Weight and depression - time for a healthy diet

I am munching my way through my last packet of crisps before the Healthy Eating weight loss diet starts in 2 days on 1^st August.  Getting breathless walking Gabi this summer has got me worried.  I have been on blood pressure meds for 2 years already, and I’m only 41.   My BMI is no longer in the overweight category but I have crossed the line into obese.   I need to lose 20% of my current weight to reach the top end of the healthy range for my height.  

This is partly linked to my mental health.  A lot of mental health medication can encourage weight gain, mostly I think from giving us the major munchies, though some may affect metabolism too.  I also spent time on one that has a side effect on blood pressure.   But it is not all the medication.

Depression can be exhausting, acting ‘normal’ in the big wide world means coming home and flopping out. For me that puts meal prep way way down the ‘to do’ list, whilst duvet time is right at the top.  Of course at some stage my body demands input, and Now!  

That means quick calories and no effort.  So surface from duvet and reach the kitchen, problem is that making a decision is as much of an effort as anything else and I am left standing in the middle of a supply of food but paralysed by the decision process.  Default kicks in and I reach for the instant calories of a packet of oaty biscuits, or crisps, or anything instant, and retreat with the packet back to the duvet and munch, and munch, through the whole packet.

That isn’t every meal, or every day – but far too frequently, and in between are the ready meals or that sole meal of the day turns into eating both portions of the meal for two.  Basically my eating is rubbish and all over the place, and that’s before alcohol calories.

So 1^st Aug is the new beginning, I have been researching, I have produced a 4 week menu plan so that the effort of choice is taken away, and I have been shopping – with a strict list!   I had a trolley full of veg and fresh fish, some chicken and not much else – no biscuits, no doughnuts, no multipacks of crisps.

The discipline will be to eat at 3 specific points each day, the diet is low in carb and limited calories but full of healthy nutrients.  Yes it is a low calorie – quick impact diet but not in a faddish cabbage soup diet way.   I know my stickability to a new project is not great once the novelty wears off, so something that feels like it is getting somewhere is better for me.   And to start with a mild obsessio

n about the healthy eating project is good for getting off the blocks well.

So enjoying the last pack of crisps and last glass of wine for a while, and the church faith lunch tomorrow – then Monday morning I will rediscover proper breakfast.  I will let you know how I do.

Living with pain

I have friends who live with great pain in their bodies, not a mere paracetamol or ibuprofen pain, but the kind that gets offered the strongest pills possible which still only dulls the worst moments.   They don’t talk about the daily pains that often – it is enough to feel it without talking about it too, and they don’t want to bore you or themselves with saying that it hurts every time someone asks ‘how are you?’

I admit to being a wimp over physical pain, and don’t even mention nausea!  What my friends live with as normal would lay me out.  But life has to be lived, and my friends like so many others find a way to keep functioning with these pains.

If only it were that easy - physically or emotionally

When they do mention how bad a day is – then it is a day when it is not just the permanent ‘normal’ pain (which the rest of us would consider a ‘bad day’) but an extra extra bad day when the meds are not helping much – or at least it feels they aren’t, though how much worse could it be without them? We all experience pain, but they live with it.

To understand depression is a similar distinction – yes we all have low days but to live with depression is to have as a normal what those without the illness know as a really bad day.  We may not tell you how tough living with that emotional pain as daily life is, like my friends finding a way to function with great physical pain, so those of us living with depression find ways to function in the big wide world.   Physical or emotional, you may not glimpse the limp or grimace with a wave of pain, we have got used to not letting it show.  But it costs us – this functioning and blending in.

And some days the cost is beyond our budget, beyond our energy overdraft limit – then we may say ‘I’m not too good today’. But remember we are likely to be using a completely different scale, so saying ‘I’m having a bad day too’ – unless you are using the same currency as us – is not really understanding.   In the same way as if I were to respond to one of my friends whose body is regularly wracked with extreme pain with the comment ‘yeah? I have a bit of a headache today too’.

I am sure that on a normal day they would be very willing to commiserate with my headache, but I should not be under any illusions that I understand their experience.

So when someone living with depression doesn’t talk about how it feels, don’t assume our normal is your normal.  And when we do say it is a bad day then believe that it is and give us space when functioning is a challenge.

They say that ‘grass is greener on the other side’ – strangely that is not the case here, at least for me, having learned to live with depression it is a housemate (lifemate?) whose habits I have got to know and learned to cope with at some level.  As said I am a wimp about physical pain and so the challenges of friends living with that seem much worse than my own journey. I wonder if they feel the same about depressive pain?

I write this on a functioning day, but where depression is as always lurking in the background, in the hope of helping anyone travelling with someone with depression to understand a bit of the difference in what we say and what that describes.

Being heard - probably Bipolar 2

Finally, I have had a meeting with a psychiatrist that has been willing to discuss past patterns in my mental health, not just how I am in the moment. There is a place for focusing on the now, but that doesn’t help to work out what the long term issues are. When I explained that I had in my previous location been passed from one junior to another as their training rotations shifted, and each with their own views – from the ‘if you are not in debt and sleeping around it cannot be bipolar’, and ‘this mood diary is not relevant as you were abroad’ – he was apologetic about what I had experienced.

We talked about different events in my life, including leading up to my big collapse at theological college.  He validated my view that over productivity, excessive confidence and boundary issues fitted the pattern of hypomania, the times when I am full of energy and ideas but often in a driven way. That can be really creative but not easy for those I am rushing into ideas and who have to slow me or stop me.   I have never thought I have had clinical mania – the sign of Bipolar 1 - but that I fit the patterns of depressions with intermittent hypomania times. I recognised myself in the descriptions I was reading of Bipolar 2 back when I had the inflated idea that a full time job, an illness and a part time PhD was reasonable.

All I have sought is a reasonable conversation with a professional about what resonated with me and how that might impact how I manage my mental health. I have had some medication that matches a bipolar spectrum view but no-one before would discuss things diagnostically.  I respect that technically the psychiatrist needs to witness a high to formally diagnose – ie not just on what I say (in case I am making it up) – but he listened and valued my past experiences and validated my self-recognition.  He agreed that if as I described then it fits the Bipolar 2 model.

I am pleased to have a putative label for my experiences, not because I want that label, but because I felt heard and my understanding of myself was valued.  Having even a ‘maybe/probably’ label is helpful because it enables a realistic conversation of how things can be managed.  But even if the psychiatrist had explained why it was not what I thought, because he valued what I had to say I would respect that view, whereas those who just dismissed my experiences did not have my respect.

It is still a seesaw even if you spend more time down than up 

When, about 7 months after my big collapse at college (I had been sent to a counsellor but no-one had nudged me to the doctor in that time), I went to the GP and was diagnosed as severe depression I came home a tiny weeny bit less low – it was not just me being a failure at being, it was a valid illness.  This appointment has had a similar, though not as desperate, an effect - what I have thought about myself I not imagination, not me trying to make more of a fuss than needed, it has been validated by a professional after a real reflection.

The power of being listened to – an example that we can all follow in our different ways.