About 5 years ago when I joined Curves, they gave me a book. I brought it home and it sat around for a couple of months before I read it and when I finally did, I found a lot of information I had heard before. After years of being overweight, you become an arm chair expert on losing weight whether you like it or not. Everyone has advice. Pretty soon you start sorting out the information based on source and practicality. The rest of it gets filed away and dismissed because it's a bunch of hooey. Still, you hear it all. The book had very little "new" information to share, but it did start out by offending me with its chapter about how eating is immature because it is giving in. Whatever! It's called survival instinct whether a person overeats or not. It's about limits. Calling eaters immature is a rude, bullying tactic - something I recognize quickly after years of school bullying.
Anyway, at the end of the book, it claimed to be reporting a series of studies showing how exercise affected depression. The source they used had three groups; one that was on anti-depressant medication, one which combined medication and exercise, and the third used exercise alone to control depression. According to them, of course, because we must sell, sell, sell the gym, they reported that the third group had the most success.
I've dealt with depression, too, and have gotten pretty damn good at hiding it. I've heard eating right and exercise is all a person needs to get over it. I've heard many things relating the two, actually. Reading it in that book gave me so much hope - I pinned everything on it.
Today I would like to say to all those people who say exercise will help with depression: You are all liars. LIARS. After a number of months at Curves, the depression started to settle in. I tried doing things for other people. I tried eating better. I tried exercising even more. I feel sure it wasn't related to my weight or weight loss because it wasn't something that came up when I felt bad, nor did thinking about those things make me feel worse. I just felt blue, then down, then worse and nothing helped. Nothing in my life gave cause for this (just to dispell people who think only when bad things happen to a person do they have the right to be depressed) it was just there like a dark shadow.
Well, maybe I have reason now, but my life is pretty good. I have kept exercising great. Yeah, I haven't been perfect on my diet, but I'm not eating a ton of bad stuff (except when I'm at parties. I don't know what it is, but I'm allowing myself to indulge when I'm in a party setting more than I had been). At home and most of the time, I eat within my calories and even when I go over, there are quite a few great things I'm eating so the bad isn't a bunch of Twinkies or potato chips. Still, it's been bad. Bad enough that I look back at that time at Curves and look at things now and have two cases where I can confirm YOU ARE ALL LIARS. It is ridiculous to think a fat person is depressed because of how they eat or how much they exercise. No one would accuse a skinny person of the same thing.
I don't want to talk about it too much, really, but trying to claw my way out is just as exhausting as being depressed in the first place. Still, I think I've pretty well established my reluctance for medical help no matter how bad things get. Hey, next time I almost bleed to death, I promise to go to a hospital.
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