The frightening caloric total, how did my body ever handle it?

Just out of curiosity, as I wrote in my journal today, I fished my memory to the best of my abilities and wrote in gory detail a list of the foods I’d typically consume when choosing to succumb to what I used to call a “Junk Food Binge.”  That was my code for anything goes, no food is off the potential list, no attempt to observe or even define certain boundaries (funny how when removing any boundaries always seems to lead to junk food and not, say, “the all-melon binge” or the “any flavor of kefir I want binge”).  I’ve always been aware of the staggering calories I must have consumed, as I still count calories to this day as part of my food plan.  In fact, counting calories is so second-nature to me, by now it’s actually more comforting TO count calories than to try to eat without having that automatic awareness be part of my selection.  Yet, it seems part of my bingeing was rooted in the need to say to heck with rules, and I kept myself mostly ignorant on how much I was actually consuming during these episodes.  “More than 3000” is about as far as I wanted to think about it.  Until today.  Yow.

I’m seriously frightened by what the sum total must have been at my worst.  My poor body, when I think of the load I caused to so many of my organs and systems, it breaks my heart and makes me sick.  At the same time, I don’t know how my body managed to handle it without the degree of weight gain you would have expected.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very active, have always been involved wth athletics and have always been vigilant about jumping back into serious clean eating following a binge.  Even so, surely these measures alone could not have negated the mass ingestion, at least that’s how it seems in hindsight.  I mean, my weight is pretty much the same as it was back in those days, and I can promise you, my net totals over a typical week or a typical month are nowhere near as high.  I exercise pretty much the same, so no change there.  How do I explain the disparity?

I can only speculate, and even then there’s really no point, just an interesting thing to ponder.  Does the body actually hit a point in which it simply can’t absorb more than “X” calories over a given period of time, so once I crossed “X” I couldn’t absorb any more?  Was I simply given the grace of a normal-weight body until I was ready to take action for my recovery?  Was I in fact still exercising more, and doing more restricting on my regular food days than I’m remembering?

Yet another reason why I’m so grateful to be at the point I’m at in my recovery.  I can only pray that I always remember how horrible, awful, panicked, miserable, depressed I was during that time.  How many times did I write the words, “So SCARED!” in my food journal.  How many times did I lay in bed, so sick to my stomach after ravaging it all night with sugar, fat and carbs, that the sound of my poor stomach wimpering (at least, that’s what it sounded like to me) made me cry?

Of course, on a lighter note, it’s still depressing, seeing how quickly those calories can STILL add up.  Anyone check the label on a can of nuts or a bag of trail mix?  Ouch!  Not fair.

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Immature thinking: Hoping that 1+1+x still can = 2

It’s funny, all the simple ways one can sum up the difference between immature/magical thinking — the kind of thinking that gets one into eating trouble and keeps them from growing and living life fully — and mature thinking and action that is rooted in mental and spiritual health as well as physical.

I was thinking about how my mind works with my own eating, when I’m “clicking” with my clean eating vs. when I’m white-knuckling it and/or at risk for a binge.  It can be summed up as, when I’m in “the flow” and am eating with full conscious awareness and acceptance of the big picture — the long-term as well as the immediate, it’s because I fully understand and accept that 1+1=2.  But when I start to struggle with that, or when I start to “futz” with my diet or play mental games to manipulate my food/beverage plan to allow “more”….it’s because I’m falling back into that seductive thought of, what if 1+1+x can still = 2?  I try to figure out how to make that true.  I want to believe there is a way to “get away with” more than just those two 1’s.  Or maybe I still understand that 1+1+x > 2, but I’m angry about that.  Cranky.  Unaccepting.  I know more than one binge has occurred because I was pissed off about the unfairness of that, how funny I am!

So here’s hoping I continue to improve my understanding and acceptance that 1+1=2.  Nothing will change that, I can only rise to that reality and conduct myself accordingly.

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Adding a new food to my repertoire, albeit the “processed” version first

I’m excited, I very much enjoy East Indian cooking and have long wanted to incorporate it into my regular menu.  Problem  is, I tend to jump a little too eagerly onto the bandwagon with these things:  the last time I thought about doing this, I bought a cookbook, a bunch of hard-to-find ingredients (mostly spices I had never used before), and set out to educate myself on authentic East Indian meal preparation.  And while the sumptuous descriptions and exotic recipes captured my imagination and beguiled my romantic side…..I never really advanced forward from the “reading” and into the “doing” phase.  Typical me!  Too much thinking, too much preparation/planning.

