It seems like my life is ever changing.
It's almost been a year since my dad's been gone and now close to 13years since my mom passed away.
thats a very long time. While sitting at a birthday party yesterday and talking to some of my amazing friends, i realized that there are reasons for everything. Why didn't I realize this sooner? I am a psychology student, this is the stuff I read about and deal with EVERYDAY. Of course there is a trigger for my weight and bad eating habits!!
Why has it taken me this long to figure this out?
Time for some reflection.
My mom was an amazing cook. Most people where blessed by her cooking. It was how we survived. she could make anything from nothing. She would cook dinner for anyone that would eat. my parents always said, "if you leave hungry, thats your fault" there was always food in our house. We were rather poor growing up and my mom did the best she could, without any type of assistance from the government. My dad worked hard to support us. With help from my family, we got by. When we started going to Centerpoint, my mom started cooking dinners for the "CFB essentials" class. She made dinner once a week at church. It was great, and as anyone knows,"Baptists love to eat!" I was always told to finish what was on my plate and i would, even if i was full. This was our rule. so I obeyed. Looking back on my life as a pre-teen and teenager, I had several different types of, what psychology would count as an eating disorder. I knew that I was gaining weight, and I also loved to eat and once my mom passed away, all i did to fill the emptiness was eat. It started with binge eating and then starving myself because I ate so much the day before. I would pick at food when I was around my friends and then gorge when I got home. i was comfortable around my family and so I ate with them and was happy. then i did the "salad only" diet. Only eating salads. I ate salad twice a day and then the rest of the time filled my body with diet coke, its diet right? so it has to be healthy? That is a no. I noticed that my clothes were loose again so I must have been doing something right, boy was i mistaken. When i got into high school i joined choir and theater and was so busy during the day that I eventually ended up on the "ham sandwich and cereal diet" where I ate cereal before school, didn't eat at school and would have a ham sandwich when i got home around 10pm depending on what rehearsal I was getting out of. This seemed to be effective as I was losing weight, but not in the right way. When you're 17 you don't think about health, you want to be thin, not healthy. thats for old ladies. I began to maintain my weight with these different techniques I had taught myself. it made sense the the 17 year old me, that if you eat, you get fat, so don't eat and you won't be fat. Live on diet coke and salad and everything will be fine..... that was such a lie. The biggest Lie i have ever believed. As I got older, I realized that I needed to do something, but didn't know what to do. I would work out for a few days and then give up. it was a vicious cycle. When I started working 7 days a week, I was so tired that i didn't have time to eat. i would grab something fast and that was it. I worked/slept/and ate. i worked so much that I started to drop weight from just the stress of work and not sleeping. I didn't mind. I worked at camp so i was walking around the camp up hills and running around the kitchen for 8 hours a day that gaining weight didn't seem to be a problem for me then. i didn't really loose very much, but I was "happy" so it was ok. after working at camp and just working with Max it was the same cycle. didn't eat till the end of the day and i would just pile on the food till I wanted to puke. I had the worst heart burn every night and told my dad i thought i was dying. it was horrible. I didn't know that eating so late, right before bed was doing that to me. It didn't seem to stop me though. I still did that, night after night. it got so bad that the acid started to eat away at my vocal cords. I went through a period where i has such traumatic vocal stress that I lost my voice for almost 3 months. i didn't tell anyone at the time that was what happened but it was. After going to the dr, he told me to stop eating late and I had to do and take all these things to make my voice heal... and it was disgusting and such a process. It was so embarrassing that I just told everyone i had a sever cold and was on meds.... it was sorta true. when I finally got better I didn't eat late for a long time... then my dad died. All of that changed. i didn't do the same things like when my mom died, now i was older and able to buy alcohol. That seemed to make everything better. Well, wouldn't you know that late night drinking will cause you to have heartburn?? it does! geeze, I was right back where i was, Vocal stressed caused by heartburn. Again, i didn't tell anyone. i knew what it was, having just faced it the year before. I didn't want to have to tell anyone that i was grieving by drinking and that i caused the same problem I had before, just with booze this time and not food. Now, you might be thinking, she seems pretty open? not when i don't want anyone to tell me to do something that isn't good for me. I kept that a huge secret. that time in my life has now long passed. I got help and have new ways to deal with grief in my life, or any other type of stressful situation really.
Knowing these triggers have now helped me to understand why my behaviors are the way they are. it's no surprise that going through what I have can do this to a person.
more later....
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