Lightbulb moment! I use my dinner to “decompress”!

This month has produced so many interesting realizations.  Initially I simply made it my goal that if I were to binge, I would limit myself to only the foods already in the house.  In other words, no special trips to the store, no purchases of normally “forbidden” options.  Doing this, I speculated, would remove some of the allure, knowing that all I’d be eating are those foods that are already part of my meal plan.  And indeed, it’s amazing how this helped diffuse the urges.  They’re still there, but for sure this helped calm down my eating.

Then I issued a challenge to myself, to pursue 90 days of “abstinence,” abstinence being, a break from bingeing altogether.  I felt I’d reached the point in which I was ready to tackle this, though I also knew that putting it out there would be risky.  90 days is a long time, and more over, the definition of “abstinence” can be massaged tremendously.  Nothing drives me crazier than when a person sets out to accomplish a goal, falls short of it, and rather than own up to it and maybe speculate on what went wrong or maybe whtether the goal was too ambitious or mismatched, they simply skirt the issue, give some general, “Well, at least I didn’t GAIN additional weight” or whatever.  Hey, the idea is to set goals and make an honest effort — and be honest with yourself, not to let things peeter out and avoid confronting the fizzle.  This is something I WON’T do on this blog.  What you read is what is happening.  You won’t see me back down or side step what has actually happened.  What’s the point?  Self-deception and denial are the fuel that keeps us in our current situations.  If you want to change you have to face both the triumphs and the discomforts of tripping.

Anyway, I have a whole lot to say with regard to those two challenges I’d issued myself.  Lots of progress, some stumbles, some imperfections.  But this has been a very different month from December, or really any period of time over the last several years.  It’s scary at times, because I’m not totally sure I like where this is taking me, but it’s also encouraging at times, as it certainly can suggest the opposite:  that I’ve stepped up to a new platform in my growth from my eating disorder.

In any event, the change of eating and restrictions in terms of binge behavior has led to a number of insights and realizations.  Last night (really, this morning) was one of them. 

I have to admit, a large factor in my eating choices has to do with calorie density.  What I mean is, I tend to try to choose foods that I enjoy, but that also provide the biggest “bang” (volume, for example) for the calorie “buck”.  Fruit, vegetables, popcorn, nonfat yogurt, sorbet, fish, fat-free cottage cheese, sugar-free jam, rice cakes, oatmeal.  You get the idea.  Don’t get me wrong, I also include olive oil (love to cook), dried fruit, sunflower seeds, rice (neither very low nor very high in calories), peanut butter, etc.  But by and large, I gravitate towards foods that both fill me up and take a long time to eat, while providing the minimum calories for that amount.  Among the foods I don’t tend to eat:  bread, butter, dry cereal, most meats (just don’t care for), potatoes, pasta, desserts, sugar, chips, crackers, cheese….you get the idea.  I also tend to shy away from certain fruits that, while tasty, are easy to overeat and are rather high in calories.  Grapes, for example, as much as I love them.  Bananas are about a 50/50; I’ll go through phases where I’m eating them constantly, then not at all.

Anyway, I know these aren’t exactly well-kept diet secrets.  I’m sure many people do this as it makes perfect sense.  Why not choose Food A over Food B if Food A is just as enjoyable as Food B, only with Food A you can eat more for the same calories?  Common sense.

But I discovered something REALLY interesting last night!

I had a good day yesterday overall.  Work went very well.  However, given my nature, I tend to get “wound up” by the end of the evening.  I work a job that demands long hours, usually quite late.  And as much as I adore my job, what ends up happening is I get so excited and jubilant as I work, by the end of my day I’m literally ready to run a 5K.  I can’t even listen to music en route home, settling instead for talk radio that I don’t even care for, just because I need to hear someone talking; I’m too wound up to concentrate/”relax” enough to listen to music, even though I normally LOVE listening to music.  This I’ve known about myself for many years.

And I’ve also known that part of the force that drives my binges is this very trait; I get wound up and it predisposes me to make impulsive, bad choices with my eating.  I can have my normal plan in place for the whole day, only to have some weird metamorphosis occur within those final two hours of the evening, leading to my making (almost always foolish) last-minute changes that almost always leads to disaster.

Knowing this about myself, I’d made some recent (as in, within the last 4 months or so) attempts to mitigate this effect.  Since I can’t seem to change the way I go about my work, my thought was, maybe there’s some intervening activity I can perform between driving home from work and arriving home for dinner.  Because once I’m home, it’s like this ticker clock goes off, and I can’t make my dinner fast enough.  So for a little while there, I was stopping off at the gym, not to exercise so much as to do other things:  sauna, sit in the Jacuzzi, stretch, sip some tea at the cafe, get a manicure, etc.  Just *something* to help diffuse my hyperactivity.  And lo and behold, it definitely helped.  I not only did better with my eating, I also loved these indulgences, began to look forward to them.

