First Thing

Ok if I am to have a healthier year I have three things that right off the top of my head I need to do: Go to the dentist Get new eye glasses Make "me" time! All sound really easy but I know myself. Happy New Year!

Fresh Start

So its that time of the year to look back and look ahead. I tried to look back at this past year to think about what I have learned and what I should do this coming year and I can see that I have learned a lot. But learning lessons and actually implementing what I learned is very different! So I am going to make myself a list of things I must change in my life.

End of the year emptiness

I have been feeling very depressed for a long time now.  I knew I have been "off" for awhile but I just skimmed back through my blog this past year and it hit me how bad its been and for how long.  This month really sucked too.  On the 10th my husband had another psychotic episode and we actually ended up wrestling on the ground and it getting pretty bad.  Something happened to my neck and it is still sore but atleast I can feel some improvement.  Then on the 18th I admitted someone here at the hospital and it was the saddest admission I have done EVER.  I was tearing up talking to her, then going through her belongings I was holding back tears and just had to leave the unit.  I went to a bathroom and cried for awhile cleaned my self up and went back to work.  The thing was once I started crying everything I was holding back for so long came out like a tsunami.  I had to go to a "safe crisis" class after work and I ended up throwing up and crying some more.  On the way home I cried the whole time big loud tears.  I also stopped to get a pregnancy test because I got my period, it was over and then I got it again very heavy for a day then I was light for over a week.  So just incase I tested, it was negative, I figured my body was responding to stress but I had to make sure.                                                             ***** I started writing this over a week ago and didn't get to finish it until now.  I am actually feeling better now.  I got my period for real and my mood shifted a bit.  My husband is still not great but he is stable enough for the moment.  Christmas was ok, I did not hit my sisters husband who is a horrible human being.  I alwayb joke about that but honestly if my niece had not been next to me I would have walked over to him at one point had hit him as hard as I could, he was beeing such an ass to my mother, who let's him and my sister live rent free for the past 15 years. I have many examples of him and my sister being morons but its a moot point by now. Anyway I didn't hit him. I still make no promises for the future. But for now I feel ok.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303768104577462562370062738.html I Know Why the Fat Lady Sings: Gorging on Kit Kats and pot roast lets you overindulge while still getting the kids off to school Why did I get fat? Why was I eating until I hurt and regarding my own body as something as distant and unsympathetic as, say, the state of the housing market in Buenos Aires? Obviously, it's not wholly advisable to swell up so large that, on one very bad day, you get stuck in a bucket seat at a local fair and have to be rescued by your old schoolmaster, but why is being fat treated as a cross between terrible shame and utter tragedy? Something that—for a woman—is seen as falling somewhere between sustaining a sizable facial scar and sleeping with the Nazis? Why will women happily boast-moan about spending too much ("…and then my bank manager took my credit card and cut it in half with a sword!"), about drinking too much ("…and then I took my shoe off and threw it over the bus stop!"), and about working too hard ("…so tired I fell asleep on the control panel, and when I woke up, I realized I'd pressed the nuclear launch button! Again!") but never, ever about eating too much? Why is unhappy eating the most pointlessly secret of miseries? It's not like you can hide a six-Kit-Kats-a-day habit for very long.[OVEREAT]Zohar Lazar 'The heroin addicts look down on the coke addicts.… And everyone thinks the people with eating disorders are scum.'Related Articles How I Stopped Drowning in Drink For Healthy Eating, Bitter is Better Seven years ago, a friend of mine broke up with a pop star, reactivated her bulimia, binged and purged for nine days straight, and then admitted herself to the Priory, a British rehab center known for treating famous clients like Amy Winehouse. I went to visit her—out of a combination of love and curiosity as to what the Priory was like. I'd presumed it was like the glitzy Chateau Marmont in L.A., but with amazing prescription drugs. Full of interestingly ravaged celebrities clawing their way back to normality, in the midst of some helpfully gorgeous décor. In the event, it turns out that, inside, the Priory actually looks, and smells, like a lower-midrange family-run hotel. Faded swirly carpets and, somewhere—judging by the smell—a perpetually boiling caldron of stew, working as the world's biggest Glade PlugIn. As my friend told me, sitting on the end of her bed chain-smoking, an institution full of emotionally troubled substance abusers turns out to be no fun at all. "There's a pecking order," she sighed, shredding her cuticles with her opposing thumbnail. "The heroin addicts look down on the coke addicts. The coke addicts look down on the alcoholics. And everyone thinks the people with eating disorders—fat or thin—are scum."More from Review * The Saturday Essay: The Nonna State * Essay: Stealing a Watch, Made Easy * An E-Reader Revolution for Africa? And there's your pecking order of unhappiness, in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination—except eating. Consider, for instance, Keith Richards, in his Glimmer Twins days—snorting, smoking, injecting, drinking. Everyone loves him! Even though, by any way we can calculate it, he would almost certainly have been a complete nightmare to be around—paranoid, shaky, unreliable and, a good part of the time, so deeply unconscious that the primary method of moving from one location to another would have been being dragged by the ankles—we still have a slight cultural frisson of "How cool!" when people get this messed up. But imagine if instead he had started overeating and gotten really fat instead. If he'd really gotten into spaghetti Bolognese, say, or kept coming onstage holding foot-long meatball subs. Long, crazy, wired nights after gigs, in penthouses, nubile dollies scattered across the room, and Keith in the center, sprawled across a silk-draped emperor-size water bed, eating Doritos sandwiches. By the time of "Their Satanic Majesties Request," what his Satanic Majesty would be requesting was a 38-inch waistband, and everyone would have mocked the Stones for having a faintly ludicrous wobble-butt on guitar who was ruining the concept of rock 'n' roll. But, of course, all this time, Keith would have been behaving like a total darling: waking at 8 a.m., keeping his hotel rooms tidy, thanking everyone, working a solid 12-hour day. People overeat for exactly the same reason they drink, smoke, have serial one-night stands or take drugs. I must be clear that I am not talking about the kind of overeating that's just plain, cheerful greed—the kind of Rabelaisian, Falstaffian figures who treat the world as a series of sensory delights and take full joy in their wine, bread and meat. Those who walk away from a table—replete—shouting, "That was splendid!" before sitting in front of a fire, drinking port and eating truffles, don't have neuroses about food. They aren't "fat," they are simply…lavish. No—I'm talking about those for whom the whole idea of food isn't one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary background static to normal thought. Those who walk into the kitchen in a state bordering on panic and breathlessly eat slice after slice of bread and butter—not even tasting it—until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of chewing and swallowing, spooning and swallowing. In this trancelike state, you can find a welcome, temporary relief from thinking for 10, 20 minutes at a time, until finally a new set of sensations—physical discomfort and immense regret—make you stop, in the same way you finally pass out on whiskey or dope. Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug—sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs—you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, stop in on your parents and then stay up all night with an ill 5-year-old—something that is not an option if you're regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of scotch. Overeating is the addiction of choice of "carers," and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of screwing yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction, making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that is why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. I sometimes wonder if the only way we'll ever get around to properly considering overeating is if it does come to take on the same perverse, rock 'n' roll cool of other addictions. Perhaps it's time for women to finally stop being secretive about their vices and instead start treating them like all other addicts treat their habits. Coming into the office looking frazzled, sighing, "Man, I was on the pot roast last night like you wouldn't believe. I had, like, POTATOES in my EYEBROWS by 10 p.m." Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others. They could reply, "Whoa, maybe you should calm it down for a bit, my friend. I am the same. I did a three-hour session on the microwave lasagna last night. Perhaps we should go out to the country for a bit. Clean up our acts." Because at the moment, I can't help but notice that in a society obsessed with fat—so eager in the appellation, so vocal in its disapproval—the only people who aren't talking about it are the only people whose business it really is. —From "How to Be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. Copyright © 2012 by Caitlin Moran. To be published July 17 by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Learning material

