26 | May | 2015 | The Honest Life

No, not that type of morning after … I mean the other one:

The “frantic-panicking-because-I’ve-eaten-WAY-too-much-the-day-before-and-now-I-detest-myself-and-want-to-cut-it-all-off” kind of morning after.

Yes, I’m referring to bingeing – again.

I’ve been doing really well recently and have been binge free for about 3 weeks now. But this weekend it came back to bite me in the bum.

When you are in the act of bingeing – in whatever form that may come in – you are completely entranced. Nothing can stop you and nothing does. You are entirely consumed in the process of drowning yourself in food.

The next morning however, is a completely different story and I guess, in a way, it is similar to a hangover; The after math from the night before shows you no mercy and you are forced to reap the consequences of your actions.

Guilt overwhelms you. Fear consumes you. Dread lingers over you.

Thoughts are going round and round in you head and you make stupid promises to yourself in an attempt to calm yourself down. You say things like “I won’t eat anything today” OR “I’ll do loads of exercise to burn it all off”. But for anyone who’s at all like me, an all-or-nothing kind of person, you already know that you’ll either be really strict with yourself the next day or you’ll completely crumble and just do it all again or simply stay in bed because it’s just too hard to deal with.

When you wake up, it’s almost like your head has been placed on an alien body. “This isn’t mine, is it? I didn’t really do that last night, did I?” , but when realization hits and your worst fears are confirmed, you brace yourself for the fact that the next 24 hours are not going to be fun.

When I first started bingeing, I was very strict with myself and would maybe go swimming for a couple of hours or restrict my intake for a couple of days afterwards as a means to deal with the guilt. But the cycle still continued.

Now, I don’t have the energy to do that anymore. It’s exhausting and miserable. So I tend to just “sleep it off” or try and pretend it never happened or attempt to distract myself. But the reality is still the same and if I just sit around and do nothing about it, I am bound to gain endless amounts of weight and that simply isn’t an option. I can’t let that happen. Please no.

You look down at yourself and grab bits of flesh in despair. This can’t be real.

* * *

Recently I read the most poignant book by author and compulsive eater sufferer, Geneen Roth, called “When Food is Love”.

In that she depicts, what I consider, to be the most accurate representation of what it feels like to binge.

She writes:

You wake up in the morning confident that today will be a two-pounds-thinner day, even better than yesterday, when you lost 1 1/4 pounds; you put on your in-between pants, not the smallest size that’s hanging in your closet but not the largest size either. You notice that they zip easily with thumb’s worth of room to spare, which is very different from two weeks ago when you had to pour yourself into them and hold your stomach in all day, breathing in short shallow spurts to keep the button from popping and your awareness from the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed to death. You eat your poached egg on dry toast for breakfast, your apple for your mid-morning snack. For lunch, you eat a piece of cold broiled chicken without the skin and three slices of tomato, all the while congratulating yourself on how good you are being, how much weight you will loose. You reward yourself for the deprivation you feel by the vision of the thin you entering a room. All heads will turn as unsuspecting people are practically knocked off their chairs, so startled are they by the magnificence of your smile, your eyes, your lithe body. Today will be a good day to go shopping, you tell yourself, try on a few clothes, see how good you look in smaller sizes. So you get in the car and begin driving to your favorite store, but as you come to a stoplight, you realize that something is wrong. Something is gnawing at you. You can’t put into words, but as you sit there, it grows more and more oppressive until you feel you’ll suffocate under the weight of it. You’re having a hard time breathing, the anxiety is rising and you want it to stop. All you care about is having it stop, and you begin thinking about the eclairs in the bakery next to the clothes store. Suddenly you are relieved. Something will take this feeling away. You don’t have to come apart. You will not suffocate. With the determination of a samurai, you steer the car to the parking lot, click click click go your shoes on the pavement. You look at the man with the tortoiseshell glasses who is passing on your left but you don’t really see him, you don’t see anything, your mind is a laser beam of intent. You want the food. Then you are standing in front of the glass case, hearing yourself order three chocolate eclairs, five cookies, and a marzipan cake. You mutter something about having a party as you pay for your relief and leave. Click click click on the pavement, the sound of the door opening, the thud of its slamming shut and finally, finally, you are alone with your blessed relief. Quickly, frantically, and without tasting them, you inhale two eclairs. At a more leisurely pace, you eat a third. Your stomach is getting full; you can feel the whipped cream sloshing against your ribs, can feel your pants getting tighter. Oh crap*. You’ve blown it. You’ve flipping* blown it. You were doing so well, sixteen days of eating dry toast and skinless chicken and you blew it in one afternoon. Ten minutes. Ten lousy minutes and sixteen days are ruined. Ten lousy minutes and your whole life is ruined. One wrong move. Why did you have to go to the bakery? Why couldn’t you just have walked into the clothes store? Why can’t you do anything right? You knew it really wasn’t any use trying to loose weight, you knew it all the time, you shouldn’t have even tried. You can feel your skin stretching right now, this second, your stomach is getting bigger, it’s no use trying to get your weight under control, you might as well give up. Just the way you give up on everything.”

*Explicit language has been changed.

Powerful huh?

When I first read this I cried. I couldn’t believe that someone else, a complete stranger in fact, was able to articulate exactly what I feel. I felt so relieved and yet so pained that there are others out there suffering just as much as I am. It’s a cruel and ruthless illness and it sucks every morsel of life out of you. You are not allowed to act for yourself, you must always give in to it. Yet when you do, you hate yourself even more …. Is there ever an end?

When I was suffering with anorexia, there were times when I’d think to myself “Wouldn’t it be lovely to allow myself to eat some chocolate” … but now, on the opposite side of the spectrum I find myself saying “Wouldn’t it be great to have the control to deny myself from eating chocolate again”.

This is my reality – contradiction.

I do not eat chocolate because I actually want to, I eat it because I am told to. Forced to. Compulsed to. Yet equally, I will not deny myself from eating chocolate, not because I don’t want to eat it, I do not eat it because I am told not to. Forced not to. Bullied not to.

My life can be summed up by a three step diagram.