Lessons learned and TLDR at the bottom.
I began my journey last May, the day after my 25th birthday. I had just spent a week in Europe with my siblings and felt miserable the whole time. Sure I had fun and I love sibs bonding time but I was incredibly self-conscious in my 246lb body and very depressed (mostly unrelated to my body issues, but certainly a factor). My struggle with food had only been getting worse and worse since college: emotional overeating and binging, eating out and like crap, and no exercise whatsoever. It was so bad that I vowed, once again, that enough was enough and I had to make a serious change.
I’d been flirting with the idea of cutting out meat for a while for health/ethical/environmental reasons. Yet the studies about cheese being a contributor to mood swings and short term crashes had planted a seed in my brain. With bipolar disorder, any outside influences hurting my mood were really something I should be avoiding. So on my 25th birthday I got a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake and the next day, I went vegan. A few weeks after that, I downloaded MFP and started tracking my calories and as a clueless vegan, my nutritional breakdown (namely, protein).
I’m not going to lie, it was a challenging transition. It took about 3 months for my digestion to get back on track (tmi). I had to learn how to get enough protein. I took a vegan cooking class, since I didn’t know how to cook or what I should be eating. Sometimes it felt like I had to do double the work to get my proper vegan diet sorted out in tandem with only 1200 calories. But I figured it out and once I did, I started to feel great. No mysterious stomach aches. My menstrual cramps are virtually gone (tmi again). My energy went up (after going down initially). Best of all, the pounds started falling off.
By the end of June, I’d lost 25 pounds. But then, unfortunately, I was hit with a few weeks of mania, followed by one of the deepest depressions I’ve experienced since I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I fell off of my healthy diet completely, though stayed vegan, and my weight loss stalled. I think this should serve as a lesson that neither losing weight nor being vegan will cure your depression. It won’t make you love yourself. It won’t be the cure-all to everything that’s wrong in your life.
My mom flew out and I got set up with a therapist and got back on medication. I got back into eating right, though not back on MFP. It took every ounce of mental energy to pull myself back into a healthy mindset, I couldn’t even fathom actively trying to lose weight. After a few weeks, when I started to pull up, I tried to get back into it but I became too obsessive about food and losing weight. It was doing more harm than good.
Then, I read a great book called “Women, Food, and God” by Geneen Roth and combined with other factors in my life, I was slammed with a revelation. I had been dealing with my emotions with food. Cliche and obvious, I know, but I’d never really been able to stomach the idea of examining the connection with a magnifying glass. I was trying to fill the hole inside of myself that was infinite and dark and shameful. But the truth is, there is no hole. I am complete, whole, untarnished.
After that, I switched to intuitive eating. I needed to listen to my body: mentally and physically. What was my health calling for? Luckily, I already had a house full of healthy foods, a repertoire of healthy vegan recipes and choices, and an understanding of calories that I could generally monitor without obsessing over. Most difficult of all, I learned how to eat without tv, music, reading, or anything else distracting me. I was shocked to find how full I could get with less food when I actually listened to my body.
The weight loss picked back up in earnest and I am now 189, 57 pounds down and only 4 pounds away from escaping obesity. I’m still working things out but I’ve never felt so confident in my own skin. I just ran my first 5k on Thanksgiving. I actually requested a solo photo shoot later that day and I was happy with all of the pictures! I felt so good getting compliment after compliment from family and friends about how beautiful I looked.
My journey is unique, as everyone’s is. But if I can to share a few lessons that could be helpful, here they are:
-Create mini-goals: where do you want to be at Christmas, your family vacation, your next birthday? Weight loss and fitness goals, in terms of results or effort (3x a week, etc) in bite-size pieces are incredibly motivational to me.
-Learn what works best with your body. I recommend being vegan but I know that doesn’t work for everyone. Maybe you feel better on Keto. Maybe you feel better with more traditional ratios but cutting out sugar and caffeine. Try something and listen to your body.
-Ditto with exercise. I like the elliptical and I tried my hand at training to run a 5k. But maybe evening walks are your thing. Or karate. Or jazzercise. If you hate exercising, you won’t do it. And unless you’re going ham, there’s no need to eat back those calories.
-If your mental health is what’s holding you back from weight loss, it is incredibly worth it to sort that out first rather than just pushing harder and harder and punishing yourself for not making progress with weight loss.
-Don’t quit. Even when you fall off the wagon for a month. Even if you have to take a break for reasons. Even if you “Day 1 again” over and over. You’ll get it right, eventually. Falling short is okay. You’re not truly failing unless you quit.
-Finally, start working on loving yourself *now*. It might take your whole journey to make it stick but practicing positive self-talk is the gift that keeps on giving.
TLDR: Went vegan and used MFP which took me half of the way. Had to stop to deal with my mental health. Switched to intuitive eating and it’s working very well in conjunction with my mental healing.
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