Sick of it

My in-laws are here again this week and I've fallen into old ways yet another time: using sugar as a drug to cope with stress, anxiety, anger, resentment.  I don't need to go into details about how much I hate their visits and why, because the real issue that is plaguing me is my inability to deal with unpleasantness without numbing myself via unhealthy and excessive food.

I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder, but I feel despair over my continued emotional eating and overeating (and of course, my weight).  And there are so many habits and behaviors that go into this that I hate.  I hate that I still feel a pull to buy whatever Limited Edition bullshit that is being rolled out each week by the Oreo people, the Ben & Jerry's people, or the Haagen Dazs bastards.  I hate that I'll go weeks without McDonald's and then fall into again, because that stuff is utter trash and when the smiling worker at the drive-thru window hands me my bag, I often sarcastically think "assisted suicide, hooray!"

I hate that today, I went to the supermarket to buy a stash of cheap candy bars to keep in my closet to get me through the rest of the in-law visit--an old bingey behavior and the exact same thing as your average pothead squirreling away his or her stash--and that I bought my 5 month-old organic pureed baby food in the same visit.  I felt utterly ridiculous unloading my cart onto the conveyor belt at checkout.  And I felt like a horrible mother.  I'm looking at my beautiful baby girl in her carseat and she's wearing a onesie that says "mommy loves me", and mommy can't get herself under control enough to ensure that she won't die of a heart attack in the next 10 years and leave her child without a mother.  I feel very much like an addict.

I am an addict, basically.

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I think I need drugs.  I know that's funny, given the statement I just made.  But the bottle of Percocet I brought home from the hospital after my C-section has given me some perspective.

A little over five months ago, I came home with a dozen Percocet.  And I LOVE how they made me feel--they chill you out, block all pain, and make you feel like your limbs are turning into liquid gold.  Because I only had 12 pills and knew I wouldn't be able to get a refill, I typically only used them on nights when physical pain (usually a terrible headache) coincided with extreme emotional pain and severe anxiety.  And they wiped ALL the pain away, physical and mental/emotional.  More than once after taking them I thought, "if I had access to these all the time, I'd have no need to abuse food.  I'd be downright skinny."

I'm not saying that abusing prescription drugs is any better than abusing food, or that I ACTUALLY WANT to trade one addiction for another.  (I took my last remaining Percocet yesterday, incidentally.)  What I'm really trying to say is that Percocet showed me the effect I've been trying to achieve with food, for years and years: relaxed, mildly good-humored, free of pain.  And it showed me that food doesn't do as good a job creating this state as drugs designed for this very purpose do.  No surprise there!

I've been trying to drug myself with food for a long time, when perhaps what I really need is ACTUAL DRUGS.  Appropriate drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist that can help me with the mental states that keep knocking me off my feet.  A few years ago, I took Prozac for a few months, but stopped when it became clear that I'd have to up the dose to continue reaping the benefits of the drug.  At the time, that didn't sound good to me, and furthermore, I was starting to get interested in having a baby and didn't want antidepressants in my system.  But I have to admit that I'm not making progress by drugging myself with sugar and that my current drug of choice has horrible side effects too (can you call "keeping oneself on the brink of diabetes at all times" a side effect?).  I have to admit that my meditation practice has helped, but it's not enough at this point.

The understanding that I'm drugging myself with food and sugar has always been there, but a willingness replace this with actual prescription drugs instead hasn't.  Until now. The hunt for a good psychiatrist is on.

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Maybe a psychiatrist can help me sort out the question of moderation versus abstinence.  That question has spun me around and around, and when it recurs I feel like I've made no progress at all.  I mean, just a post or two ago I spoke about how the  5:2 diet doesn't require you to give up dessert and how that's better for me, given "how I'm wired."  And here I am again, questioning.

ALL ABOARD THE CRAZY TRAIN!!!

