Fat camp - coming home

Now that I am safely home, having survived four weeks at fat camp, I decided I should reflect on what I learned and achieved while there.

I have to admit that the time passed incredibly quickly. During the first week I was confronted by my own foibles – the extent of my ‘unfitness’ particularly compared to other campers; my perceptions of myself and others; as well as the extent to which I control all aspects of my life and am uncomfortable being dictated to by others.

Things improved after that, but there were still times that I battled with some of my demons. Heading to fat camp, I hoped that my 25yr battle with food, exercise and dieting might be resolved. It hasn’t been and realistically I realise that four weeks at a health retreat cannot erase years of obsession. I have long-known that eating and drinking are, for me, symptoms of other issues. What they are I don’t exactly know. I suspect that they stem from my need for ‘control’. The fact that (as an adult) I tightly control all aspects of my life – other than what I eat and my lack of exercise – is telling.

Experts say that girls / women / people become anorexic because they feel they have no control over their lives. They reduce their food intake because that is the one thing they can control. Twenty-five years ago my parents battled me over the dinner table as I starved myself to 45kgs. They despaired as I spent my nights in my bedroom dancing around to burn extra calories, having already exercised much of the day. Other than tie me down or hospitalize me, there was nothing they could do. It was the one thing I could control. And I was… in control.

Not any longer. Food and exercise are now the only things in my life I cannot control.

I wonder now if the underlying issues to my eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia and over-eating) will ever be unearthed. Perhaps I don’t need to know ‘why’. Perhaps now it is solely about self-control. Perhaps I need to stop relying on food to fill the gaping hole inside of me. I need to find other things to sate the emptiness.

So, though I survived four weeks at fat camp, I haven’t discovered the magic elixir that will solve all of my problems. I have, however, been confronted with, well…. me. My weaknesses and my strengths. My beliefs and my perceptions.

I have written about them in this blog, discussed them with my fellow campers and pondered them during the little time we had to ourselves there. Some of the things I have learned are things about me. Others are not.

I now know that 1 kilogram = 7700 calories, so to lose 1kg, you need to ‘expend’ 7700 more calories than you consume (over a period of time). As someone who relies on logic, this equation makes complete sense to me and came as somewhat of a surprise – that I hadn’t know it earlier.

I learned (the hard way I think) that sharing your anxiety with others doesn’t help ease it. Constantly and publicly obsessing about something (hills and steps) doesn’t make it go away and just annoys those around you.

Very importantly I learned that hills are not insurmountable. They can be hard and painful, but can be climbed. Slowly and steadily. It doesn’t matter if you are first or last to the top, as long as you know you have tried and given it your best.

I already knew, but confirmed, that I am a control freak and do need to know what is ahead of me. While I am comfortable with change and actually enjoy it, I need to know where we are going and that there is a logic to it.

Finally and surprising to me was the extent to which Victorians are ridiculously obsessed with Australian Rules Football and discuss players as if they are intimate friends. The obsession pervades all aspects of the State’s culture and is akin to some form of mass hysteria(!!).

So, almost 14kgs lighter, with lessons learned and many kilometers of hills under my belt, I farewelled our trainers and the other campers and headed home. The feeling was (and is) almost impossible to describe. I am reminded of prisoners leaving jail; of addicts leaving rehab. I wandered around Melbourne airport, bereft. While our classes at camp discussed ‘the outside world’ and its temptations and prepared us for ‘after’, I felt at a loss. I roamed from café to café, looking for something suitable for a coeliac AND a no-carbohydrate diet. I ended up with a diet coke. On the plane, I was offered cake, or biscuits – or an apple. I could have none of them. Eventually they found me a small packet of almonds which I ate, even though they were salted.

In my apartment, I opened my refrigerator and looked inside. After a month away it was bare. Dinner time and my options were limited. Even my ‘healthy’ frozen veges including peas and corn (a no-no on a no-carbohydrate diet) were now out of the question.

It wasn’t just the food. While at the airport and on the plane, I found myself teary and unsure. Even now, everything feels different. I don’t fit. After four weeks there, the camp had become my ‘comfort zone’. The outside world is now unfamiliar to me. It is a new challenge which I wasn’t expecting. I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. I’m not. Perhaps it is different for those who leave and return to family. Perhaps I feel lost because I didn’t come home to anyone. Just an empty apartment. An empty life.

Adro and the camp manager, Dante, talked to us about going home. Not just about what we will eat and how we will exercise, but about other aspects of our lives that have led to our overeating or our destructive behaviours.

