My Body My Food

I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging at the end of the last blog post.  I presume everyone who reads is Facebook friends with me.

To make a long story short, I was able to see a psychiatrist and they upped one of my meds and that mostly fixed everything.  Just as I had gotten the meds fixed I had a really horrific confrontation with a woman at work which set me back a good bit.  In June I got sent to another building to sort out some problems there and have since been happily in limbo, technically working with a team I never actually have to see.  I found that as long as I don't have to witness the team drama it doesn't bother me.  On top of that I LOVE the project I'm doing.  A couple weeks ago I got notice that I might have to move back over with the team, but it's kind of a one person says yes and another person says no kind of thing.  I figure I'll sit away from the team until someone tells me I have to go back, and not worry about it because it's out of my control.  That's easier said than done though, because now I'm having flashbacks every day about the stupid aforementioned confrontation.  Oh, I also got a new counselor, and I was really freaked out at first because she had a Christian symbol tattoo, but I ended up just telling her my worries about it and we talked about it and it turns out I really like her.  That wasn't as short as I'd planned.  In any case, I decided to come back to my blog to talk about my body and food issues.  Today's food and physical body.

I weigh 130 pounds more than I should, which means to be at a "healthy" BMI I should lose half my bodyweight.  I've put healthy in quotes there because I think eating right and exercising regularly makes for a healthy person at a wide range of weights.  I'm also a compulsive eater and I have been for as long as I can remember.  I don't eat whole pizzas at a time or anything, but I can easily put in four pieces, and then another two later, and another two in the morning, and another two later until that pizza is gone, because I can't stop thinking about it until it is.  Drive throughs are my downfall.  I have to drive past dozens of them every day.  I adore breakfast sandwiches.  I like fatty food, savory food, and sweet food.  It's definitely not one or the other for me.  I'll eat something junky to celebrate any small achievement and to console any minor bad mood, any excuse to get something yummy.  I used to avoid the vending machines at work by not carrying cash, but now they take my card, so it's hard to get through the day without two diet rockstars and a rice krispy treat.  It's definitely a compulsion.  Almost all my binges are not gigantic but they are calorie dense, like a milkshake on the way home from work after a tough day.  In my adult life I have not been able to stave off eating compulsively for more than about three months at a time.  I hide it from Evy so she won't beg for the junk I'm eating.  I'm not sure why I'm like this or what to do about it except to keep trying again/harder to stop doing it.  I've tried everything short of hiring some meanie to follow along behind me and knock the junk food out of my hands directly.  I'd hire a personal chef if I had the dough.

I remember when I was very small my mom would give me a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and a piece of bologna, some canned veg-all, and a canned pear for lunch, and she cooked supper.  I think I may have been hungry a lot, but mom was strict about food because she didn't want me to ever get fat like she was.  My school age breakfast was the same and lunch was a PB&J sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a snack like a granola bar or fruit leather.  That lasted until ma got sick when I was in 6th grade.  After that Dad and I went out a lot to fast food and buffets, and I put on weight at a rapid pace.  The summer between 9th and 10th grade my ma helped me crash diet, teaching me how to count calories, and sneaking me cigarettes to help stave off my hunger.  I managed to stay somewhere between thin and chunky until ma died when I was 22, often by denying myself meals so I could fill my belly at others.  After ma died I gained a bunch, got back down to 200 for one shining moment after my divorce, and then minor roller coastering to my current weight.  I've maintained this weight for a few years, mostly through feeble ongoing attempts at Weight Watchers.

