Saturday, July 14, 2012

I want to be a blogger again.

Well well well, she returns. Who am I today, you ask?

Actually, that's what I ask myself on a daily basis. Since the last time I wrote in this blog, I've gone raw. It started with an attempt to lose weight, since I remember last time I did the raw thing, weight just flew off me. I started off not just making green smoothies but making my favorite recipes that I mentally amassed on a list that should've been entitled "the highest fat recipes Lori has made -- raw style." I pulled out all my Ani Phyo books and got going with cashew everything. Kale chips, nut pates and spreads, blended raw soups with avocado, raw hummus with lovely olive oil. Two weeks later... I was fatter. And still not feeling great. I know my energy was supposed to skyrocket and my skin was supposed to glisten and glow, and those things did not come to fruition. Pun intended, but only to me, who knows where this is going. I knew that this was not right and I needed to do it right.

Eventually, I stumbled back upon 80/10/10, a "diet" that my friend Tom from high school avidly (at least at one point) followed and raved about. He would tweet and 'book about eating ten bananas and feeling amazing, not gaining weight but gaining energy to fuel his runs. In typical fashion, I ravenously read all materials involved in raw veganism of the 80/10/10 variety. It truly made, and still makes sense to me, and I'd encourage every single person who might stumble upon this blog to read the crap out of it. It's how we humans are naturally supposed to feed our bodies and goes in to precisely why this is.

80/10/10 made me (maybe literally) smack myself in the forehead. We are not supposed to eat avocado after avocado or need to replenish our cashew supply every three days. Fat is fat (ish...read the book), and too much is too much. 80/10/10 was the way I would clean my body from the inside out and would ultimately be the way that I can eat and stay thin and have energy and be happy. Still, this is all I want in the end. It just so happens that in our society and in my eating disorder-riddled life, happy equates to feeling good about the way I look first and then feeling good about other stuff later.

The diet, or lifestyle, has been a struggle. At the top of the list is eating a lot. For one, I love to eat. I became anorexic because I loved to eat so much that it made me slightly fatter than my friends that I felt the need to not eat anymore and get skinny. When finally given the allowance to eat tons of fruit, I was thrilled. The gurus on 30bananasaday say you can't get fat on fruit. Your body burns the carbs off  via dietary thermogenesis. It's science! What I cleverly did not let register was that if you have a calorie-restricting past, of course you will gain weight when you're eating thousands upon thousands of calories for the first time since god knows when. I started eating minimally when my stomach would just. not. fit. 10 bananas. But once I started cramming them down, I learned that hey, I do feel a little better eating more. Oddly enough it's usually the next day AFTER cramming em in that I feel better.

Lately, I've felt that I've required a lot more calories to feel good that next day. Working long 12-hour days has been breezier and I'm more chatty with my patients, adding new exercises left and right, being more on top of my paperwork and feeling less I-hate-life and more I-like-raw. I've also not been eating enough a lot of days and feeling depressed and lethargic. This is not with 1500 calories.. it's with more like 2500-3000. One day when all I ate was like seven massive blender-filled smoothies of bananas, the next day ended up being SUPERB. Where does this leave me? FATTER. They say it will take a year for me to end up at a weight I am healthy and happy at and for my body to adapt to eating more, but I should continue to pack in the calories in order to fuel my active, healthy lifestyle and get the nutrients I need. Funny thing is, I truly still do believe this. But I am always full, in a kinda depressing place in my life which I'm trying to turn around (per usual), and fairly inactive, and I'm getting down about being fatter. I also feel like I'm losing touch with my hunger signals.

New plan...listen to body, still eat a decent amount, see how this week goes. I'm off from work and have seriously minimal obligations. If I'm under-carbed and lethargic, I will watch movies and eat a lot. Funny enough, the only way I was able to get out of the house and make this blog comeback was to drive to Barnes & Noble, get an iced coffee which I painstakingly gave up, and seriously cheat. Tomorrow's a new day. No baked potato, dulse (read: salt), no caffeine. By the end of this week, I want to be tan, exercised, happier, and maybe slightly slightly less fat. Or less concerned about fat and more concerned about "getting the calories and carbs I need to fuel my healthy active lifestyle."

This was LONG and I didn't even address all the points I wanted to, but I'm glad I'm back.


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