155 in Five Days: Day 4

I haven't weighed myself, but I'm probably going to succeed at this, because I can't eat anymore. I just had my last piece of food ever, which was a cucumber slice. Now I am drinking lemon water and unfortunately I will need to have a sip of vodka to ease the alcohol withdrawal. I will probably still run because I love running, but I won't gain any fitness from it because I will not be taking in any fuel.

Dr. Ana says... "skeletons in coffins don't ever drink again!"

155 in FIVE DAYS: Day 1

For the next five days, I am going to take a break from focusing on ANYTHING else, and dedicate myself completely to attaining 155.0 lbs. Very minimal computer use, lots of reading, at least ten miles of running a day, fiber, fiber, more fiber, filling up on water and greens and chewing gum and staying out of the house so I can't eat. Single. Minded. Dedication.

It's 5:43 in the evening, and I've already eaten dinner, but I'm not starting tomorrow. I'm starting now.

Weight loss, group fitness, and other things

Two days ago, I took the test for my group fitness certification. I don't know whether I passed or failed but I know I did better than I expected, and I'm happy with my performance. The standards for passing are super high, so knowing I did well doesn't necessarily mean I passed.

I graduated from day treatment a week ago and have moved to Continuing Care, which is a step from 20 hours of treatment a week down to only two hours a week. I've been using some of this new spare time on running even more than I already was. The fact that I got a new running toy on Friday -- a Nathan Firecatcher hydration vest -- also helps :)

The scale has been rewarding me for all that extra running, and I am now 162.0 lbs. I'm going to walk to treatment today in order to burn even more calories. I want to be under 160 by April 20 and under 158 by April 30, and then under 156 by May 10, etc. two lbs every ten days. And I can do it.

I have a new girlfriend!

Yep. What the title says. It was completely unexpected and I wasn't looking at all, but a beautiful woman leapt into my heart through my eyes and my skin and I fell for her, hard.

This is apropos of nothing, other than, I suppose: be sober + be body-confident + be clear-headed + be awake + be able to actually leave my room and go out and socialize + don't be a flaky asshole = hit the happiness jackpot, sometimes.

I successfully applied for Medicaid and have filled out my FAFSA, and am adopting a dog very soon and getting my Basic Group Fitness certification even sooner. So big adulty things like getting my own health insurance, going back to school, becoming more employable, and willingly taking on responsibilities are happening with a lot greater ease than I ever imagined.

My mental health is excellent right now. And hopefully it is not done getting better.

30 Days of Thin: Day Two

Too lazy to type out exactly everything I ate today. A summary: almond milk, a veggie wrap, greek yogurt, strawberries, nuts. 
Total: 956 calories.

Question: How tall are you? Do you like your height?
I'm 5'10", and I don't like it very much. On one hand, it helps me look strong and athletic, but on the other hand, it decimated my competitive dance career, made me a target for bullying in school, and is a factor in making me look intimidating to some, rather than looking as submissive and harmless as I am.

To T or not to T?

Playing With Your Food For Grown-Ups

(I'm partially x-posting from my MPP in PS, so for any PSers reading this, sorry for the redundancy!)

I relapsed again a few days ago, and decided to give habit-switching another shot. Instead of getting high on alcohol, I am going to get high on calorie restriction. Does this mean my ED is back? Well, as long as I stay in the driver's seat, the answer is NO. I'm just having a bit of sober fun.

I found an old tag called "30 days of thin," and I'm going to give it a go. It started off as a 'healthy weight loss' tag but of course it got co-opted and corrupted. The idea is to answer one trigger question per day for thirty days. The first and last questions are "what are your stats?" and "what are your stats now?" so it's meant to be done as a companion to a pro-ana diet, in which hopefully you'd lose some weight in the thirty days and have success to report at the end. I'm not going to follow a particular diet, but I'm just going to keep my calories under 1000 per day.

So, Day One:
30 - the almond milk in my coffee throughout the course of the day
60 - six almonds
72 - apple
448 - eight shrimp gyoza
60 - sesame oil
15 - low sodium soy sauce
60 - honey in my tea
Total: 745

Question: what are your stats?
Height: 5'10"
HW: 170 (BMI 24.4)
LW: 138.5 (BMI 19.9)
CW: 164.6 (BMI 23.6)
...and I don't have any other stats 'cause I don't take measurements.

Within the first ten days, I am going to get under 161 lbs. That's "GW1", if you like.

Antabuse (Subtitled: Is My Liver Mad At Me?)

I started Antabuse over the weekend.

