You are fat. You’re ugly. You’re stupid. Your eyelashes are too short. Your nose is too large. Your teeth aren’t white enough. Your hair is dull. Your skin is splotchy. You’re a failure. You never do anything right. You aren’t good enough. Does any of this sound familiar? So many of us talk to ourselves like this every single day. But why? Why do we think this is ok?

If you met a child on the street, how would you talk to her? Would you say those things to her? Would you look at that child and say “you are fat, ugly, stupid, worthless?” How do you think that child would feel if you were to say these things to her? How would it impact the way she saw herself, the way she behaved, her ability to love herself?

I gave up, I quit. I was too depressed, too tired. It was too hard. The passion and the drive are gone. I resigned myself to this state of “good enough.” Other people succeed, people in different (easier) circumstances than me but I can settle for this. Just read through my blogs and you can see it – I gave up on trying to lose weight, gave up on meal planning and prep, gave up on a workout routine. I have no fight left in me. Or so I thought.

I haven’t given up. I have fought back against my depression, regained my drive. This is not good enough. I set a goal for myself, set it more than six years ago, and I am not there yet. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times I stumble I will pick myself back up. No matter how life changes, no matter how my circumstances change, I will not quit. Not really. The fire in me never truly dies. It may dwindle to a single glowing ember but it is an ember just waiting – waiting for me to stoke the fire again. I NEVER truly quit.

Regardless of whether I ever considered myself a tough person or a resilient person or a fighter, that is exactly what I am. I will not look at pictures of myself and wonder, “how did I let it slip away?” I will not look at myself in the mirror and chastise myself for getting so close then giving up. This is not a linear journey because life is not linear. For every time I think I quit, there is another time I realize I haven’t quit at all. I just regathered my strength, refocused my intent, navigated some obstacle set before me.

I have realigned. I reloaded the playlist to my most dedicated and successful days in the gym back on my phone. I have cleaned out my gym clothes drawer because when I started this journey I had one sports bra and one pair of sweat pants and one tank top and that was all I needed to succeed. I have revisited the old pre-MyFitnessPal Microsoft Excel spreadsheet I kept to plan and log meals and track my progress, pulling meal ideas and inspiration. I am checking out a gym closer to the office – even if that means paying for two separate gym memberships. I have not quit.  Are you getting this? I HAVE NOT QUIT.

I am not a garbage can. And, yet, I have been filling myself with garbage for months – both literally and figuratively. I am left to wonder, now, if this influx of trash isn’t at least partially responsible for the downturn my mood has taken; for the depression that has left me often apathetic about my health and wellbeing and the world as a whole. I have often heard it said “garbage in, garbage out,” usually in reference to nutritional intake and I believe that to be true in every aspect. Furthermore, I have been consuming more and more garbage as time has gone on.

At the gradual onset of my dejection months ago, I failed to make the connection between what I was consuming in a figurative manner and my mood. At that point, I was eating healthfully and exercising and blaming my emotional state on a lack of progress in my weight loss journey. Now; however, having had time to reflect, I realize my emotions shifted sooner and in response to something totally different: the way I was feeding my environment.

Every day we go into the world and are exposed to a barrage of information: news media, social media, water-cooler conversations in the workplace, etc. and every day we choose what we let in, which conversations we will participate in and how. Being positive, spreading a positive message is important to me – being kind, empathetic and compassionate is who I choose to be, how I choose to participate in the world. Without going off the political deep-end, I will say that maintaining a positive attitude has grown more difficult as the Presidential election has progressed. As a person who describes her political views (and spiritual ones, for that matter) simply as, “be kind and take care of each other,” it has felt like there is no place for me and my type in the world anymore. Sheltering myself from messages of fear, anger and hatred became nearly impossible. Furthermore, I began to react to those messages with my own anger, my own negativity – I was actively engaged in consuming this garbage. Realizing this to some extent, I deactivated my Facebook account in May. While that helped, it did not stop me from continuing to consume this garbage through other sources.

