Hey everyone!
I am 25 FtM, 5'4, and already down to 181 lbs from 186 last week (very fast and first weight was a scale at the doctor's office, so I'm assuming this as mostly water weight and a difference in scales but still! Very happy to see the decrease!). So, so happy I found this subreddit a few days ago, as reading through all of your triumphs and tribulations, wins big and small, has made me enthusiastic about actually getting healthy rather than just "losing weight" for the first time in my life.
I am posting today mostly for accountability, I guess. I am (unfortunately) an old hat at losing and gaining and losing again and gaining even more. I've been overweight since age 6 or 7, surrounded by a household full of people who were chronically under weight. Yes, you can imagine what that did for my self-esteem (it's non-existent). All my life, it's only ever been me who has to watch what they ate. Me who wasn't allowed to have dessert while I watched my family pig out on anything they wanted. Me who was bullied at school. Me constantly getting comments from well-meaning family members and family friends about my weight and "should you really be eating that?". Me overhearing my mom crying to my dad when she thought I was asleep about how she's worried I'm going to be fat and miserable until I die young of some comorbid illness. Me getting dragged from nutritionist to nutritionist and eating "special" (read: gross) diet food and new food rules that changed with every new nutritionist.
Needless to say, my relationship with food probably hasn't been healthy since I graduated preschool. And I never understood why it was just me. I thought there must be something wrong or broken with me, and there was nothing I could do about it. That I was doomed to be "the fat kid" forever.
Until the summer between 9th and 10th grade. I was 15. We finally had Internet, and I spent literally all day on the computer. It completely distracted me from everything, even food. I would watch YouTube videos and read for hours and hours until it was 8 hours later and I still haven't eaten anything all day. I would make myself soft boiled eggs and a bagel and get right back on the computer. And that was it. Every day. All summer long. My only meal was eggs and a bagel, and the occasional family dinner.
And the weight melted off of me. At the time, I think my highest weight was 165, and 2.5 months later I was about 140. I was shocked! I didn't think it was possible, because I'd never been able to lose weight before. And I wasn't even trying! Suddenly everyone was proud of me. I was getting a bunch of positive attention from everyone about my weight. It was the first thing people talked about when they saw me. My parents were visibly relieved. And all it took was just not eating.
Hello, eating disorder! (TW START. Will mark the end, skip to there if you need to)
I stopped eating breakfast- only coffee. I stopped eating lunch at school. I'd get home from school and eat fruit or a small bag of hot cheetos, and stuff myself with dinner. Which progressed to getting home and taking a nap to avoid eating anything at all. Maybe I'd eat dinner, maybe not. But I absolutely never finished anything I ate. It didn't matter how hungry I was, or even how much food was there to start with. It didn't matter that I was fainting left and right. It didn't matter if I was exhausted and shaking. It didn't matter if my heart was getting damaged and my body canablizing itself to stay alive. I was finally "skinny", and if I finished my food, I was going to gain everything back and disappoint my family and be right back where I was. I ate a lot if I had 600 calories in a day, and punished myself the rest of the week by eating even less.
(END TW)
I'm not sure what changed but I hit 117 pounds and gradually came back to my old (still poor) eating habits. I started seeing my weight creep back up and I would start to panic, but then console myself about still being a normal weight. And then the excuses kept coming. And kept coming. And kept coming. And then 4 years had passed and I had blown past my starting weight to a grand 192 pounds and I hated myself.
I tried to get back to my starvation "diet" and I just couldn't do it. I would last few a couple of weeks or months, lose 20 or 30 pounds, and then go on a binge and "give up", and gain it all back and more. Then start a different, actual diet (like keto) but start to fall back into my anorexic mentality. And I was juussttt self aware enough to know that was a bad thing, and gave up again. The entire time, guilty for every morsel of food that passed my lips. Blaming myself for not being able to starve myself well enough (I know, I know).
Cue 4 months ago. I finally got on some antidepressants that I should have been on since maybe age 9, and the whole world feels different. Leaving my house doesn't feel half impossible. Hanging out with friends isn't completely exhausting. Hell, getting out of bed every day no longer feels like climbing Everest. I have all this brand new energy I've never had, so I figured I might as well do something with it. So I started seeing a "food therapist" who works with people with anorexia and disordered eating and does the whole "intuitive eating" thing.
I realized that my weight isn't the problem, but the consequences of the problem. I realized that I was absolutely miserable no matter what I weighed. There was no difference between how I felt about myself at 117 pounds vs 192. My relationship with food, how I think about food, how I think about my body, my thought processes in general - here lies the problem.
I also realized about a week ago that I "intuitively ate" myself to another 20 pound weight gain. And I realized that this was okay. Because I learned that blindly "intuitive eating" doesn't work for me. I learned how to recognize my distorted thoughts and I'm working on learning how to combat them. I learned some steps to work on forgiving myself for being in this situation in the first place, and accepting and working with or around the circumstances that I didn't have control over but which lead me here as well.
I figured I needed something different, so I searched reddit for a weight loss sub and found this one. Within 5 minutes, I learned about CICO and TDEE. And then I downloaded Noom, which seems to be exactly the kind of structure and direction I wasn't getting from the food therapist, and has been providing context to some things that weren't clicking when my food therapist brought them up.
For the first time, I feel like I'm motivated for the right reasons, with the right intentions. I feel like I do actually want to be healthy, not just "thin". I want to run a mile non-stop for the first time in my life. I want to hike some national parks without being out of breath and in agony. I want to eat good food guilt-free with my friends and family. I want to know what it feels like to not be self conscious. I want to know what it feels like to not completely hate myself.
Am I worried about falling back into an eating disorder? Absolutely. But I hope I have a better support system now, and I'm in a much better place mentally than I've ever been, so that doesn't happen. I have the tools now, and I'm ready to make the change once and for all.
This really does feel like the last first start.
Sorry for the ultra long (and kinda rambly) post and thank you to anyone who made it this far 😊
