Stormy weather

Hi Friends. Sorry for the lack of posts over the last week. The title of this post is correct in two ways - the weather in the UK is indeed stormy today with heavy rain, galeforce winds and flooding in many places. It hardly seemed to get light today and was totally dark by 4.30pm. So a bit of a non-day really. I'm just very lucky that I'm not in danger of flooding at all being on slightly higher ground. I would be living in terror otherwise. The river this week has looked quite swollen already without all this rain today. I do worry about the roof leaking though. It makes me feel quite vulnerable.

The first few years I lived here the whole roof would sway in a high wind. Then some work was done to strengthen it and it's been fine since then. The property is Georgian so about 250 years old and I often feel it's as solid as cardboard! The method of building in this part of the country at that time was just to use a load of rubble and skim some stucco over the top to make it look smooth and posh. I have seen the truth of this myself when surrounding houses have needed to have the stucco replaced and so have it all chipped off to reveal the rubble underneath. It's slightly worrying ...

The other stormy weather is in my head. As issue has come up over the last week and really slapped me round the chops. And for once it's not something to do with my weight. Which is a relief in a way. The issue is not something I can discuss on my blog which is really tough because I'd love your opinion on it. I know you would have some great ideas. As it is I have not been able to speak to anyone about it so far. I have just been driving myself almost mad in my own head. It has been hell.

I have feared that I was having another breakdown. That is how much it has shaken me up. It may even have happened. I don't know right now.

I have been very shaky in a way which is totally different to depression. I have had some very distressing thoughts and a bucketload of anxiety. All the worry and upsetting thoughts have actually made me feel physically ill. I have struggled to find a level place in my head.

Sometimes the only way to escape all of this is to move to a completely different place in my own head. Ie almost become a different person. Not that I do that deliberately. It just happens sometimes.

Today I felt lonely. I wanted to be with other people because I need that support. I still haven't been able to go healing at the library. My goal is to get there some time before Christmas.

I was due to see my healer the coming Monday but she texted to say she is unable because she's visiting her mother in Cambridge. I think I really needed to see her. It will have to be the Monday after that instead.

The aforementioned issue is tied up with The Future and how I will survive then and what I will be able to do. I know your immediate reaction to this will be to concentrate on the here and now and leave the future until I get there. But this issue means I DO need to think about it now and plan out what I'm going to do.

But what can I do? Will I be able to work ever again? In the last 3 years I have been unable even to do 1 hour a week voluntary work let alone anything else. Of course I want desperately to be able to work. I cannot have a normal life unless I can work. But the reality is that I will certainly never work full time again and even part time work will be incredibly difficult. I just get stressed so easily.

But without being able to work I have no future at all that I can see.

I am so worried about my future prospects. In a way it is a good sign that I can even think about this stuff because over the last few years I haven't been able to do that. But now I am in a crunch position over it so I have no choice. And I'm not handling it well.

Chances are I will just end up more ill.

With my weight I have almost accepted that I'm just going to be a seriously mentally ill person shuffling around town (when I'm able to get there lol) with undyed, unkempt hair, wearing glasses and looking fat, greasy and spotty. So attractive! But I don't have the mental or physical strength to do any better at the moment. And that is if I can even get into town ...

My eating is less than it was due to my blood sugar being better from all the walking I have done. I've only managed 2 walks so far this week but I did 5 long walks a week the previous two weeks. But I am still eating too much.

Often in my life when everything has seemed over whelming and out of my control I have decided "OK I can't fix all that but at least I can be thin", and then proceeded to do what was necessary in adjustment of food intake and getting some exercise to achieve that. It isn't going that way at this time. I wish it would because at least I would be achieving on some level.

I don't know how I am actually holding it together at the moment. "Only just". I have been in a battle for psychological survival the last week. I don't know what the outcome will be. I need to find a solution to the problem.

Sorry about the shabbiness of this post ...

A Bad Day

I went out early today to do my shopping - and didn't find it too difficult to get out or be out. When the agoraphobia isn't 100% full on, I can manage very early, before most other people are around, or very late. It's just the 12 hours in between that I have the problem with.

Anyway, I've been so worried recently about not getting out and continually running out of food, that I made sure I wouldn't run out in the near future by buying loads and loads and loads. I think you can probably already imagine the rest before I tell you ...

A lot of bloggers complain that they are good all day and then binge in the evening. But I'd say although it's bad to binge any time of the day or night it's much worse to binge first thing in the morning because then your blood sugar is kaput for the whole day.

And yes Chris I do that multiple slices of toast with sugar free jam thing too. So I'm typing with jammy fingers. My laptop will suffer a certain amount of crumb infiltration if I'm not careful now ...