On one hand, there are several people whose intelligence and experience I really respect that advocate moderation.  They say you aren't really at ease and therefore haven't really solved your problem until you can be moderate around sugar and other indulgent foods.  This makes sense to me.

Add to this the fact that I've never succeeded at abstinence for more than a few weeks at a time, and that involved much white knuckling, and there was usually crazed consumption of sugar afterwards that undid any good that was achieved.

Add to this my past experience with OA, which preaches sugar abstinence.  I didn't see many success stories in those church basements.  There were a few abstinent people, and they seemed batshit crazy with OA-speak...and the rest had been struggling for years but kept coming back to the meetings, believing it to be their only hope.

And then there are my stints in "treat legalization", which I have found really does decrease my desire for sweets. (ETA: It decreases my desire for the specific treats I legalize.  I wouldn't say it decreases my desire in general.)  And mindful eating has shown me that I can be satisfied with less of something at a sitting: a smaller slice of cake, fewer cookies, whatever. So I have experienced other modes of eating treats that give me some hope.

Taken together, that's a lot in favor of moderation.

But then there's the reality that I'm so often NOT moderate.  I overdo it, over and over again, and I'm hurting my health.  My bloodwork and the way I feel day-to-day is proof enough of that.

And so often, my thought while buying and eating crappy foods is "I hate this.  I'm sick of this."  I'm not even enjoying it, or paying attention to the food...because all I'm after is the high, anyway, and half the crap I buy disappoints when it comes to flavor.  So yeah, I *know* how to eat mindfully, sure, but I usually don't do it, because eating mindfully interferes with the pursuit of a drugged state...which is what I'm after 90% of the time I eat sweets.  Even now, even though I no longer binge like before.  I'm still after that altered state.

Lastly, I've been studying the dharma for a year and half now, and it has helped my life in various ways.   Many Buddhists would advocate giving up anything that makes you suffer--sense pleasures, relationships, pursuit of status or fame...really anything you grasp at desperately that leads to repetitive suffering.  For me, sweets surely fall into that category.  I suffer because of them, in a way that many other people don't.  And so often I think my life would be happier and more peaceful if I could let go of them completely and be free of the suffering they cause.

So taken together, that's a lot in favor of abstinence.

Conclusion: I need help to get out of this confusing abyss I've been in for too long.

Lost. And fat.

On Friday, March 1st, my baby turned 8 weeks old.  I weighed in at 260 that day.

So I've gained some weight, obviously. My sister stayed with me during a good chunk of February to help me with the baby. I loved having her here!  She's five months pregnant, though, and we indulged in pretty much anything we felt like.  Now she's gone, I feel more overwhelmed with childcare, and I'm fatter than before.

I feel totally lost at sea right now in terms of weight loss and behavioral change.  I'm a terribly inconsistent person; I lack follow-through.  I come up with an idea, a goal, a plan, and I fail to follow through the next day.  Sometimes the same day!  I can't really blame this on having an infant to care for because I've always been this way; however, having an infant does not make this any easier.

My mind slips into all-or-nothing thinking more than I care to admit.  I catch myself faster than I used to and can adjust the tone of my thoughts better than before...so that's something.  But even when I tell myself to simply pick ONE area to work on, ONE habit to change, I freak out and can't pick one.  Or stick with one.  That daily vegetable I mentioned in my last post?  Never happened.

I so want to be a good example to my girl.  I so want to spend this year at home not only bonding with her, but getting healthier month by month.  And more at ease in my skin!  It used to be that photographs were taken of me infrequently enough that I could internally wince when I saw the reality of my body size in pictures, but pretty much let it go, bury my head in the sand, and carry on unaffected.  It's a different story now.  You know how picture crazy new parents go, right?  And aunts and uncles and everyone else?  I have ended up in more pictures during the last 2 months--me holding the baby in all sorts of positions and angles--than in the past two years combined.  I've seen enough of myself that I just can't ignore how bad I look anymore.  I've reached that point where no nice/dressy clothes look good on me; every human body has a threshold past which clever layering, shapewear, and all the other tricks in the book can't really hide the truth anymore.  I've been there for some time, wearing baggy and practically unisex clothes so I don't have to deal with it.  But if I'm being honest, I long to wear lovely clothes that boost my confidence and celebrate the fact that I'm alive.

