A binge unfolds

Wha-a-a? That's a crazy title, huh? What it means is that over the last couple of days, I've felt myself slipping back into some disordered thinking, and worse, disordered eating. Upon returning from the trip and finding myself at a new low weight on this journey, not to mention writing about the relative peace of normal eating on vacation, I found myself starting to restrict my food intake. Just a little the first day back, then a little more on Thursday, and by Friday I was feeling quite depleted and empty. EMPTY and tired.

At the crux were a couple of things:
1) I was ready to fast forward this weight loss. Eat less, lose more. Eat next to nothing - even faster. I dabbled with anorexic eating many (28+) years ago, as well as laxative and diuretic purging. Believe it or not, I never became bulimic because I couldn't make myself throw up. Of course I'm glad about that now, but back in those days my eating was screwy in many and varied ways different from its screw-up-ness of today. Yet those restrictive notions were working on me this past week.
2) I knew I had a party a friend's house Friday evening to celebrate a gal's 1 year AA anniversary, and I realized I'd been planning to tie on the feed bag in a major way for the event. This group of women can cook some good food, and when I got honest, it was clear I'd been eating too little for a couple of days in preparation for major consumption of mass quantities of all not nailed down during and after said party. Stupid crazy behavior that I know doesn't work, and generally am able to avoid in my current incarnation.

So here is the Friday sequence that unfolded into my first binge eating in several weeks. By lunch time Friday I was ravenous - truly empty-stomach hungry. I had brought a sane lunch, which I ate, but it didn't "do it" for me. In a couple of the classrooms, the staff had done cooking projects yielding some decadent sweets, which I staunchly resisted and declined. Until I didn't. And finally, about 1:30 in the afternoon, I wandered down the hall to one particular room and asked if they had any of their confections left...I had one small 2 inch square of something, and the switch flipped. The rest of the afternoon, then on into the evening at the gathering, and even after I came home, I ate. Healthy delicious dishes alternating with heavy desserts, handfuls of nuts...on and on. A bona-fide frenzy of out of control eating. Interesting is that during the party, friends who hadn't seen me for a while were commenting on how they could see I'd lost even more weight! "Ha", I thought - "and I'm in the process of packing it back on in this very moment."
Si-i-i-gh.

I woke up Saturday feeling surprisingly okay given the onslaught of food my body had sustained the night before. I felt the episode was over, and the binge "out of my system". But again, I restricted my food all day (attempting to compensate for yesterday's iniquities is rarely a successful venture), keeping intake very bland and austere. After a sane dinner, I started making repeated trips to the kitchen foraging for anything with which to concoct something tasty. I keep no junk around anymore. So in order to do too much damage, I'd have had to either get very creative, or go on a food run. Thankfully I was feeling too lazy to go out, but I did manage to eat too many nuts, some toast with butter and Trader Joe's Pumpkin butter (OHMIGOD...it's amazing!), and a piece of cheese. It was not a bad episode because of the limits provided by empty cabinets and lazy self.

I wasn't going to confess all this bullsh*t because I want to sound better and saner than I feel. But again, what good does withholding my truth do me? I think I'm okay today - I've gotten in 2 walks (despite the achy knee...I figure it's going to be surgically fixed in a matter of weeks, so resuming some walking is safe within reason) and have eaten sanely. No crazy restricting. But the thoughts of not eating keep popping up. Damn! I'm sick of having an eating disordered mind. I've just written about what eating too little led me to over the last 2 days, and still I'm tempted to try and not eat.

The biggest reason I'm writing about this is that I want to keep this day sane. Eat healthfully. Resume my short-lived truce with food of the last couple of weeks where we peacefully co-existed. Just this day. It's back to one moment at a time for now. But hopefully I will note tomorrow on my blog that I got through yesterday (today) without falling back through the binge chute.