Old newbie, looking for B.E.D. support

MDfour

Hello again, MFP, my old friend.

I used this site in the springtime, but have been MIA for quite a while now. I’m a 21 year old senior electrical engineering student, and I really need to get my life back on track – especially with my health.
I’m back with a simultaneous sense of shame and newfound resolve.

The backstory:
I started my nutrition education journey in January of 2010. I learned all about calories and macronutrients and exercise. Before then, I didn’t even know what macronutrients or calories were, and I had never gone to the gym or done any form of exercise outside of the years I played softball. I tracked my intake and workouts using fitday.com, and was successfully able to reach 126 pounds by June 2010, after starting at around 160.

Unfortunately, while that was great, it started me on my extreme body rollercoaster and food obsession. Life happened, I stopped caring, went back to my old ways, and by January 2011 I was 166 pounds: the heaviest I had ever been. Disgusted with myself, and having just dumped my boyfriend at the time, I hit the gym with a vengeance and returned to dietary consciousness and obsession. By the end of March 2011, I was back to 146 pounds and much happier with myself. In April, I started a MyFitnessPal account to help me with the last 11 pounds (my new goal was 135). I reached that goal at the end of April.

At that point, I began a terrible habit of binge eating on the weekends, and I wouldn’t eat anything at all on Mondays and led a very low calorie/gym rat lifestyle on other weekdays just to maintain, which I was only able to do for the month of May. June hit, the binges came more often, and the exercise decreased. By July I was back to 165. My rollercoaster was steeper and faster. Disgusted again, I did well for about a week. Then my personal life crashed. Family tragedies happened, my health was poor, and depression hit hard. From July until last week, I acted as if I was trying to gain weight. Ate everything; didn’t exercise. Slept 12-13 hours a day, did poorly in school, and didn’t do much of anything except eat and surf the web.

My name is MDfour, yesterday I weighed in at 190 pounds, and I suffer from depression and Binge Eating Disorder. The former worsens the latter, and the latter worsens the former.

But I’m strong and I can fight this. I started feeling better about my life last week, which may have had to do with my school semester being finished and with me getting back to my full time office job. Moving to a new city has actually been a great mood booster. I’ve been working out consistently, which also helps treat my depression, and two days ago I got my diet back on track and restarted MFP with a different username. I am once again back with a vengeance, but hopefully I can do it without being obsessive this time. This time feels different, because even though I am the largest I have ever been by far, (and even considered clinically obese at only 5’5”), I don’t feel wildly unattractive like I did even when I was only 10 pounds off from my goal. At this point, my goal is just to be able to run 5k’s and 8k’s like I used to love to do in the spring of this year, and I can’t do that to my liking with all this extra weight. So here’s hoping!

Thanks for listening. I know this is a great community and I am happy to be back!

Also, if any of you suffer from serious BED like I do, would you please consider being my friend? I desperately need some pointers battling that. It’s the biggest thing that will stand in my way.