I’m going to get a little personal here for a second.

June has been a rough month for me, mentally, physically and nutritionally.

Finishing up school should have been an exciting time but instead as I was receiving that diploma all I could think was ‘I don’t have a job, I don’t have an income.’ Sure I have a part time job (one shift a week) but suddenly, with my savings and student loan depleted, that was not going to pay the rent. I started applying for jobs and not getting anything back and I could feel the stress building up as the days passed and I couldn’t even buy groceries.

I’m so used to eating very healthy, fresh food and I was in a position where the contents of my fridge were a bottle of mustard and a jug of water. It took no longer being a student for me to finally have to start living like a student.

As a result whenever I managed to scrounge together some cash I ended up buying things that weren’t so great for me. This has started a downward spiral and I’m now trying to dig myself out of a real nutritional mess. It’s affecting my mood, my ability to get things done, the quality of my sleep and really just everything. It takes removing processed sugars/food from your life to really know the breadth of the negative effects these things have on your body. It’s not until you get rid of it all that you know how terrible you really felt before.

I’m pretty sure I have mentioned in the past that I am a binge eater and I hope that this post will help make me accountable for some of my actions as of late. Not only do I binge but I hide it. It’s like the switch in my body that says “okay, you’re full now” is just shut off. I can eat forever and never feel full. The amount of food I can consume in one sitting is unreal. Of course, I don’t want to look like a glutton in front of other people so I do these things in private. Part of the problem is that most of the time I am alone so it’s easy to let it get away from me. I have really let it get away from me this time and I feel like it’s starting to get out of control. It’s like I can’t remember how to stop even though I’ve done it so many times before.

It makes me so guilty because I feel like in just a few short weeks I have managed to unravel months of really hard work. I can’t achieve my goals if every six months, when I get just a little bit stressed out, I let myself become a total slave to food. I know these things and yet I still let it happen every time. I wish there was a way to make myself more accountable or figure out how to put an end to this cycle.

This blog, I feel, is one of my accountability tools. Talking about this, admitting to all of you that I have a problem and its name is food, is a huge relief to me. I have since gotten myself a really fun/cool fitness-based part time job and the excitement about starting work is definitely help calm my desire to stress eat.

There’s nothing I can’t come back from. I can only go forward. I just need to sort myself out again, get back in the gym (I also managed to talk myself out of going for nearly a week because I have zero energy), get my eating back on plan and keep my eye on the prize. Here I go…