Wow what a wonderful example of misinformation. Let me explain, I work in an inpatient psy hospital and once a year we must take a three part class called safe crisis management where we learn how to handle situations that arise that can become a crisis and what to do if there is a crissis. One step of avoiding a crisis is knowing what to expect from a patient based on personality and diagnosis. For example someone who is in a manic phase of their bipolar disease will probably not sleep at night and will have trouble keeping their voice low. So knowing that you would try to provide them with an area on the unit far from sleeping patients with an activity that is calming. Makes sense right? So I took part one of my class this past Monday and we spent sometime reviewing different diagnoses. We played a matching game where we needed to match the symptoms to the dx. Here are the two sentences ment to be matched with anorexia: "Most often diagnosed in females. Many individuals come from controlling families where nurturance is lacking." Really? Ok I understand the first sentence, mostly dx in females. Yes men do have EDs but less often. But the second sentence bugs me. I think for teaching purposes it is a horrible summary. It makes it sound like if we all had more hugs as children we would be fine. Is that how you would define anorexia? I describe it as a coping mechanism in which a person is overtly controlling about what they eat in order to feel that they have control over life, brought on by a feeling of lack of control. It may start as a diet but spirals out of control to where "looking good" in life is no longer a main focus. Ok end of my rant.

Happily Ever After

As Gilda Radner used to say, "It's always something." "I wanted a perfect ending," she wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, toward the end of her life. "Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next."

Liebster blog award!

