Mind over does-it-matter?
Aug. 26th, 2011 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dennyThis is a bit rambling, sorry. There are a lot of thoughts that all sort of interlink, but I'm not mentally well enough to put them into a coherent narrative.
I've had a few things happen this summer that have caused me to become very depressed. The first and largest being Grace splitting up with me, which left me in quite a vulnerable state when the other things happened, and I'm currently quite seriously broken.
One side-effect of this that I wasn't expecting, is that after each shitty thing has happened, I've lost weight at a faster pace. Even after getting beaten up at the riots a few weeks ago, which meant I stopped going to the gym (and haven't started again yet), my weight has been steadily dropping. I'm starting to wonder whether this is a good thing, or whether I should be worried about it.
Partly this is because I'm very aware of eating disorder stuff, having been involved with a number of women who've been through it or were/are still fighting with it. Helen has beaten her food issues to a truce, but they're still very present in her thinking, and she's been finding it difficult watching me lose weight so quickly over the last few months. She asked me quite early on to stop talking to her about exercise/diet stuff all the time (it was on my mind a lot in the first month or two) as she was finding that quite difficult, which is most of the reason for the cut on these posts.
I swear I am still eating properly, even though I'm depressed - I'm eating at least breakfast cereal plus one large meal every day, which is one breakfast more (and, admittedly, a lot of chocolate less) than I used to eat before I started all this body-shaping stuff (I've spent most of my adult life only eating one proper meal a day, plus snacking the rest of the day).
So I'm finding it kind of weird that even though I'm stopped exercising, weight is still dropping off me at much the same rate as it was when I was exercising - or possibly even faster, I've lost almost 2kg in the last fortnight. I'm not sure how to account for that... I know being miserable can make you lose weight, but I assumed that was due to not eating. I am eating. Not super-healthily either, since I stopped exercising, although I'm still not snacking as much as I used to before I started this health kick, and I'm still mostly not drinking highly-calorific drinks.
Helen and I were discussing stuff recently and she said she found it hard to tell the difference between 'body shaping', and 'exercise bulimia'. I thought about it and said that maybe you could guess the former had slipped into the latter when someone gets below their ideal weight and keeps pushing downwards. She thought it was more about motivation than outcomes, which obviously makes more sense, but I was trying to find a pragmatic definition/test for someone else (her) to use looking at it (me) from the outside, when motivations are often unclear.
It's since occurred to me that although my nominal ideal weight is about 66kg, the fact that I'm under-muscled means that I'll probably have to go below that ideal weight to get my body-fat percentage down to an ideal/healthy level (which I suspect is key to my main goal of getting my stomach back into shape, as that almost certainly requires me to lose a large amount of visceral fat, which will probably be last to go). Obviously I'm still trying to build up muscle too, but that's a much slower process than losing fat, so I imagine I'll have more chance of hitting the body-fat goal first. So it seems likely that I'll end up trying to qualify for my own pragmatic definition of having an eating disorder. Which is a little unnerving.
The magic scales tell me that my body-fat has dropped from 23% to 18.4% since I started, which is pretty good going I think. They also tell me that my muscle percentage has gone up from 30.3% to 34%, which I was also quite happy about. Then I worked out the absolute weights represented by those two percentages - a shifting target given that my overall weight has been dropping, so each % point is worth less in kg now than it was at the start.
Obviously I am losing fat - I've gone from carrying around 17.7kg of fat to 12.5kg of fat according to those scales. However, my muscle percentage, when you work it out as muscle mass, shows that I have neither gained nor lost any muscle - it's stayed absolutely steady at 23kg (+/- 0.1kg) the whole time!
I'm not entirely sure that's true - I think the figures from the scale suffer from not being able to measure upper-body development - but that also makes me wonder if I might now be losing some of the upper-body muscle I had gained recently, and that's where the weight loss is coming from now that I'm not exercising those muscles (and not shovelling extra protein in my face 3 or 4 times a day).
Not really sure what to do about it anyway... my hand still hurts too much to lift weights, and I'm too miserable to want to go out to the gym (or anywhere) most of the time anyway. Maybe I should try to eat more protein still, even though I'm not exercising? I do eat tuna a lot, a tin every couple of days at a guess, and that's fairly protein-heavy.
Anyway. All of that above is where I am, or where I was. Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep and mostly thinking unhelpful thoughts about everything that's happened lately, I caught this pattern of words in my thoughts: "At least my weight is one thing I'm still in control of."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would define as an eating disorder. So now what?
I've had a few things happen this summer that have caused me to become very depressed. The first and largest being Grace splitting up with me, which left me in quite a vulnerable state when the other things happened, and I'm currently quite seriously broken.
One side-effect of this that I wasn't expecting, is that after each shitty thing has happened, I've lost weight at a faster pace. Even after getting beaten up at the riots a few weeks ago, which meant I stopped going to the gym (and haven't started again yet), my weight has been steadily dropping. I'm starting to wonder whether this is a good thing, or whether I should be worried about it.