So that idea faded into the woodwork a long time ago.  UNTIL…..on a recent trip to the grocery store with my husband, we happened upon the “international foods” aisle, and lo and behold, they have pre-packaged East Indian dishes, ready to heat in much the same way you find American rice and other dishes.  Eureka!  Now granted, I don’t for one moment kid myself that this is any equivalent representation of what I might experience at the local East Indian restaurant or even by my own homemade efforts.  But whatever gets the ball rolling, right?

So tonight’s dinner will be Kashmir Spinach, and I could not be more excited!  We’ll see where this goes…..

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Update, and may take a break

It’s been a strange month.  With only one stumble, I’ve managed to stick with my initial goal — that of not allowing a separate, “special” trip to the grocery store should I make the decision to binge.  In other words, if I feel the need to eat beyond what I’d planned, it must be foods that I already have at home; no special “treats” or normally “forbidden” items.  The idea is, I wanted to see what would happen if I removed any sense of allure to the binges, at least in terms of WHAT they would entail.  There’s not nearly as much enjoyment from them when they’re simply comprised of foods I’m already including on my food plan!

But I also did make that 90-day challenge for myself, one in which I wanted to see how long I could be abstinent (abstinent, in this case, referring primarily to not bingeing).  Not wanting to evaluate the wisdom of issuing such an ambitious challenge until I gave it an earnest shot, my behavior these last  few weeks has been quite interesting, to say the least.  I would call it a mixed bag, in terms of success.

There have some very distinct differences in my current eating patterns than my norm.  True to the goal, I have not “binged” in the same sense I normally do.  Normally, if I decide to binge, along with the glee I feel in allowing myself access to certain “treat” foods, I typically throw any sense of calorie-counting or even hunger checkpoints out the window.  Basically, I eat until either the foods I’m interested in are gone or until I’ve “had my fill,” which almost 100% of the time means by the time I stop eating, I am extremely uncomfortable.  HORRIBLY uncomfortable.  That, actually, has been among the leading incentives for my wanting to change these days.  I feel mournful, sorrowful, and quite scared, at the awful abuse I inflict on my body by this behavior.

But in the place of the “normal” binges has been a sort of hybrid creature, and I’m not liking it.  In some ways, it’s “good” in that, I have yet to eat completely out of control or to get to that “horrible discomfort” point.  What has happened is, in between days of clean eating, I have days in which I, after dinner, decide to eat extra food.  The big differences are, I’m choosing foods that offer no more enticement than my food plan:  soup, apples, microwave popcorn, etc.  AND I’m still counting my calories meticulously, so that at least I know what the damage is.  And while I still end up eating more than I want, I do stop well before I would normally do so.  Clearly, these strays are not serving quite the same “release the pressure valve” purpose offered by most of my binges.  But I still consider them binges.  They still render me way beyond an amount of calories I need, though nothing like the devastating calorie blitzes I’ve been guilty of inhaling in the past.  And predictably, it doesn’t take nearly as long to recover from these deviations; I find much less “aftermath” to suffer and start to feel like myself again sooner than I do under normal “post binge” circumstances.

But the mind is tricky, and with these changes — I actually worried that this would happen — I’m straying from my food plan more frequently than normal.  This is disturbing  me greatly.  I worry that if I keep at this, I may be looking at the formation of a habit that will be tough to break.  A habit that could turn disastrous if my momentary “relative” self-control with these eating splurges should ever spiral back in the direction of my regular binges.

So my instinct is to say, this was good, it served its purpose, it helped me swing my eating habits back (overall) to a more healthy schedule, it gave me good insights — insights I would not have had if I had kept my same-old, same-old m.o., but now I need to let it go.  Do I think I could keep going for the full 90 days?  Actually…..yes.  But I’m not sure this is what I want.  If I stop it now, I have a much better chance at breaking this pattern before it has a chance to really become habit.

But how’s this for a monkey wrench?  So far, it seems my weight has stabilized!  Not to where I usually like it — I’m still about 2-3 pounds above my normal weight (I’d gained about 4-5 from the holidays this year, more turmoil than usual, part of the reason for my doing this month experiment).  But, if I’m to believe my weigh-in of a couple of days ago….and a few days before that…..yeah, it appears possible that things aren’t deteriorating on the weight end.  MAYBE.  Two or three weigh-ins are hardly enough to see a trend.

