My road to recovery

Had to muster up some courage to write this down.

I started out as a fat kid, weighing in at 225 pounds and a height of 5 foot 8. I used eat a ton of food. Mostly unhealthy deep fried stuff. I worked the graveyard shift which meant snacking late night on fries just to keep myself awake.

I would have probably continued the same habits, but one day one of my co-worker taunted me on my eating habits and quoted "I should be ashamed of myself" This feel into the ears of the people around and this is when the fall into the rabbit hole began.

I signed up to the gym and began my journey to slim down. The initial few months were good, I began with light cardio and weights working different muscle groups.
I ate right, eliminated the late night fries. I started reducing weight. In the first 2 months I dropped down to 94 Kgs. This inspired me even more. I started working out more. My sessions went from 45 minutes to an hour and half. By the 4th month. I was around 88 Kilos.

Then the worst happened, carb phobia. I eliminated potatoes, completely, until my recovery. Bread was out, anything from flour was out. I kept saying to myself, "hey maybe I am just doing keto", but deep inside, I knew I wasn't. I ate less as the day progressed. From 2300Kcal a day I dropped to 1400 by end of my 6th month. I weight around 80Kilos.

Things did not get better, I started running 12 Km a day, my Gym extended to 2.5 hours. I barely did any weights and I barely ate any food. With my work timings, I never had breakfast, I trained fasted state and ate just a chicken salad post workout. I did not eat anything until dinner. Dinner was an apple or two and a glass of skim milk.

So yeah, I started to eat less than 1000Cals a day, welcome eating disorder. This went on for a month and then the cravings began. By this time I had dropped down to 70 Kilos. Then I started to restrict on weekdays and making up for it on weekends where I used to binge for 2 days. Then feel guilty about it and purge. This went on for few weeks and then I realized that purging is not the right thing to do. So instead of purging in the toilet, I started purging with cardio. I started with 2.5 to 3 hours of runs. Used stairs wherever possible, Went on a fat burner. By the end of month 10ish, I had dropped all the way down to 56 Kilos.

I was nothing buy bones on my shoulders and chest. I was weak, had no energy to continue to run (Ran 1000Km under 78 days) depressed, irritated, whatever you could think of. I wanted to eat so many things but was afraid I would gain weight. I did not want to tell my family about this, because the place where I come from, people with ED are treated differently.

But then, something good happened, I read a post online where someone spoke about their ED recovery, where they ate a little of everything daily to overcome the urge to binge.

Of course, I could not shoot up from my sub 700 calorie diet to my normal 2300 Cals a day diet. I had to take one step at a time. I went out and hauled in some ice creams, some cookies some chips. I ate a good lunch and a scoop of ice cream. I took a cookie to work and ate it, I had dinner and another scoop of ice cream.
I felt happy, I did this for another day, and then another and then for the week. I was happy on the next Monday because I did not binge over the weekend.

Then something even great happened. I quit my job and joined a new one which was an early morning shift. This is when my recovery began. For the first day after an year, I had breakfast, I couldn't stuff a lot of course, I ate some egg whites, had some oats. I felt great, I had lunch and then hit the gym. I gave up on my insane cardio routine. I started only lifts. I supplemented with protein shakes, and some good dinner with dessert. Things went great.

As of today, I am not completely there yet, but I have made significant progress. I am not afraid of potatoes anymore, heh! And I eat them often.

What my ED recovery taught me:
I do not follow a diet anymore.
I eat when I am hungry and I eat what I crave
I don't restrict any food types.
I socialized more to overcome my ED. I went out with people and ate all the things I missed out over the last year
Life is too short to restrict yourself. Like my father said, eat what you want, you only get to live once. Don't be a 50 year old and look back on the things that you missed.

Currently, I eat around 1900 Cals a day. Keep my cardio to 2 days (20 mins session each) only. Incorporate heavy lifting sessions.
I weight now around 68 kilos. Got some fat around my belly, but I don't care anymore. I lost plenty and I can live with that.

Hope this helps someone out there.


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