Adjustments to my new lifestyle

For my job, I talk to people about the importance of listening to your body. I talk about the fact that diet programs often get people out of touch with their bodies true needs, and instead listening to someone else about whatever prescription for eating is recommended, typically for weight loss. 

I completely buy into this, and I think it's essential for long-term weight control. I also know that it's very hard. 

I had gotten to a point after moving to Grand Rapids, where I was truly eating intuitively much of the time. I was eating when hungry, stopping when full, and it felt great. I was actually exercising less than I had in a while, which was weird for me. But after years of struggle with disordered eating, I was feeling at peace with my body and with food, and I was pretty close to the lowest weight I had ever been since college. 

Then, as I mentioned in my previous post, I became a Beachbody coach and started exercising regularly. I started working out 5-6 days per week, which I had never done since probably high school, if that. I was, and still am, excited about how I have made changes, and I definitely feel stronger than I've felt in a long time. 

Problem is, instead of losing any weight, I ended up gaining about 4-6 lbs since I started. So right now, I am now actually closer to the weight before I got in touch with my body and felt true peace with food. Shoot.

My best guess about what is going on is this: I think a small amount of the gain is due to muscle gain, maybe 2-4 lbs at most. But I am quite convinced after thinking about this for several weeks, that at least 2-4 lbs is also due to eating more, and actual fat gain. Again, shoot. 

Despite getting in touch with my hunger and feeling pretty intuitive about my eating, I noticed something as I started to exercise more regularly. As a Beachbody coach, I am connected with a group of people who are also working on health and fitness goals. It's super cool and inspiring 95% of the time. However, I realized that about 5% of the time, I was comparing myself to their progress, and feeling the pressure to "eat better" and show the most amazing results. For me and my history, this backfired. I found myself getting stressed about the length of time I had to show my "after" picture. I also found myself getting stressed about seeing people I had not seen in a while due to concerns that I would not look enough like I had been working out as much as I had.

This experience led to about 1-2 weeks of what I would call the diet mentality and some binge eating. Not huge amounts of eating, just overeating most nights by, say, 1-2 bowls of cereal or a granola bar or 2. Or just ordering pizza and eating that for days straight. By the end I realized that I was not only feeling physically crappy, but I had somewhat reverted back to a mental state I had not been in in a LONG time. 

Luckily, I have a super supportive fiance who helped me by allowing me to talk about it. Through that, we realized that me weighing myself on Saturday morning was becoming more of a stressor than anything else. So since that day, about 2 weeks ago now. I haven't weighed myself and I do feel better. I'm still struggling a tiny bit with feeling that need to hurry up and "eat really well" so I can lose weight and feel better more quickly. I'm back from vacation and planning to do meal prep today and go for a walk in the park with our dog. 

My blog today is really just free writing about my experience. Maybe I'll come back and clean it up someday. But I want to document it, because it's so easy to forget how you felt in the struggle moments, and I do not believe I am at all alone in this experience. I fully plan to get back to my intuitive eating self, and feeling good in my body on a consistent basis, by feeding my body with good foods. 

My goals for the week are to plan healthy meals, and listen to my body, and continue to avoid that scale. At least for now...