So….. I have some thinking to do.  I’m not afraid to abandon either the 90 day challenge OR the January challenge (actually…..I won’t abandon the latter as there are only a few days left of the month, and I do think this is a good break from certain food habits I’d developed) if it turns out to be not what I feel is what I want.

I also may take a break from this blog (hey, it IS called the *part-time* bulimic, isn’t it? my attempt at humor).  I have so much going on with my work and I worry that concern about blogging is actually taking my eyes off my eating “steering wheel” at the moment.  Then again, maybe I’ll discover I benefit more by keeping the blog going than in taking a break.  I just wanted to let readers know what’s up if I suddenly drop off the face of the earth.

We’ll see!

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Progress report on 90-day challenge: The cheese cometh, the cheese must go-eth

It’s been a mixed week.  My self-started 90-day challenge is still on, and I’m relieved to get through almost the first week without major incident — something I haven’t been able to say for a while now.  But it hasn’t been without a couple of stumbles, and I have to nip these in the bud before my mind infers that somehow I “got away” with these deviations.  Ironically, that’s always been a force to contend with in myself; slip-ups, if they don’t feel too consequential, have the dangerous ability to suggest that they can reappear again soon after with no harmful impact.  At a time when I reached my heaviest weight (a number of years ago), that’s how it happened.  It didn’t happen by bingeing; it happened through steady, seemingly “harmless” overeating, with just enough clean eating days in between to make me feel falsely safe and secure.  I weighed myself only sporatically and wow, was I in for a shock when I finally stepped on the scale.  It’s actually one reason I “accepted” bingeing as a method of weight management for myself.  When I binge, particularly at the end of the day when the digestive ill effects will even further impact me the next day, I can’t for one second fool myself into thinking that what I did wasn’t “so bad.”  You KNOW it’s bad.  Your whole body knows, the consequences are stark and horrific and throw you back into action like nothing else can.  But overeat a little?  Especially if you do so early in the day — i.e. take in a few extra calories between breakfast and lunch but eat a normal dinner, you could emerge the next day feeling no perceivable changes in your digestion, energy, etc., even though you did what you did the previous day.  This, I believe is what lures people into a false sense  of security and inaction.  My challenge, therefore, lies heavily in striking a happy medium between the two extremes:  to not binge, and for many reasons, but to also not let the occasional slip-up become anything more than occasional.  I have to react to these indiscretions with the same voracity that I do a binge, or I’m setting myself up for that same steady creep that resulted in ## extra pounds lo so many years ago.  I will NOT go there.  I was miserable on a level that is indescribable; I would actually rather be riddled with an eating disorder of the first order for  the rest of my life than let my body return to that place.  At that weight, I’m useless.  I don’t function well, I’m distracted every second of the day by how bloated and imbalanced I look and feel.  I’m not healthy and I’m aware of it when I’m there.  But I also know how physically awful it is to binge, what it does to my body.  I don’t want to remain so reliant on that behavior as my “parent” — the impetus to snap myself back on track.  I want to snap and stay on track through other, more mature, internal motivations.  That’s what these 90 days are all about.

Anyway, on to my post title.  Both of my slip-ups this week involved parmesan cheese.  This is definitely a good example of a craving that long since ran its course, only you cling to the food item not for the actual satisfaction it brings you, but out of habit.  You don’t enjoy it nearly as much as you think you will or remember doing so, but you turn to it anyway at a moment of concentration lapse.

So I’m officially moving it from my food plan list to off of it.  It’s no good for me, salty and loaded with saturated fat.  I’m definitely much better off without it and now I’m making it official.  Done.

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“Those aren’t ‘weekday’ foods!”

Interesting thought processes since making my decision to aim for a 90 days of continuous “abstinent” (binge-free) eating.  I was at work yesterday, around lunchtime, ready to go use the fitness facility and get my workout in (we have a gym on-site — very convenient).  The sun was shining, pouring into the fitness center windows, seemingly “flushing” all the previous day’s shadows (we’d had lots of cloudy days lately) and brightening my mood as only the promise of fresh air and beautiful weather can.  I felt energized, almost as though this decision to “aim for 90” has freed my mind, allowing me to think about other things.  After all, if I’m not groppling about when my next cheat day is….why then, I can allow myself the pleasure of noticing those little joys that sometimes fall off my mind’s radar.  And it’s only Day 3!

