Numbers, Numbers, Numbers!

As I sit here at the airport, on the way home from Alabama, I can already feel my mental health improving. As much as I enjoyed spending two weeks visiting my mother, every single thing about that environment is perhaps hand-crafted specifically to give me evil thoughts.

I'm annoyed and concerned with this fact in equal measure-- annoyed because it is simply unpleasant to be in an environment like that, and concerned because spending a couple weeks in a different place shouldn't be enough to make a supposedly healthy and recovered person struggle.

"Triggered" is too strong a word for what I felt. "Bothered" feels more proportionate.

Readers, I think it's time for another list.

Things About My Mother's House That Prompt Disordered Thought Patterns (Number 4 Will Shock You!) 

1. Constant diet talk 

 My mom has been trying to lose weight probably for as long as I've been alive. I grew up seeing bikini pictures from women's magazines taped over the StairMaster next to sheets of paper listing goal weights and measurements. So the idea that a woman should always be vigilant about her body is something that has always been in the back of my mind. It takes on something of a different tone though now that I'm an adult. Now, for the first time I've been consciously aware of, my mom has a goal weight that is less than what I weigh. That is a strange thing to grapple with. My mom is talking about the things she should and shouldn't eat, about being "good" and "bad" with the things she chooses, about wanting to have a "total reset" during her wellness retreat. We go down to the community center to meet her friends at the coffee social:

"Are those lemon poppyseed muffins? How are they? Worth the calories?" 

 

2. Surrounded by weight loss materials

 My mom's on-again-off-again relationship with weight loss has resulted in the accumulation of a massive amount of stuff. The back wall of the living room is stacked at least three feet high with weight loss books and specialty diet cookbooks. Oftentimes these books are for diets that directly contradict one another. That doesn't matter, though, because it's not the point. She was never going to follow, Keto, Paleo, the South Beach Diet, the Flat Belly Diet, the French Woman Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, Whole 30, and whatever else, all at the same time. In fact, several of these I don't remember her ever doing. Four Paleo books has not resulted in a Paleo diet.

I walk into her bedroom to check my outfit in the full-length mirror in her armoire. I open the armoire and it's full of exercise dvds.

I check the medicine cabinet to get allergy meds or melatonin, and it's full of weight loss supplements, of varying levels of safety and efficacy. I go to the pantry to find some food to eat. More supplements: green juice powder, protein powder, fiber supplements, protein bars, that fat-free powdered peanut butter.

She has a full exercise room in her new house, full of every gadget imaginable: yoga balls, medicine balls, dumbbells, resistance bands, weighted hula hoop, jump rope, aerobics steps, trampoline, treadmill, rowing machine, and stairmaster. Paradoxically the exercise room is so full there is almost not enough room to use any of that equipment.

My mom's approach to health (and to most things) is that if she can just find the right thing, the problem will be solved. If something is wrong, then there must exist some book or some gadget that can fix it. If it doesn't work, then that must have just been the wrong thing. We move onto something else. 

 

 

3. No exercise during the day

Living in a neighborhood that is not walking distance from anything, and having no plans most days, I have no externally imposed reason to leave the house. Normally at home I would be walking around a lot -- going to the grocery store, walking to campus, sometimes walking somewhere like a bar or to the movies. Here, unless I make the active decision to move, there is no reason to move. That means a couple things: Firstly, I always have to remain aware of how much or how little I've exercised during the day. Not a particularly sustainable thought pattern for me. Secondly, all the moving I do ends up taking the form of structured exercise and "workouts." If I walk for an hour in Berkeley, it's because I needed to go somewhere and then come home. If I walk for an hour at my mom's, it's because I did an hour-long workout on the treadmill, where I am presented with too many statistics for my own good. I'm thinking about the distance, the incline, the speed, the time, the calories burned. My constantly-optimizing tendencies lead me to pull up calculators: how many MORE calories would it be if I went just a little bit faster? or just a little bit steeper?

This isn't to say that I don't have a cruel attachment to my step count at home; I absolutely do. It is just somewhat harder to avoid here.

 

4. Have to plan all my meals

Just as being in a sedentary environment forces me to constantly think about my exercise, being in a vegan-hostile environment forces me to constantly think about food. Where are we going tonight? Do I need to eat before we leave? What can I make for dinner tonight? How much of my stuff is left? These practical questions end up slowly morphing into How much have I eaten today? When should I eat next? What should I eat? Why am I eating so much unhealthy food? Why am I hungry at all if I haven't exercised? 