Antabuse reacts with any alcohol that enters your system, making you extremely sick. Among other things, it removes the possibility of even keeping down any alcohol, which means I literally cannot drink. If have even an ounce of vodka (or beer or wine or mouthwash or cough syrup or...), I will just throw it back up. It's enforced sobriety.

Unfortunately, I'm experiencing appetite loss as a side effect. This is not a common, or even occasional, side effect - it's one of the contact-your-doctor-immediately side effects, because it could mean my liver is failing. My liver, despite what I've put it through, is extremely healthy -- the last time I got a liver panel done, three weeks ago, all of my numbers were excellent. But I am now on five daily meds, and that might be a little much. I'm going to ask for another liver panel the next time I see one of the doctors at the treatment center.

Stay tuned; sometime later in the week I'll be publishing a long post about the difficult decision of whether or not to start biologically transitioning. The pros! The cons! The bewbz! The wtfs?!?

(P.S. I have a bottle of seltzer here in my bed with me, and I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and panicking! My subconscious jumps to the conclusion that it's my usual bed-companion, a bottle of vodka, before I can consciously step in and correct it. Wow.)

A Return

Treatment worked.

That's the two-word summary of my experience on the psych ward. I ended up going to Suburban Hospital, not PIW. I got Wellbutrin (a dopaminergic antidepressant often combined with other antidepressants in order to make them work better) and Baclofen (a muscle relaxer, because I needed one) added to my meds, and both are working wonderfully. The Wellbutrin, in particular, has completely changed my life. That is not an exaggeration. Each day is an adventure, as I am relearning what my capabilities and limits are from scratch. The subconscious dismissal "that's a thing I can't do" honed over eight years of mental disability gives way to the conscious "I couldn't do that before, but let's just try it because I might be able to do it now." This is still a learning process, of course - even though I can do certain things now, doing them often fails to occur to me because I am so used to being unable to. But here is a list of things I have done since getting on Wellbutrin, that had been difficult-to-impossible before:

1) Showering all by myself, without even having to be told to.
2) Washing dishes. And not just a couple dishes here or there - entire sinkfuls at a time. (This is HUGE!!!!!)
3) Signed up for a class to get my Group Fitness Instructor certification, so I can have a marketable skill with which to eventually enter the workforce.
3.5) Actually had the confidence to believe I could handle obtaining and holding a job! Couldn't handle either of these things before, that's for sure.
4) Started filling out several applications - and finished a couple! (To adopt a dog, to get said dog certified as my ESA, to get myself inside the tangle of red tape around needing, acquiring, and owning a service dog, and to go back to school for my MA in Education!

Exciting, exciting. But there are still things I haven't yet worked up the courage to attempt, including the extremely important matter of checking my email, and the slightly less important matters of figuring out Amazon Payments so that I can retrieve the money currently trapped in my account, finishing the KickStarter campaign for publishing Freight Special, and doing any work at all on my two novels, The Life Mechanic and Care. Oh, and I also haven't been able to quit drinking, though I am making progress on that front. I'm going to 3-4 AA meetings a week now and have developed a group of sober friends, and my lapses are now actual lapses, rather than several-month-long continuous binges punctuated by single days of sobriety.

As far as my diet... I expected anorexia or bulimia to automatically swoop in to replace the drinking, because I always need to be doing something addictive and self-destructive... but that hasn't happened. I am still constantly making plans to starve myself, of course, but in practice I am eating normally and maintaining my weight.

So on all fronts, my mental health is currently better than it has ever been in my life, even better than it was when I was a kid (because back then, even though I was much more functional than I am now, I was also much more suicidal, and I had an active eating disorder too.)

And guess what -- I still bore the hell out of myself. My life is still bland, pathetic, and mostly confined to a single room. And now I am more bored than ever, because I don't have nearly as much screwed-upness consuming me (not that I'm complaining about that!) For now, "healthy" seems to be just "lack of unhealthy." And for me, "lack of unhealthy" is essentially lack of anything at all. But if the Wellbutrin keeps working, then that will change, eventually, as I welcome little productive bits back into my identity and build a self of which, someday far in the future, I can be unashamed. Maybe even proud.

The Bin

Tomorrow, I will be going inpatient at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington. My depression is more severe than it has ever been, even worse than that first episode in high school. I had been doing a trial of TMS (transcranial magnetic neurostimulation) for treatment-resistant depression at Butler Hospital in Providence, RI, but I got dismissed from the study for being too unstable and declining too rapidly. The head doctor urged me to walk into the nearest ER right then and there, but I chose to travel to Maryland so that my mother could take me to a hospital down there. I need to be parented more intensively than anyone in Boston can or should parent me. So I'm on an Amtrak train right now, on my way south.