I read this and I’m optimistic but, as a fellow eating-disorder sufferer, and as @garagerocker13 implies with his reply it’s possible to read between the lines here and not arrive at being optimistic.
I hope this isn’t the case, and that we can all celebrate, but here are some thoughts that I’m having
“Continue eating as you are eating”
What does this mean?
Are you eating enough?
Are you eating a varied diet?
Is your vegetable intake normalised now or still excessive?
Are you getting adequate fats?
Are you getting adequate carbs?
Are you getting adequate protein?
Are you getting enough salt considering your activity levels?
“Train hard”
What about training smart? If you continue to maintain your step count I expect your knees to keel over, or your hips
Therapy, therapy, therapy
I had my first depression at 16, I’m now 28 and I still have problems. If I can say anything on that topic is debatable but my advice would be “don’t settle for me feeling better”. I fell into that trap, as I wasn’t at my worst things were okay enough and that’s why I’m still having problems.
It was fine, because I was a teen living at home with very few other cares and I managed school so it couldn’t have been to bad
It was fine, because I was a teen living at home with a job that I kept up appearances at
It was fine because I was a student that got my coursework done but didn’t manage to participate at all in the student experience, but at least I was getting my grades (never finished my degree though)
Eventually, depression would come to destroy relationships, friendships, and employments. And in truth it was never fine - not even starting at the first bullet.
These problem compound over time. The time you invest in getting it sorted now will pay dividends for the rest of your life.
Agreed 100% Getting by and doing what needs to be done are valuable skills, short term, but I don’t believe them to be effective long term. If you aren’t making movements towards dealing with underlying issues they will eventually become so big they can’t be ignored or other confounding issues will come along that add up to something that can’t be ignored. I have issues today as a 34 year old man that could likely have been dealt with as a teenager if I’d taken appropriate steps. I had a break down 2 years ago in the middle of a performance review with my line manager due to allowing “survival mode” to become the norm. Don’t be like me.
Like the others, I am encouraged and hope you get on the right track while seeking out therapy.
Have you thought about doing something for workouts you actually enjoy? It seems that these pistol squats do nothing but hurt your joints. You push through the pain for no real reason. Miserable workouts =/= good workouts.
Most importantly do as you say and eat what you want and more important as much as you want for awhile.
Yeah. After blowing along and being the wind on my own sails for, oh 47 years, I completely broke down psychologically after my heart attack. Definitive proof of my fragility in the face of a mortal threat may have put me over the edge, but decades of abuse and neglect got me to it.
Fortunately, found a really good therapist who has helped tremendously.
I can’t imagine, like truly cant- what life would have been like had there been some therapeutic intervention in my formative years.
Yeah, absolutely. My current mindset is to compare it to financial health. For a few years I was doing the emotional equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck, enough to get by and showing all outward signs of being ok. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck though, it doesn’t take too much to push you over the edge. It also limits you in other ways: much harder to help other people when you’re barely getting by yourself.
Yeah, aside from lacking any reserve or resilience, I was experiencing a lot of unattended to damage almost continuously. The only apt analogy I can think of is, accurately enough thanks to @EmilyQ, like Dexter, except that my dad wasn’t a cop, he was just the jagoff from down at the bar.
I’d been able to channel a lot of my agression toward useful things like work and lifting, but even that backfired and turned inward upon myself, which is not anywhere anybody ever wants to be.
@Voxel@dagill2@SkyzykS
Thank you guys so much for sharing. It means a lot to me.
I’m considering doing the 10k swings challenge again, but don’t think it’s mentally going to happen. I’m also increasingly out of shape
If I’m lucky, I might get a barbell and weights for Christmas
felt good, took it easy and got a nice pump, wanted to do a 1hr weighted walk, but wasn’t going to happen
I took a look back at my log and wow, my standards have slipped. My workouts these days have been 45-50min and have generally lacked intensity despite me trying.
This is the slippery slope I’m talking about. I keep cutting small corners and quality slips without my awareness
Monday starts a new “cycle “. For my main work, I’m thinking about borrowing from @Frank_C and doing too sets then 50lighter reps in as few sets as possible
Also, how do you guys manage to do conditioning on hard lower body days?
@cyclonengineer I like pistols. I’m pretty tired of following a plan and just want to do what I want, but that’s where discipline comes in
Imagine how bad ass you’d be if you stuffed your face with all the macros multiple times a day. I doubt even your hero stefi (idk how to spell it) could stand a chance. Shame we may never get to see that.
… still mysteriously gaining weight…this is what I would have looked like at the END of a large meal a couple months ago. Now I look like this first thing in the morning
@Voxel this is what I meant by able to “pinch more stuff” I didn’t have this fluff a month ago
Weight: 99.6
I’m really frustrated because I know I haven’t been in a surplus, much less one big enough for me to put on nearly 2lbs in a week
admittedly, I have been eating a lot of sodium and dairy lately, but not eating dairy last week didn’t seem to make a difference. Also, my diet’s been the “cleanest” it’s been in the past year
Week16: day6
50min weighted walk-45lbs
not too bad, easier than expected- still go HR up a bit, going to try for an hour next time
I’m supposed to get back on program tomorrow, but I really don’t want to
There is a time and a place for a challenge workout, or a training plan that has you purposefully overreaching. They are best reserved for when life stress is low. Your life stress isn’t low. You can’t kill yourself in every avenue of your life and have something left at the end.
Gaining weight is good for you, continue gaining weight. That being said, continue if you can without finding other ways to engage in self-harm. I understand this is uncomfortable for you, and sometimes it is acceptable to create ourselves a plateau before we continue to progress if we aren’t sure we can maintain our current progress without suffering through a period of regression. Perhaps this will be a strained metaphor, but, sometimes when there isn’t any wind in the sails the best thing a ship can do is to not sink when it isn’t possible to move forward.