Stuck in an odd in-between space, because I am preparing all my own meals for the most part, but I can't make everything I want to, and I don't have all of my normal staples, so it's a balance between what I want to/can eat and what my mom keeps around. The things I can make are not nearly as nutrient-dense as the foods I make at home, so my plantmaxxing numbers are way down from my normal averages.

 

5. Scales

My scale died a year or two ago, and I decided to simply not replace the batteries and put it away in the garage. I haven't regularly weighed myself in ages. My mom has a scale, though. (Two scales, actually) So one day while she was at work I decided to go into her bathroom and weigh myself. I get on the scale and am so shocked I get on the other scale for a second opinion. Reader, I weigh about ten pounds more than I thought I did, or about ten pounds more than I did when I was regularly weighing myself. Seeing that number (152, if anyone is being nosy) brought up a lot more for me than I expected. First of all, it is almost as much as I weighed in 2020, before I fell into any toxic weight loss spirals. That means that after all of that, I've gained basically everything back. Not a fun thing to realize. Secondly, this weight is about ten pounds more than my mom's goal weight. Lastly, and the thing that bothers me the most, is that I don't know when it happened. 

Logically, I have no reason to be upset. If we're staying numbers-oriented, my waist measurement is actually within about half an inch of where it was back when I was measuring, so it's not a question of all-over weight gain. I kept taking lots and lots of bodychecking mirror pictures to make sure I still looked normal. I guess I wanted to have it both ways: my body changed noticeably last year (wider hips, bigger chest) in a short span, and I wanted that without it also making the scale go any higher. If I have a complaint about that I can take it up with the laws of physics, I suppose. 

Even though I have no logical reason to be upset, I noticed I still felt very upset because of a perceived loss of control. When I was rapidly gaining weight in 2022, I found it extremely distressing, so I ended up establishing a set of conditions for myself: essentially, if I'm eating as healthy as possible and also exercising enough, and I still gain weight, that's ok. In short, my recovery was conditional on my continuing to do everything right. 

Now, I'm very rarely that strict --Readers know that I love snacks, treats, fun drinks, and all those things-- but every once in a while I find myself thinking that I've forgotten my mission of remaining totally in control. 

 

6. Too much downtime 

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, having too much time on my hands is a recipe for disaster. Too much time to myself means too much time to think. Too much time to think means too much time to scroll. Too much time to scroll, when that scrolling is taking place in a house filled floor to ceiling with the ghosts of failed weight loss attempts, leads to thinspo pinterest. Thinspo pinterest is, at least, marginally better than thinspo tumblr, due to the site's far superior content moderation.

My old lifestyle board, "trying to lock in without becoming patrick bateman," wasn't enough anymore. I had to make a second, private board called "and so what if i AM patrick bateman?"

 

 

Thinspo, Fitspo. Cheesy motivational quotes. High volume low calorie recipes. Workout plans.

Taking after my mother, I aggressively and obsessively collect these, regardless of whether I will actually act on them. More often than not, I don't; I just start collecting posts that will simultaneously fuel and appease my anxieties. Usually when the time rolls around for me to start doing any of the things I saved, I will have already gotten over the particular episode I was experiencing.

However, this time I am still thinking about it. Nothing drastic really, not even any specific strategies in particular. Just the recurring thought that I should probably start taking measures to lose about ten or fifteen pounds in about as many weeks. And I keep thinking about this, even though it's probably in direct contradiction with my other goal, which is to get stronger, build muscle, etc. 

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All of the discussion above just proves the point that I have goals, and I have metrics, and those two things are actually unrelated activities. I need numbers to look a certain way, because, well, those are the best numbers and I need the best numbers! And sometimes those numbers actually are divorced from my real goals. For example, do I actually think I would look better 10-15 pounds lighter? Unclear. But 135-140 are just excellent numbers. Real top-shelf numbers.

It also shows that the reason I do so well at home is because I have set up an environment that specifically avoids all of my normal triggers. That fact is somewhat troubling, because it means that my ability to be normal about food is still tied to my ability to be completely in control of it. At home, I can make my meal plans, do all of my prep, make sure I walk enough, follow all my routines. I feel okay eating whatever and whenever I want, because I only keep healthy foods in my apartment for the most part. I've continued the habit from the Dark Times of knowing at least three days in advance what I'm going to eat for each meal.

(I've actually continued a lot of habits from my Patrick-Batemanest times. All my jokes about horsegirl tendencies date back to that era. But apples, oats, carrots, and walking are all genuinely awesome so I kept all that up. Dance videos, too.)

Honestly, I am getting bored of thinking about this and writing about it. If I can't be bothered to write any more I certainly can't ask my devoted Readers to read any more. 

There's an unfortunate loquaciousness that accompanies self-awareness!