Dealing with failure and overcoming it

What is failure? What is it like to fail?

I haven’t binged since I begun, but every now and then I keep eating small cheat meals, so that I don’t get tempted for bigger ones. That, however, is still failure for me at some level. The journey on the path of fitness is a constantly evolving one. There are so many things you can explore and learn, about your own body, and with each step you get closer. Here are some of the things I have learnt during my journey so far.

Patience.

Perseverance.

Priorities.

These are the things I still have to learn.

Discipline.

Organization.

Calm.

When you start working out, it is generally just to lose weight. Weight loss is one of the biggest motivators, or mostly because of personal reasons such as people taunting you, making fun of you and the like. At the core of all of this, is anger. Anger is sometimes the biggest motivator. The problem with anger is that it is short lived. I have come down to 20% body fat now, and I’ve realized that I’ve run out of all my anger. Everything I had pent up within me, all of the frustration, it’s all going away slowly. I’m not saying I’m fit. I’m not even saying that I’m over my binge eating problem. I may fail. I may give up again.

But I’ve got clarity like never before.

When you watch all of these motivational videos and trainers speak, and you’re not that much into fitness, you’ll roll your eyes every time they tell you that getting a six pack is not all that important and having strength is more important. I mean what do they know right? It’s quite evident that everyone around you likes calling guys hot, and more often than not those guys tend to have abs. In fact, the trainer who’s telling you to focus on fitness is doing so without a shirt, flaunting his chiseled body at the camera. It is a study in hypocrisy.

My goal now, is to reach peak physical fitness, no matter what.

Think of it this way, when you are at peak physical fitness, you are bound to look good and probably even have abs. But what’s more important is that you will be in full control of your body. You will be at mental peace. I love opening my cupboard now. I haven’t lost all that much of weight but the weight loss has been enough for me to fit into my clothes again, and I love trying on new things I never even knew I had in my wardrobe. I’m kind of a hoarder that way. I used to buy clothes and say to myself ‘I’ll wear these when I’m in shape’ That day never came because I always gave up on my diet and my workout routine. It was always the same excuse. I was this close to my results and then some birthday, some party, some treat came up. Before I knew it, I was back on the drive.

Not this time though.

I don’t know if it is because I’m writing about it, or because I have a changed outlook towards the whole concept of eating, but I don’t feel the drive anymore. I don’t pass a roadside and think to myself,”Yeah I need to gorge down all these things”. It may have been due to the change in lifestyle or the fact that I feel accountable to all my readers (even if it might be just one). If you were to fail and eat a bit too much, what would happen?

Previously I’d feel the guilt. It was so heavy on me. It used to sit on my shoulders and keep menacing me about how useless I am and how it’s all over. And that’s the worst part. When your mind start steering your guilt towards “What does it even matter anymore? Why diet now? Why workout? You just ruined it all”, that is the place where you go back into binge eating. This is the one thought that you are supposed to avoid at all costs. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about binge eating or anything else. When you are persevering towards something with all your might and you fail, the one thought you should not listen to is where your mind tells you its all over now, and that you should just go back to the way things were.

Getting out of your comfort zone is difficult because your mind is comfortable in that zone. It doesn’t want to come out, and it will look for each and every opportunity to try and make you go back. In such a situation you cannot really listen and obey. You have to fight it. You had a bad binge? No biggie, start again tomorrow. If you have been working out well and your diet has been good, your body will get rid of the junk in a week or two. Just keep your resolve. Don’t feel bad and go back to that lifestyle again.

I’ve reached a point of stagnancy now. Nothing is changing. I’ve gotten to about 79 kg but nothing is happening past that. I think this is the part where I have to be patient. This would previously have been the part where I give up.

Not anymore.

I’m going to keep trying harder and striving towards perfection. This isn’t some race where I’m trying to reach the finish line before everyone else. This isn’t to prove anything to anyone. I’m just trying to find peace, and for that I want to get rid of all the clutter in my life. The biggest form of clutter I see right now is my own body fat, and getting rid of it using the right ways will make me agile, active and fresh.