Partly this is because I'm very aware of eating disorder stuff, having been involved with a number of women who've been through it or were/are still fighting with it. Helen has beaten her food issues to a truce, but they're still very present in her thinking, and she's been finding it difficult watching me lose weight so quickly over the last few months. She asked me quite early on to stop talking to her about exercise/diet stuff all the time (it was on my mind a lot in the first month or two) as she was finding that quite difficult, which is most of the reason for the cut on these posts.
I swear I am still eating properly, even though I'm depressed - I'm eating at least breakfast cereal plus one large meal every day, which is one breakfast more (and, admittedly, a lot of chocolate less) than I used to eat before I started all this body-shaping stuff (I've spent most of my adult life only eating one proper meal a day, plus snacking the rest of the day).
So I'm finding it kind of weird that even though I'm stopped exercising, weight is still dropping off me at much the same rate as it was when I was exercising - or possibly even faster, I've lost almost 2kg in the last fortnight. I'm not sure how to account for that... I know being miserable can make you lose weight, but I assumed that was due to not eating. I am eating. Not super-healthily either, since I stopped exercising, although I'm still not snacking as much as I used to before I started this health kick, and I'm still mostly not drinking highly-calorific drinks.
Helen and I were discussing stuff recently and she said she found it hard to tell the difference between 'body shaping', and 'exercise bulimia'. I thought about it and said that maybe you could guess the former had slipped into the latter when someone gets below their ideal weight and keeps pushing downwards. She thought it was more about motivation than outcomes, which obviously makes more sense, but I was trying to find a pragmatic definition/test for someone else (her) to use looking at it (me) from the outside, when motivations are often unclear.
It's since occurred to me that although my nominal ideal weight is about 66kg, the fact that I'm under-muscled means that I'll probably have to go below that ideal weight to get my body-fat percentage down to an ideal/healthy level (which I suspect is key to my main goal of getting my stomach back into shape, as that almost certainly requires me to lose a large amount of visceral fat, which will probably be last to go). Obviously I'm still trying to build up muscle too, but that's a much slower process than losing fat, so I imagine I'll have more chance of hitting the body-fat goal first. So it seems likely that I'll end up trying to qualify for my own pragmatic definition of having an eating disorder. Which is a little unnerving.
The magic scales tell me that my body-fat has dropped from 23% to 18.4% since I started, which is pretty good going I think. They also tell me that my muscle percentage has gone up from 30.3% to 34%, which I was also quite happy about. Then I worked out the absolute weights represented by those two percentages - a shifting target given that my overall weight has been dropping, so each % point is worth less in kg now than it was at the start.
Obviously I am losing fat - I've gone from carrying around 17.7kg of fat to 12.5kg of fat according to those scales. However, my muscle percentage, when you work it out as muscle mass, shows that I have neither gained nor lost any muscle - it's stayed absolutely steady at 23kg (+/- 0.1kg) the whole time!
I'm not entirely sure that's true - I think the figures from the scale suffer from not being able to measure upper-body development - but that also makes me wonder if I might now be losing some of the upper-body muscle I had gained recently, and that's where the weight loss is coming from now that I'm not exercising those muscles (and not shovelling extra protein in my face 3 or 4 times a day).
Not really sure what to do about it anyway... my hand still hurts too much to lift weights, and I'm too miserable to want to go out to the gym (or anywhere) most of the time anyway. Maybe I should try to eat more protein still, even though I'm not exercising? I do eat tuna a lot, a tin every couple of days at a guess, and that's fairly protein-heavy.
Anyway. All of that above is where I am, or where I was. Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep and mostly thinking unhelpful thoughts about everything that's happened lately, I caught this pattern of words in my thoughts: "At least my weight is one thing I'm still in control of."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would define as an eating disorder. So now what?
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 12:09 pm (UTC)Anorexia and bulemia are both very bad for you. Eating and exercising together are good for you. And that's really important.
I don't think it's right for you to go beating yourself up and turning a what could be a very positive thing in your life into a negative one. All you need to do is keep it in perspective and in proportion, and be aware it could run away with itself. Having a 'stopping point' such as ideal weight might be a way to give yourself limits.
Part of the good in the exercise isn't to do with the shape of your body, it's to do with your health, your heart, and it releases endorphins which will help counter depression and make you happier. These are all important, and should be remembered, and I don't think you should entirely give up on it.
It doesn't matter if you miss a day/week/month, but carrying on and doing a bit will be good for you. It's like the balance between not over or undereating - there is an appropriate amount that is good for you and important to keep up.
Observing you may be stepping outside the 'sensible' is good, as it can enable you to step back in to reasonable limits. Catastrophising about it isn't helpful though.
So think about what's good, what's not good, what you want to achieve, what you want to avoid, and go for it.
And remember depressive thinking can often be flawed, so sanity checking here is a good plan.
xxxx
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 12:42 pm (UTC)Going to the gym with specific toning and shaping goals in mind /is not/ exercise bulimia. Exercise bulimia is very much "oh shit I ate a whole tub of ice cream last night, I'm going to work out till I've burned all those calories off". You're not there. You're not in that headspace (I hope).