I vowed a better work-life balance. Not just in hours, but in also quality. I can no longer live a life where the only enjoyable thing I do each day is drink and eat to excess. There must be something more and my next task is to find it.

Fat camp - one week down.....

One week down and 3 to go (http://rockafellaskank.blogspot.com/2009/05/fat-camp-beginning.html). The thought still depresses me. I guess I know I am not ready to go home. I would still be tempted by tinned caramel and meringues. By chocolate and hot chips. Here we learn that ‘food is fuel’. Full stop. That we are not meant to savour it; to enjoy it. Or to crave it. I don’t know that I want to live by that mantra. We also learn that we should be ‘living in the moment’. This is a biggie for me – a constant worrier about what is to come. Nonetheless, I want to ask how, if we are living in the moment, we don’t enjoy the food (that we are eating in that same moment).

Many diets and dieticians tell you to focus on what you are eating. Savour it. Enjoy it. They tell you not to eat distractedly in front of tv or shovel food in while reading, but to savour every morsel.

Either way, I like to think that one day I will be able to think of food without having a lot of baggage attached to it. I know I need to break the nexus of food and tv, food and reading, food and sitting, well…. food and everything really. I need to live a life where I have things other than food to fill it. Whether that mindset will be broken here, I do not know.

I survived the 1000 steps, though what I wasn’t told was that the walk TO the steps was as bad as the steps themselves. Another camper walked with me and encouraged me the whole way. Her distraction tactics didn’t entirely work and I whinged the entire time, but I did make it. Only 46 minutes of agony.

Unable to ‘live in the now’ I started obsessing about having to do the same climb in a fortnight. Plus a hike up a long incline (mountain type thing) next week. As I have said before, I know that worrying doesn’t help, but as yet I am unable to prevent myself from doing so. My first goal, is to allow myself to worry but then tell myself that there is nothing I can do about it and that it doesn’t matter if I struggle.

What I am slowly coming to terms with is that I am unfit. Overweight and unfit. I did know this, but suspect I have been in denial about the extent of my problem. Though I am the least fit I have perhaps ever been in my 41years, as I have a fairly athletic history, I expected to be able to perform better than many people here. That has not been the case. In fact I am ranked in the bottom two of all twelve. Having said that – that ranking mostly relates to activities that involve us doing inclines and hills – at which (you now know well) I under-perform on.

My biggest fear coming in was that my injured ankle would hold me back. In all honesty, it is only my fitness that is holding me back. The trainers have not been sympathetic to my injury, rarely offering me an alternative to running and games in the sand (the latter jarring my foot quite a bit).

After one week, I am unable to detect any improvement in my fitness. Logic, however, tells me that I can only be getting fitter. Perhaps the heavy, aching limbs prevent me from feeling lively and energetic.

On a more positive note, I am trying. When told to run, I try. I cannot run far and yearn for the days – even a year or so ago – when I was able to build up to 20mins on the treadmill. But those that know me, know I do complain when given a challenge, but then go ahead and do it anyway. My pilates instructor will attest to the fact that she will tell me I have to do 15 repetitions of an exercise. I start complaining halfway through, but usually determinedly do 20. Failure is not an option. Giving up is not an option, but for the first time (and if honest), I suspect I have to realise that mediocrity is what I am fated to achieve here and all I can strive for.

Meanwhile, I head into week 2. I can only hope that before I know it, I am back here, reviewing that week. In retrospect week 1 has flown past. With tightly-programmed days and essentially no free time until after dinner, the day is taken away from us. We move from one activity to the next. While a couple of people who have been here for sometime, skip activities, the rest of us do not dare. And, most of the classes (complementing the exercise) are enjoyable.

Adro Sarnelli (winner of Biggest Loser here in Australia and who owns the camp), himself, is affable and charismatic. He is genuinely committed to this place and to us. To our journey. Passionate about his cause – weight loss – he is happy to share his successes and failures with us. He also answers obscure questions about his time on “The Biggest Loser” with good humour and patience.

Other than the manager, Dante, we are entertained by a group of trainers and support staff. The guests themselves reflect mish-mash of society. Younger than I imagined and slimmer than I imagined, I am the third oldest guest and third biggest person here. We have mostly bonded as a group, though obviously some getting along better than others.

Here we are laid bare. Much of our bravado and the barriers we have built around us are broken down so our raw selves are on display. Sometimes it isn’t pretty. But it is real and I guess that’s all that matters.