If you have faced failure out there or are struggling with weight loss, please read this entire article very carefully again. Your mind is your enemy, and destroying your tendency to binge and remaking new brain tendencies to lead a clean eating life, is going to take some time. Overcoming your temptations is going to take some time. Getting your life back on track IS GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME. Accept this fact and move on. Don’t be in a hurry to achieve results. Clean eat as if its a chore. Workout as if its a chore. Soon you will start to feel good and want to do it. Until then be patient with yourself. Don’t be so hard. Be kind on your body. Give it the nutrition it needs, don’t deprive it. Make sure you have enough to rebuild after you have burned off.

I hope you guys keep reading this and keep working at it. Peace.

Staying the course, even when you fail

It’s important to understand one very essential fact when you’re striving towards basically any goal. The most important lesson that most people forget.

New goals to be set are just as important as the ones you’ve passed, because stagnancy is the enemy of progress.

I’ve come down to 81.7kg and about 22% body fat. It’s great news for me. The problem is, I’ve realized the fact that once I get to 15% body fat, I’ll be faced with the quintessential question.

What now?

I mean I can take pictures of myself, put them on Facebook, make all the females that dumped me jealous, make my guy friends message me for tips, and keep working out to go even lower or maintain my current stats. But is that it?

The problem with staying the course, like I mentioned earlier, is motivation. Motvation to work even when you think you’re almost there, and after. Motivation to keep running. If you’ve passed the finish line, take another track and start again. At 15%, I may be in great shape, but where will I be as a human being. Is the body the only thing that should be trained?

That is why I’m planning to train my mind as well. I plan to put my brain through a rigorous regime, because the brain is a muscle too, and if you don’t exercise it, it’s going to get flaccid (not literally, this is a metaphor). I plan on learning new things. A new language, a new subject that I’ve never touched before, and probably hate. I’m going to start from the very basics and work my way up, just like I did with my body. At some point I am bound to see progress. As a human being, you never really run out of goals. There is so much knowledge out there. If you’ve been pursuing one subject like we’ve all been trained to do in life, and if you wake up one morning and say ‘You know what, I’m going to study Quantum Physics/French Literature/Political Science for the heck of it!’ no one’s going to come at you with a spear. Thanks to the internet today, knowledge is free, and it’s out there. Maybe you’ll never use what you learn, but we forget that the end goal isn’t important, the offshoots are.

In the process of learning new things, you will get new topics to make conversation about. This in turn will make you come off as a smart and interesting person. You can write articles and send them to online newsletters, start your own blog, do basically anything. I mean for the love of God even MIT has started putting up it’s lectures on an open source platform! What’s stopping you?! Go and get educated!

Education and training of the mind is just as important as training of the body. If we all train our minds a little bit every day, we might one day become a much smarter world, and see through the blanket of ignorance that politicians, world leaders, and everyone else is trying to pull over us.

As for me, I’ve decided on one foreign language and one hour of mathematics, every single day. I’m going to wake up an hour early and do half an hour of each. I may get bored, daunted, thrown down and beaten, but I’m going to keep at it till I start understanding what I’m studying. If I don’t understand a topic, I’m going to read it again, watch YouTube videos, take online tutorials, WHATEVER IT TAKES!

Hoping to tell you about some progress in my next blog.

Progress and Motivation for Weight loss

I feel good today. I had legs (Kris Gethin 12 week trainer), and man did I give it my best. This entire week I have had a lot of motivation, and most of it came from within. Of course, this doesn’t mean I didn’t watch endless YouTube videos to get motivated. I want to talk about stagnancy in weight loss today.

When you stop binge eating and start working out, chances are you are going to start losing weight real quick. The good thing is that with the help of the web, you don’t need a gym anymore. You could get an entire fitness plan for free from the internet. No! Don’t go out there and pirate premium workouts. I’m talking about other free workouts. Here are a few channels:

https://www.youtube.com/user/yaboymillhoy

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4GJndVHEhdmqLFBHOCi97A

https://www.youtube.com/user/FitnessBlender

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCMpl_T99aDh7OtKklXcfA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_DvR0g9o7wDgmY3fzbhMw

If you mail me, I could send you another 10 sources (for free). Fitness has gone from being this mystery secret that common people thought only existed with the bodybuilders and athletes, to something that is so common that a person following it for about two weeks can have most of the info that a professional would. What a great time to be alive.

