Healthy Living Expectations & Two-Part Anxiety

Part of the reason I haven’t been blogging as much lately is because, to be honest, I haven’t been being as healthy as I’d like to be. I’ve been completely swamped and stressed out by classes this semester and just surviving has been my number one goal this past month. Because of that, I haven’t been exercising much at all and I’ve pretty much completely stopped following my Healthy Goals Checklist. Sometimes I feel really guilty and upset about what’s been going on because I kicked butt this summer and lost almost 15 pounds. If I spend the next two months of this semester continuing to not be very healthy, I could gain it all back! Actually, I’ve been too scared to even step on the scale lately because I’m so worried about what I’ll see.

While I’m feeling really bad about this, there’s also another big part of me that wants to try and cut myself some slack. I did really well staying healthy this summer, even though my Heel Pad Syndrome is worse than its ever been. Picking back up where I left off at the end of the semester isn’t going to be the end of the world. Even if I do gain some weight, at least I know that I have the potential and the ability to shed those pounds because of how great I did this summer. And the biggest thing is that I shouldn’t be stressing out over my weight because I need to put all of my focus and effort into doing well in my classes.

So I know that I’m doing the right thing — putting my weight loss goals aside for a short time in order to get good grades and keep my sanity — but it also makes me feel like a fraud as a healthy living blogger. How can I keep being a “healthy living blogger” if I’m admitting to everybody that I’m not being healthy?

Recently I read Laura’s (from Becoming the Odd Duck) post on what upsets her about the healthy living community, and it really made me want to write about all of these feelings I’ve been having. Yes, I’m a healthy living blogger — but, no, that does not make me perfect. On top of this, I already feel ostracized in this community for being overweight. I always feel like I’m being judged for not being extremely healthy because I’m overweight. It’s like people don’t understand that it’s a struggle. If I could be 100% healthy every day, I would be — trust me. But I’m not. And that has a lot to do with why I’m overweight. It’s really hard to lose weight. And it’s even harder to deal with the emotional side of it.

I don’t want to feel pressured to be healthy by the healthy living blogger community, because I’m already getting enough of that pressure from myself. I want to feel like it’s okay to take a break from following my Healthy Goals Checklist in order to keep myself mentally healthy. I’m making a choice for my body and I stand by it. Being healthy isn’t just about what you eat and how often you workout. Sure, that’s a huge part of it, but it’s not everything. Right now I really need to focus on myself and my grades. And I refuse to care if you want to judge me for eating Annie’s Mac and Cheese a lot more than I’d like to admit to .

As a lot of you guys already know, I have clinical anxiety. Ever since this semester started, I’ve really been feeling like it’s been kicked up a notch.

I want to try to explain to you what my anxiety is like, since it’s different for everybody. When I picture it, I see it as being separated into two different categories: (1) rumination, and (2) obsessive compulsive tendencies.

Rumination is hard to explain, because it can be an almost tactile experience. Basically, it’s when you either can’t stop thinking about something (like how I get worried about my weight) or you keep replaying something in your head (like a bad experience or a conversation with somebody). In the past, rumination has been the biggest part of my anxiety. Before going on medication, it would keep me up all night because I couldn’t stop the thoughts from racing around in my head (And that’s on top of the insomnia I already have! Although, debatably, that could be in itself another separate side effect of the anxiety).  Sometimes it would get so bad that I’d replay a single event or conversation in my head multiple times a day for weeks, or even months. Luckily, the medication I’m currently on has really helped with this part of it. I almost never experience rumination anymore, which I am so thankful for.

The second part of my anxiety is obsessive compulsive tendencies — which have been in full force lately. For some reason, while I have experienced this side of my anxiety before, it has just recently become the dominant aspect. I’m not really sure why this happened. I think it’s either because of moving into the apartment with Brent or because I switched medications, but I can’t know for sure because they both happened around the same time.

I much prefer the obsessive compulsivity to the rumination, so I’m not all that upset about the change. My apartment has never been cleaner, and neither have my teeth or hands! Brent has started to make fun of me because of how many times I wash my hands a day (at least thirty) and my epic chore chart on G-Cal .

For example… here’s what November looks like. Everything purple is a chore that needs to be done (usually one or two a day). It might seem a little crazy, but I love that everything is spic-and-span around here. Brent says that he’s going to monitor me to make sure it doesn’t get too out of control, but it hasn’t started to interfere with schoolwork at all yet, so I think I’m good for now.

I actually want to do a post on how to create your own chore chart, because I have found it so useful and wish that I’d come up with this system a long time ago. So stay tuned for that!