She Became A Butterfly...

Okay so maybe I'm not at the point where I could be considered a butterfly, but I'm working my way there.  I wanted to share this quote because I happened to come across it looking for another quote and I just really love it because I find it, personally, very relatable.  I feel like I've gone through a lot of darkness with my depression and eating disorders and all the other "fun" stuff life has thrown at me and I feel like I'm finally coming out of that darkness.  I just thought it was a really beautiful quote.

So one thing I wanted to mention really quickly that I realized I really didn't get into in my last post was my eating disorders.  People generally figure that those who are overweight are overweight because they're pigs and eat too much.  In my case, that's true because I have a binge eating disorder.  Basically what it means is that I overeat a lot even when I'm not hungry and I feel like absolute crap afterward, both physically and emotionally.  It was because of this that I also started purging.  While that hasn't been as big an issue for me as the binge eating, it's still really unhealthy.  But I've been doing way better with it since I started eating more regular meals which I think is awesome.  I haven't purged in at least a couple months and when I have the urge to eat, I'm going to shoot to grab something healthy.

I had that issue last night.  My best friend and I went out to dinner and had a good sized dinner plus dessert, but after he left, I still wanted to eat something.  I honestly was not hungry at all, but I wanted food.  So I had some grapes which turned out to be rather sour and pretty much put me off food for the rest of the night.  Not exactly what I had in mind, but it worked and I was pleased that I hadn't either gone out and picked something up or rummaged through the house for something unhealthy.

The hardest part with the food is just battling the bad habits I've built up over the years.  I'll be driving around and see a Dion's and think, Oooh, a pizza sounds amazing right now!  Or I'll pass a Dairy Queen and think of how good a Blizzard sounds.  And then I try to rationalize with myself that, oh, I haven't had thus and such in several weeks and now I can't have it so I should get it as a last meal, kind of thing.  I've been really struggling with that, but so far I've only had one slip up.  More on that in a bit.  It's a daily battle, but I'm finding that overall I'm doing pretty well.

Repeat Everyday

Two years.  It has been almost exactly two years since I abandoned this blog and basically gave up on ever losing weight.  It's honestly been a rough couple of years.  I quit my job at the bank very shortly after my last blog post because I hated it so much.  In October of 2014 I ended up attending Extreme Weight Loss Destination Boot Camp up in Denver, Colorado for a week.  We were given meal plans, recipes, exercise plans, and a whole lot of other really great info.  I met some really awesome people, but honestly found it a little hard to connect because there really wasn't anyone else there my age.  When I got back home, I really tried to make things work, but I really didn't enjoy a lot of the food which I felt lacked flavor and could take quite a while to prepare.  So I soon fell off the wagon and returned to my old habits.

At that point I basically stopped caring about my weight and resigned myself to being overweight.  I tried going back to UNM in the spring of 2015, but ended up having to drop all but one class because I was failing them all.  I started a new job in March of last year working for at a dry cleaners.  I've been there for a little over a year now.  I continued to struggle with severe depression to the point that I was suicidal and cutting again.  The binge eating and bulimia also continued and my weight spiked again back up into the 320's.

And that brings us to the present.  I returned to college this past spring at my local community college and for the first time since graduating high school, I was actually very successful.  I passed all five of my classes with straight A's and really enjoyed myself.  I found that I was a much happier person and I think I went through a lot of mental and emotional changes.  I stopped getting so down on myself and stopped caring so much what people think of me.  There are a lot of days that I look in the mirror and think, Hey, looking good, girl!  I'm not stupid, I know that I'm still morbidly obese, I know that by society's standards I look like crap, but I'm learning to be comfortable in my own body, to put more stock in the words of those who love me than those who don't.  Honestly, if someone started talking bad about me, rather than getting depressed and feeling worthless now, I'd be more inclined to flip them off and tell them to shut up.  Um, just to be clear, I don't go around flipping people off, but in that situation, it would be very tempting.  If I was a better person, I would ignore them and move along, but I'm really bad at being passive and ignoring things that piss me off.  As my best friend recently commented, I'm not an indecisive or passive person at all.  I can be very passionate which means that sometimes I react or say things without thinking it through.  Something else to work at, I guess...