When it comes to binge eating again, self control is key. I could tell you  a million tricks (nothing new that a simple Google search won’t reveal) but it is ultimately up to the you because when the binge drive hits you, you are all by yourself. No one is going to come at that specific moment and tell you to stop. You could explain to your friends and family a million times that you’re dieting or trying to control your binge, but chances are they won’t really know what you’re talking about. At that particular moment, you will be your greatest strength and your biggest weakness. All you have to do is remember why you started, and go back to that one moment, that lowest point, that ultimate failure, that made you take up fitness.

I’ll just tell you a little story of what my lowest point was. If you have read the prologue (link) you might have come across the fact that I had once done high intensity interval training for 2 months straight and lost a lot of weight, slimmed down and even started building muscle. Before this particular incident, I was a binge eater for about 3 years straight. There was nothing that came between me and my binge, and my enforcers made sure of that. So what was it that made me change my ways?

One bad day. That’s all it took.

It was the day of my graduation and I had to go to my college. I weighed 92kgs back then and was a size XXL. I went to college early, had a large pizza before I could go to the ceremony and then made my way there. It was a collective graduation ceremony, with people from different streams coming together. Arts, Natural Sciences, Applied Sciences, etc. We had our pictures taken, degrees collected and caps thrown, and after everything was said and done we had a prize ceremony for all the achievers. I was amongst them becuase I had scored really well. I felt like a winner.

One by one people’s names were called out. Everyone went on stage, took their prizes, posed for pictures, and went out the other way. It was my turn. I went on stage, shook hands with the principal and posed for pictures. I couldn’t hear a single clap in the entire auditorium. They might as well just ahve booed me off the stage. I felt a little bad, but not so much. I went off stage. And then this strange thing happened. This other student, my namesake was called on. He had pretty much achieved the same thing as me, and when he went on stage the crowd hollered and cheered. Everyone loved him. He was quite the popular kid.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like all that much of a winner.

That evening I went home and was eating my way through a bag of chips when suddenly I heard the beeping of my phone. It was the same guy, my namesake, who also happened to be the guy in charge of giving out the photographs. He congratulated me and then sent me my picture. And there I was.

Huge.

Pathetic.

I know this might sound like a body image problem, and I know that I have to accept what I am. I also know that being fat had nothing to do with anything. He was popular because he was more outgoing, and friendlier than I was.

But still. That one moment where I took a look at myself. I threw the bag of chips as they were in the dustbin (I never EVER waste food, so that was a big deal). I decided to change my life. And then I started working out every single day for two months till I had gotten slim again. The problem was, I didn’t know what to do once that workout was over. I mean, I had lost weight, what now?

The problem with motivation is that when you start to get closer to your goal, it begins to waiver. Satisfaction is the biggest enemy of progress. If you’re satisfied with what you have, you automatically think you don’t have to work anymore, and you end up going back to where you started. That is why binge eaters are known to starve themselves till they lose weight and then one day go nuts with their bingeing. A consistent level of motivation is a necessity. I have seen this with many people who come to the gym. Unlike me (and some other people) their goals aren’t to get fit. They want to look good because they want chicks, and things like that. They start off with very high levels of motivation, and one of two things happen. They either reach halfway through to their goals and reach a plateau, or they don’t lose weight very quick. In the second scenario, they give up because they’re frustrated, and that’s bad. The former scene, however, is much worse, because they have reached halfway, and just because they get satisfied with their results, they start falling back. Missing workouts, regular bingeing, all the motivation comes crumbling down.

