Last night, I was upset, stressed out, frustrated and felt helpless. I’m not gonna go into why, sorry, it’s too personal and it’s irrelevant anyway, so please humour me and take my word for it. At midnight, lying awake, the thoughts going round and round in my head just wouldn’t stop, and somehow, I didn’t want them to, as unproductive as they might be. I was swimming in them. They were oddly comforting. I mean, if I keep them going, I don’t have to do anything about them. Oh, wait, lightbulb, I actually can’t do anything about them, it’s an almost completely external problem. I have next to no control over this one. Hm.
So despite being plenty full up from my dinner, I felt the desire to eat – carbs and fat is what I wanted, preferably dairy. I tried to ignore it. I started watching something on my iPod in an attempt to distract myself. Then I went on autopilot. Without really thinking about it or noticing – I think I tried pretty hard not to notice, actually – I got out of bed and went to the kitchen where I ate two pieces of cheese on toast, a bowl of cereal, and the remainder of a tub of hummus. OK, about half of a tub of hummus (at least it was reduced fat, like it’s OK to binge on diet foods). Ironically, while watching a TV programme about addiction. Ha ha ha. That might not seem like a lot of food but if you think about it, that’s a breakfast and a lunch on top of the three normal meals I had eaten already, and I’m only 5”2 so I don’t need that many calories. I actually thought about getting some crumpets out of the freezer but I recognised that I’d already eaten till my tummy felt tender so I just finished my glass of wine, had a bitter cry, beat myself up a bit and went back to bed.
And I felt wretched. I mean, I already felt wretched beforehand, but afterwards, I felt worse, but different worse. I felt like I’d let myself down so badly. I felt distended and huge, and… like an idiot, basically. I know all this stuff, I know what I should be doing to clear these eating problems out, to deal with them in other ways, I advise others about it all the time, all smuggity smug look-at-me-with-my-book-learnin’, so why can’t/don’t I apply it to myself? Why do I keep going ahead and making the same mistakes, exacerbating this problem that’s both the cause and the symptom of so many of the other issues in my life? The reason I’d binged was still there, but now I was feeling shitty about binging as well as what triggered it in the first place. Displacement?
It’s really been a fair while since I overate in this heavily emotional way, and a couple of weeks since I overate (at least, more than a few bites) for any other reason – fear of future hunger, for example, or a feeling of entitlement or occasion (“He’s having a cookie, dammit, so I can too, otherwise it’s not fair” or “It’s Saturday morning, it’s Danish time”). I can give myself props for that, and I do. For example, the other night we went out to eat, and the Wild Child part of me saw a rich creamy risotto on the menu and immediately went “That’s a treaty meal-out type thing! Have that!” but I listened to my body and it told me it had had enough stodge with the sandwich I’d had for lunch, it didn’t want or need more, it wanted green and crunch and vitamins, so I chose a spinach and avocado salad, which I could have made at home, but which hit the spot perfectly, and was light enough to leave me a space for dessert, which I enjoyed very much without guilt. This afternoon I made a batch of hummus for my sandwiches, then made myself a 3pm lunch (first time I’d eaten today, waiting till I was hungry, self-correcting) of pitta with hummus, salad and a sprinkling of feta, warmed under the grill, and I was reasonably full so I chucked some of it away so that I could enjoy some fresh raspberries with a blob of Greek yogurt without making myself feel bloaty. The frequency of my secret eating is reducing, I’m finding it easier to leave food on my plate occasionally and to give my body what it wants rather than what my brain says I need. I recently got pics of myself at a healthy weight – something of which I had no concept previously – made by Weightview so on the wall right next to my desk, there’s a pic of me in my undies looking half-decent! My god, what an extraordinary motivational boost that is, to have something visual to aim for. I can almost feel it reprogramming my brain and body image. It’s like it’s telling my body that what it’s seeing in that picture is how it is by nature, that its shape right now is an anomaly, and it’s reprogramming my cells and brain to make it so. A vision board effect. It’s made it so much easier to eat like a naturally slim person. And even though I’m far far from that picture in reality, I feel a little bit better about my body having that there to look at, which is odd, because there was a real risk I could feel worse. My size isn’t actually reducing, it seems, but that’s a whole other bitter and twisted entry.
So why this snap last night? Was I punishing myself for not having the strength to deal with this issue? I don’t think so. Really, it’s an external problem, there’s little I can do except a) cut the root of it out of my life (don’t want to do that, it’ll take too much good stuff with it) b) sit and wait for it to get better on its own, doing what I can when I can to nudge it in the right direction. B it is, then. But I’ve been doing that for months, and it’s going nowhere. So maybe it is a loss of control thing, like I alluded to above. I didn’t know how to fix it, I was trapped, so my lizard brain went crazy with the threat and I went nomnomnomnom, warp spasm, literally chewing with the stress like Martha says in the 4DW. Maybe that’s it. And there seems to be very little fun in my life right now – it’s always been a straight swap with me, in situations like this, to top up absence of fun with the reliable sensual pleasure of food, particularly when everything else feels precarious. Perhaps the lack of pleasure in my life combined with the stress of the current situation to create a backpedalling warp spasm binge the like of which I haven’t seen for a very long time. I haven’t eaten through tears, or secretly in the middle of the night, in months and months.
Ohhh, I seem to have been talking (writing) for ages, on and off. I don’t really know what about any more. I think I’ll just post this and then go do some of the other FTF things I still need to get done, and come back and have a look later, and probably get embarrassed and angry at having written a pile of stream-of-consciousness twaddle. If you have read this far and I have made any kind of sense, please do let me know I am not alone. Or if I am, any thoughts would be appreciated. Apart from “Shut the fuck up, fatty, and go on a diet.”