Right now I'm on vacation and am attempting one more time.  It's SO hard to make changes when I'm working.  I just don't have the energy to keep them up and I keep slowly slipping back to where I was before.   My vacation is a staycation and I'm focusing on the following:

• I happily joined the cheap no-frills gym that just opened across the street from my house.  When I'm working I will only be able to use them on weekends as they have reduced hours at the mini pre-location they opened, but on 1/1/15 they will open the main gym and I will be able to go before work or after.  There will also be classes, including Zumba which I love.
• I'm tracking my food on Weight Watchers again.
• I'm trying to eat mostly things which are whole or minimally processed, with a focus on fueling my physical body properly.  This is after a discussion with my doctor of me possibly having an endocrine disorder.
• Last week I instituted theme nights at home for four nights a week, both to improve family bonding and to set a dining theme for each evening so we are prepared, and avoid last minute takeout suppers. (Monday is planned takeout like Subway, Tuesday is antipasto (cold supper), Wednesday is family dinner, and Thursday is a fast or very easy cooked dinner, like crockpot or stir fry.
• Some time ago I started packing my own lunch when I pack Evy's.  I'd like to source some more easy whole food options for the lunches, because I'm packing a lot of froot by the foot and angry birds graham crackers.  
• I quit diet cola again.  Needing a diet cola is often a great excuse for a trip through the drive through.  Plus, that stuff is nasty for my body.

I know that seems like a lot at once, but if I don't structure this staycation all I'm going to do is eat, sleep, and play video games.

40th Bday Post

I stayed up until the wee hours of my birthday doing my 2013 self assessment for work.  It was actually pretty positive.  I listed all the stuff I've done, quantifying how many of this or that I did.  I found out that despite being so upset because I have more to do than I could possibly get done, I did an extraordinary amount of stuff this year!  Much of what I did was innovative, technical and complex.  I'm impressed with myself, and my boss should be too.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'll just get a 3, "meets expectations".  The person that I watched be a total badass in 2012 only got a 3 on his review, and left shortly thereafter.  But despite what the boss does with it *I* know that this year I was a badass.

The outpouring of good wishes for my health and birthday has been really touching!  At work they outdid themselves decorating my cube and did a card where everyone signs.  Some people have reached out specifically and said some of the nicest and unexpected things.  Thank you all so much!

I'm going to get off here now and go see what sort of trouble I can get into!

Operation Fix Me

Hi!  So I'm not doing so well.  There's a post down there I didn't even share because I wrote it in half-on crisis mode.  Here's the biggest problem.  Full on crisis mode for me is bad, folks.  My anxiety attacks include lovely things like screaming (loudly), falling on the floor, drooling, choking and gasping for breath.  (I looked on youtube for an example but none of them are as bad as mine.) I can NOT afford to have one of these at work.  If I did I'm sure an ambulance would be called, and I have very very serious reasons why I MUST not be 5150'd.  Of course, trying to make sure I don't leads to additional anxiety.  I had to take an Ativan at work yesterday, it sucked.  My brain was dulled.

So...operation fix me has started.  I told my counselor what was going on (I had an anxiety attack over telling her about my anxiety attacks, so meta!) I asked for two weeks off work.  I told my manager that I am having health issues, and I told my new lead, who I trust implicitly, exactly what was going on.  I have today and Monday off to start, and then I will return to work for two weeks of training up my lead and new colleague to do what I'm doing and then I'm out of there for two whole weeks and I will NOT be logging on for anything less than a balls-out emergency.  Letting go of work is hard though.  Maybe because I feel important there, and I really like feeling important.  Also, my responsibility, which creeps back in in an, "I'm the only one who knows how to do these 100 things, who will do them if I'm not there?"  and "I got three x yesterday that I need to do y to but I didn't get to them even working 12 hours a day, what's going to happen?"   I'm going to get in trouble.  When people ask why something is not done the only thing I can say is, "Sorry, I didn't have time."  No one likes that answer.

Today is kind of worky.  I had to log on to approve a ticket I promised to approve, and later I have to log on to write my year end review, due today and haven't started.  :-/  I'm home though, and hiding on IM so no one can bug me unless they know the trick of checking to see if someone is hiding on IM or really offline.

I'm going to be posting short posts about operation fix me I think.  Today I'm having my nails done, because they are falling off.  We're going to Ikea to buy pillows for the whole family and have some meatballs.  Ikea is a fun place for us, like an adult playground where we ooh and ahhh over the interesting designs and fall in love with the ingenuity of the cabinetry and stuff.  It's getting kind of late, so the nails and Ikea might happen in the other order.  Then I have to take Evy to exchange with her dad for the weekend.

