My Story – Part Three

There came a point in my obsession where I realized I couldn’t keep jacking up my mileage and eating less every day. Over the course of the year I’d started to lift weights but relied on hear-say to build my routines. I feared weight lifting in the early period of this first phase of ‘transformation,’ concerned that I would ‘gain weight’ and ‘bulk up.’

It didn’t take long before I recognized that great physiques were built by iron and not by cardio. I found myself more and more in the weight room and less so on the track or trail. I started to flip through Men’s Health rather than Runner’s World. I still didn’t know anything about nutrition, or really, anything about exercise. But I wanted six-pack abs. Even at 120lbs, I carried so little muscle I still had none.

When I finally prioritized weight lifting my hunger skyrocketed. I started eating again. All the endurance training helped blunt my appetite while weight trained seemed to encourage me to eat. Instead of listening to my body and making rapid and efficient gains I, with brilliant idiocy, felt that all I needed were a few then en vogue tricks of the trade – no carbs with fat, no carbs at night, no high GI carbs, only monounsaturated fats, tons of protein, and of course, ‘keep it clean’ to put on muscle and gain no fat.

And then I started to fall apart… again.  With low-carb mania at its peak, bodybuilding websites reflected the trend.  With my exercise regimen putting me close to 12+ hours a week of intense exercise, I embarked down a long road that carried with it feast, famine, and an eating disorder.

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I started pairing extreme diets with extreme workout protocols.  High intensity interval training three times a week?  Awesome.  Full-body workouts four times a week?  Most excellent.  Hideously and dangerously low-calorie and low-carb, even compromising protein?  Sure ‘nuff.

There was no limit.  I’d learned that results were had from deprivation, from uncompromising commitment, and a never say ‘no’ attitude.  I dove into the supplement culture.  I devoured every article I could.  It became my new obsession.  I tracked every calorie, counted every carb, freaked when I couldn’t get what I thought to be a ‘proper’ meal in, and turned into an utter headcase.

And then the binging began.

Whether it was the mental stress associated with the ‘rules’ of eating, outside life pressures, chronic deprivation, or overtraining, I can’t say.  What I do know is that I began consuming as much food as humanly possible ever-single-weekend for about a year.  I recall one legendary weekend where I tracked my calories.  In a twenty-four hour period I ate close to 20,000kcal.  I gained 24lbs that day.  I was like a bodybuilder on a permanent pre-contest cut.  I thought I was going insane.

Living in a state of constant food paranoia is something I’m sure too many can relate to.  It’s as though your entire world, your entire life revolves around what you’re putting (or not putting) into your mouth.  I would go out to dinner with friends, refuse food in favor of coffee, and be on the brink of passing out.  I would often leave social gatherings to eat ‘clean’ foods and, in the end, binge anyway.  It was a vicious cycle, the dark underbelly that goes by unspoken by too many.  When you live your life online amidst fellow obsession compulsives plagued with similar afflictions, it’s difficult to identify the ‘dis’ in the disorder.

Fed up with it all, crippled by rampant binging, my social life gone, instead replaced with a paranoid hermitic existence, I made some drastic changes.  I abandoned the gurus and promises and left behind notions of rapid and maintainable progress.  I came to accept that I needed to slow the fuck down and get my head screwed on straight.

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A chance e-mailing with Alan Aragon ruptured my crazed neurosis.  Not since that first run had there been such a sharp break in my world view.  I went from orthorexic, restrained eating and painfully debilitating exercise to logical and reasonable nutrition coupled with progressive training.  Overnight I discarded all that I ‘knew’ about nutrition and found myself, alongside my new mentor, abreast PubMed articles and Medline.  I’d taken guru-talk at face value and had ignored what my body had told me for too long.   I should note, it’s not that the recommendations of online fitness authors were wrong per se, nor did they fail to net results; they did.  The twist was that I was obsessing, expending far too much effort over details that made no difference in the end.  These marginal matters stayed too central and occupied mental space better spent on my studies.

Over the next two years I would rebuild my body with less stress, more confidence, and smarter choices.  My progress wasn’t linear – the obsessions of the past caught up with me about a year into my recovery as I was diagnosed with clinical overtraining.

I can’t say enough about questioning any advice given to you.  One of my great discoveries of the past year, in contrast to advice ad infinum from sources around the Internet, is that I do spectacular on a higher carb diet.  I presumed that carbs were behind my ‘insulin’ resistance.  I presumed I was glucose intolerant.  I presumed I had contraindications swirling about me like plagued pigeons.  I never bothered to find out what happened if I just follow my instincts.

Bodybuilding, fitness, diet, physique transformation – it all serves to distance you from all the biological and physiological signals your body pumps out.  Too many people are willing to sublimate their own tastes and desires and instead follow scripted guidelines from authors who know nothing about them.  To the extent we’re similar, we each carry wildly different psychological profiles.  Where brute force and a never-say-quit attitude may carry someone their whole life, others need tempered approaches more cerebral in nature.

Some authors may intone here that there may be a perfect ‘fit’ physically that doesn’t fit psychologically.  I don’t believe this to be true.  To a certain degree, I believe we shape our physical selves through the cerebral games we play.  Our brains are the first and last points of entry and egress for our actions.  We must think before we do.  At a very basic level we think ourselves thin or think ourselves fat.  We think ourselves muscular or we think ourselves emaciated.  The notion that some optimal protocol exists that contradicts your psychological reality is an absolute falsity.

Find your own route and realize setbacks just refine your means to progress.  The world is rarely black and white.  Look at the shades involved in everything you do.  Not just training and diet but everything in your world.  There are many hidden surprises to be found among what would seem to be otherwise the straightforward, trodden paths of life.

While this article series may be over, subscribe and follow Ryan’s physical pursuits on his website at http://www.ryanzielonka.com. And if you want to learn how to avoid all the pitfalls he fell into, click on the Services link at the top of this page to learn about his consultation  practice.

Tagged as: fat loss, lifestyle, weight loss