My mom didn't help me with clothes, bra shopping, makeup, any of that stuff.  Much of that was her own narcissism, but some of it (I have come to realize) was her own incompetence and lack of ease in this area.  I want to help my own daughter, but I won't be able to if I haven't figured it out for myself first.  The same could be said of cooking and healthy eating, of exercising, of so many things.

It feels good to write, even if it's all over the place and mostly a testament to me being lost and going in circles.

I've been binging the last three days

And it's awful. It's not fun or pleasurable. It's highly distressing.

In terms of amounts, my binges are way smaller. The first two days, it was Easter candy and today it was angel food cake and whipped cream. But smaller amounts are little consolation. And frankly, I'm GLAD my standards are changing. I want them to. I'm glad I now find eating 6 servings of malted milk balls in a day to be alarming and depressing instead of no big deal. (The package contained a total of 7 servings, and it was hard for me to not finish the box just for the sake of finishing it.)

One of the frustrating things about blogging is that I say something one day, and truly mean it--such as when I declared the other day that "I no longer feel compelled to finish things just for the sake of finishing things"--and then days like today, I have to turn around and announce that I was wrong. Something will occur that shows me I haven't moved entirely past this issue or that behavioral tendency, and then I feel embarrassed about my earlier statements. I try to be conservative in my proclamations to avoid this very thing, but it still happens.

How did I fall into binging again? Well first, I felt urges to binge for three straight days. On the evening of the third day, I developed a killer headache. That was my breaking point. I was beyond frustrated that the urges did not abate for three days despite my efforts to ignore them, neutralize them, distract myself, calm myself through meditation...none of my regular techniques worked. I was already raw from that, and add a bad headache and a really monstrous period and I just didn't care anymore. I wanted relief from the urges to binge NOW and there was one surefire way to accomplish that: binge.

So, I now know what my current breaking point is. It used to be I couldn't withstand the urges for mere hours. Now I can tolerate up to three days of irritating urges before giving in, but I can't tolerate four days or five days. And I guess can't tolerate the urges coupled with severe physical pain. When I say "can't", I mean that my firsthand experience indicates I cannot YET do it; that my skills and strength aren't sufficient for that level of challenge.

The next time I face a real challenging stretch of days, I may do much better. Maybe I'll be better at disassociating from the urges, better at calming myself, or better at interrupting my behavioral patterns by then.

One might wonder why I felt urges to binge for three straight days in the first place. I think many of the things that have historically triggered my urges to binge simply happened simultaneously: hormones and a very atypical period, problems in two of my closest relationships, health worries, exhaustion from special errands I was doing for someone this week, rumination over career concerns, and more. It was an uncharacteristically bad week. Yet these triggers didn't make a binge inevitable. All these triggers would have amounted to nothing had I dealt with the urges they sparked in a more skillful way.

All this has reminded me of what Hansen says in Brain Over Binge--

1. Life is messy and it's impossible to control or avoid triggers, especially when you have lots of potential triggers. So the answer lies in dealing effectively with the urges you experience, not in directly managing/tackling triggers.

2. I binged to get rid of my urges to binge. The urge to binge IS the disorder itself.

3. By binging, I reinforced my brain's problematic wiring. Each day of binging was more extreme than the day before, and I felt increasingly out of touch with my Highest Human Brain/Highest Self as the binging went on.

I must become calm and non-reactive in the face of my urges. I'm trying to figure out how to do that consistently. It's led me to try meditation, work on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy exercises, and more. I marvel at how Hansen was able to just...stop. So quickly. She understood how her brain was tripping her up, decided to look at the urges she experienced through a different lens, and made rapid progress from there. If I play the comparison game too much, I start to get scared that I'm "doing it wrong" or that "this approach won't REALLY work for me." But rationally I know that just because something is difficult doesn't mean my approach is faulty. (Quite the opposite, usually!)