Thank you Kitty for nominating me for the Liebster blog award, that was so nice of you! And again congratulations on the wonderful addition to your family! http://yesiwillbelosingit.blogspot.com/?m=1 *Rules:* - When you receive the award, thank the person who gave it to you, and include their link in your blog. - Post 11 things about yourself. - Answer the 11 questions of the person who nominated you. - Choose up to 11 bloggers with less than 200 followers. - Create 11 questions for your nominees! - Inform the nominees of their nomination. Let's see 11 things about me: 1. I was married on 10/14/06 to my husband who I met in college. We started dating when we bothb ended up taking a class together, a class I was only taking to stay full time as a student so I could stay on my dads insurance. 2. I have been in therapy since I was 17 years old. I probably should have started earlier. 3. I don't have one traumatic experience that I can pin point that caused my eating disorder. This seems to confuse people who think that EDs only happen if you are abused, and forget it is a complex illness that has many causes. 4. I have a Bachelors Degree in Nutrition, I picked nutrition as my major because of my ED. Looking back I was scared to try for a different degree thinking I wasn't smart enough so I should just stick with what I knew. 5. I want to change my life but I am scared of change. 6. I feel like I am naked if I leave my house without jewlery on. I always wear my wedding ring and engagement ring on my left hand and I wear atleast one ring on my right hand, earings, and a necklace. Sometimes I will add a bracelet. 7. I have 2 recurring nightmares that started when I was a teen. They vary slightly but in one I ant stop myself from bouncing off the ground uncontrolably (kind of like when you are "double bounced" on a trampoline) and th other is me driving and not being able to control the car sometimes I am driving but I can't reach the peddles or I am sitting in the backseat or the car lights are off and I can't see. 8. I daydream often. 9. I feel like I have lived several lives, I used to joke that at 14 I felt like a divorced 40 year old. 10. I am trying to prepare for the worst and hoping for better. *11 questions: * * Name the one part of your body you love. Really? Ok I do actually have body parts that I don't hate: my eyes and my feet. I don't like anyone elses feet except babies but my feet are ok, plus I am able to buy childrens shoes sometimes because they are small. * Where do you see your self in 5 years? If I am being optimistic I would say still living in this area with my husband. I would be working freelance using my nutrition degree and filing the paperwork to be a foster family and buying a house. * What is your favorite color? Royal purple and than any shade of purple. * If you could have one wish granted, what would it be? Restore my husbands health. Or perhaps just serenity or contentment in life. * What does your perfect day look like? I would wake up at dawn to go for a walk in the woods, it would be about 75 degrees out with lots of birds chirping and a few small animals running around. I would have pancakes for breakfast ad not feel bad afterwards. I would spend time at the park with my husband and my dog and have a picinic lunch or eat outside at a resturant in town. The rest of the day would be filled with laughter and conversations that make you feel closer to a person namely my husband. And on a perfect day my husband would feel like his true self all day long. * Name the one thing you can not live without. This is kind of pathetic but I cannot fall asleep without the tv on. So my cable/internet is what I couldn't do without. I mean who wants to live without either after having them? Not me! * Name 3 places you want to visit. Ireland, Italy, and all 50 of the United States. The last one was a suggestion from a woman I met in a nursing home, she said not to forget all the beauty we have in this country. * Lazy day on the couch, what do you do? First, get a more comfortable couch. Then I would be watching Mystery Science Three Thousand movies, Dogma, and then eating yummy sugary treats throughout the day with my husband and my pets. * What color is your hair? Right now it is a dark brown with some reddish tint to it. I dyed it this color which is pretty close to my natural color so that I wouldn't have to do anything for sometime. I want to dye it a dark strawberry blonde but I want it done professionally so I am waiting. * Name one thing that you hate! I hate the relationship I have with my body and mind. I am finally aware of the disfuctional relationship I have and I am trying to change. Ok here are my 11 questions: 1. Why did you start your blog? 2. Does anyone in your "real" life know about or read your blog? 3. If you could make one food your magical food that has no calories and no baring to your weight what would it be? 4. Are you invovled in any type of treatment? Are you on any type of drug therapy? 5. Looking back at your life when do you notice the begining of your disordered eating? 6. What is your favorite way to waste time? 7. What activity do you hate doing; dishes, cooking, commuting, making phone calls, keeping on top of your finances? 8. Looking back at your life is there anything you wish you did more of? 9. If you won a contest that allowed you to build your dream house what would you want and where? 10. Do you have a target weight? What do you think will be different in your life if/when you are at your target weight? Ok I am nominating a few people who have been nominated already and I don't expect you to re-answer anything or even send anything else out, I just really want to know your answers to the questions and let you know I really like reading your blog. Emily Anonymous Kitty Ruby-Tuesday And hoping to get you back to blogging, Does It Even Matter