Quote from: Shawn Sunshine on February 05, 2013, 10:33:09 PM
I am bi polar too which does not help my moods and eithier I have too much energy or not enough.
I don't mean this as a way of further complicating matters, but if you are on any of the more common medications prescribed to manage bipolar, the meds may be part of the weight problem. I've been meaning for awhile now, to bring this up, in part because it's been an issue for me. I peaked at 265 lbs., got a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis, which was the main thing that finally got me to control things -- I also tapered off the Wellbutrin and Depakote, which, along with a very bad experience with Lithium, were much of what took me from my pre-diagnosis weight of about 180 lbs., to that hugely dysphoric (apart from comforting myself that the weight was boosting estrogen levels without formal HRT) weight of 265.
I'm not suggesting you should dump the bipolar meds, as that could be dangerous, and bipolar disorder is so very different for individuals that I doubt there is any single answer. I just want to have put my own case out there for you to consider. Also, I should be clear that tapering off the meds was something I did to stop the weight gain (as well as because it seemed to have practically no effect, and in my case, I was fairly atypical for bipolar, in that manic episodes had never happened to any degree that anyone had seen before, and the one that did happen was a direct result of starting Celexa, an SSRI, when my (ex) therapist was convinced that I could not possibly be bipolar.
Also, on weight, and this might be relevant since we both come from somewhat similar, repressive and homophobic cultures, I realized, as part of what was going on for me related to the escalating depression that led to the SSRIs and the mania that sealed the bipolar Dx, that at least some aspect of what led me to find weight control hard and to see a secondary gain from added weight was that, once I had gotten down to that 185 (I had gone as high as 235, before that, in part the result of couvade during my ex's first pregnancy)... for me, a lot of what drove me to gain weight had to do with how it lessened the attention and pressure I felt from men showing me some kind of sexual interest (at least that's how I perceived their looks and glances) when I was at such lower weights.
Saying this, because I think it's probably something that is true for more than a few of us... if we want to be seen as women, even though they might be responding to some aspect of us that is feminine, I know it was a kind of attention I was very conflicted about. I've found that admitting that to myself has made much of the difference in being able to maintain a more healthy diet, limit food intake, avoid destructive food habits and so on. Exercise has also helped, but without dealing with the emotional triggers and finding ways to defuse them and more actively embrace my sense of identity, exercise would have been useless. I actually can lose the weight fairly easily, when I'm avoiding the more toxic habits I developed that mostly came down to emotional eating or even self medicating myself into a sugar-induced state of near catatonia.