That is why you should always be deconstructing old goals and making new ones. Make small, achievable goals. I understand that if you want to go from 90kgs to 80kgs, that may be a great goal, but the problem is if you don’t achieve it in time your motivation might waver. So break your goal down. Plan to go from 90 to 87, and when you reach 87 push aside that goal and replace it with the one to go from 87 to 84, and so on. When your goals are small and easily achievable, you begin to feel more accomplished as you complete them. That’s when you stay consistent. I know I have to go down to about 15% body fat, but I’m not really going to aim to go from 27% to 15%. I’m planning to go to 24% first.

Stay motivated. Use any means necessary if it doesn’t come from within, and keep working till your results are reason enough for you to wake up the next day and keep your body moving.

Cheers.

Where many people go wrong with Weight Loss

I’ve been battling weight problems all my life. Yesterday was my sister’s birthday and I had gone to meet her at a McDonald’s. I went in with the intention of giving her a gift and catching up, because we hadn’t met in a long time. Instead, I found myself waiting for her as I glanced on every single thing I had avoided for these two weeks. Burgers, fries, wraps.

FYI, McDonald’s is really not the place to go to if you’re trying to escape the binge.

Anywho my eyes fell on the coffee section and I thought about this YouTube video that said black coffee is great for suppressing appetite. I rushed over and got one to see if it was true.

Sure enough, it tasted like horse piss, so the lingering after taste annihilated any cravings I might have had.

An hour later I found myself chatting up with my sister, holding on to the coffee for dear life. She asked me what I wanted and I told her nothing because…

She didn’t even let me finish speaking and started telling me how I always do this. I keep ‘dieting’ to lose weight and end up having double the amount later. She even warned me not to be anorexic. I had no idea how to convince her that I wasn’t really eliminating anything, rather just substituting stuff. When you have failed an ample number of times, people usually don’t believe you.

“Bullshit! You should just eat everything and workout twice as much” she said as she ordered a box of chicken nuggets which I finally accepted to have at her insistence.

That doesn’t really make any sense. As many trainers have stressed before me, it’s not really about calorie count. It’s all about what foods you eat. Quality trumps quantity and automatically ensures calorie count. I had seen this guy once explain it to me in the best way possible, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Let’s assume you have a Snickers bar. You haven’t eaten lunch so you think a Snickers bar is okay to have. 100 gms of Snickers is about 500 calories. So ideally, it should give you enough energy right?

Well, yeah it should, but dieting isn’t really about just keeping your calorie count at bay. Think about it. Snickers has 24gms of fat for every 100gms. That is about a fourth of the entire mass. Picture that fat. That’s the amount of fat that I lost after a three days of working out. It’s not easy to burn off fat.

Now let me just put this in perspective. If you were to have 2 medium sized potatoes (mashed or whatever), about a 100 gms of brown rice, 100 gms of chicken breast and a cup of tomatoes, the calorie count would come at 434, so let’s put in a medium sized orange there and NOW we’re looking at 500 calories. Ideally, if you were an organism that had a computer in your stomach that could figure out the exact calorie count of what you just put in, the first meal of one Snickers bar would fill your stomach.

Real life is very different. Your stomach has no way of knowing the exact calorie count of what you put in until it is broken down into those calories, which is why there is this neat little system where you only stop feeling hungry when your stomach is convinced that the VOLUME of food is enough. Our ancestors had the most straightforward and simple food where the volume was in ration with the calorie count. With the food processing industry, a thousand calories are pumped into a small snack just to enhance taste.

Having that snickers bar is not going to make you feel full. Your stomach is going to send over a ‘I’m hungry feed me properly’ signal in a matter of minutes. the second meal however, will make you feel full and satisfied, and THAT’S what substitution is all about. It’s about quality and quantity.

Coming back, I did have the nuggets (288 cals of pure fat and cardboard chicken) and ultimately left. I went home and had a proper meal of brown rice, tomatoes, an orange and some buttermilk (home made). I should mention at this point that when I bit into that piece of nugget, I had a very strong and overpowering feeling to buy an entire meal. My brain was pounding away saying ‘COME ON!! ONE LAST DAY!! YOU’VE ALREADY LOST WEIGHT HAVEN’T YOU? WHAT’S WITH ONE BURGER??” I didn’t suppress that emotion nor did I go and have a meal. I just enjoyed the nuggets to the fullest extent and went home from there. I’m starting to have my binge under control.

