The Battle of the Mind

You know, I once had a doctor tell me I was fat. Well, not directly, but close enough. I knew what she meant. I had gone in for a physical, and she asked me lots of questions about how much exercise I got and such. Even though I wasn't that coordinated or that good at sports, I was still fairly active. At the time I was babysitting a little boy during the summers, and I would always bike to his home. In fact, most days I would get out and ride my bike around for hours. I knew those neighborhoods literally like the back of my hands. I could tell you how to get to every single park nearby, and I often walked to those, too. I loved being outside. Still do, in fact. Anyway, before I left that doctor's visit, the doctor gave me a pedometer and told me I should walk something like 4000 steps a day, around two miles or so.

That's easy, I thought. It will be just like a game!

I would wear this thing everywhere, just to see how many steps I could get. I would walk around the house, around school, during babysitting. It did become somewhat of a game to see how many steps I would take. During those long hours of babysitting when the boy I watched went to play with the neighbor kid, I would jump around and such during commercials on TV.

Hm...maybe this is why I can't sit still for very long now. I get anxiety after an hour. Long car rides and TV/movie marathons are now almost out of the question. I need to move. I think I fear that if I sit too long, I will get fat. Silly, I know, but definitely with a hint of truth in it.

Now I've somewhat adapted to this anxiety, allowing myself some time to get up and stretch, especially during long car rides or meetings. However, I know I also tend to compensate with food--that is, not eating much of it. At the time, it became a battle in the mind. "If I eat _______ (fill in the blank)," I would think, "Then I will get fat. I have to move so much in order to burn it off." I would think like that all the time. I became obsessed with comparing how many calories I ate with how I many I burned at the gym. It was all I could think about. I remember in high school wiggling my feet in class to burn off random small amounts of calories. I had read somewhere about wiggling during that day could burn around 300 calories, and I figured, if I wanted to lose weight, then I had to do it. Consuming food and burning calories. Consuming and burning. If I consumed less and burned more, I will loose weight. This was my thinking. It was all I really thought about, and I thought about it all the time. Consuming and burning. It overcame my thoughts, making it hard some days to focus on other things. All I could think about was that I was fat and that I had to eat less and exercise more.

I admit, being a nutritional science major, there is some truth behind all of this. That was Satan's tool: take a bit of truth and exaggerate it to use it against you. Yes, if I eat less and exercise more, scientifically, I should lose weight (ignoring the many other factors involved in metabolism), but the way I was going about it was what damaged me. I disregarded the fact that I was a growing girl, that the body does need a certain amount of calories to function properly. Whenever I tried to tell myself that eating this one thing would not turn me into the size of a killer whale, my mind would fight itself. One side tells me it's ok, the other side telling me lies. This escalated
into anxiety, and sometimes I just couldn't decide what to eat, or if I should, so I just didn't.

I lost 40 pounds within a relatively short amount of time. By looking at me, you couldn't tell I was anorexic or had an eating disorder. I wasn't underweight yet because I was still a bit pudgy. However, looking at the pattern I was going in, my mom and even my doctor started to get worried. Instead of her telling me that I needed to lose weight, she was asking me how I was doing it. I didn't tell her that I wasn't eating much. In my eyes, I was still eating normal-sized helpings, just more fruits and vegetables (less calories, remember?).

What kind of snapped me out of it, at least for a little while, was my mom once talking to me, telling me that, if things got worse, people would investigate the situation. I would be monitored, and my parents would be questioned as well. I didn't really fear for myself, but I didn't want my parents to get into trouble. I loved them, and I could feel their love through all of this. I think it was them that helped me not go extreme with things. They knew I was a daughter of God and precious, no matter what size.

Unfortunately it is a lesson I'm still learning.

As I said, this moment kind of snapped me out of things, but not completely...