I feel like I'm finally putting behind me a really crappy mood that had settled over me the past few weeks. I felt unmotivated, bored, and hopeless. This didn't just relate to my fitness regimen, but overtook my entire life. I didn’t give up on any of my goals, which is a little surprising in retrospect, but I wasn’t as excited about the process. I wasn’t very excited about life. The most frustrating part was that I had absolutely no idea why. I just didn’t care about anything. I was losing weight, clothes were fitting better, weights were getting easier to lift, and I was feeling much better physically…and that was just the fitness stuff. I have the love and support of a wonderful family at home. We have a home, food, and everything we need. That’s a whole lot to be thankful for, yet I still just felt blah. Something must have changed, but what? The answer was a lot simpler than I could have imagined, and something that I (quite easily) may have never guessed.
The human body is an extremely complex network of systems and subsystems that work together in really amazing ways to keep us going every day. Science has come a long way in explaining exactly what it is that makes us tick, but there are some things that we just have to accept as true. I’m not going to break things down to a chemical level or give some detailed medical explanation here (mainly because I can’t), but what you put in to your body can have a huge affect on you. I’m not just talking about a purely physical affect either; your mental health can be just as affected by what you eat and drink as your physical health. Now I don’t have any fancy-schmansy book learnin’ or doctor’s degrees to back that up, but I HAVE sought solace in the occasional chocolate bar and felt the very soul soothing effect of a well prepared homemade meatloaf. The bitch of this is that there really is no formula for what foods are going to affect you in what ways. That’s just the price you pay for being a beautiful and unique snowflake, I’m afraid.
I know at this point you are just about pissing your pants to know what had me on the slow boat to Emoville. I’d be happy to tell you, but BAM….there’s a twist! It wasn’t just one thing. I’ll give the strong amongst you a moment to collect yourselves, as I am sure you are the only ones left after the heads of the weak literally exploded with that revelation. I’ve said before…countless times…to anyone that would listen or lacked the capacity to escape the sound of my voice…that I do not believe in diets or diet plans that exclude any foods or food groups completely. True, you should avoid some foods more than others but ignoring them completely just seems like bad news to me, especially if it’s something that occurs naturally in the world…like sugar. I’ve been so gung ho with all this new life stuff that I’ve started to naturally avoid anything sweet like it was some kind of dick-melting plague. That’s kind of good, I needed to eat less sweets but my body doesn’t react very well to not getting a little sugar fix every now and then. Sure, I’ve got my cheat days, but I use them mostly to go to restaurants or to eat pizza. Dessert has been completely neglected and my body and mind were pissed. I hit a small plateau with my weight loss during this time frame as well. I was still losing, but not at the same rate I was before. The same thing happened to me years ago when I was in boot camp and we were restricted from sweets. As soon as that restriction was lifted and my inner fat kid got to have a piece of cake one a week, the weight started coming off again. Same thing happened here. Had some cake and ice cream at a birthday party because my little “woah is me” kick was in full swing and I not only felt better but my weight loss got the kick in the junk it needed to get moving again. At this point I was feeling a little better, but something still wasn’t quite right.
To compensate for the lack of sweet, sweet sugar in my life I increased the amount of artificial sweetener I was ingesting. At first it was just two or three diet sodas a week, which didn’t seem so bad. As is generally the case with any bad habit, it started to creep up on me without me noticing. When I finally stepped back and took and objective look at it I was pounding two to three of these things a day. I was looking for excuses to go to the store at night so that I could pick one up and inhale it on the way home. I used to do the same thing with donuts…and years ago with cigarettes. Rule of thumb here, if you feel like you’ve got to hide it then you shouldn’t be doing it. There have been a lot of conflicting reports about the effects of artificial sweeteners which I think has a lot to do with what I said earlier about different people being affected differently by what they put in their bodies. For me it seems that large amounts of artificial sweetener make me a moody little bitch of a man and should probably be avoided in favor of black coffee, beef jerky, and rotgut whiskey.
Now let’s be clear, I’m not saying that you should eat a cupcake, ditch the diet soda, flush your Prozac down the toilet, and sing “tra-la-la” because everything is going to be peachy. There are a lot of factors involved in anyone’s mental state and what you put in your body is just part of it. If, however, you’re feeling down all of a sudden and you can’t think of anything that may be causing it, then it can’t hurt to take a look at any major changes to your diet that could be doing some weird shit to the chemical balance in your body. Or maybe you should just stop listening to The Cure so damn much.
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