Oh Yeah, I Have a Blog

Apparently I've been slacking.  You'd think that'd be a good thing, but honestly I'm kind of drowning right now.  I moved out on my own into a 2 bedroom townhouse about 3 miles from school.  That part?  Awesome.  I'm less than 5 miles from Autumn and Laura and about 20 minutes from Danielle and little man.
Lots of people warned me that I'd be lonely living alone.  And sometimes I am, sometimes I miss having someone to talk to every night.  This is one of the AMAZING things about being an introvert-I thrive in an environment where I get time to myself.  I don't have an issue being alone because being in huge crowds makes me nervous.  All of my energy comes from solitude-reading a book and just relaxing.  I can be myself when I'm alone, nobody can judge.  I can crank up the radio and sing along or dance, there's nobody watching.

So, if living alone isn't the problem, what is?  My confidence.  I thought I had it all under control, that I was finally confident in who I am and who I want to be.  But I'm not.  Not by a long shot.  I'm still 80 lbs over my low goal weight and 70 over my high goal weight-about 150-160 is my goal.  My weight seems to define me right now and I get disgusted when I overeat.  Sometimes, I don't eat.  I wish I could say that it's always unintentional, and most of the time it is, but sometimes I thrive on having that self control.  It's something I've always lacked.  You see, I have a binge eating disorder, have for a long time, and have never managed to control it.  Finally, now, I have the self control to not eat and a part of me wishes I could never eat again.  Unlike most addicts (and this is a true addiction), I can't just quit the thing that I am addicted to.  I can't walk away from it and never touch it again, you have to eat.  Sure, I can walk away from the unhealthy food in theory, but sometimes people have no say over where they eat-whether it be because other people take them out or because someone cooks it in their home and it's rude to not eat someone's cooking, no matter how bad it is for you.

So you can see why going a day, two days, three days, as long as possible without eating is appealing.  Breaking that addiction, learning to recognize being full, not bingeing.  It's just not practical.  Yes, there's the "starvation mode" myth, where your body will "totally hold onto fat and get rid of your muscle," but it's just not true.  The other myth is that if you eat less than 1200 calories as a woman or 1500 as a man, your metabolism will slow.  There's no scientific evidence of these magic numbers-for some people it may be no less than 2000, for others they may not have a number that they have to eat to have their metabolism go down.  When I don't eat, I lose weight like crazy.  I didn't eat much the past 5 days and lost 7 lbs, no magic number there and it wasn't intentional, it just happened, and it's dangerous.  Seeing all of that weight come off so quickly makes me want to not eat longer, to see how many pounds I could lose if I didn't eat much for a week, a month, two months.  Some days I just don't think about eating and it's amazing.  Not having my life run by food for the first time in years.  But at the same time, it's not healthy.  I know this.  But it doesn't stop the urge to try.

I need to learn to stop putting all of my self worth on my weight.  I know that underneath all of the fat is a beautiful person just waiting to come out, but will losing the weight be enough?  Doubtful.  I was thin once and STILL had no confidence.  I'm awkward, I talk too much, I'm annoying, all of these things I've been told over the years weigh on me and hold me back from being who I can be.  I over think things, overanalyze, obsess even, and I don't know how to stop.  I'm always trying to figure out what I did wrong, even if there's no evidence that I did anything wrong.  In my mind, things could have been better if I'd just done _____.  It doesn't matter if I did something amazing, like when I got my acceptance letters for nursing school, I wished that I'd applied for a Bachelor's program because this would ONLY be an Associate's.  Or I wished I'd applied to PA schools or even med school because things might have been better if I had.  I couldn't just sit back and go "holy shit, I got into one of the hardest undergrad programs in the nation to get into (nursing in general)."  I had to find SOMETHING wrong with it.  I don't know why I do this and I don't know how to stop.  I think I'm so afraid of failure that I lead myself to it because if I don't try, I can't fail.  At the same time, I'm afraid of success because if I succeed it means I did something right, and I feel like I never do anything right.

I try the "fake it til you make it" approach to confidence and it's great, in theory.  I can talk a big game about how awesome I am, how laid back, how much fun I can be, but when it comes down to it my nerves and insecurities get in the way.  I can't just sit back and relax, there's always something running through my mind that I should be doing instead, or how to do what I'm doing better.  My brain never shuts off and I'm ready to cry because I just can't handle it sometimes.  There's so many negative things I think about myself on a daily basis and only rarely do the positives come in.  Sure, I say them.  I tell people that I'm awesome, but it's all a show.  I figure if I pretend to be confident it'll make people think that I am, but on the inside I'm miserable and thinking of how my thigh is currently the same circumference that my waist was in high school or how my double chin shows up in pictures.  For every "selfie" I post on Facebook there's about 15 others that I didn't post because I was trying to get it perfect, make my face look as appealing and thin as possible and to avoid having my arms in the picture because they are a source of insecurity.

Now my question is, how do I stop faking and start believing?  It feels like all around me everyone is confident and I'm just sitting here only seeing the bad in myself.  It sucks.