When Sixteen Minutes Is an Act of Love

  Not a great week for me with activity which is disappointing on a few levels.  I was hoping to see a significant loss this week on the scale since I weigh in Christmas Eve morning.  My weight loss has not been very significant since I quit smoking 6 weeks ago.  I have lost a total of 3.5 lbs and I keep gaining or losing the same pound or half a pound every other week.  I've been increasing my strength and endurance, building up my cardio workouts to reinforce my new smoke free lifestyle.  I was hoping my new increase in exercise (Activity Points or AP's for all you Weight Watcher folks) would finally translate on the scale.  So to get benched by a virus complete with low grade fever and body aches sort of sucked for me big time.

  I have always been pretty fit.  I discovered exercise in my teens when I would tag along with my mother to Elaine Powers Figure Salon.  (I know I'm dating myself with that reference.)  It was the 80's and I was probably about 16 years old. I loved to work out and I loved what it did for my body, so a healthy habit was born. I have been exercising in one form or another since then and I'm grateful that I got into the habit at a young age because physically I've reaped some rewards from a life long love of fitness.

  When I started to abuse exercise  or use it to offset certain binge episodes or as a means of enhancing my anorexic weight loss, it was less of a health habit and more of an obsession. I used and abused fitness and lived in denial about what I was doing to my body for many years. I hit a bottom with this sort of abusive relationship to exercise when I got very sick in 2002.

  I have some health issues.  Some are genetic, some just happened and some I contributed to through years of abusing my body.  I have a rare blood disease and the treatment makes me very sick. Fortunately, I only go through this once a year or two. I don't like it but I accept it and it helps me stay healthy.  In July of 2002 I started blood treatment while being very active with my eating disorder. That summer, I hit my lowest adult weight ever and I still wanted to lose more weight. I exercised 6 days a week during a blood treatment that normally  leaves me fatigued for 2-9 months afterward. I was overdoing it, pushing and pushing until my body couldn't take it any longer.In October of  2002 I had to have unrelated emergency surgery and my immune system completely crashed. I developed Epstein Barr which caused Acute Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which lasted almost four years.

  The CFS combined with the blood disease and a neurological disorder forced me out on disability at the very young age of 36. It's been 6 years since I've been able to work. My mission since then has been to try to heal my body and get back to work. I've managed to do that slowly since then, using nutrition, holistic medicine, exercise and some serious mind/body work. I've managed to take myself off seven out of the eight medications I took daily for years and I hope to be off the last of it by the middle of February.

  Exercise is a big part of my healing plan but it's a slippery slope with a person like me.  I have to take things very slowly or my immune system and my body rebels.  I become sick and weak with days (and sometimes weeks) of fatigue.  Exercise makes me feel good and I love it. I love to feel stronger, I love to challenge myself, I love to reach my fitness goals and set new ones.  In fact, I am so addicted to feeling good through exercise that I don't always know when to stop.  I still have trouble with this after all these years of working on finding "the middle way".

   I became sick with body aches and fever this past week.  Two days earlier I had a new personal best using my NordicTrack skier. After this fitness victory, I was incredibly disappointed that I had to rest.  I took Thursday, Friday and Saturday off.  My normal exercise schedule is at least 5-6 days/week so it was very hard for me to lie around and do nothing.  Sunday I did some gentle yoga and 35 minutes on a stationary bike (which is nothing aerobically compared to the NordicTrack) and yesterday I felt well enough to get back on my skier. My usual time is 35 minutes, the personal best I hit the week before was 50 minutes and yesterday??? I stopped at 16 minutes. Could I have gone longer? Yes absolutely, the endorphins were just starting to surge my brain and I could have pushed, I wanted to push, but I had to tell myself no. I had to love myself enough to get off the machine and accept that I was still fighting a virus and my body needed to heal. There was a lot of negative self talk about "What I could have done" or "What I should have done" but what I had to do was stop, love my body and respect my limits.

   This was harder for me to do than the 50 minute "personal best" I pushed to do last week. But my journey to health isn't supposed to mean a loss on the scale this week.  It means pushing myself when I can and loving myself  just as much when I can't.

From Food To Health....

So...I've been reading a lot of weight loss and healthy living blogs lately. Then I started following people who wrote these blogs on Twitter and an addiction was born! Then I started following people that these people would recommend, which led me to discover more people and so on, and so on, and so on.

To make a long story short, I was inspired and cheered on, educated and motivated and finally decided to start a blog of my own. I know a thing or two about weight loss (and gain and more loss and more gain and reaching goal and maintaining, then some more gain). My original name for this blog was Food... The Final Frontier. No, I'm not a Star Trek geek (Yes, yes I am.) but food was my "final frontier". It's the one addiction I could never completely give up or live in that (ever elusive) gray area with, as you can see by my loss/gain ramble up there.


I've been recovering from one addiction or another for 21 years. I'm a recovering alcoholic, drug addict (8 years), recovering bulimic, anorexic, exercise bulimic (7 years).  I've overcome a compulsive spending addiction (3 years).  I was addicted to meaningless relationships (I know what you're thinking..."That's not an addiction."  Yes! Yes it was, I swear!  I couldn't be alone...like ever. My self worth and self-esteem was all wrapped up on having someone, anyone in my life romantically, often to my determent, so I purposefully spent 2 1/2 years by myself.  No dating, no sex, nothing, nada, zip.) Lastly and most recently I've quit smoking again. After a 2 year relapse I am back on track.

I have been actively working on recovery for one or more of these addictions for over 20 years. My recovery for each one was never linear (as I'm sure you can see by the lack of the number 20 in all my "recovering"  time.) There were many fits and starts and  many relapses but somehow, I've managed to put together some real abstinent time with every single one of these compulsions/addictions.

So what's the point with all the navel gazing blather?  Well, the one thing I have NEVER been able to have a period of abstinence or recovery with was food. Yes, even as a recovering anorexic and bulimic I've never been able to fully stop the compulsive overeating or the binge eating, but boy have I tried. For me food is "The Granddaddy" of all my addictions, my final frontier....and it's been that way since I was old enough to steal cookies from the babysitter's pantry. So I wanted this blog to be where I finally came to peace with my food addiction.

As I thought about what that meant for me I realized what I really want is 'the middle way'. I want that ever elusive gray area. I want to finally be healthy in body mind and spirit not just with food, but the way I think about food and the way I think about what food does for my body. While we're at it I also want more body acceptance and self love, and I'd like to be able to rest my body when it's tired and strengthen it through activity without feeling guilty that I skipped a day. I want to be able to make choices that are not so healthy and not worry about fat and calories. I want to be able to truly enjoy what I'm eating. I want to eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full without thinking so much about it.  Finally, I want to live each day to it's fullest regardless of what I weigh, how my clothes fit, what I ate or didn't eat or how much more fit I was this past summer

I want true health. Body, mind and spirit kind of health. So it's that journey to health that is my "Final Frontier", The Granddaddy of 'em all, my great white whale. If I've learned anything from years of struggling with addiction, it's never just about the object of my obsession, so my blog and my writing  can't be just about the food, it's got to be about true health.