Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I have continued to track my daily weight and average it for the past month, in spite of wishing that April would just die a horrible death and be done with it. I am an emotional eater, and I do pretty well when my stress level rides between 60% and 80%, but I have not yet built up alternative coping mechanisms for when my stress skyrockets past that point. This month:

1. I have faced the possibility of breaking up.
   
2. I have traveled to my parents’ house for a visit.
   
3. I have gotten behind on work to a degree proportional to the visit home.
   
4. I have attended more than a dozen job interviews.
   
5. I have survived a serious health scare.
   
6. I have managed my family’s feelings about a gay brother who just came out.
   
7. I have learned that my current roommate will be moving out and, without a definitive answer about jobs or locations, I am back in the business of finding a new roommate.
   
8. I have hospitalized 2 of my clients for suicidal threats.
   
9. I have braved some serious financial difficulties.
   
10. I have begun to consider serious future plans, including PhD applications, licensure, and moving. A big move. Like, a state-to-state move. Again.

Ironically, we could have stopped at number one and still capped out my 80% stress threshold, so you can see where things got out of whack for me.

Part of this whole project is about getting to know and understand my body better. How does she respond to illness? To stress? To happiness? What happens to her during my monthly cycle? How does she respond when I have good days or bad days?¹

Here’s what I’m learning.

• My body’s “natural” weight when I’m bingeing is around 340 pounds.
  
• My body’s “natural weight” when I’m not bingeing (but not really restricting my food and not exercising) is around 315 pounds.
  
• My body (or my mind? or both?) has some sort of plateau around 300 pounds that is hard to break through.
  
• My body does not seem to respond well to sugars, due in large part to the diagnosis of PCOS that I’ve had for over a decade.
  
• My body gains around 3-5 pounds each month during pms, then releases it plus a few more pounds if I can more or less stay on track throughout.

As a final thought, I’ll mention that the late-blooming orchid is still full of billowy flowers, which show no sign of so much as wilting. In the meantime, another of the orchids from the front window is sending out an arm full of buds.

This metaphor — of starting over with fresh starts and building on previous lessons in the meantime — is not lost on me.

1. By this, I mean emotionally good/bad days, and not good/bad eating days, since I don’t assign value judgments to foods. [↩]