But prior to descending into the gym, I walked the hallway past the company kitchen, where apparently someone was baking pizza for their lunch, as the unmistakable smell was wafting from the oven.  Oven as in, the regular oven, not oven as in, the microwave.  You know that fragrance of freshly baked crust?  It was that kind, not that “pretend crust that just got microwaved and is now either soggy or dry and hard as a rock.”  Forgive the tangent, but why bother to even try eating pizza if you’re subjecting yourself to such an unsatisfying taste and texture?  If you’re going to have pizza, even “healthy, low-fat” pizza, for pete’s sake, at least bake it the old-fashioned way (yes, I know those silvery microwavable “crisp disks” that come with frozen ‘zas do help….but no, I don’t find they help enough).

But I digress.  As I greedily inhaled the pizza’s aroma (hooray for pizzaroma?), I found myself experiencing a shift from how I’d normally react.  Normally, that nanosecond that follows would have been something like, “Mmmm.  Smells good.  Oh well, can’t have it.  Next!”  I never eat outside of my food plan during the day, and never eat stuff brought into the office.  Not treats, not catered foods.  Don’t need it, don’t want it.

But yesterday’s reaction was different.  It DID smell good.  I acknowledged that.  I also had no problem acknowledging that I’d have to wait until later, much later (as in, after work) before the next time I eat.  No problem, nothing new there.

But rather than feel a twinge of…..desire?….for the pizza, instead I found myself experiencing the spontaneous thought of, “THAT’S not ‘weekday’ food!”  Meaning, why would you eat something so heavy and dense (especially when compared with what you’re getting in terms of nutrients) in the middle of the week…..in the middle of the DAY….no less, when you have things like work and other tasks at hand?  It suddenly seemed so out of place.  Later, I had the same reaction upon watching a TV commercial for those Chunky soups (not the regular kind, the kind that is basically a casserole-in-can:  pasta with meatballs, for instance).  Understand, I don’t mean “sinful,” just….misplaced.  It would be like getting ready to run a 10K, only instead of having that bowl of oatmeal first thing that morning — something to fortify your body without causing any distress, you instead chose that moment to eat two pieces of your aunt’s “famous” fudge.  Or you’re about to go to a wine tasting of some rare Sauternes, and just beforehand you pull out a piece of grape Bubble Yum.  Do you see where I’m going?  You’re choosing a food that is entirely mismatched to the activities you’re embarking on; food that may even impede your full enjoyment of those activities.  Suddenly, to me it seems the only rightful foods to be eaten during the week are those that are nutritious but light — fruits, vegetables, yogurt, cottage cheese, clear-brothed soup….light foods that will leave you nourished but not weighed down (physically OR mentally).  I’m not even so much referring to calories as I am the complexity of the food.  Plain, peasant food is for the weekday.  Complex, decadent, rich, comfort foods — those are for the weekend, not only when you’re able to relax and not rush the digestion, but also so that you can more thoroughly ENJOY the food.  Can you really enjoy pizza fully if you’re wolfing it at your desk with the phone ringing and your mouse snaking up and down the memo you’re typing?  You may as well just do plain baked potato with a little black pepper, or a few sticks of string cheese and a small apple; you’ll derive no less enjoyment (quite possibly MORE) and you’ll do your body so much better!

It was just such an interesting and different mindset from the one I’ve been in for so long.  I don’t think it’s a completely new one; I think I’ve been “here” before.  And surprise surpise, when I have I seem to recall a much smoother era in my eating behavior, stress management, emotional navigation, etc.  What’s interesting too is that these things never seem to be something you can impose on yourself; at least, not so that it reaches “this” level.  It’s good to do plenty of self-talking, to help reinforce the path you want your mind to take.  But you still have to sit back and wait for your boat to finally float out of the fog.  And what’s amazing is how that fog can seem so thick and impenetrable one minute…..then all of a sudden it’s blown off, and you can see for miles.  The trouble is you just don’t know, when you’re in the fog, how close you are to that clearing, and I sometimes wonder if the more you zero in on worrying/wondering about that, the more you steer your boat deeper into the fog.

In any event, it’s nice to be enjoying some sudden clarity like this! 

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