Just searched for "adult education (my town)" and came up with

"Naughty (my town) Wifes [sic]

Husband Out For Work: You In For

Naughty Pleasure. Join For Free"

Is that educational? Sadly I'm not married.

Anyway, why the binge? A certain amount of domestic stress - I won't go into the details. This is really annoying; that any even fairly medium sized stressor can set off the bingeing. I've only had about 3 hours of sleep each of the last two nights which is a very bad sign in retrospect.

The only good I can draw from this is that most of the food I've been eating is not of the fatty and/or sugary variety. The one or two items of fatty food that I did have provided no "hit" for me. I was surprised that I didn't really enjoy them. This is due to breaking the fatty food addiction with orlistat. I ate the fatty and sugary things first of course and then threw about half back up and took orlistat for what was left to ensure that addiction didn't take hold again. But I still have a bad carb thing going on.

For the rest of the day I've been compulsively eating (without any vomiting) low fat carbs - multiple bowls of muesli, bananas, dates, sandwiches, large quantities of crumpets and toast with half fat soft cheese and all fruit spread ... Definitely better than the stuff I was eating in the previous bingeing weeks. But still way way way too much; leading to several hours this afternoon of scary severe stomach pain followed by near diarrhea.

With the physical consequences of this behaviour being so bad - not forgetting of course the obvious weight gain - it just hammers it home yet again that this is a mental illness. My body definitely doesn't want me to do all this to it. Yet at the time it was the only way of dealing with my stress, anxiety and depression. I did consider taking a tranquilizer - I have a few left over from some dental treatment I had last year - but it didn't appeal. Would have probably been the better thing to do though I'm thinking now.

The previous evening I had dealt with the stress by drinking alcohol. Better than eating and don't worry I'm in no danger of being an alcoholic - I can't tolerate very much alcohol at all. I only had about 3 units worth. I did consider - at least I was considering the other options to eating I'm thinking now - I did consider having a drink this morning but couldn't do it. My body just doesn't like alcohol that much. But then it doesn't like vast quantities of food that much either lol!

Hopefully, as the stressor has now receded, I will calm down in the next few days and manage to reduce my food intake to where it was. I had hoped to get back to my diet this week, but as I have to cut down gradually I can't see myself getting there until next week now which is really pissing me off.

All I can do is try to stay calm and keep going....

Tough weekend

Today my mood is totally different to my jubilation on Friday. It has been a tough weekend. I feel like what happened on Friday was almost supernatural. Like not me at all. That I was very guided to doing what I did. I'm sure I felt so good because I was sent a lot of healing that day. The people who give the healing are so good to me. Someone always send me healing on Friday morning to help me get there. And on the rare occasions when I don't turn up they always send me plenty of healing.

It was a brilliant day, both for eating, being able to ignore my hunger and feel OK about it, and for the fact that I now have a totally useable, ultra clean fridge and freezer!

But obviously eating so eating much less for one day was bound to have a knock on effect. The carb monster has been on me ever since then. I tried to hold off but I couldn't. I was back to the 6 bowls of Readybrek on Saturday.

Friday made me realise how much this thing is in my head. That when I'm in the right place in my head I can control my eating - ignoring my hunger, making good decisions, and using tablets to help control cravings if necessary. Chris said something very insightful in her Thurs comment - that my agoraphobia is probably so bad because I am trying to tackle my eating problems. I think this is true. I'm seeing how much I have been "self medicating" with food; eating to cover my depression and anxiety.

When I'm in bingeing mode, every time I feel bad, I eat to feel better. Feeling bad emotionally is the prompt that tells me it's time to eat. I treat that feeling as though it's hunger. And this pattern is so difficult to get out of. Because when I feel bad I have no response to that if I'm not using food as my way of dealing with it. Hence I have been crying and feeling down and depressed the last couple of days. Grimness.

I have on previous occasions been through this pain when "coming off food", and it involves lots and lots of crying. I suppose, as with all addictions, this is a withdrawal effect. It seems to be especially bad in the first 2 weeks, and up to 4 weeks after "giving up" food. This tells me that it doesn't go on forever. It is only a few weeks. But I don't think I can deal with it at the moment. It's too much.

I've considered if I should try taking anti-depressants (ADs) so that I am dealing with the depression that way. But this would be a difficult path for many reasons. Firstly that ADs take 2-4 weeks to get working so I would have had to start them a while ago. If I had fully cottoned on to what was going on here, I could have looked at that way of dealing with it. But I wasn't so clearly aware as I am now. The awareness has come from writing all this down. I have never written or spoken about this stuff before hardly at all. Let alone just letting it all hang out here!

