Category Archives: Eating Disorders

Trudging the Road

Following my food plan was fairly easy for the last 5 weeks or so since I started. Good planning helps my willingness to adhere to the plan. I go shopping twice a week and stick to a planned list. I take at least one day a week to cook several days worth of food, and I store it in the refrigerator or freezer. This is especially helpful during the work week when I have less time to devote to preparing and cooking.

I am losing weight. I do not know how much since I do not have a scale, and furthermore I do not want to know. I can just feel it. It is hard not to focus on the weight loss. I need to remember that the weight loss is just a side effect, and not the overall goal. Following this food plan is about so much more than just weight loss. It is about sanity. It is about health. It is about shaking the selfishness and secrecy that surrounds my life when I am obsessing about food.

I have so much weight to lose. My guess is that it is close to 200 lbs. That is a daunting amount, and that is another reason not to focus on it. I do not want to overwhelm myself with thinking about how far I have to go. The last time I was on this plan I lost around 100 lbs and it took over a year. Losing the excess weight is not the end goal for the food plan. This is a lifetime commitment to sanity with food, and it does not stop when I reach a goal weight. My plan will likely be adjusted by my nutritionist at that point to be a maintenance plan instead of a weight loss plan. That is a long way down the road, though.

4 Weeks Recovery

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Life is getting better. I have so much more energy. I phased out my afternoon naps that I took almost every day earlier this summer. I am getting exercise and spending more time outside. I adhere to my food plan daily. I report my food to someone every morning. I am speaking with other women who share the same problems with food. I am trying to help other people who suffer from alcoholism and compulsive eating. I notice physical changes in myself besides weight loss. I hunch my shoulders and hide my eyes from people less. I walk straighter and taller and feel my confidence returning.

This Friday I go back to work after having the summer off. I work at a local school, and I am looking forward to going back. I do miss the structure of my days when I am working. I feel confident that I can incorporate my food plan in to my work day without a problem. It will just take good planning and willingness. I really enjoy my work, and I am so glad that I moved from New Jersey to Colorado last year to take this job.

Two years ago almost to the day I had a total breakdown spurred by a PTSD flash back. I lost my ability to work. I couldn’t read temporarily. I felt like someone reached into my brain and stirred its contents, and I had to spend almost a year getting everything back into place. I lost my job of ten years after I was not able to return to work after 3 months of FMLA leave. I was a walking zombie mired in depression. I did not leave the house except to go to therapy. I was incapable of any social interaction. My parents were my heroes. I moved into their house. They helped me clean out my condo and put it on the market. My mother fought tirelessly with insurance companies and to get me on disability. I was incapable of doing any of it. If I did not have my parents, I could easily have wound up homeless and without medical care.

Things did not turn around for me until the following spring. My doctors made an adjustment to my medication that made a massive difference in my ability to cope with daily life. Within days I came out of my fog and back into reality. I started socializing again. I visited a few supportive old friends. I planned a trip to spend 3 weeks with my brother and his family in Colorado. Those three weeks I spent in Colorado revitalized me. The weather and scenery were beautiful. I loved spending time with my niece and nephew. I thought about moving to Steamboat Springs for years, but it had never seemed like the right time with my job. Now I had nothing to hold me back. My job was gone, and my house was sold. It was time to make the change.

I went back to New Jersey, and told my parents of my decision, which they supported. I started looking for jobs online immediately. I was worried about my marketability for employment with a one year gap on my resume, but it turned out not to be an issue. I had a phone interview for my job at the school, and I was hired over the phone to start in early October. My brother and sister-in-law invited me to stay with them for a few months. Once my parents realized I was serious and had a solid plan, they also decided it was time to move to Steamboat. I moved out in September, and they followed in December once they sold their home. My whole immediate family now lives in Steamboat. We all enjoy the natural beauty, lovely weather, slower pace, and quality of life we found here.

My recovery from compulsive overeating is really the last of my battles for now. I have not touched alcohol or drugs in 12 years, I am getting successful medical attention for my mental illness, and now I am taking care of my problems with food. Something new may always pop up, but for now, I am doing everything I can to have a healthy and successful life.

3 Weeks

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I now have 3 weeks of abstinence, and there are definitely positive changes happening. I have more energy. I no longer feel the need for a daily nap. My ability to walk is improving. I am now up to walking a mile and a half, and the pain in my leg and back is no where near as debilitating. I am sure I have lost weight, but I do not know how much. I do not own a scale and I do not intend to get one. How I feel and what I can do are more important than a number on a scale.

