Woody Allen
The horrible for me is realizing I could stand to lose at least 50-70 pounds and the miserable is standing on the scale after an eternity of what feels like the worst deprivation ever, lasting 1 month total, to find out I'd shed exactly seven of those unneeded pounds. The only reason I'm not flooded with self-hating thoughts regarding what a failure I both feel like and no doubt will turn out to be as I try to quench a tsunami like desire to over eat, is that I'm so busy remembering to phone my sponsor and figure out what vegetable or how much salad I need to make to fill half my plate that I don't have inordinate amounts of time left over for anything else. That and I lie down to go to sleep and become riddled with anxiety that even without the excess poundage, I'll somehow starve between dinner and breakfast (this I have come to learn is a common fear amongst overeaters!).
All in all, I am getting through, one day, one meal at a time as the encouragement often. goes. What I'm seeing is how very much free access to food and a perceived need to eat throughout the day, pervades my identity. So many times I've reached for something I wasn't hungry for and even stopped to ask myself why I think I'm doing 'this'. The answer quite often was 'It's who I am. It's what I do."
I just completed a food history, something it never occurred to me to do in easily 25 years of making concerted constructive efforts to reduce the need to overeat. I don't know why I find it surprising how important I've made eating but it has infused every ordinary and extraordinary breath I've taken as long as I can remember.
I love knowing this and really seeing this as I work at not needing to eat when I'm not the slightest bit hungry, yet I am well aware of this appalled aspect of myself that is horrified the extent to which what I think I need is so different from the fact of the matter. In addition to the revelatory knowledge that very little starving takes place between those who get a nutritive dinner and breakfast the next morning, it has also come as a shock that one can subsist on 3 moderate meals and that if a snack is in order, the traditional apple, banana or other type of fruit can suffice, even satisfy any biological hunger that might arise. You couldn't provide me more shocking data if you told me not only is Elvis alive, but I am he. (And by the way, can you prove I'm not?)
"The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it." Emerson
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In a similar vein (sp?) I've decided to track my eating - just what and when - for two weeks. Throughout my pregnancies and in between time I've seen a nutritionist whom I really liked. When she asked me what I ate in a day, it was both hard for me to remember (!) and hard for me to come completely clean with her. I've had such a huge paradigm shift with regards to eating over the last few months and since I've seen her. It is earth-shattering how much more attention I pay to what / when I eat just because I'm trying to write it down. The attention alone is making me make different choices not because of a sense of "shoulds" or guilt or anything, it's just a level of awareness that reminds me I want to make "better" choices. It's a journey, man, it really is.
ReplyDeleteTracking has made a huge difference to me in awareness and in changing my habits. (PS, Celia, what happened to celebrating the loss of 7 pounds?)
ReplyDeleteRegarding the starvation between dinner and breakfast, somewhere I read "Hunger is not an emergency". That was news to me. Possibly it's not right up there with the fear you report, but I think it's in the same family.
Thanks, Ladies- yes on tracking- always a help and my blogs are time delayed which I'm in the process of changing. I have lost 23 pounds and celebrate each month of being in OA as well as each 'decade' lost.
ReplyDeleteI love knowing that even non-eating disordered people can find something novel in the idea that one's physical being is not in a dire state because hunger has come upon it.
Yes Melissa- coming clean with what I eat is at times mystifying and at times horrifying!!!