This morning I worked out for about 2 hours. I’m not even doing it for the weight loss anymore. I’m not even doing it for the muscles. I just love the feeling of the afterburn that comes. You feel great and tired and fresh. You feel like killing someone and kissing them at the same time. You want to go to sleep but you want to get up and do something else. It’s a mixed bag but the overall feeling is of achievement. Working out is a great feeling. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

As of now my goal is still to get down to about 15% body fat. And most of all it is to stop bingeing.

 

How to control Binge Eating

Okay, so I haven’t posted in a while, and it may seem like I may have gone down the rails. That however, isn’t the case. I’ve pretty much been successful (in this week, there are still chances of me going astray). There are so many different things that I’ve learnt during this week, right from controlling myself to the emotional turmoil that is caused when you start to avoid binge eating. When you are a binger, food is basically your do all and get all. When you stop looking to food as a means of your emotional satisfaction, there is a huge void in your life that you don’t know how to fill.

To begin with, you don’t know what to do with all that time. Eating less makes you feel weak (even though you are just getting accustomed to not bingeing) and at the same time, the amount of time you spent bingeing now seems hollow. Take these two scenarios.

I used to go out on a walk almost every day. On the way there is a multitude of fast food joints and while returning from my walk I used to make sure I gorged on whatever I could. Soon the walks just became just another excuse to eat. I used to set out of the house with money in my hand looking forward to that biting into the various foods I craved. This of course, was all part of the drive.

The second scenario is the present, where I pretty much am actively trying to avoid the binge. When I go for a walk now I have nothing to look forward to. As a result, I tend to enjoy the walk less, which directly results in the duration of the walks getting lesser and lesser. I get bored very soon. You see, the whole intent of the walk has been removed. Now it’s just a regular walk. And who wants to just walk right?

Wrong. These are one of the first things that you might face when you decide to avoid the binge. There are so many events in your life that you will realize, were just centered around food, or were an excuse for you to binge. All those things will now seem hollow. That is why you have to think of other things to fill up this void. I, for one, picked music and reading, and of course, a strenuous workout every day.

The second thing that you will begin to feel is an emotional void. Everything around you will start to change as the brain fog just melts away. I was left with a lot of questions this week.

1. What am I doing with my life?
2. What are my goals?
3. Is she even attracted to me anymore?
4. Why can’t I just have a normal metabolism?
5. Am I a good human being?
6. What is the point of all this?

You’ll get moody, and very angry with yourself. People around you will try to take this as a laughing matter and even eat in front of your face. They will talk about your disorder like it’s not that big of a deal. ‘Just control yourself’ is what they’ll say.

Let them.

There is just one key to success here, and that is motivation. Thanks to the internet today, motivation does not need to come from within. It has to, but in the initial stages chances are that it won’t. So you just have to think about one question amongst all of the ones above.

What is your goal?

I have chalked out a goal for myself now. I don’t want to lose weight anymore. I want to lose body fat. I am at 27% body fat right now. my goal is to go down to 12%.

I have that goal now, and I have so many people on YouTube who are constantly putting up videos on how they did it. The plus point about that is that you learn a lot. The second thing you get is a lot of motivation. Just keep doing what you’re doing every single day without thinking about it. If you are on the road to quit bingeing, keep a few healthy snacks by your side. I went out today to shop and got myself a lot of health snacks like protein bars and protein chips. They were a little expensive, but I saved up.

I carry a protein bar with me. You can even carry something as cheap as a banana and have that.

The thing to remember is, there is a very easy process when you think about bingeing that you can follow. Here it is.

Sit down.

Take a deep breath, and focus on your inhale and exhale. Breathe again. Slowly. Slow down your breaths as your progress and have a keen focus on your breath. Notice how your chest inflates and deflates with every breath. Do this for an entirety of 2 minutes. Once that is done just ask yourself:

Is this really worth it?

Do I really need this binge right now?

Is there any way I can work around it?

