On being overwhelmed

When I decided to use my “corona time” to work toward actually dealing with my life long eating disorder I turned to the internet.  I came across SO much information, so many blogs, so many books!

Where to start?! I closed my browser and binged.

First, I should talk a bit about my “cycle” and how I came to this decision.

My most recent weight loss endeavor was WW, and I lost about 30 lbs before I plateaued.  The plateaus are the beginning of the end for me. I get MUCH stricter, I exercise a LOT more, and when the scale doesn’t budge, and it does not budge,  my discouragement and frustration leads to some version of this thought, “If I’m not going to lose any weight why am I even on this diet?!”  So I have a cookie here, a slice of pizza there...it’s always a slippery slope that ends in me glomming onto binge foods and eating them in secret.

Currently my weight is almost back to where I began.  I weigh myself frequently, if not daily.  When dieting, I weigh myself daily.  It’s almost like a religious experience.  I awaken, I pee, I remove my clothes, I am excited and nervous.  I step on the scale, a supplicant awaiting judgement.  The unspoken question is if I was good enough the day before to get rewarded with a weight loss.  My mood ABSOLUTELY depends on the scale god’s judgement.  Rationally I am not actually thinking any of that, but that is what it seems like now that I’ve stepped back and analyzed it.

So here I was, at home day after day due to the lockdown and “having” to eat with my family around.  I live with my husband and college age daughter.  Snacks and treats and stress galore.  At first we didn’t know how long it would take our unemployment to kick in, if we would have health insurance, or even if one of us had already been infected.  Congress hadn’t even passed the stimulus package yet.  So, super stressful.

My daughter does her own thing with food  (this is another whole eating disorder story that I will touch on in a different post) but my husband is romantic and likes to eat with me, and to cook for me. Which I appreciate because, I don’t enjoy cooking that much.  (Again, I will I elaborate on this at another time).

As sweet as it is that my hubby likes to take care of me in this way, I noticed that he always serves me smaller portions than I’d have served myself.  He also is one to skip breakfast and not eat lunch til 2:30-3:00 pm.  He wants to eat dinner at 8:30 ish and then snacks at night.  I, on the other hand, do a breakfast around 6:30 am, a 10:30 snack, a 12:30-1:00 lunch, maybe a 3:00 pick me up, and I’m ravenous for dinner by 6:30 latest.  Then I want a snack before bed!  When we were both working, it was easy to accommodate my own rhythm because, as a restaurant manager he wasn’t usually home during my dinner time.  Being home together for a long stretch of time, and his desire to sync our eating to be romantic, really threw my issues with eating into the forefront! To me anyway!

When we’d get up and have coffee, I’d offer him breakfast and he’d refuse.  I can not skip breakfast at all, so I’d eat.  But, I’d  end up feeling guilty, like a pig, since I needed to eat when he didn’t.

I’d have breakfast and a snack and be ready for lunch, and he hadn’t even eaten anything yet!  That did things to me, very bad things.  I started getting up early just to eat before he got up.  I started sneaking food. I was binging a lot! Shoving chips and/or cookies in secretly whenever he wasn’t around.  My dog would eat whatever missed my mouth.

I’d wake up and feel fatter.  I felt like a big, ugly, gross, failure.

My sister was using her lockdown time to learn a new language!  Someone else I knew was taking a course online! I “knew” others would come out of quarantine thinner, more fit, prettier.  Not me though, I was dealing with this weird stress acne around my lips and I “knew” I was going to come out fatter.  I imagined I’d be secretly a laughing stock.  “Why didn’t she use this time to get healthier” everyone would wonder. What a waste of time.  What a waste.

Thankfully I read an article on how we don’t have to use the pandemic time to be productive.  So that helped, but, I wanted to be productive.  I wanted to FINALLY lose weight and exercise and come out of lockdown thinner and prettier!  I wanted the congratulations and compliments!  I just couldn’t stop binging.  Could. Not. Stop.

Somehow, my brain realized that my sweetheart husband wasn’t even noticing when or what I ate, and definitely wasn’t judging me.  I realized the problem was all me.  I realized that for many, many years I’d thought I was managing my B. E. D. but in reality I was only yo-yo dieting.  Keto, Atkins, WW, intermittent fasting, vegetarianism, Optifast... these diets had all been successful. Successful in helping me mitigate some of the weight gain from my binges.

According to the book I ended up choosing as a starting place, “The Diet Survivor’s Handbook” by Judith Matz, LCSW and Ellen Frankel, LCSW, these diets were just part of the disorder, not at all a solution.

I purchased the book on my kindle, and felt so overwhelmed that it took a full week until I could even begin to read it.