Tomorrow is my 40th birthday, which is playing a part in my anxiety, but I think it's a peripheral part, like, the anxiety from work spills over into everything and makes it bad too.  Poor Sheldon!  He's the one I'm always with when I finally break and have an attack.  I'm sure it's because it's the only time I really feel like I can be myself is with him, but really, poor guy!  He's being really great about it, but I can see he's becoming exhausted as well trying to support everything else so I can keep it together enough to continue working.

Whoops, start over.  Tomorrow is my 40th birthday and I was able to Priceline a nice hotel in Oakland for $60 (thanks to Judge for reminding me again how to Priceline properly), so we'll be playing in the City Saturday and Sunday.  I'm not planning anything specific, I mostly like looking at the people and architecture and pigeons and other city stuff, but a good meal or two will probably be had.  I have Monday off to rest.  My sleep has been utter shite lately.

Still Not OK

I think I've cracked, or am about to, because I can't seem to pull myself together. I'm back at work today (we were allowed to work at home for Christmas and New Years weeks) but I can't stop crying. It feels like every aspect in my life is just bad. Everywhere I look everything's all wrong, it's bad, and I don't have the mental resources to deal with any of it. I'm back in debt, over $1000 now. My mental health out of pocket costs are $235 a month. My work, I don't think I can deal with changing jobs, but I can't deal with the one I'm doing either. We're finally getting a new person at work to be above me, so I go back to being a peon instead of being a peon trying to do peon and senior work both. This is the third time this has happened in a year though, and I feel like I could DO all the senior work if I didn't also have my peon work to do, but no one has given me a chance to try, they just give the interesting work to someone else. It just looks like I'm a great big failure because I can't do both jobs well. My kid just got back from 2 weeks away and her new favorite thing to do is scream "I hate you" at Sheldon. The house is a mess, there's no food and no money AND I need gas, so a couple hundred more will go on the credit card. I can't find time to exercise and I'm not sleeping well at all. Oh, I also have this check to deal with for my 401k rollover, but now that it has gone past the first I don't know how the taxes will work, and also my kid has been termed from her insurance due to the ACA, so now I have to figure out how to work that before March 1 too.

Secret Nutters

So, about 10 minutes after that last post, probably because I let my guard down before it was time, I had the biggest anxiety attack I've had in years.  Thank goodness it was NOT a screaming one, but it  awful enough that I asked Sheldon if he thought I needed to go to the hospital or something.  It's really embarrassing too.  Having anxiety attacks makes me feel crazy and ashamed.

I've been really careful since then to keep an eye on how I'm feeling and try and tend it so it doesn't get out of hand.  I've continued to believe the work stuff is not all my fault and that's helping.  On Christmas I started to feel anxiety coming on and took an ativan for the fist time that wasn't for something like flying or surgery.  I didn't want to break my "streak" of not having to take them but it seemed more practical to break the streak and not have an anxiety attack in the middle of Christmas dinner.

During times of anxiety I also get this really fun thing where I'm able to leap to big conclusions in a single bound.  For example, today we put away Christmas and I saw Sheldon lovingly packing away his Star Trek ornaments into a special box.  Immediately I figure that he is of course separating them so if he decides to leave me this year they will be easy to grab.  I KNOW this is likely ridiculous, and I'm super lucky to have Sheldon and friends who I can say, "Hey, I want you to know that I am feeling this thing that I am pretty sure is unreasonable and it would be really helpful if we could speak briefly about it."

I'm going to be working set hours and making sure I don't get too emotionally involved in work and then trying to get a handle on my mind and health and stuff.  I need to make time for exercise and eating healthy.  I KNOW that doing those things improves my physical and emotional health more than anything else.  I KNOW how to do them, and it kind of baffles me how I just slip so easily back into gluttony and sloth when I feel so much better when I do them and worse when I don't.

