Mental Illness and Physical Health

[stormdog]

Content warning: body weight, weight gain, weight loss

Mental illness and physical health: they are connected. Here's my weight tracking from Fitbit.



July of 2012 is when I started tracking food, eating more healthy stuff, and doing a lot of cycling. Physically, I felt great during the span of time up through January of 2016. It was good for my state of mind too.

Grad school started in fall of 2015, and things got gradually worse for me. I finally decided, in January of 2016 to leave grad school and go back to where I had a support network. I spent the immediately following span of months doing a lot of crying and recovering, and just didn't have the will to keep doing the fitness stuff I'd been doing. I'm still working on that recovery.

The occasional sharp points after around January of 2018 are times that I briefly started trying to track food again, but quickly gave up due to lack of metaphorical spoons.

I'm starting again, in a hesitant kind of way.

Comments

[cmcmck]

It's important not to force yourself to do these things.

Btw, I meant to ask- what name are we to know you by? As you know, Chiara is a blog name and I'm not sure if I've ever shared my big bad world name with you.

[stormdog]

Sorry for not answering earlier: I'm not quite sure yet. :)

My legal name is Christopher. That makes Chris convenient as a gender-neutral shortening, which is what I've always used anyway. I don't think anyone's called me Christopher since I was a kid and getting in trouble! So for a while I'd thought that I'd just use that and make life simple.

That said, I remember my parents telling me that if I'd been female-identified at birth, they would have called me Meghan. That meant more to me than I realized, knowing that. My 15-year-old fem user icon is titled Meghan, and I've been thinking more lately about whether I'd like to start being Meghan. I think the answer is probably yes, since my internal concept of myself as a young girl who needs me to take care of her (if that makes sense?) is named Meghan. Having this thought of myself as a little girl who needs help and love helps me get past my fears to give that help and love to myself.

My parents are coming to visit in a couple weeks and I'm going to ask them if I remember that name correctly. If so, I think there's a good chance I'll start using it. And if not, I may start using it anyway!

[cmcmck]

And Chris always gives you Christine or Christina.

My parents never wanted to know as you know but I suspect it'd have been Margaret as it's very much a family name.

I knew that young girl well- got to be her too, at least a little! :o)

[stormdog]

I'm so glad you got to be her! I hope I do too.

I was sitting on the couch with Danae yesterday reading about the name Meghan and learned that it's a short form or alternate form of Margaret! (Though I don't think I'm a Margaret.) I was showing Danae what I said to you about my name because I'm still in the process of figuring it out and writing to you about it was also a sort of processing of the concepts for me.