In hindsight, it seems obvious ­­– almost embarrassing how obvious it is – that the sadness I am feeling about the political, social and moral atmosphere of the world would, in turn, began to affect my weight loss efforts. That’s the thing about depression… it is all-encompassing. There is no aspect of your life that isn’t, at some point, going to be touched by it. As heavyheartedness consumed my emotional state, I have struggled to care about anything. Eventually, I stopped caring about weight loss, about healthy eating, about exercise. Now I wasn’t just consuming garbage in my heart and mind; I was consuming it in my body, veering away from our healthy eating habits, calorie counting and meal planning and, instead, indulging in processed foods and frequent sugary espresso drinks. And my weight has begun to creep back up.

Yesterday, after weeks of furiously dropping my two cents on news story comments sections, plunking down each night for a daily dose of The Daily Show and tweeting a hailstorm of remarks pertaining to last week’s debate, I realized that I am not just consuming garbage – I am bingeing on it. My faith in humanity is nearly gone, the only hope I have for the future involves a plan to disappear into the mountains and live off-the-grid. This garbage can is overflowing. It is time I realize that I am not a garbage can.

I will not fill myself with garbage anymore. From this point on, I am focusing not on weight loss or numbers on a scale, numbers on a nutritional label. I am focusing not on negativity in my environment, on hateful or demeaning political candidates and their voters. I am focusing on only the good stuff. We are switching from calorie-specific meal plans to a simpler, more organic and natural way of eating. We will eat balanced and nutritious meals comprised of healthful, whole and organic foods – not processed, packaged convenience foods. We will eat healthy portions, eating until we aren’t hungry rather than eating until we are full. I am changing the way I communicate on Twitter, unfollowing users posting political messages on Instagram and switching from traditional news sites to those focused on reporting good, uplifting and inspiring news stories. We will exercise to feel good, to feel strong and energized but will not mentally flog ourselves when we have an off-day or take a day to rest. There will probably come a day in the future when I return to my calorie-restrictive meal planning and my hardcore workout plans but, for now, I have to focus on getting well in my head, my heart and my body. I have to take the pressure off myself, alleviate the demands of a confining dietary regimen, be gentler with myself regarding my performance and expectations. No more negative garbage coming from my foods, my environment or my own mind. I am not a garbage can.

On July 26, a particularly warm Summer day, I set out for my usual lunchtime walk. I was enjoying the fresh air, sunshine and exercise when pop, stumble: my knee let out an audible, ratcheting pop that unsteadied my step. It wasn’t painful, per say – more simply startling and uncomfortable. A bit later and pop, stumble, it happened again. Three times during that walk, my knee popped. I tried to recall if I’d injured it during the previous day’s workout; after all, we’d done lunges and squats. Maybe that was it. For the next few lunch breaks I’d kept attempting to walk but the popping became more frequent. For the coming weeks, I’d stopped walking but kept working out despite the discomfort. While each pop wasn’t painful, the frequent cracks and clicks would leave my knee tender by evening and a throbbing in the knee occasionally woke me in the middle of the night. I tried to treat it at home with rest, ice and elevation but it wasn’t seeming to improve. Worst of all, it was affecting my workouts. It is bad enough that my depression has sucked all the ambition from my weight loss attempts (my heart wasn’t in it but I was still doing the workouts and the meal plans), but now an injury was taking workouts off the table. Finally, last week I let myself get talked into going to the doctor.

I get very nervous going to doctors. “White Coat Syndrome” kind of nervous. Since losing a large percentage of body fat, it had gotten better – gone were the nagging questions and soul-crushing diagnoses about blood pressure, glucose levels and cholesterol. I’d gotten every medical ailment that maligned me under control through my healthy diet and exercise. But last Tuesday, after a bad day of drinking no water (only four cups of coffee) I found myself with an unexpectedly sudden doctor’s appointment – the doctor could fit me in that afternoon. I rushed out of work and hurried to the doctor’s office in Silicon Valley commute traffic, parched and out of breath. The inevitable happened: my blood pressure tested high. I tried explaining… the coffee, the stress, the dehydration. I tried bargaining… look at my results from my last visit when my blood pressure was fine. It was all to no avail. Kaiser brags heartily in radio ads that 86% of their patients have blood pressure under control and I was NOT going to negatively-impact their precious percentage. Choked-up, teary-eyed and devastated, with few confidence-inspiring answers about my knee, I found myself standing in line at the pharmacy to fill a prescription for Lisinopril (not to mention a future appointment to visit the lab for blood work).

