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.

The surprising process of legalizing junk food

Interesting things are happening with my eating in the third trimester.  I'm almost 36 weeks now, and still weigh 260 pounds.

I'm not exactly sure when or why this started, but just over a month ago I decided to take yet another crack at changing the way I behave around sugary junk food.  It might have something to do with picking up one of my old Geneen Roth books one night; she's very "pro-legalization" and recommends things like carrying chocolate that you love in your purse at all times.  

I decided to give it a whirl.

16 weeks pregnant and pondering spirituality

I've had lots of stress lately--plumbing problems, financial stuff, relationship stuff.  I have managed to keep abstaining from sweets during this bout of stress, but it's not easy.  The stress triggers urges to give in and have something so I can feel pleasure, escape, relax (and make the urges themselves go away--the biggest and most immediate drive behind this whole cycle).  Pleasure and comfort are in very short supply these days without my favorite junk foods.

Every option seems difficult.  I outlined it in my last post.  Eating sweets moderately is difficult and requires a lot of energy and willpower.  Abstaining from them is difficult.  Binging and overeating are difficult ways to live too, for different reasons.  All of these options are difficult, but some of them lead to worse outcomes than the others, so I have to make my choice with that in mind.

Sometimes I wish there was brain surgery available that could remove or "wipe clean" the neural pathways that make sugar, binging, and food such a big freaking deal to me.  Because rewiring my brain through hundreds of daily decisions and actions is so damn hard.  Often I feel like I'm not making any progress and then I start to doubt whether lasting change is even possible.  I believe I can change my behavior, sure, but will the incessant whining in my head for MORE MORE MORE ever cease?  I wonder if I will be white-knuckling it to the grave, alternating between sheer willpower and mindfulness practices to get through my days without overeating or eating lots of sugary junk.  Both willpower and mindfulness take a ton of energy and effort, at least for me, so I question the sustainability of that.

IF the mindfulness stuff becomes more like second nature, though, MAYBE things will get a bit easier.  I found a Thursday night insight meditation group in my area and attended the meeting last week.  I really liked it.  I've been meditating on my own (inconsistently) and reading extensively on the topic of Buddhism for months now, sorting through different schools, ideas, and practices so I can piece together something that works for me.  I think I've rejected more aspects of Buddhism  than I've embraced; I'm not one for orthodoxy or pre-scientific nonsense and feel no need to  become more aligned with irrelevant Tibetan/Japanese/Sri Lankan/(fill in the blank) cultural trappings.  I'm a secular westerner that's influenced by Buddhism rather than a Buddhist influenced by secular western thought, that much is certain.  But the parts of Buddhism that make sense to me are becoming really important to my life.

No one would be more surprised than me if my lifelong food and weight woes brought me to a satisfying spiritual life around the age of 30.  It was my search for binge eating disorder help that led me to Vipassana (insight) meditation, and Vipassana led me to consider Buddhism as a whole.  I've never HAD a spiritual life before now.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

Inattention is key to binge eating

You hear all the time that eating mindfully helps you eat less.  It's true.  If you attend to the experience of your food and your eating process as fully as possible, you can be satisfied with less.  Start doing it and you'll see the contrast from all those times you wolfed something down while multitasking or otherwise distracted and then thought "That was it?  That wasn't enough."  And then reached for more food then and there, or perhaps an hour later. 

If you want to eat less, pay more attention.  If you want to eat more, pay less attention.  In my experience (and I'd be interested to hear other views on this), I don't think one can binge mindfully.  A binge indicates an unusually large amount of food eaten in an unusually brief period of time, and there's an mental state involved that isn't calm or focused.  If your mind is calm and you are eating slowly and attentively, I doubt you are binge eating.  It's possible you are still overeating,  but I think binging is unlikely.

Ice cream was a classic binge staple for me; I'm still prone to overeating it.  Can you believe that it wasn't until I slowed down and tried to eat ice cream mindfully that I realized my mouth became numb after a scoop or two and that I couldn't really taste the ice cream after that point?  And that it's not pleasurable to eat ice cream you can't taste?  All those years of binging on ice cream a few times a week depended on my inattentiveness; it's how way I was able to remain convinced that I "loved" eating two pints of ice cream in 20-30 minutes. 

If you tend to binge while watching TV or movies, browsing, fiddling with the radio in your car, playing games on your phone, letting your mind wander far and wide, whatever...try doing it without your favorite distraction added.  You might find that the act of eating itself becomes boring pretty quickly, and that the food doesn't taste as great as you remembered.

I'm convinced that junk food manufacturers depend on people not paying much attention to what they are eating.  Eating m&ms in the movie theater is fun.  Sitting down at a table and eating one m&m at a time, attentively, is freaking dull.  I think fast food tastes good, but it loses much of its magic when you pay close attention to it--say, if you sit down and eat it quietly instead of while driving or talking with another person.  And there are so many junk foods I thought were delicious until I slowed down and discovered they were too salty, too stale, too cloying, or too bland for me.  Some of them need to be paired with OTHER junk foods in order to be really enjoyable (for me, chips and popcorn taste much better with a soda alongside).  This doesn't mean I'll never eat such foods again, but having experienced them in a new light, I'm unlikely to reach for them and even less likely to overeat them.  Without some distracting activity paired with those foods, they just aren't that fun.

I don't think that mindful eating is a straightforward, easy solution to binge eating.  Not at all.  But I think it really can help lessen the grip of problematic foods.  It can allow you to see that there IS hope: if your perception of a food can change via mindfulness (despite believing for years and years that your connection to that food was ironclad), then your behavior around that food can change as well.  And no matter how entrenched your binge eating disorder is, there is a part of your brain that remains capable of providing insights and applying solutions to overcome it.  We've got to put more stock in those parts of our brains!  Mindful eating is one way of doing exactly that.