Day Seventy Five!!

I think I am suffering from withdrawal. What is withdrawal?
Withdrawal is the symptoms experienced from the effects of overeating. I never really thought about the fact that after eating a huge amount of carbohydrates there could be a hangover. 


My major bodily reaction to gaining back my weight has been back pain. I didn’t get it at first, I never have back pain, I am pretty much the strongest person in my family. But when you start to lose weight your centre of balance starts to shift and then with the sudden experience of gaining the weight, it means that there is added pressure on the lower back. Since gaining this weight over Christmas I started with a little bit of lower back pain, and I thought it was my mattress so I repositioned it, but then the back pain continued to increase and of course I continued to eat and continued to gain, and even though I have lost that five pounds, my back has not snapped into its normalcy, it has still continued to ache. 


Symptoms of withdrawal includes; snappy moods, insomnia, tremors, nausea, aching muscles, cravings, increased hunger, and mental fog. After eating so many carbohydrates, a food addict can spend a good portion of the day thinking obsessively about food. I can remember doing that, I can remember plotting my day all around what it is I was going to eat, I can remember finishing a meal and immediately starting to think about what I was going create for my next snack. 


When it was that I wasn’t doing that, I realized that my addictive eating behaviour encroached on my entire day, impairing other activities, and taking up a huge amount of mental space and time.


Dr. Laurie calls this being in denial. Starting off with good intentions to cut back, yet being overwhelmed by the desire of “normalcy”, my trigger foods overwhelmed me, and believe it or not, my denial took over and in gaining, I started to blame everything else but that added weight for my back pain symptoms.


Sitting here in pain could easily push me into giving up. Why go through this? Why not just consistently pack on the pounds, have the same centre of gravity, and just deal with being big? 


The reality is, I don't want to be big. I want to fit into good looking clothes. I want to fit in. People who are big, from my experience, are looked at as lazy, and dumb. Big people are the butt of jokes, the last chosen, and sometimes even hated. I experienced that in grade school. I have had enough of that. 


So, now I have had a very good learning experience. Yo-yoing sucks and that means that my body is no longer resilient, so I need to have, and be able to maintain consistency. That means that when I weigh myself everyday, if I start to gain weight, that is the queue that I have to pull back on the amount that I am eating as well as the carbohydrate amount that I am eating. 


I can no longer throw caution to the wind and say to myself “oh well, it’s Christmas break.” Just like all those people who think that they can have a cheat day and eat as much as it is that they want. The truth is, that is just binge eating. It is actually permission to yo yo diet. 


Celebrate, yes, for a day, and within reason, but not daily, says Dr. Laurie. When the weigh scale starts to go up, that means that I need to immediately get back on the plan, not wait until my body starts to speak to me, in pain. ​