Lost
A couple of years ago I started off down a road to wellness. I joined LA weight loss so I could learn to eat healthier and so I would have someone to hold me accountable for what I ate. I also started training for marathons and slightly less than two years ago I completed my first marathon. The end result was that by the summer of 2007 I had lost 56 lbs. In October 2007 I trained for and completed a second marathon while raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
After my second marathon, things started to go downhill. I trained so hard for the marathon and pushed my body so hard to finish the marathon that I sustained some injuries that just wouldn’t go away. See, I’m not a runner and my choice of words, “I finished a marathon,” is not an accident. I’ve never run a whole marathon and in my opinion I’ve never finished a marathon well. Both efforts pushed my body and mind to their limits and it took days just to be able to walk normally again after the effort.
Sometime between the two marathons I lost my edge with nutrition. I plateaud on my weight loss, I stopped going to LA Weight Loss centers and really relied on the training to keep the weight off. I had this mentality that I needed to eat more because I was running so much, and while that’s a true statement, what I was eating to boost my caloric intake was totally wrong. I justified eating double quarter pounders by saying that I could afford to eat those since I was going to do a long run on the weekend.
Overtime, those double quarter pounders were a habit that was all too easy to fall back into. That was after-all how I’d eaten for a long time before I joined the weight loss program. After I came back from the second marathon and was injured, I kept eating but wasn’t training. I gained about 10 lbs between October and Christmas. It was the holidays; I would get back to training in January after I healed up. I took a new job in December, Sarah and I found out in January that we were expecting Micah and life just continued along at a blistering pace.
Jackie and I signed up to run the half-marathon in Nashville in April. We thought doing a half would be a nice way to slowly get back into training. We had both gained weight back, we both had injuries to get over and the half marathon is a much more forgiving distance. This was a plan that would have worked but my eating habits weren’t good. There’s only one thing worse than eating habits, my training habits. I just couldn’t get back in the groove. April came and I considered not running the half. In the end I “finished” it, but it took so much longer than it should have. By the time July rolled around I had gained 30lbs back and I can’t run more than a mile or two without having knee problems.
I always told myself that if I had a something to train for, I would work hard enough to be able to complete it. The problem is that I’ve always looked at it from the standpoint of training and I’ve never put the training with the nutrition.
I’ve always looked at eating the right foods as a diet, something that is short term until you loose the weight and once the weight is off you can go back to eating how you want to. I know…..for someone who’s supposedly smart, that’s pretty stupid logic. But, it doesn’t change the fact that I think like that.
They say that first step towards recovery is recognizing that you have a problem.
I have a problem. I eat when I’m stressed. I eat when I’m bored. I eat when I’m tired. I know the types of food that I should eat. The types of food that I could eat that would help me with stress, boredom, tiredness, depression. The kinds of food that I would not feel guilty eating, but just today I went down to the cafeteria, bought two oatmeal cream pies and ate them both. I ate them fast so no one would see me eating them. I ate them fast because deep down I was embarrassed that I was eating them fast to hide the fact that I did eat them. I played hockey this morning though, I burned a lot of calories so it’s okay. I won’t gain weight because I’ve already burned those calories.
I’ve disappointed myself on a regular basis because I hide away somewhere and eat snacks that I should leave alone. I want to loose the weight that I’ve gained back and more, but I haven’t found a way to let the snacks and the junk food go.