My story is similar to Bob's in a number of ways. I'll elaborate tomorrow, but my views and life has totally changed after working to have a healthier relationship with good.
I grew up with good parents who loved me, made sure I was fed, but weren't privy to all the knowledge we are now about macronutrients, and much beyond "if you eat too much, you gain weight; eat in moderation; eat mostly healthy foods and go lighter on the snacks." I was an active kid who played outside til it was dark, played multiple sports (until HS, when I played exclusively baseball year-round), and was always on the move. I have a bigger frame that started to show as I got to jr. high and sometime around then is when I was somewhat chubby. In hindsight, I wasn't fat; but I just wasn't skinny either. But that didn't matter to kids who made jokes, and I wasn't smart enough back then to know any different other than to be hurt by it.
So at a younger age than I'd like, I started associating certain foods as good and others as bad in my mind. I went through a phase of eating only a packet of ramen noodles, maybe a banana and a little pack of those 6 crackers w/ peanut butter and that may be what I ate for an entire day. In addition to that -- if that wasn't bad enough -- I was still highly physically active. I would go to my baseball practices or games, still run and exercise on my own, etc. During my junior year of high school, I distinctly remember a time in early Spring when my girlfriend (of like all of a month lol) broke up with me (read: cheated on me and then lied to me about just needing space...lol) that was during 2-a-days for varsity baseball tryouts. I lost 10 pounds in under a week's time from all the running they had us doing before and after school, as I pretty much just didn't eat and did nothing else other than try to stay awake in class and sleep as soon as I got home.
By my senior year, I was running either 7 or 9 miles a night, every night, in addition to my baseball practices, weight-training, etc. And still not eating what I should and unfortunately not knowing about protein, needing to eat enough calories to build muscle, etc. All I knew was food made me fat and I was fat, so I couldn't eat more food. It was absolutely awful without me even realizing anything was wrong. I also hated people seeing me eat. So that obviously led to binges, when I would eat all the "bad" foods on my own, away from the eyes of anyone else.
In college, I would play 3 hours of basketball a night (in addition to lifting, walking all over to class, etc.) and again, barely ate most of the time. I didn't know that not eating was screwing up my metabolism, keeping me from losing fat and gaining muscle. I just had the only thing I knew -- eating makes you fat, so don't eat as much.
I slowly learned more over time. However, it still took a LOT of effort to find a healthy place in my life when it came to food. Once I was in grad school (at 23), I had my own house that I lived in, so I was cooking and feeding myself and that really helped. I unfortunately fell into that group of the brainwashed who preached "clean" eating and thought anything "not clean" was bad. I was obviously not in the healthiest mindset, but it was better than where I'd been -- baby steps.
Near the end of grad school is when I found bodybuilding (not just Men's Health fitness routines; I finally stumbled onto MD and that changed the game for me). Along with that came getting online to some forums (namely here lol) and I started to learn more about nutrition than I had before. I still had some demons to fight and move past, but I was on the right track.
During that time, I went from a ripped 208 all the way up to 300 lbs. over the course of about 2 years, despite continuing to lift, play basketball, etc. (I was playing safety in my flag football league at 290 lbs). Nothing made sense. I saw over 10 different doctors, including endocrinologist specialists at two different D1 research universities. Other than finding hypothyroidism, they couldn't find any answers for me other than the nice "you have to eat less than you burn" from a HORRIBLE endo, who I'm ashamed to know is published and still teaching med students. Anyway, I ended up finding a small pituitary tumor that explained all the things being slightly off and while I never found a true answer, some tinkering and medicating on my own led me down the path to recovery.
I went from 300 lbs down to 240 between June and November, and after that point (3 years ago), I've yo-yo'd back and forth a little bit (never getting higher than 250ish again.
But about a year ago, I started training in the mornings and included stair sprints and laps in between each one of my lifting sets and that afforded me some more calories when it came to eating. I've still got a lot of ground to cover and grow psychologically and emotionally, but I feel SO much better about my relationship with food than what I did. I have Halloween candy still left -- it's December! That never happened! lol. I can have ice cream or pizza or anything else. But it's no longer full day "cheat" meal binges or anything like that -- I've found a healthy level of moderation and balance.
It's not perfect; nor will it ever be, but I feel like I'm in a way better place than I used to be. It was largely in part to finding AM.
