Starving to Death

I had a couple of conversations this week that took me right back to where I was five years ago -- the week of my diagnosis with Celiac.

The first conversation was at Weight Watchers. I signed up for the core plan and was going through the whole spiel with the instructor. She was pointing to a continuum of hunger and saying "you need to stop eating before you are stuffed and not get so hungry that you get desperate."

In a flash - I remembered back to that desperate hunger when I came home for the first time and realized whole swaths of the pantry were off limits. I recall being determined I was never going to put that poison gluten back into my system. Hunger is powerful and I remember being confused and at a loss, hour after hour, meal after meal, about what was next and safe. I remember filling those gaps with marshmallows, nuts and coke -- just buying myself time so I could think straight until I could plan the next meal. The experience drained me then and just going back there drained me again. I was surprised at how powerful the effect of that memory on me was. After all - it was nearly five years ago.

Since then, over time I "got healthy" - but my weight drifted up. I think I have a lot of positive emotion associated with that weight gain. To me - the gain has coincided with my improvements in health. So the extra pounds represented being more muscular, healthier, recovering quicker, even a "safety margin" of fat in case I needed it.

Which brings me to my second conversation. I was talking to a person from my cycling class about Celiac. I told him how, pre-diagnosis, I would drink four cokes with my Beligan waffle w/ ice cream dinner, go for a run, then go out with my girlfriend for Texas pecan fudge pie a la mode and not gain weight. He asked me how that was possible, and I explained that my intestines were so destroyed by my autoimmune reaction to gluten that the food just passed through without being absorbed. Even though I was eating, I was literally starving to death.

And when I said that -- starving to death -- I received one of those lightning-flashes of clarity. It struck me that my self-preservation instinct really drove some powerful thoughts and emotions for me around food. It's absolutely silly to think that someone with my means could starve in an country with such ready access to food, but in that twisty, emotional world, not everything makes sense and not everything is logical. These feelings around food, driven by my self-preservation instinct, are some of the strongest emotions I cope with. At (blessedly infrequent) times they've made me snap, be less of a person than I should be and driven me to tears. I realized that it's taken me five years to get the emotional space to want to do something about it.

When I finished an Ironman, half Ironman and marathon in the space of four months, it exploded any idea or emotion I had in my mind that Celiac could hold me back physically any more. With nothing left to prove physically, I've been thinking that the next step in my training is to finally drop the weight. Based on the conversations this past week, I've found that this next step in my journey may be much more about my emotions and mindset than anything else.