Written on 16th May 2009. Subsequently posted.

Fat Camp - the beginning

Day 3 at the fat camp (http://rockafellaskank.blogspot.com/2009/05/fat-camp.html) and the last day and a half have been amazingly confronting. I can only hope that this experience – challenging as it currently is (mentally as well as physically) - helps me grow as a person.

Physically the camp has been hard, from the fitness test the morning after our arrival (day one) and the subsequent ‘outdoor’ training which meant running up and down hills. I have long-hated hills since an episode in Zimbabwe, when I found it really hard and got incredibly sick, climbing the stairs out of the ravine after whitewater rafting at Victoria Falls.

I came with an injury and the trainers have been spectacularly unsympathetic. Instead I feel like a hypochondriac of sorts when I remind them that I am not supposed to be actually running (or fast walking) this week. In fact I ran on my first day here and have continued to do so, hampered more by my fitness than my foot.

Existing on 800 calories or less a day is easier than I thought, particularly when your day is filled with exercise, classes and cooking. And, when you retire to your bedroom at 7pm with only sleep on your mind.

To date, we have essentially had three training sessions a day. Unfortunately many of them involve hills.

Yesterday, Day 2, I started to miss the things we go without. (Absolutely no carbohydrates or sugar – including fruit, some veges, and milk-based products). As someone who had been binging on hot chips and tins of caramel with meringues and lemon crème yoghurt (don’t cringe, I assure you that the combination is lovely), I suspect I will feel the loss. Of the 12 campers here sharing my pain, 8 are in their second fortnight. They tell us the detox is horrid and they all suffered to varying extents.

So far, my symptoms have manifested in grumpiness. Yesterday the manager here told me I HAD to try the stuffed mushrooms at lunch. I refrained from telling him that I was 41years old and, ‘didn’t he think I had tried mushrooms before’. I was very good the night before and tried the cauliflower mash (it was promised to be like potato mash – it wasn’t). In the end I ate the mushroom toppings for a 42 calorie lunch. And I was like a petulant child. More than ever I wanted to go home and the idea of living like this for almost 4 more weeks felt like more than I could bear.

And when confronted with a post-dinner stretch and meditation session at 7.30pm I wanted to revolt. I just wanted to go to bed, I didn’t want more – even if it wasn’t exercise. Again, I was petulant.

I heard last night that this morning’s pre-breakfast exercise involved driving to some mountain, so I obsessed about what would be before us. It wasn’t a huge climb, but up and down and around the mountain, with some pauses to run up hills and stairs on the way. Towards the end (of the hour or so) I wanted to throw the towel in. I rarely give up. If ever. Today I came close. I wanted to just fall over in a heap and have someone else take care of me (like my fantasy of being hospitalized and being taken care of!!!). Instead I had to keep going and eventually staggered to the end of the hill as we completed the training session. I wanted to swear and scream. I wanted to vomit and almost did on the crowded bus trip back to camp.

Having recovered from the early morning training session and had breakfast, we were to embark on another training session. On the schedule it read ‘interval’ training. This I understood to be in the gym and, like yesterday’s aerobics session, more in my comfort zone.

Instead the trainer gave everyone a choice and all bar two of us voted for outdoors. Obviously in the absence of equipment, I knew the training would involve that which I feared most – more hills. I was furious with my fellow guests. I was furious with my lack of choice. As I walked near the back of the group (down the first hills) I was livid and I was upset. Again I was the petulant child who didn’t want to play.

The trainer instructed us that we had to run up and back down this hill a number of times. Instead I walked at the back – not fast and not caring – with an injured member of the group. The trainer seemed to have forgotten that I had an injury anyway. I suspect he just thought I was fat and lazy. While I did the work, I wasn’t happy and in the comfort of my fellow guest, I burst into tears. In her third week, and the heaviest girl in the house (I am next) she was sympathetic.

I know myself well. It isn’t exactly the detox that is throwing me. The experience has been emotionally confronting. I am a control freak. I live alone, I am responsible only for me. I organize my own work program and that of others. I usually have complete control of all aspects of my life. Suddenly I am here and I am in control of nothing. I cannot decide what I want to eat. What I want to do. Instead we have a menu we adhere to. We have a 9.30pm curfew – which isn’t required as we are in bed by then anyway. We are told when to be where and where to be when.