You should be fine. Just hang in there. Temptations are the worst mainly because people around a binge eater do not take his or her problem very seriously. But you can’t expect them to. They do not know what you’re going through. To them it’s just a person who ate a lot and now doesn’t want to eat. You are alone in this. Take responsibility, don’t be scared. Be aware, go online, get knowledge and take steps.

 

Take action. Now. You can do it. I believe in you.

 

Day 1: Legs

So today is the first day of my Kris Gethin workout.

It was horrendous.

But I’ll come back to that later.

Waking up:

I woke up at about 7am because I had to work. I really have to time myself to wake up earlier. I had seen this video alpha m., a YouTuber specializing in grooming and self-improvement (link). He had basically enlisted a few tips to wake up early in the morning. One of those tips is to use repeated alarms. So say you want to wake up at 5 am, you set an alarm 20,15,10,5 minutes before 5am. This goes to all the snooze button hitting fans out there.

I really love the idea.I know I’m going to be waking up grumbling to myself early in the morning. It sounds like like a really effective method, however. Before this, I had read in a Robin Sharma book (don’t remember which one, I read a lot) that it takes exactly 42 days to form a habit. So if I were to put a repeated alarm for 42 days, my brain wouldn’t need it on day 43. The only problem is that I live with my parents and they might not really appreciate the repeated alarms going off.

At this point, I’m past caring. I’m going to do it anyway. Let’s see what happens. I’m hoping to hell that I don’t forget to set my alarms.

Eating:

This morning I had some rice flakes and one boiled egg. Lunch was 4 slices of white bread and two scrambled eggs. I know, I know, white bread is a strict no-no. But it was raining cats and dogs and I didn’t want to go out just to get some whole wheat.About half an hour after my workout I had a cup of green tea, an orange and a multivitamin.This was about 10 mins before I started writing this post, which is 20 mins before it got published. I have about 3kg (yes I use the metric system. LEARN TO CONVERT PEOPLE) of brown rice in the house. I’m thinking of making a meal plan.

At the same time, I conflict. I really want to take up the intermittent fasting method. It seems like a really interesting method. Especially for a binge eater like me, some amount of discipline and self-control balanced with being able to eat what I want in that specific eating window, seems like a good idea. I should make it clear at this point that I’m just starting out on my workout, and I don’t plan on taking any special pre or post workout powdered supplements or tablets. Mostly because I don’t want to invest in them. I have a long history of taking up workouts and giving up on them. If I were to spend X amount on some protein shake and then give up on my workout in between, I’d lose the X amount.

I should mention that I have a food weighing scale to measure how much I eat. They come at really cheap prices. If you don’t have one, understand that a small palm sized bowl of the height of a standard pinky finger can take up food ranging from 70-150 grams depending on the type of foot (potatoes are going to weight more than rice). I also have the Noom Coach app on my phone so that I can log in exactly how much I take in. Sometimes calorie counting seems like a very tedious task. Sometimes I even skip a few days before I start logging my calories again.

You know what? I’m not going to stop today. I’m going to make sure that I log in. It’s not about knowing how many calories I’m eating. I used to be a patron of My Fitness Pal, but I switched to Noom mainly because it has a color code for every food type. Green means healthy, yellow is midway between healthy and unhealthy, red is unhealthy. This helps you see what kind of foods you would rather eat. That plus the color red is known to agitate the brain and alarm it (which is why it’s the universal sign for stop), so you don’t feel like having foods that you’d later see as red on your Noom. You can use whatever you want. You can even choose not to use anything. I’m going to use the app because it has certain times when you can eat. You can’t add more than 5 meals a day, including the three standard meals and two snacks. This will allow me to regulate my eating to 5 meals and probably control the drive when it comes midway, knowing that I can’t log in.

I said probably. Let’s see what happens.

Okay so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to have my last meal before 8, which is going to be some lentils (100 grams) and some brown rice (150 grams). Then I’m going to eat my pre-workout banana (stop giggling. what are you, 12?) at 10am tomorrow and then go to workout at 10.30am. That puts my fasting window at 14 hours. Let’s hope I don’t have cravings. I’ll post the rest of my meals in tomorrow’s post. 