Look at it this way - you haven't gained muscle weight, but you *have* lost fat weight, and that's a whole huge part of the battle. Thing is, you've got one of them thar fast metabolisms, and that means you have to eat the right things at the right times to maintain the muscle mass whilst still dropping fat. At a guess, because you're depressed right now you're looking at everything from a negative angle, rather than a neutral or positive angle, and that does make a big difference to how you see things.
Here's the thing. You need to tank it up on protein. A tin of tuna every couple of days? That's not going to cut it. I eat something like 150g of protein a day - if you can't get that kind of quantity in via normal methods, then you need to be using protein supplements (Maximuscle are my preferred brand, and my trainer swears by them as well - excellent product, and 37g of protein in every shake! - but there's plenty of stuff out there; I can recommend you a good website that I buy through if you're interested). Chicken and fish are also good lean sources, but I would also supplement with beans and other legumes as well. If you're not doing a lot of cardio, cut the carbs (e.g., lose the bread, rice, potatoes, pasta... I know, all the nice things!).
Your body will plateau from time to time, and you'll be working out and getting nowhere. The answer is to change your routine up (your body does get used to these things), do something different, and hit different exercises. This is where seeing a trainer is invaluable as they *always* have something different up their sleeve - seriously, a year ago I would never have even thought about seeing a trainer, and now it's such an important part of my life I would recommend it to *everyone*. Even if you just do it once a month, it'll be enough to give you some new ideas and some fresh things to work into your routine.
Might also be worth picking up a subscription to something like Men's Health or similar, as they'll have plenty of ideas in there for things you can add in. And of course if you're ever in Bristol you're welcome to come work out with me! :D
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 12:52 pm (UTC)I may or may not be gaining/losing upper-body muscle, there's not really any way to tell with those scales - they only measure the legs really. I certainly gained some muscle at some point, I can see it :) but I dunno if it's going again now - if it is, it's not going swiftly at least, as I can't see it happening. I have been considering protein shakes, yeah - might get some when I start exercising again.
I definitely plan to go see a personal trainer as soon as I have earned some money - which will hopefully be in about a month or so, depending on how long this client and agency take to pay their invoices.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-26 01:51 pm (UTC)Word to the wise though, when you start on protein shakes, *NEVER* buy the strawberry flavour ones..... :)
There are a number of ways to hit weights which will affect your muscles in different ways - drop-sets and super-sets are my favourites, but there's also light weight with lots of reps for lactic burn and endurance, high weight with low reps to bulk up, or high weight with as many reps as you can manage (i.e., go to failure). Recently Emma (my trainer) has had me doing tri-circuits (three exercises back to back, low weight/high reps), and compound supersets interspaced with cardio intervals (compound exercises are those which use a lot of different muscles in one motion, so things which include squats and weight lifting at the same time, i.e., engaging the core in order to push the weight). These really hurt, but they do make a big difference to muscle mass and tone very quickly.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-31 04:38 pm (UTC)And meh, it all sounds a bit rubbish, just wanted to send some virtual hugs. Thinking of you x
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-30 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-30 01:12 pm (UTC)find something to snack on. not chocolate if that's bringing guilt-thoughts into your head and making you ponder the issue, but maybe bread rolls, individual frozen veg portions can be handy, even go ahead biscuits, pre-made mash portions (easier and quicker than cooking a jacket properly, tastier than microwaving) - consider protein shakes if you're worried, although these should definitely be an AND not an OR.
the gym and particularly strength work for me is a MAJOR way of staving off the depression, but i very rarely go alone. join a class, preferably a drop-in one so there's no guilt-incentive, but a friendly one so you've got nice people to look forward to seeing. obviously i'd recommend boxing circuits but it depends what your local ones are like. i was very very lucky to stumble into mark's class.
to you and helen, losing weight as an end goal of exercise is... i want to say stupid, but i understand not everybody starts out like i do - but no, the stuff you're doing, i wouldn't expect you to lose weight very long because building muscle doesn't take years, it takes months. i certainly haven't lost weight since going boxing, in fact i've probably put on half a stone, and i probably worry about what i'm eating less, except in the sense of making sure i get enough of it, regularly. so conflation with eating disorders is sort of understandable but not really helpful, sorry. hugs to both while dealing with this.
i'm surprised and a bit worried that you're still losing. i'm surprised that your muscle wossname isn't increasing. have you spoken to a pt? worked out with anyone else?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-30 05:35 pm (UTC)Like I say, my muscle mass has visually increased significantly since I started going to the gym a few months ago, so it's just an artefact of the how the scales work that makes it seem like it isn't. Basically, the muscle mass in my legs hasn't increased. Does mean I can't measure increase or decrease in upper body muscle though, which is irritating in either case. Might buy some scales that have a hand-grip, for a more full-body measurement.