Closer to Fine

FitLife by Slawa

I have four more months of normal eating under my belt. Though I am still walking a tightrope. Instead of a binge-eating safety net available to catch me, I can see a starvation one below. I have mentioned my time of under eating in other posts. I thought I would explain it further now.

It began with my wanting to get healthy about seven or eight years ago, when I was living in a one bedroom apartment Arlington, VA with Mikey. I thought I would make some little changes to get healthier, rather than tackling yet another all or nothing diet. I started by working out ten to fifteen minutes a day. After a few months, I found myself wanting to work out more. So I did. After another few months, I thought I would like to change my diet. All of the above were good steps to positive changes. There was a problem with my plan, though. I was on lithium at the time to treat my bipolar disorder. A person on lithium cannot simply change his/her diet willy-nilly because of the way the kidneys process the medication. I won’t pretend that I totally understand this. What I do understand is that the kidneys take in the lithium as if it is a salt. If the person taking lithium changes his/her salt intake (by lowering or increasing it), the kidneys may take in too much lithium, causing lithium toxicity, which can be fatal.

I understood the risks but I was determined to make a change. I went to my psychiatrist and expressed my interest in changing my diet. My doctor was not the best match for me. She was a gruff sort of person and there was a language barrier. I left my appointment with the instructions to not change my diet. She gave me no advice, no suggestion that perhaps I could change my medication; nothing. She simply said, “don’t change your diet”. I proceeded to immediately change my diet for the better, which meant less salt.

I am not sure why I didn’t listen. I think it was a chicken or egg situation. I had trouble sleeping in the months prior to the change I made. I tried to take the lithium faithfully, and certainly did during the times when it seemed I was experiencing a bit of hypomania. I don’t believe the medicine was working to its full capacity and this may have been part of why I made the poor decision to disregard my doctor’s opinion. It is common for people with mental illness to need to make adjustments to medication as the medication can stop working after a time.

Sometime in the midst of my months of changes to improve my health, Mikey and I moved to Baltimore, MD. I was in a new home with less friends nearby, working from home as a phone sex operator with endless time to myself to contend with and possibly a bit of extra stress from the move. I will never know for sure when things started getting bad; when I started experiencing episodes again after a few years of relatively level mood (the lithium was never a wonder drug for me, but an improvement from past options). I do know when they got very bad and when they got far worse.

It started with my diet. I started watching what I was eating a bit closer in August of the year of the move. I cut back on pre-packaged foods, which meant I was taking in far less salt. I also thought I would like to quit smoking, cold turkey. A week later, I was in a bad place. I was experiencing tremors, I couldn’t sleep and my words were coming out in a drunken-sounding slur. With the help of the Internet, I figured out what was going on fairly quickly.

I called my doctor and told her what I thought was going on, the words “coma” and “death” at the forefront of my mind. My doctor ordered a kidney function test and that I stop taking lithium immediately and permanently. Within another week or so, I was free of nicotine, was eating well and undoubtedly, already off my rocker. I was afraid to try another medication and really never wanted to take any medicine in the first place. My head wasn’t right. I knew life was never good when I wasn’t medicated, but I couldn’t think clearly enough to rationalize getting another prescription. And I was scared. Lithium toxicity (confirmed by the kidney function test) could have killed me. I thought little good could come from putting more chemicals in my body.

This began a year of nearly no medication of any kind for me. I became obsessed with natural health. I replaced lithium with fish oil, white flour with whole grains, white sugar with less processed sugars, chocolate with carob and caffeine with exercise. If I got a headache, even a migraine, I refused medicine and opted for water, rest and stretching. Soon enough, it became my way of life. I took up yoga and biking, working out nearly three hours a day, most days. I was completely obsessed with sticking to my new food preferences. I refused anything that didn’t fit my idea of what was healthy.

This way of being stretched on for nearly an entire year. All the while, my mental health deteriorated. I fought with Mikey a lot, often sleeping in a separate bedroom or a friend’s house, rather than with him. I all but stopped sleeping completely. Three hours of sleep in one night was good for me. All of the negative effects of this are not the point of this post, so I won’t list them now. What is relevant, is how it effected my eating. I started to lose weight rapidly. I lost nearly forty pounds in a matter of a few months. I looked good, but I was very sick. I was playing an idiotic game with my health and I have my bipolar disorder, in its raw form, to thank.

While not medicated, I experience extreme highs and lows. I don’t think I fall into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (used to diagnose mental illness) description of bipolar disorder. If anything, I am closest to Bipolar II. I experience extreme rapid cycling and mixed episodes. There is very little break in the torture for me when I am not medicated. I don’t sleep much and I hardly function. During that year off medication, I would go twelve hours without remembering to go to the bathroom (I know because in my crazed mind, documenting such things was important). I found that I could stretch a chicken breast, some steel-cut oatmeal and a handful of broccoli as the only caloric fuel for my body for days. If I noticed I was hungry, the gnawing pain was easily replaced by something my screwed up mind thought was more important, for example writing poetry, cleaning the house or drawing. If I stopped myself long enough to really notice that I was hungry, I often chose to ignore it because the scale kept reading a lower number and that was something I had wanted to see happen since I was twelve years old.

More time passed. I lost more weight. My body far exceeded what I would have hoped for in terms of aesthetics. I was a bombshell. Eventually, being off medication, not sleeping and starving myself caught up to me though. One year following the lithium toxicity incident, I woke up after a night’s sleep

Psychosis by Isis

consisting of all of two hours and I lost my mind. People like to say, “I lost my mind”, I think, when they don’t know what that means. When I say, “I lost my mind”, I did. I experienced a period of psychosis that I cannot count in hours, as I was hardly there. The details of the psychosis are interesting, but not important to this particular post, so I will leave them out.

I was admitted to the Walter P. Carter Center in the city, spent a week among my people and was put back on medication. All good results from my psychosis. The new medication was hardly a match, unfortunately and it took another six months to find one that would work for me long term. At least I was able to function. I quickly went back to my bad ways of eating. I lost my desire to work out. I put on fifty pounds.

And now, here I am. Still overweight, but thanks to intuitive eating and a lot of support, I am happy. So why, one might ask, am I walking a tightrope over an under eating safety net? Because the desire to be smaller is there. I want to be hot. I want to love my body again. I feel funny eating intuitively, lately. It has become extremely easy and it feels like a game sometimes. Yesterday, at lunch, I ate five, small bites of a cheeseburger and threw out the rest. Was I full? Or did I know it would help me lose weight, eventually?

Earlier this week, I went to the OBGYN where the doctor insisted I step on the scale. I told her that I have an eating disorder and that I no longer weigh myself. I told her what I thought I weighed and it wasn’t good enough for her, so I did as she asked and stepped on the scale backwards. Probably lacking understanding about how the number on the scale affects someone like me, she said, “How much did you say you weighed?” I repeated the number I got the last time I weighed myself and she smiled and said, “Oh, you are much less now.” I’m trying not to let it affect me, but I want to know the number and I want to make it less.

All I can do is let time pass, eat what I want and what I believe is healthy for me and hope that my eating continues to improve. I try to ignore the temptation to play the game, to let myself slip back into that place I was in all those years ago when I was so darned good at it. I try to stop myself from bingeing, which hardly comes up any more, I ignore diet ads and continue to fight to be a better version of myself.