My problem: I finally wanted to give a shit, so I did.

I have a darker side about food (but no my steak is not dark, it's medium rare)

When we are happy, we want to do something to celebrate.  When we are sad, we want to do something to mask our sadness. Sometime the two can be the same.  An example is drinking.  Most of us enjoy a glass of wine when on our downtime.  It's something we do in a meal, it's something we do when we hang out with people, and it's something we do when we want to celebrate. It tastes goods!  We can stop with a buzz, or we can chase after the high until we passed out.  While drinking is generally affordable depending on what you drink, it can get very expensive.  For special occasion, we have a good reason to go after fine wine.  I am guilty of sending Windward Wine as gifts and I have a $200 bottle of Opus One myself.  Because drinking is like a magic pill, some of us started drinking when we feel stressed or depressed. We drink more, and we drink a little more, and we drink a little more.

But it doesn't have to be drinking.  Shopping, partying, exercising, smoking, taking recreational drugs...etc.  These are things that can go to both extreme.  Even 'chilling' can be in both extreme (chilling on the beach when you are happy, losing motivation when you are sad). For me, it's food.  I eat when I am happy, I eat when I sad, I eat when I am busy, and I can spend a lot of money on food.

My family eat out a lot and I carry that over.  Even though I consider myself a decent cook, my time are usually spent on my other priorities other than cooking.  Cooking and eating out may actually take the same time, but in my mind I am doing 'two things' if I were to cook.  If I am eating out it's just eating out. It's one less thing to worry about.  While a lot of my friends go hang out and drink.  My kind of hanging out are eating.  You don't ever hear me asking people to go have a drink.  If I want to hang out, I usually ask you to go eat with me.

After started working I am able to spend more money on food.  Long gone are the $1 hamburger day back in junior college. I literally went to different fast food restaurants ordering the $1 hamburger (Jack in the Box, McDonald, Carl's Jr, and Burger King). If I do well on an exam I will add cheese on my burger.  As most of you know, I have been chasing the perfect Tonkatsu (Japanese fried pork chop). If you tell me a good place to try and it's $60 per order, I'll order it.

As I get older, my stress level increased.   I started using food as my medium for my own coping mechanisms.  In addition of eating food for my own enjoyment, I started using food to relieve my stress.  If I am stressed and I don't have a lot of free time, I will eat.  In my mind, eating make me happy, so subconsciously I eat to try to make a stressful situation go away.  Of course my mind play trick on me telling me that eating helps with stress but in reality it doesn't.  Instead of making a situation better I did the opposite by eating more and more.  Food wasn't about tasting good anymore, it was about stuffing myself until I cannot move.  It's like I turned into someone who drink not because he is chasing the high but he drink for the sole purpose of getting drunk and passing out.  Or someone who does drug not for the purpose of getting high but for the purpose of wanting to forget things.

oh god I even try to make the NCAL Ironteam fat

Only after talking to my friend who is seeking help with her Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that I realized what I have an eating problem (I got her permission to write part of what she told me on this blog).  What she told me resonance in my head because I can relate a bit of what she told me.  I think we all experienced similar feelings at time and I wanted to share that here. It was important for me because what she told me weight so much I started thinking about why I do things a certain way.  One day I was chatting with her and she told me she is receiving treatment for PTSD, severe depression, and anxiety disorder. she told me she has no self esteem because it has been shattered and she actually believed it. She was pushing people that care away because she was fragile and can't afford to get hurt again.  She got into a vicious cycle where she drinks and use drugs because she didn't care about herself.  She didn't figure out she has a disease until she got into an abusive relationship and got admitted to the hospital because she tried to commit suicide.  That's when she started to seek help because she wanted to live and she wanted to stop destroying her own life.

I didn't know how to react at first, and it took me a few days to digest what she told me.  And when I did things started to come together.  I was eating unhealthy and I was eating too much because I didn't care about myself. I didn't care what these food is doing to my body.  I didn't care if I gain weight, I didn't care if I get slowly.  I just want to stuff my face with food because I was either stressed or depressed.  I was destroying myself.

This whole stressed thing affected my workout as well.  I had multiple 'breakdown' during my runs because a lot was in my head and I just cannot get myself to run.  I will literally stop in the middle of the run even though my body is fine.  My mind was so occupied that I have a hard time telling my body to run (that's not a good thing when you are 10 miles away from your car).  I am sure you experience a day when you are feeling so sad you just want to sit at home and do nothing, or that you feel so dragged that you can't even get out of bed.  Or that so much stuff was going on in your head you have to call in sick.  We did not need to go into detail of why I was stressed or I why I felt like I was carrying a lot of weigh. It was a combination of things and I am dealing with them.

I spent the next few days talking to my friends.  I talked to my doctor about this and I got some insight about my issues.  Just like the girl that I talked to, I want to care about myself.  I have to.  My goal is to run the Angeles Crest 100 miles and this eating thing need to stop. I need to drop some weight so I can be a faster trail runner with less chance of getting injured.  I need to stress less so I can enjoy life a lot more.  At times I felt like I was broken and I cannot fix myself.  That no matter what I do I will remain broken. But the truth is, we can all fix ourselves.  But we need to care enough to do that first.  It can be a long process and it's not easy, but we just have to glue ourselves together... one piece at a time.  It's important to have people that support you, and I have a very small network of friends who supported me when I struggled. I am very thankful for that.

My goal is to drop down to 180s lbs by Med Feb.  Instead of getting on a diet program or read self-help book, I am going to figure this out myself.  We don't learn from following, we learn from discovering and understanding.  It's when we struggle where we learn the most, and the thing you learn will last a life time because you connect all the loose end in your head.. by yourself.

my physically activities masked my issue *_*

Like what my friend Emily told me "I think that a lot of people have addictions to various things, and some are more destructive than others. Ultimately it's good to be aware of our own coping mechanisms".  At the end of the day, we are all addicted to something.  For a long time I didn't think much about my eating problem because the amount of exercise I do did a nice cover up to this eating thing.  My doctor even told me my fitness level balance out with me even when I am a little on the heavy side (It helps when you run faster than your doctor haha).  I think talking to my friend about her problem really bought up all these thoughts.  She wanted to care about her life so she is changing and that has an affect on me.  While I can't help her directly, I can pick one thing that I can improve and improve it.  It's not a walk in the part.  I have been trying to lose the weight for 5 years and I have been failing.  I finally realized I have a problem and I want to do something about it. Eating healthier is not something I 'needed' to do, it turned into something I 'wanted' to do.  We all feel like we can't control our behavior or our feeling at times.  This is a blog about coming to term with yourself.  This is a blog about change, and this is a blog about believing yourself.

Need to take control of my eating habit.  I am going for the win!

I will blog about my progress from time to time.
 
My friend told me she wanted to care about herself, I am telling you that I am going to pay more attention to myself, and I hope my readers will start thinking about things that bother them.  We can lead a cow to a lake but we can't make a cow drink unless he wants to (in the Chinese version we use cow instead of a horse).  I was by the lake for a long time, today I finally drunk the water =)  Funny thing is, I did not get why people don't drink the water for the longest time... until now... because I am one of the cow that didn't drink the water!!! We can't push people to change. We all need to dig our own way out when we are ready... when the timing is right.