Hi all,
Just joined this sub and am hoping to find some healthy and nuanced support on my journey. My (33F) wife got sober from alcohol in 2023 and it was so inspiring to me that I decided to try starting 1/1, especially since I am going to start trying to get pregnant later this year and I really want to be my healthiest for that process. But alcohol has only been part of the problem for me.
I've had an effed up relationship with food for most of my life, had disordered eating in jr high/high school and spent years doing low carb, Whole 30, paleo, vegan whatever with my weight always fluctuating between like 130-180 (I'm 5'4" for reference). I did get really into yoga and general fitness a few years ago, which has been great for my mental health, and I built a ton of muscle so I know some of that fluctuation has to do with muscle gain, but not all.
What really threw off my journey was intuitive eating, though. Around mid-quarantine as more people were struggling with their drinking and eating habits staying home all the time I feel like there was this huge proliferation of intuitive eating content online and it seemed like a really appealing thing to me after so many years of trying all these diets. And one thing I will say positively about intuitive eating is I feel like trying it did help me to take the morality away from foods in terms of looking at them as "good" and "bad" but all of them are just foods I can make choices about, which is good.
I am also a very social justice minded person and I feel like I got sucked in by the anti-diet rhetoric that says any intentional weight loss for any reason ever is fatphobic and contributing to the harm, discrimination and even potentially the death of larger people everywhere, and all intentional weight loss is inherently rooted in some kind of systemic bigotry and oppression.
The trouble is, I am diagnosed bipolar and likely also autistic, and have been on mood stabilizers, anti-convulsants, and briefly anti-psychotics since 2018. I am stable and have only had a couple of manic episodes since then, and between medication and therapy and healthy exercise habits I am fine most of the time, which I am thankful for. But the whole "listen to your body" thing literally doesn't work for me and I don't think it is a very trauma-informed approach more broadly. Those of us with severe mental illness or trauma have bodies that tell us to do all kinds of unhealthy, ill-advised and in some cases even toxic things, and a big part of learning to live with mental illness is learning how to honor your body and its cues/needs without necessarily doing what it says all the time. I literally have to be on medication 24/7 in order to have any semblance of a "normal" relationship with my body.
So in the last year and a half between my attempts at intuitive eating and a medication switch I had to do in September 2022, I have gained about 30-40 pounds and I hate it. I stepped on the scale yesterday and it was 179 lbs. My back is hurting more, I am losing flexibility in yoga, and half of the clothes I love no longer fit. Again, I've gained some muscle, but that is only a portion of it. Starting this year off being newly sober has motivated me to be the healthiest I can be and I am realizing that some amount of discipline around my food intake needs to happen. Not into fad diets anymore but I do want moderation/portion control and less processed foods. I feel my healthiest around 140/150 and I want to set myself up for success especially since I know my body will inherently change through and after pregnancy.
I feel like there are going to be people who say I wasn't "doing intuitive eating right" but I was following it as best I could, I read all the books, all the IG accounts, etc. My body just literally has a condition where it does not send me the right signals sometimes, especially when it comes to mood regulation of which food is a huge part. The medication helps but that is the condition I will live with for the rest of my life and unfortunately "listening to my body" is not always a good idea for me. And I don't say that to talk negatively about myself, I love myself. It's just the truth.
Anyway… I guess I'm hoping maybe someone else has had the experience of being a person with mental illness/trauma and gaining a butt ton of weight via intuitive eating, and then figuring out how to recover from that and lose it without falling prey to disordered eating and fad diets? I'm not trying to expect too much of myself being newly sober and all, but I want to capitalize on this momentum start really taking care of my body for the long haul.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/niFEHlJ
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