The whole experience has hit me hard. Sitting in the doctor’s office with an injury preventing me from working out, I found myself facing down a dragon I’d slain long ago. While, intellectually, I know I have lowered my blood pressure and improved my health, being put back on blood pressure medication for the first time in more than six years was adding insult to injury. I have not filled this prescription since I was 290 pounds but here I am again.  Aside from requesting a new general physician (which I am doing), I am no more sure how to recover from this emotional injury than I am sure how to recover from my knee issue. I have a physical therapy session tonight to teach me stretches and exercises to help with Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome – even though I’m not convinced that is the problem with my knee after a seemingly periphery examination of the joint. I am hoping to resume exercise soon. I’m not sure when I can resume the pride I’d had in my accomplishments.

I feel I need to say something – after all, it has been nearly a month since my last entry – but I haven’t known what to say. Initially, I took a break from blogging because we went camping. When we returned; however, I remained uninspired and uninspiring. I have been keeping up with meal planning and we are working out three nights a week (more or less) but my heart isn’t in it and I have been struggling mightily with my food addiction.

I have moments when I feel motivation strikes, when I make mental plans to go balls-to-the-wall again but those moments are fleeting and always gone when the time comes to actually get off my duff and do something. I am struggling with exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion but inner-exhaustion. I am tired of meal planning, tired of spending my Sundays meal prepping, tired of giving up my free time in the evenings for workouts. I think about all the people leading “normal” (or what I imagine are normal) lives and I am exhausted from feeling like I have to count every calorie going in, every calorie going out, every moment of movement and exertion and making sure all those numbers add up to numbers being subtracted on the scale. My life feels as if it is ruled by diet and exercise and I know that will never change. So long as I want a healthy body at a healthy body weight, I will have to be ever-vigilant about diet and exercise.

Maybe it is the Libra in me, demanding a balance of the scales, but my mind and heart rail against the seeming-unfairness of it all. While I feel surrounded by healthy-weight people who are free to skip gym days (or never go to the gym), free to indulge on the weekends, I am tethered to the demands of a calorie-restricted lifestyle. Sure, I could say, “*&$% it all” and accept myself at my current size, a larger size. A lot of people do that and that’s great. All I have ever wanted for anyone is to be what they feel is the best possible version of themselves, for them to love themselves. But this is not the best possible version of me. So long as I struggle to hike, climb, run, scale flights of stairs; so long as I experience any physical limitations due to my size or weight; I am not the version of myself I want to be. So… diet and exercise.

I want to stamp my feet and throw a tantrum, screaming “it’s not fair!” but I know I’ve done this to myself. Here is where I fall farther down the rabbit hole. I hold myself responsible for the situation I am in – and rightly so (nobody force fed me until I was 290 pounds). But being accountable shifts to blame and blame is a concept with a far more negative connotation. I blame myself, I get angry with myself, I punish myself mentally and physically (with food) then I feel sorry for myself and soothe my anger and sorrow with more food. Then I regain weight and the blame-anger-sorrow cycle starts anew. I know I need to forgive myself, to love myself and to go about my healthy lifestyle with love, compassion and empathy for myself. At the end of the day, THAT is the struggle now. That is where I have gone so terribly off-course. Self-love and compassion, at this point in the cycle, are empty words – lip service. I am simply feeling nothing towards myself right now but anger, frustration and impatience. Until I can truly love myself again, forgive myself for my history and treat my body with kindness coming from a place of compassion and not punishment, I’m just going through the motions of healthy diet and exercise. That, I’m afraid, is uninspired and uninspiring.

I haven’t got much to say this week but I refuse to let this blog fall the wayside, cease to be a priority. I have continued to struggle with mild depression, making it difficult to stay on-track with my meal plans – the desire to soothe difficult emotions with food persists and is strong. That combined with missing cardio sessions in order to watch the Democratic National Convention this past week cost me my chance at reaching Onederland last week. Rather than feign optimism or try to pump myself up, I am simply trying to maintain the course and work through my feelings. I may get to Onderland this week, I may have to wait until we return from our planned camping trip. The most important thing right now is my emotional wellbeing and coping with that little black raincloud following me around. I have to shift my focus to my inner-health and do my best to not let my physical health backslide in the meantime.

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WEEK TWELVE CHECK-IN
Weight: 202.4 (.8 pounds gained this week, 12.6 pounds lost total)