 2 weeks. Housing was hard to get, and we ended up living in a cockroach infested shithole, hours away from our families as newly weds. I started packing on pounds and my new marriage started to fall apart.
I finally got out of the law school situation, and we eventually moved, but the covid times took such a toll on my husband and I, that we took a long time to get our footing. I eventually went back to school to be a teacher in 2021, and finally felt like things were better. In August of 2022 I started student teaching. Making no money, working 70-80 hours a week, and relying on my husband’s low paying job to support us during this time lead to both of us drinking and eating to soothe ourselves. By December 2022, I was 190 pounds, and didn’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore.
Well, now it’s almost May 2023, and I’ve lost 25 pounds since then. My old demons still stay with me, but I’ve done it in a healthy way. I guess I’m making this post to remind myself that things have been so hard and I should be proud of myself, or just getting through it all. I hope this post kind of shows how a specific person’s struggles in life can affect their body. If you’ve read this (and god bless you if you did) just know that I genuinely believe we are all just doing our best and that there are so many things we can’t control.
If you’ve ever dealt with disordered eating, body image issues, weight issues, or anything adjacent, please be kind to yourself.
[link] [comments]
source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/1306bxz/semi_rantgeneral_thoughts_after_losing_20_pounds/
No comments:
Post a Comment