Workout:

This 12-week journey is very crucial to me. It will basically answer a lot of questions. The first one would be,”Can I beat the drive to binge?”. The biggest problem we all have is motivation. I don’t want it to be a problem. I have a few videos on my cell phone that I like to watch before I hit the gym. Before I hit the gym is the time when my brain is most vulnerable to tempt me into not going. That is the time I need to fight it in order to get control and make my way to the gym. My friend had once told me that the biggest challenge isn’t workout out, it’s getting up every day and going even when your workout starts to get repititive.

So I did the legs workout of Kris Gethin’s 12-week transformation program. It started out with 20 minutes of light jogging followed by all the leg machine exercises that you can easily find in a standard gym. It was the sheer amount of sets and repititions that got to me. At the end of it, I could barely stand. I was out of breath, mentally and physically tired and could barely make my way to the door.

And then I saw two flight of stairs to the exit. That sounds like a piece of cake on any other day, but when you’ve lifted close to 60kg with nothing but your thighs, getting down a flight of stairs is the most excruciating thing ever. I had to descend the stairs holding the bar at the side, like a toddler.

But the important thing was that at the end of it, I was proud. I had done it. I had made it this far. It wasn’t really much. In the grand scheme of 12 weeks I’ve gone by with 12 hours of this…thing. BUT IT FEELS AMAZING. I know for a fact that I won’t be walking much, but I have to go to my friend’s tomorrow at 12pm, and I’ll be coming back at night, which means I have to clock in my workout at about 10.30am.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for me to wake up early tomorrow.

The first thing I’m going to do is wrap up all the work I have today. Usually I do half of it till midnight and the other half in the morning, like I did today. But I’m going to try and cram and finish it off by midnight so that I can wake up early tomorrow.

Fingers crossed.

 

Prologue: How binge eating controls my life

Hi, I’m Nat, and I’m about to start off on a journey. The problem is, I need your help to start.

There are many different reasons I’m writing this blog. None of them are for fame or money. The most important reason, I think, is for self-introspection. I want to see what my brain is saying. The other is to share so that I can get feedback. A third reason could be that I don’t really want to share anything with a therapist, and nobody else will listen to me.

The first thing you should know about my binge eating story is that this isn’t a success story. I haven’t overcome anything through a really inspiring tale that I’ve come to tell you.If you are looking for motivation, you might only get it from a part of this blog. I’m still under the influence of my eating disorder. I’m still being controlled by the binge. That is why I’ve decided to go on a day-to-day account of how it feels to binge, and what it is like to be a binge eating person every day. If you’re looking for something to relate to and possibly live my ups and downs with me, you should take this blog up.

The second thing you should know is that I’m not going to offer any direct help or therapy.This, of course, doesn’t mean that you won’t find the answers in this blog. You may, and if you do I urge you to write to me and tell me. All I’m going to do is share. I’m going to share everything that I have pent-up within me for the last few years.

Right from the time I grew up, I have been under the influence of food. When you live in a poor family that is full of people that are strict, you tend not to have many luxuries in life. My father had a regular source of income. However, he was strictly against smoking and drinking, on moral grounds or because of his past experiences with people. Unfortunately, he was also against going to the movies a lot, playing video games, watching a lot of telly or even surfing the web. These, however, were for purely monetary reasons. As a result, my brother and I had only one form of positive reinforcement throughout our lives.

Food.

When you live in an economically backward family that cannot afford things like a play station of a new bicycle or even martial arts or swimming classes, pretty much the only way parents know of rewarding you is to make you eat good food. My mother is an excellent cook. She’s also really good at reading me. Whenever I was sad or anxious after a day of school, she used to whip up some treats for me to snack on. Whenever I had an exam or some event that would get me all stressed up, she would make my favorite food so that I could snack on it. It didn’t matter if it was my birthday, my brother’s birthday, or any special occasion, we celebrated with food.