Admittedly, as the holidays approached I began to stop doing this.  Why?  Not sure, actually.  Without a doubt, it’s a bit exhausting.  My days are long and this additional activity demands its own extra effort.  At this time of the year especially (cold, snow, ice), it becomes more of a hassle.

Okay, so last night I had a good evening at work, but a few (normal) stresses as well.   I was doing okay with my eating this week — some issues, some of them scary, but overall well.  I had no reason to believe last night would be anything but a success in terms of my sticking to the meal plan.

So I got home, cooked my dinner, which was delicious.  Healthy, warm, nourishing.  I emerged very happy and content.

But then…. I kept going.  Oddly enough, I literally almost exactly repeated my day’s food.  In other words, nothing exotic, no treats, I had almost exactly the same foods I’d eaten on my meal plan yesterday.  Definitely well in excess of what my body needs (great….back to “damage conrol” mode), but not a single “woo hoo I’m eating this!” forbidden pleasure-type foods.  Vegetables.  Soup.  An Asian apple-pear.  Sugar-free dietetic mousse from a mix.  No out-of-control portions, though by the time I stopped it was definitely enough to cause a great deal of stomach distress.  I went to bad extremely angry at myself.  What the HELL?

It wasn’t until this morning that I realize what I do.

I use my dinner to decompress.

And last night….. I had more stress to “vent” than normal.  And guess what.  My dinner didn’t “last” long enough for the full decompression to take place.  Because it was weird, the impulse to eat more came out of nowhere.  It was as though I felt a certain let-down upon finishing my dinner, like, “But I’m not READY to be done with this yet!”  I didn’t feel hungry per se, just wanted to keep eating.  But I didn’t want to undo the progress I’d made this month or gain weight (well…at least not gain so much weight that I couldn’t get back on track quickly), so I fastidiously avoided any foods that would constitute my “treat” foods.  By keeping my foods within my “normal” options I avoided initiating that “what the hell, I’ve already eaten this, may as well go for the things I’ve been craving!” switch.  But still, I ate.  And well in excess of what I needed.  But I had no problem stopping long before I might normally have stopped with my “regular” binges.  So something was definitely different here.

And that’s when I realized this this morning.  I had more on my mind last night.  More “stuff” to release.  The safety valve was my dinner, only the safety valve was not opened for long enough to fully release the pressure that had built.  I had to re-open the valve and keep it open until all pressure had released.  I could then stop and relax, albeit now with a whole new stress in its place.

So here I sit, with a bloated stomach and this realization.  Which means I have to do something about this.

Clearly, I have to figure out how to release that steam, that built-up energy (which by the way is often positive, which makes it even worse as I feel like I’m truly abusing food for NO good reason!) in some other way.  Yes, I’ve become good at sitting with my emotions and not letting them sway me the way they used to.  And yes, I’m valuing my body and my sense of worth more than ever, which is one reason I made these challenges for myself this month.  But I don’t think any amount of recovery from the ED will negate the fact that I’m inclined to work myself up when I’m at work (or anything — I get excited and happy and sad and intensely passionate in so much of what I do).  I need some additional strategy to take that edge off of the pressure, so that dinner becomes the tail end of that unwinding process.

What to do?  Not sure yet.  I could resume my hit-the-gym-after-work routine, but I also need something I can do at home.  Last night, for example, would have been out of the question for that strategy as the temperatures dropped below zero, with windchills even worse.  I need to keep it practical and accessible enough that I’ll readily be able to follow through with it.

Got some brainstorming to do!

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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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“Must have a hobby!”

Well, maybe not a hobby, though that’s one option.  But I do think I have the personality type that needs something to focus on at all times.  I often wonder, in fact, if there’s not much that separates super-intense high achievers (i.e. people who attain exceptionally huge career status, largely due to their own hard work) from those who struggle with addictive behavior (and in some cases, have both of those occurring).  The very same inclination to throw oneself wholeheartedly into their work, or a hobby, or whatever task is at hand, is also the same trait that, in the absence of some distinct and engaging life focus, can end up steering a person towards funneling that same energy into addictive, destructive behavior.  And if this is true, is it wise to try to change this inclination in one’s personality?  Is it better to simply try to work with it, take advantage of it even?

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