Food: Friend or Foe

I've kept it no secret that I've had issues with food for...well...my entire life. And this ranges from multiple rounds of eating disorders, to gaining a massive amount of weight that got me up to almost 300 pounds...and then losing over 100 of those pounds. And to date, I still have a daily struggle with food. And most days, will readily admit that I'm addicted to food. Not only do I love food...I mean really good food. I think about food all the time. And if I go 15 minutes without eating something, I get a little shaky. And seriously...it's not like "normal" addictions where you can just go cold turkey. Because if you go cold turkey on food, that's called "anorexia" and that's just not a good thing either.

So, for the past year (ish) I've had a really weird struggle. I will do wonderfully all day long at eating healthy, staying within my intended calorie goal. And then evening comes along and I can't shove food into my mouth fast enough. Or get enough in there.

And for a really long time, I thought I was crazy, and that it was simply a mental problem that I needed to overcome. But seriously...Ironman training, not a good time to tell me I can't eat food. You might not come back with any fingers.

But today, I read an article courtesy of USAT that made a light bulb go off over my head. 

I have been starving myself.  Not that I haven't been eating, I just haven't been eating enough.  In fact, I was about 500 calories off of my baseline calorie intake (at least according to this article).  And 500 calories, that's actually a lot of food. 

So, we're going to try something new.  We're going to try to eat more.  And I'm going to go back to my "it's ok to eat 1 cookie a day" rule.  Normally, I'm fine with that rule, but with the whole binge eating at night problem, I've restricted myself from cookies in general, unless I intentionally wanted to binge, then I'd have a hard time resisting that aisle at Whole Foods. 

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going completely off the deep end with junk food.  At least that's not the intention.  I realize how much better I feel when I eat healthy, and I'm making no plans to change that on the grand scheme of things...but in small portions, I'm ok with that.  I mean...working out a minimum of 15 hours a week...I think that deserves a cookie.

Though, this does allow me to address something that some of my non-endurance athlete friends have said to me a lot lately.  "You're working out all the time, you can eat whatever you want." 

That sounds really nice, but it couldn't be further from the truth.  If anything, I have to be more careful about what I eat BECAUSE I work out all the time.  I have to make sure I eat enough protein, and carbs, and fat, but not too much fat.  All for optimal performance value.

And at the end of the day, I'm going to try to care less about what the number on the scale says, and value more how I feel, and even more what the tape measure says. 

A little over a year ago, I weighed the least that I have as an adult, and I was the smallest as I had ever been as an adult.  This year, I now weigh about 10 pounds more than I did, but I'm the same size.  And I'm ok with that. 

So I'm sure that this is going to continue to be a daily struggle for me, but I'm hoping that one of these days, food and I can be on friendly terms without being TOO friendly.