From your earlier posts with regards to college, it is very clear that you have an elevated need for control. I didn’t reply at the time I do believe, and I just wanted to add a supporting voice to all of the people that pointed out that part of higher education is learning how to deal with things not running smoothly. For me, my first experience of the sort, was during high-school during a project-course where the teacher went in purposefully and deleted the entire project from the school’s servers to see if us students could adapt and restore things from our own hard-drives etcetera. Anyway, I digress. My intent with bringing this up, your need for control, is that you’ll never be in control. Life will always throw you a curve-ball, or several, at a time. It’s best to find a way to live where you can have an idea of what you want to do but remain adaptive to reality.
Many eating disorders start when someone’s life is tumultuous because usually one thing we can control is our food intake. But this tends to only work for a while, as eventually the body will start fighting us. And now we feel bereft of all control, which furthers our distress. So we tighten up our reins even further, perpetuating the negative feedback loop.
I should add that from my recent readings on eating disorders it would appear that being chronically underfed has as a side-effect obsessive thought-patterns and a malformed body-image (I’ve mentioned the latter previously). The former explains how we can perhaps rationally understand that what we are doing is disadvantageous to us but make it really hard to escape our “habits”. It might also be by this token why, when someone exits a diet, they struggle mentally.
I’m probably over-stepping my boundaries, but I prefer to associate my thinking with tangible examples. @jskrabac, obviously very successful with his physique endevours, had this thread,
and in other threads he is forever a voice of reason, but he struggled a bit with his carb intake, thinking that he was getting fat. But he kept his carb intake up, and after a while his body found a new balance and seemingly whatever demons were plaguing his mind with regards to gaining body fat they disappeared,
And it is funny that, because I was the one that suggested it yet I get caught up in the same traps myself. I can rationally tangibly associate actionable dietary habits with “science” but that doesn’t stop my brain from getting caught in the bottom of a maelstrom if I’ve been under-feeding myself. Whether or not what I’ve read about under-feeding encouraging this faulty thinking is accurate or not I do not know, but it does align very well with what I’ve observed in myself and others.
It is believed that the reason this happens is actually to save energy, that it’s metabolically cheaper for the brain to continue along in already established thought-patterns.
That’s skin, not fatty tissue.
Anyway, to return a bit to weight gain here’s a thought that I originally learned about when it came to losing weight but it also applies in reverse.
Let’s hypothesise that a person needs to lose 10kg to get to the level of leanness they want to.
But if they were in a maintenance/hypertrophy period to begin with, they are presumably carrying as much glycogen as they can (which binds water, 4g of water per gram of glycogen), and they are probably as hydrated as they’ll get and their bowels are “full”. So, they are carrying some 2-3 kilos maybe (250-270g of glycogen → 1kg of water + bowel weight) “extra” that’ll also leave their body as they lose those ten kilos of fat.
And, for every kilogram of fat that leaves the body, they are going to lose some other stuff to go along with that. There are fat-soluble minerals stored in fatty tissue, there’s some water there, and maybe one would even lose some muscle. I recall reading that barring muscle loss you are looking at losing 250 grams of other stuff per every kilo of fat.
This would apply in reverse too, and then as we are gaining both muscle and fat you are picking up weight on two fronts. New muscle mass means even greater glycogen stores, so not only does the muscles add scale weight but also the glycogen and the water. And so forth, you are smart enough that I don’t have to write it all out.
What we can try and do though, when gaining muscle, is to not beat it into smithereens so we actually end up gaining some muscle. I.e., you train, you trigger a hypertrophy response through mTor-signalling then we don’t want to do a ton of cardio which would break down the already damaged muscle further meaning that whatever recovery it manages to undergo it doesn’t end up being a net loss nor do we want to signal AMPK which would inhibit the mTor-response. This entire paragraph was written to encourage you to walk a lot less
@jskrabac if you dislike me using you as an example let me know and I’ll remove it
Thanks for the post! I definitely get the part about control- that project course sounds like a nightmare. I remember having actual nightmares along those lines. I can’t imagine it actually happening
All I want is to find a maintenance. My weight isn’t fluctuating, it’s spiking. I’ll just stick it out and wait.
What’s more strange is that my appetite had dropped considerably. Does that mean that I need less food? Right now, I’m feeling really full at “1400” but eat “1600” because I feel like it (ie a slice of cheese)
Regarding sodium, I have to limit it because of my kidney(s). I was doing really good, then cravings hit big time (probably due to stress, sort of like how some ppl crave sugar). I don’t sweat much so electrolytes shouldn’t be an issue
Well, you know it is a problem for you. As people, we are bound to in life have our own share of problems. Some of them we’ll need to work around, some we can leverage to our advantage, some are minor enough that they rank as mere inconveniences. Do you believe you have to work on being able to have less control for you to live a long and healthy life?
If so, I highly encourage you to visit Train Ugly dot com. Take the main URL and go for the article at “/jungle-tiger/”. It might give you a meaningful mental model for how to start moving in a direction where you are comfortable with having less control.
Another mental model of theirs I like a lot, especially for lifters, is “robbing reps” (they write about it on their new site The Learner Lab).
Essentially, on a set of 12 for squats, the first few reps don’t really suck that much nor do they facilitate growth. If you had a coach that took the bar from you after rep 8 to help you out so you didn’t have to get as uncomfortable you’d never get stronger or bigger. You are going to have to find a spot wherein you release some control, to the point where you feel uncomfortable, until you no longer do. Then you’ll have to release even more control to get uncomfortable again.
I realised a few years ago that the phrase “you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” also applies to myself. I can’t reason myself out of emotions.