In fact eating out was the kind of bait we used to get to achieve things in life. “If you get good grades, I’ll take you to XYZ eating joint for your favorite burgers.” Looking back, I think that is where the whole cycle began. I know my mother meant well, and was only trying to treat her kids and make them have fun living within their means. However, this constant barrage of food as a rewards system and a stress buster began paving the way for neural circuits. My mind started associating food with almost every emotion, most dangerously boredom. The end result today is that I want to eat something delicious no matter what. If I achieve something, I want to eat. When I’m sad or upset, I want to eat. When I’m tensed, I want to eat. Hell, even when I’m bored and there’s nothing else to do, I want to eat.

This friend of mine is an enforcer without knowing it. It is no fault of his own. It’s my problem. He’s a pretty chilled out dude. We get together at his place and eat. In fact, if neither of us has enough cash to eat, I may not even visit him. That’s how low I’ve sunk. Food controls my life and I admit it. I’m not proud of it. I want all the help and support I can get.

Simultaneously though there is this ever growing need to look good. I don’t have a great face, which is why the only other thing I decided to rely on is having a great body. I’ve been seriously trying to hit the gym since I was 14. That doesn’t really work out well. I join a gym, and for some time I’m making some real progress. However in the middle of it all, I may break my nutrition plan and binge, and then feel so crappy about myself that I actually don’t go to the gym the next day onwards. It feels like I’ve wasted all these months working out because I had a pizza.

I don’t know how many of you experience this, but one of the things I experience is something I call ‘the drive’. This is one of those episodes where I suddenly want to eat something. I may not even be hungry, and I want to eat. I may just as well be walking on the street, but when the ‘drive’ hits me, I want to go to the nearest junk food outlet and gorge on something. This may even be after having a full meal. The reason I call it the drive is because when I’m in that mode, I’m numb to everything else. All I can think about is the feeling of biting into that scrumptious snack. My actions of walking to the eating joint, placing my order, paying for it from my wallet or card, sitting and eating the whole thing non-stop, all happens like I’m on automatic. I feel like I’m not actively controlling any of those actions, that I’m just a passenger giving in to my mind taking over with the drive. You may know this as bingeing or cravings, but I like to call it the drive, because it drives you. You don’t give two hoots about the entire world. You just want to eat, and sometimes it doesn’t even matter what.

Don’t even get me started about all the times I’ve decided to diet. This is an on an of cycle that goes on every month. I take up a diet, and restrict my calories, and then one day the drive hits me, and when I snap out of it I’m at the supermarket gorging on chips or eating some other junk. Then I feel so crappy about it, there is no lower measure to how bad. And then comes the message from my mind that, looking back, I couldn’t hate more.

“This is okay. Start dieting tomorrow onwards. Let today be your cheat day.”

Instead of going straight home, I get an ultra drive and just keep walking to all the stores I can find my favorite snacks in, gorge on them saying ‘I am going to be so strict with myself, tomorrow onwards’.

It’s been 15 years. The tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

The biggest problem is that I don’t even know if writing about this is going to make all the difference in the world. What I do know is that I desperately want to come out of this. I want to come out of that trance and be self-aware of the actions I’m taking and their consequences. I want to be aware of the fact that I’m eating myself to oblivion and gaining weight and losing it in constant fluctuations. I want to eat healthy, live healthy.

Starting today, I’m going to start doing two things. I’m going to regulate (not curb) my eating disorder. And I’m going to start on a regime of Kris Gethin’s 12-week trainer.

12 weeks. I’m giving myself 12 weeks to go on this journey. In these 12 weeks, I’m going to share with you tips and tricks that I’ll read about as I seek info on how to

• Wake up early every day
• Have a morning routine
• Clear up the fog in my mind. Be sharper and think straight
• Get rid of the drive. Gain control over my mind
• Eat healthy, workout hard
• Change my life. Be more availale emotionally
• Give you the first hand report of all my failures and successes
• Get ripped

I hope you stick with me these 12 weeks, whoever you are. It’s just a start. If I come out of this with some form of self control, I promise you, that you’ll have a first hand account of a person who was at rock bottom, but ultimately got to the top