I admit I miss the honeymoon period I enjoyed when I first finished reading the book: things seemed very clear and easy to me for a few weeks. I still consider Brain Over Binge a fantastic resource and a trusty map forward! But more and more, I feel like the real work is just beginning for me.

Information and Fear Hangover

Well, I did it again.

My little celebration of positive changes and 20 pounds gone lasted a few hours, and then the next challenge presented itself.

Some history: I have these nagging unpleasant sensations throughout the right side of my abdomen, and some swelling around my right ribcage. This has been going on since mid-2009 and it scares me. I've had tests done: bloodwork, CT scans, a special gallbladder test, ultrasound, endoscopy. I've consulted with my internist, gynecologist, and gastroenterologist. They can't find anything wrong with me. They did notice my spleen is slightly enlarged, but I feel nothing out of the ordinary on the left side of my abdomen where the spleen is located. My bathroom habits and periods are the same as they were before these sensations started (sorry if TMI).

After all those tests resulted in no answers, I just went on with my life. I felt the sensations--ranging from weird to annoying to very occasionally slightly painful--every single day. My upper right abdomen remains bloated and tender to the touch. It's been just over a year since my last round of tests and inquiries and my side has been bothering me much more lately. I'm grappling with a sense of panic, shame, and regret for not continuing to pursue answers. I worry something is actually terribly wrong with me and I'm gearing up for another round of medical fun, starting with an annual physical and going from there. This time I'm going to push harder for explanations and solutions.

All this is background to what I really sat down to write about. Yesterday, I was thinking for the millionth time about trying an elimination diet to see if that could help my symptoms. Perhaps I could eliminate dairy for a few weeks and observe, and then repeat the experiment with wheat/gluten. At the same time, I think about the reality of binge eating disorder, the way I'm JUST NOW starting to get better and normalize my relationship with all foods, and the fact that forbidding something as common as dairy or wheat might create a real mental and behavioral backlash. I don't want that to happen.

A bit later, I found myself on the Whole9 website. These folks have created a paleo elimination diet called the Whole30. I must have browsed the site for hours, even though I had already familiarized myself with it the first time I researched paleo and primal eating in the middle of last year.

By the time I was done reading, I had concluded I was a weak piece of shit, will probably end up with a cancer diagnosis next month, and will die shortly thereafter. Or if that doesn't happen, I will likely develop multiple sclerosis by age 32 and ruin my husband's life. That I'm killing myself with every bite of grains, dairy, sugar, and legumes I take and if something bad happens to me, I completely deserve it because I completely caused it.

I went to bed miserable and scared, and did not get up until this afternoon. I did not want to deal with my thoughts, feelings, or life in general. When I finally got up and got moving around, I honestly felt hungover from the night before and the first thing I wanted to do is eat both pints of ice cream in my freezer. Two unopened pints of premium, limited edition flavor ice cream that have been sitting there, ignored, for days. That I had been looking forward to savoring at some point, but had no urgency to eat whatsoever. (And these are the kinds of changes I've been so pleased with lately!)

I quickly realized this was a reaction to the fear-inducing material I had read the night before. Either I was starting to think about a strict elimination diet at the back of my mind and therefore creating the urge to rebel or "get it while I still can"--or I was wanting to numb myself from the panic I'm feeling about my health and my apparently suicidal eating of black beans and yogurt. Either way, I did not act upon my fleeting thoughts. I did not binge.

I'm sure there is value in the Whole9 approach. I'm sure they are right about several things. But I am also sure of the following:

I don't respond well to a tough love approach. If you check out the site I'm talking about you will quickly pick up on the tough love/dietary badass tone that many people dig and that I personally find exhausting. I take the "know thyself" bit seriously, and I do know this about myself.