In addition, obsessive by nature, I have tried to live without numbers for some time. Recalling my devastation each time I stepped on the scales I stopped weighing myself. At one point my doctor had me on a ‘healthy eating plan’ which didn’t allow me to count calories, or points, or fats, or any other kind of number. I was nervous about the seeming lack of parameters or controls, but it worked. For a while.

Here, it is all about the numbers. We wear a heart rate monitor all day. It is programmed with our height and weight and so it counts our calories as we burn them off. I easily burned off over 5000 on my first full day – and consumed less than 700 (though not all days have I burned off this many). We religiously write down our calories as we consume them and our calories burned after we expend them.

Day 4 has seen an improvement in my state of mind. Despite four training sessions today I feel much better, though some of this could be because those sessions involved no hills and no queasiness. It meant that I could engage more with my fellow campers and I attempted to be less negative about the whole experience. I really struggled on the previous two days. I hate to think how the others have perceived me. I am hoping that my stay here and my mindset are starting to turn themselves around.

We have a session tomorrow that involves climbing 1000 steps. Everything I hate in one fell swoop. I have obsessed about it since learning of it but realize there is nothing I can do in advance. Worrying won’t help me at all and in fact, it means my dread grows. My certainty that I am not capable of doing them needs to be challenged – I realize this. I can’t even imagine how hard it is going to be. Am I resilient enough? I never give up but I wonder if pushed hard enough, will I? I can only hope not.

Written on day 4 (14th May 2009). Subsequently posted.

Fat Camp

I have this song in my head. It’s one from Play School that I used to sing to my niece when she was little, “We’re going on a bear hunt…”. Instead the words in my head are, “I’m going on a fat camp….”.

I tend to blame almost everything on my weight. (Although not global warming or the international economic crisis, ‘cos that would be just plain silly!)

But stuff that is wrong with my life I believe can usually be traced back to my weight problems. When they started back in 1983 the issue was a different one to that I have now. I became very thin. At that point, a relationship was established between my mind, my body and food that I have been unable to overcome.

Fast forward to 26 years later and the problem is the opposite. Over the intervening years I have lost and gained 10, 20 and 30 kgs a number of times but I keep going back. There is no middle ground for me. It is all or nothing. Eating badly isn’t just a chocolate bar. It is family block after family block. It is hours, days and weeks of binging.

While my weight is the (sole) biggest issue in my life, it is the impact that it has had on my life that devastates me.

I have always been single, never loved or in love. I blame this on my weight and how I am perceived, not only by others, but also myself.

Confidence that I lack in the workplace and while with friends is generally because I feel fat, unattractive and unworthy. A failure. It plays on my mind and undermines other aspects of my life.

And, even though I know that guilt and self-loathing will follow, I can’t stop myself. Overeating and drinking is usually the only thing that provides any comfort. The irony is not lost on me – that if I ate and drank less, I might have a man or a family beside me providing that comfort. Instead I fill the abyss with calories.

The spiral is ugly. The fatter I feel, the less I exercise. For someone who was once athletic, I know this is a waste.

I fear I am now perceived as a frumpy middle-aged woman. And more than self-loathing; I now feel extreme regret. That I have lost 26years of my life that I can never regain.

While I feel stymied – unable to act, I am forcing myself into a lifestyle change that I hope is not too late.

I am going to a fat camp. For one month. I wish it were longer. I wish I could emerge like a swan from the prison that has been my body and my life for 20 years. Instead, I have one month and I can only hope and pray for change. Physical and mental.

I realize of course that I shouldn’t call it the fat camp. It is, in fact, called The New Me Retreat (www.thenewme.com.au). Run by the winner of the first series of The Biggest Loser (in Australia), Adro Sarnelli, it is based on the series’ premise. A house of people and lots of exercise. You have to be 20kgs overweight to go. You can only go for a minimum of 2 weeks.

I’m not sure what to expect. (When I was wealthier and lived overseas) I visited a health retreat in Queensland – a couple of times. While the experience was amazing and made me reconsider the direction of my life, the focus was more on recharging one’s batteries. Though health and fitness was on the menu, the experience was luxurious and featured pampering treatments and meditations.

I am expecting the fat camp to be different. Hard. Challenging. While excited, I am also approaching the month with dread and nervousness. I can already imagine the burning in my lungs as I struggle with a hill or sprints. And, my expectations are high. I am expecting a change. In me. “A New Me”. Someone who, at the end of this experience (which includes the weeks and months after), looks like they should and is motivated to keep it that way. Someone who loves life. And themselves.