I could've spoken or written about it before but I've always been scared to do that because when I've attempted it, it's only made the problem worse. Just as adverts for food, recipes or articles in magazines, seeing people eat on TV etc can set me off bingeing, then talking about it always seemed to be an immediate trigger. It brought it to the front of my mind, like full on danger, red light flashing, total terror. So I shutdown that possibility. I couldn't cope with it. It was just too dangerous to talk about.

I'm not saying I could talk about it now - I don't know at the moment. But writing about it and even more importantly, reading other people's experiences, has really started to get all this in perspective for me. Provided a safe way for me to think about it. In fact I've thought about very little else recently.

So this is the power of blogging!!!

It's not just the reading, but also the suggestions make me think about why for example I can't buy my shopping over the internet and get it delivered as Chris suggested. I have, of course, sometimes thought about this. But now I really have to think about it because I want to give a response back when someone has taken time to think about my situation and make suggestions and write a comment. Whereas when it's just in my head, I can let it go. When I am not accountable to anyone else - (and lots of people have written about setting up a weight loss blog to be accountable) - then those thoughts can just be left, can drift away. But now I have to think, "Why can't I allow myself to have some shopping delivered?" Is it because that would be making things too easy for myself? Is it just because I haven't done it before? Is it because the cost of about 5 pounds to have it delivered seems ridiculous when there are shops just round the corner? Or is it because I'm not worth the 5 pounds? I'll let you know when I work it out.

Back to the issue of ADs. I have tried them before but the side effects were always really bad. I couldn't tolerate any SSRIs - like prozac or citalopram. I was on the tricyclic AD Lofepramine for 3 1/2 yrs but gave it up end 2005 as the side effects became too overwhelming. Tricyclic ADs are very toxic. The strain on my kidneys (which took 6 months to return to normal after stopping them), the low blood pressure coupled with low blood sugar totally ground me down the whole time. My hair went prematurely grey because of those tablets (kidney function problems). So in the end I didn't have much choice. Also tricylclics cause weight gain. I was my highest ever weight on Lofepramine. So not what I want in that respect either.

I am taking 5-HTP tablets at the moment - one a day last week and now I've started taking 2 a day. It's a nutritional supplement which is converted by the body into serotonin - the neurotransmitter that ADs seek to potentialise. Works much quicker than ADs - you feel the effects from the second day. When I stop taking it I will cry for a day or two. But the withdrawal is no longer than that, so much better than ADs. And there are no physical side effects. It's gently supportive and makes you care a lot less about things. But it doesn't of course make you feel happy. I'm going to keep on with it even though it doesn't offer anything near total protection from the overwhelming crushing pain of food withdrawal. But I have only stepped up the dose on Friday evening and maybe it would be worse than it has been without it. I've known days in this situation that were much much much worse than yesterday or today. This, in comparison, is low level pain, like an ache that's always there with regular but fairly brief periods of crying and piercing pain. Not full on curled up in an armchair with my head in my hands crying and crying and crying all day every day. So maybe it is working as much as it can. Maybe I should step up to 3 tablets a day? I am worried about the withdrawal from that of taking so much, but I would have to reduce one tablet at a time. Just as if I was coming off ADs. More important to stamp on this eating thing now than worry about that.

I am also taking rhodiola, a herbal supplement. Said to help make serotonin and dopamine (neurotransmitters) more available in the brain so making you feel better. I thought it would go well with the 5-HTP. It is also said to help with recovery from physical exertion - I've been taking it for the last couple of weeks now and maybe this is the reason why I have suffered no physical problems when I have had a sudden, unusual level of exercise ie comparatively long period of time walking. Problems like swelling of knees, aching of muscles in legs and bottom, aching knees or joints anywhere. I found this really surprising.

The above is what I knew when I started taking it. But I've just read how this herb also has an effect on opioid peptides. I mentioned in my first ever post how eating fatty/ sugary foods creates opioids in areas of the brain linked to this behaviour (see link to research in that post). So maybe this might offer some support there too. Rhodiola is an "adaptogen" which helps both mind and body deal with stress and return to normal functioning. It has also been implicated in helping prevent weight gain due to stress - but the experiments involve rats not humans! Still, I'm hoping it will help.

Jonathan Cainer says for Monday, "Better a little bearable pain today than a lot of regret tomorrow". Sadly the pain isn't little or bearable. But in taking these tablets I suppose I'm trying to make it less painful than it otherwise might be.

I still don't know if I can put myself through all this... But I don't think there's an alternative.