Fear and stress are bad for your health. Surely as bad as canola oil or brown rice. Enough said.

Fear, guilt, and shame are not good foundations for behavioral change in most people. Fear has sparked me into action before, sure, but never sustained action leading to long-term change. And I'm seeking sustainable actions and long-term changes!

Lots of well-meaning, knowledgeable people don't know anything about binge eating disorder and therefore are not equipped to advise someone with it. Even the experts "don't know what they don't know", so to speak. It still amazes me how rare it is to find someone talking about obesity and binge eating and general health in holistic brain-body terms. In most discussions, it seems we are either all brains or all body.

So, I need to go to the doctor. I may experiment with reducing or eliminating dairy and/or wheat and/or gluten in the future, on my own terms. I cannot disrupt the progress I'm making with my eating disorder right now. And I need to stay far, far away from nutrition websites. Especially the badass kind.

Edit: In the spirit of honesty and also because my food record for the week clearly states it, I want to record here that I did binge later in the day, after writing this post. Nothing like my old binges in terms of amounts, but I would classify it as a binge nonetheless because of my mindset and approach at the time of eating.

The truth

When I stop posting, you can rest assured I've lost my way. You can also assume I'm spending lots of time hunched over my laptop or iPhone, reading about nutrition.

I realized today that the ongoing nutrition research, compulsive checking of my favorite weight loss blogs, and all the rest has become an addiction of its own. I'm a sugar addict, sure, but I'm also an information junkie. At this point, I think the latter is almost more problematic than the former.

Only today did I realize that I am scared to interrupt the constant incoming stream of information about food, exercise, and health. It's like I'm frightened that tuning those things out will lead to ignoring my food/weight/health problems and result in devastating weight gain. Another fear? That the final missing piece of the puzzle--the magic detail that will make everything fall into place for me--will get overlooked if I'm not constantly taking in new information.

The (not-so) funny thing is, I've been gaining weight while all this learning and obsessing has been going on. I have knowledge, but no results to show for all my reading and ruminating. Something has got to change.

I tell myself that I've learned enough to get going on a healthier track. I do okay for a bit, then I have a few bad days of eating, freak out that I clearly don't have the answers I need, seek refuge in the stories and research and views and programs of others, try to adapt to some of models I read about (trying OA, eating low carb, going paleo, whatever), hit a roadblock of some sort, repeat cycle. It's tiresome.

I miss having a life outside of this obsession.

Here's the other bit of truth telling for today: starting this blog has shown me, yet again, how hard I try to perform for others. I want so badly to appear that I've got my shit together; another part of me longs to be vulnerable and real and honest about how out of control my life often feels.

When I was getting things set up on Blogger, I sat down and made a little weekly schedule for my blog. On Monday I'm going to write about this, and Tuesday about this, and so forth. I wanted to go from not having a blog to having an amazing one that shows how awesome and determined I am, and I wanted it to happen overnight. When I got busy and couldn't create the kinds of posts I was envisioning right out of the gate, I opted to skip posting altogether. It's classic perfectionistic, all-or-nothing behavior and it invades many areas of my life.

Isn't a little post that simply tells the truth about what's going on better than nothing? And why would a person that has 100+ pounds to lose try to pretend that everything is smooth sailing all the time in Dietland?

Tonight, I'm admitting that I'm shipwrecked.

Out of sorts

I'm all over the place at the moment. I had guests over the weekend and on Monday, which left me exhausted. (It always does.) So yesterday I slept most of the day away before going out for dinner and a late movie. Today I start a certificate program in writing that I'm very excited about and I'm unable to focus on much else.

Some meal planning, grocery shopping, and a trip to the gym is all that I need to get the wheels in motion again, and that's how I want to spend my day tomorrow. I don't like this directionless, scattered feeling.

My reward for losing 10 lbs. arrived this afternoon, though, which is both a bright spot in my day and a reminder that I want to resume my efforts and earn more rewards! I will post pics when I get it assembled.