I looked up loving kindness meditation the other night, but when I got to the bits where I'm supposed to be loving and kind and forgiving to myself I just couldn't make myself buy in.  When I see my friends having a hard time it's really easy for me to empathize and be understanding about all the things that contributed to their hard time.  When I turn it inward though I can pick at every time I slacked when I should have been working harder, and I know all the times when I played when I could have been working towards my goals, and I can't say I did my best, so how can I be forgiving?

Made it another day!

Ok, so now thanks to a Lot of help from Sheldon, all the presents have been bought and I don't have to work for the next two days.  I spent today letting go of a lot of responsibility for my impending business failure. I'm keeping a more appropriate amount now.

I came home and fell asleep for three hours.  Now we're watching A Christmas Story and tentatively wrapping gifts (read: tossing shit in gift bags, yo).   Why do always forget how funny this movie is?   I  feel pretty good.  Thanks  to everyone for  wishing me well.  It really helped!  

I hope everyone has a safe and happy (or at the very least not unpleasant!) next couple of days.

Merry Christmas

Christmas used to be my favorite holiday.  My birthday was OK until my 30th, when I almost spent the whole day alone because my then-husband wouldn't bring our car home and I wasn't allowed to ride in the work truck, and then I finally did get to go to my old auntie's, and my parents showed up, and that was it.  My parents and aunt were the only people who cared enough to do anything for my 30th birthday.  Valentine's day was OK until 2006 when my then-boyfriend of 2 years chose that day to tell me that he had a new girlfriend, well not exactly new, they'd been seeing each other for a number of months.  I guess telling me was his gift to her.  Anyway, now I don't really like my birthday or Valentine's day.

Christmas though is special.  I can spend months figuring out what to get people, I LOVE picking presents for people.  I like baking, I like entertaining, and I like having a Christmas tree in the house. Christmas was my absolute favorite holiday.

This year though it's been ruined.  My work, I got a project on Thanksgiving week that's been taking up 4-6 hours a day of my time, but I'm also the only person who can do these two other things.  Those two other things re really just packs of things though.  One of them is 40 things, and one is a dozen things, and I needed to be able to get them done between Thanksgiving and New Years.  So there's basically 18 working days in December, so I needed to get about three of the things done every day.  Each thing involves a lot of back and forth with outside agencies and a lot of testing, but three things a day is definitely doable....if I wasn't spending 4-6 hours a day on the project.  I called out to my superiors several times that I was not going to be able to do ALL the things, but they haven't done anything about it.  If I don't get these things done literally THOUSANDS of people will be at the least inconvenienced and at the worst one or more could die, so I'm really emotionally invested in the things, but I'm doing the best I can, and knowing that even then I will NOT get these things done is literally driving me crazy.  I can't sleep, I'm exhausted, I'm despairing, crying every day, and have started having anxiety attacks for the first time in a few years.  It's making it so I can't function at all at home.  I have to keep it together at work, so all the falling apart is happening at home.  I'm working extra hours when I can, sometimes even until midnight, but I don't have the energy to keep it up, so one day I'll work 12 hours and the next day I'll be exhausted after 7.  I'm having a hard time getting to sleep so I'm having a hard time waking up, and I'm dragging myself into work at 9:30am.  It looks bad.  People are running out of patience with me too.  They want me to do fun stuff and I'm too tired, or they want to talk about something other than how shitty my work is, or they don't know what to do when I can't stop crying and it's starting to irritate them.

With all the energy I'm investing in working and the worry I can't get rid of I have NOTHING left over for Christmas stuff.  Everything is just another thing that must be done on time.  On top of everything, No money showed up for any of Sheldon's three jobs in December.  I guess everyone likes to put off paying until the next year to make the revenues look better.  So we were waiting for the money to show up which we were planning to use for Christmas and it didn't.  Luckily I did a weekend project at work that got me a $500 bonus...payable in gift certificates for specific stores, none of which I shop at.  Kmart was one of the stores, so I just spent several hours trudging around Kmart looking for Evy's and everyone else's Christmas gifts.  There wasn't anything fun about it.  I wasn't able to really get any of the stuff I wanted to get, just a bunch of meaningless crap to fill the empty spaces under the tree so Evy won't be disappointed.