Body Positive

Common weight loss advice will tell you to restrict your calories and exercise to lose weight. If weight loss is your goal this is actually sound to some extent in the fact that you’re going to be making your overall deficits lower.

BUT:

If you’re serious about fitness beyond weight loss and want to be fit for just the health benefits/not being out of breath/whatever, it’s a bad idea to restrict and exercise because it’s going to make exercise really, really suck. 

Dieting saps your energy level. Exercise requires MORE energy from you. How does the combo even make sense?

Also, dieting slows down your metabolism progressively as you restrict and lose weight. The boost in metabolism for exercise is NOT enough to make up for that and in fact might even make it worse (trust me).

At the worst restricting period in my eating disorder I was exercising over an hour a day and eating a ridiculously small amount and losing almost nothing because my body was starving (was not underweight either). And exercise was absolutely pure torture trying to burn off energy that my body physically didn’t have. It exhausted me, my body ached constantly, my periods stopped. It was horrible.

Now that I’m recovered I love to exercise. And I make sure to keep my eating up because i definitely notice my dip in energy level during exercise when I don’t.

Exercise is no longer a punishment or something I HAVE to do. It’s something I chose to do, in moderation, to make myself feel good. To anyone with fitness goals I urge you to do the same. It will make you a lot happier, feel a lot better, and help you stick with exercise in the long run. Zap those associations of exercise with fatigue and pain and all those things that burn you out and learn to build associations with pleasure and increased energy and strength.

I’ve officially been in recovery for my eating disorder for almost 2 years and completely symptom free (no binging, no purging, no restriction, none of it) for 1 year today!!

One day I’ll post my story if people are interested. How to tell it all without being a complete tl;dr (maybe post it in segments?) and not too triggering is a challenge. It’s been a whirl-wind though. I spent ages 12 to almost 20 completely controlled, often miserable and depressed, and near the final stages completely lost productive functioning. And now? My life is far from perfect but overcoming this has given me a lot of confidence and hope I never had before. I will be graduating with my bachelor’s in december and looking forward to a happy and healthy future.

virtutethecat:

TW for diet talk.

When someone is fat, all of a sudden foods have too much fat/sugar for them, no matter how healthy the food is.

“Oh! Don’t eat bananas! Those are SO high in sugar!”

“Nuts are okay, but they have a lot of fat and that’s very unhealthy!”

“Avocados are pretty much 100% fat, don’t eat them!!”

No, fuck you. I will eat all of these things and whatever else I want.

So true.The double standard is incredible.

See a family where everyone’s thin eating at mcdonalds/dairy queen, etc.? Aww how sweet. See a family where one or more members are fat eating at the same restaurants? OMG HOW DARE THEY/POOR MODELING/CHILD ABUSE/BLATANT DISREGARD FOR HEALTH, etc. 

1. Fat people (or anyone who isn’t the “ideal body weight”) are told since they are fat, they are eating too much. They are expected to go on a diet until their weight reaches societally expected ideal weight.

2. Diets typically involve severe calorie restriction, often several hundred or even more below the person’s natural required intake.

3. The caloric deficits involved in dieting create both a physiological and psychological reaction in the body and in the brain to correct for the fact that it’s starving. This can be manifested in the the urge to overeat or binge.

4. Binge urges often focus on food that is calorically dense and high in fat and/or sugar. This makes sense, ‘cause a starving body wants the nutrition it’s been desperately deprived of as fast as possible, especially if those foods haven’t been allowed on the current restricted diet plan.

5. The person who binges does not see it as a physiological reaction but one of personal moral failing (“This is why I’m fat, I have no self control, look at what I’ve done). They may end the binge with a resolve to have more self control next time and create even more stringent eating standards for themselves. 

6. Either this cycle repeats itself (sometimes for months, years, decades…) causing the person to gain and lose over and over again, sometimes gaining higher each time, the person develops into even further severely disordered behavior (morphing into bulimia or Binge Eating Disorder), or they decide to cease dieting.

7. The phenomenon of this reactance-based overeating or binge eating reinforces societal beliefs that fat people eat too much and don’t know how to moderate their eating, when in reality the diet itself is what caused this stray.

This is why it is absolutely fucked up to recommend dieting to people with high BMIs or BED: It does nothing useful in the long run and might do psychological harm to the person in the process. Treat physical and mental health issues (when people have them) not body weight!

(Note: I know it’s not this cyclical or severe for absolutely everyone (not everyone who does or quits a diet ends up binging in the process), and certainly not all EDs involve binge-components. However, the literature on restrained eating and eating disorders support this trend pretty well.)