Off the blood pressure meds (Guest Post)

I was pretty pumped on Tuesday this week when my doctor turned to me and said my blood pressure was great and I should stop taking meds altogether. If you missed all the excitement you can read about my initial high blood pressure diagnosis and my follow-up ponderings only four short months ago.

So how does one go from 156/118 to this sweet, sweet moment?

I’d love to tell you it was a radical shift in my eating or a renewed sense of focus on working out. It wasn’t those things, although I’m sure it has helped. It was me feeling actually quite unwell and I had given up hope. On some level I was pretty sure I was going to die of a heart attack or stroke and part of me was ok with having that happen.

So, pure, unadultered terror is what finally got me to confront my overeating. I don’t recommend this approach, it is, as the cool kids say, like way no fun. My beloved was scared, we fought for about 2 months about seemingly everything. We purged the house of alcohol because I  knew if I stumbled on the overeating the next choice on the list of external self soothing was booze. I constantly questioned my ability to be able to address this longstanding problem.

If I think carefully I can remember disordered eating as young as 10 years old, hiding food, eating until I could burst and always needing more. I’m 39, that’s a long time of behaving one way so this newfound sense of clarity about how I have used food to cope is a bit strange. My therapist pointed out that by choosing to volunteer at the Kincardine Race I was perhaps, for the first time, honestly participating. I wasn’t pretending I could do it all, that I was fat and fit. For some folks that may be the case but my body was telling me I needed to change, my blood pressure was off and I wasn’t feeling well.

My first goal was to simply be mindful when eating and that has had a tremendous impact. This one choice lead to a 18 pound weight loss over 4 months, just a little more than 6% change in mass, as I try to come to terms with the underlying causes of my overeating. My physician tells me this has taken the pressure off my system. I will stay mindful and see where I level off weight and blood pressure wise.

Feminism has served me well for many years and it continues to help me frame my experiences in meaningful ways. It’s not lost on me that part of my overeating is to keep straight, cys-gendered men away from me. There isn’t a single year I can think of where I wasn’t at least once sexually harassed by men since I hit puberty, not one year free of this in 30 years. While I know, intellectually, I do nothing to warrant this my emotions turn this inward in awful ways and I have deep shame around my body and my sexuality.

So I keep going to my therapist, as she guides me through this journey to know myself, my most undiscovered country, because I am worth knowing and I want to live. I really do and that is kind of amazing, to have rediscovered hope, to be empowered to end the war with myself.

A new thought repeats itself when as I gain insight “when the sleeper awakens”. I remember H.G. Well’s character awakens to the horror and the awesomeness around him. His quest to cure insomnia causes him to drug himself asleep  for 203 years. I have missed out on fully appreciating what is great in my life by not addressing what isn’t working for me, I was asleep and now I am awakening to what others have always told me, I’m smart, capable and worth the effort of changing.

Good thing I have another 60 years or so to go because it feels like I’m ready for a great leap forward.

Natalie is a quirky woman who is learning to revel in her eccentricities and celebrating the uniqueness in others. She does some caregiving to her teenage minions, some paid work and tries to remember what a gift her beloved of 19 years is even if he is a lean, fast responder type with a high baseline. She’s trying to be a better cyclist and insists that the contact between her saddle and her bits is consensual. She may have to invest in something other than her 1960s bike but she is awful stingy.