This last weekend we had 27 family members gathered to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The weekend was full of drinking and eating. It is not difficult for me to abstain from alcohol after 12 years of sobriety, but the food was more difficult. I did not eat any of the appetizers are other food served to the guests. I stuck to my food plan entirely and prepared my own meals. I tried to stay useful by washing dishes and picking up trash and recycling. Some of our family members had questions for me about what I was eating and why, and I answered honestly. Anyone who inquired was supportive. I feel fortunate to have kind and loving extended family (and immediate family).

2 Weeks Back

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I now have two weeks of abstinence for the first time in years. I am already feeling much better. My feeling of well-being can be attributed to both a healthy diet and exercise. I follow my food plan precisely. I attempt some form of exercise every day. The last few days I walked on the track at the local high school. The first two days I was able to walk one mile. The pain in my right leg was too much to go further. The third day I pushed myself to go one more lap. I stopped several times to stretch in order to make it, but I made it. I just walk through the pain as best as I can. The last time I was abstinent I did not do moderate exercise as recommended, and I am determined not to make the same mistake again.

The rehab I went to had an acronym for the four points of recovery they wanted us to follow: SERF. Spirituality, Exercise, Rest, and Food Plan. This time around I am focusing on all four points. I do a period of prayer and meditation every morning, and I try to practice spiritual principles throughout the day, and help people when I can. I exercise moderately. I sleep 8-10 hours a night. I follow my food plan from my nutritionist daily, and I also report my food daily to someone else in recovery. All of this runs contrary to what I would do when left to my own devices. I need to be willing and open to suggestions from people who recovered from compulsive overeating.

Trudging Along

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I am keeping up with my food plan day to day, and I am also exercising. I did try taking a walk the other day but my back and leg cramps were really bad. I will stick to yoga for now. Settling into the routine of my food plan is difficult. I eat six times a day, and it takes a lot of planning and effort to do that. I also report my food for the day to someone else first thing in the morning so I can be accountable for what I eat. I went out yesterday with my sister in law and my niece for a few hours, and I brought my morning snack with me, but I was watching the clock hoping I would be back from the trip at a reasonable time to eat lunch. It will take a while before I can stop watching the clock and just start listening to my body. At this point I still feel hungry most of the time, so I don’t trust my own instincts about when to eat. I know this will improve over time as my body adjusts to my food plan.

Exercise

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Exercise is tough for me being as overweight as I am. I do not own a scale, so I do not know what I weigh, nor am I interested in knowing. I just know my body is unwieldy and uncooperative. I was once a good athlete and I loved to exercise, but the more weight I gained through eating compulsively, the harder and harder exercise of any kind became. I am plagued by pain in my lower back and lower legs which makes even short walks difficult. Even yoga is difficult due to the weight of my body and the size of my stomach. Either I cannot bend completely or I cannot support the weight of my body in most poses.

So where do I begin? I know moderate exercise will be a crucial part of my recovery, and it was an area I neglected in my last long period of abstinence. I need to do better. I am just doing what I can. I bought a beginner yoga DVD, and I am doing the poses I can to the best of my ability. I have to believe that the more I do, the more I will improve, and the easier it will become. I am also doing lots of stretching. I am hoping I can release some of the tension in my lower back and legs so that walking becomes easier. It is no longer an option to do nothing. I have to dig myself out of this hole. I need to start with simple exercises and work on setting higher goals for myself.

7 Days

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I am now 7 days in to food abstinence. This time is more difficult than last time. When I got abstinent last time I was in a rehab setting, and I had a lot of support. This time I am doing this alone. I am struggling to find help from someone else with the same problem, but I am geographically isolated, so it is far more difficult. I do have support from my family, but they are not compulsive overeaters or any other kind of addicts, so there is a limit to what they understand. I am making phone calls and reaching out to potential resources, but I have yet to make direct contact with anyone. I am following my food plan, reading recovery literature, and starting light exercise. I feel confident about my level of commitment to recovery, but I also know how baffling this disease is. I want to be sure that I am doing all I can, even if I am not able to find another compulsive eater to talk to about recovery.

Powerlessness

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I am 100% convinced I am powerless over food. Left to my own decision making, I do not have the good judgment to choose healthy foods in reasonable portions. I will consistently go back to sugar and flour and eat far more food than one person needs. There is no safe period of time for me to be abstinent from sugar and flour and return to them. I am left with no choice but to weigh and measure my food so I do not overeat (or under-eat). I can only eat foods from a prescribed list from my nutritionist. My own human power fails me time and time again when it comes to food. I need a higher power in my life to help me follow through with abstinent eating.

The Sugar Crash

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The last time I posted on this blog, I was attempting to get back on track with my recovery after I relapsed back into binge eating. I somehow avoided going back to sugar and flour, so I hoped that abstaining from binge eating would not be too difficult. That period of recovery lasted a few days, maybe a week. I returned to binge eating quickly. I hoped, rather than believed, that I could still avoid eating sugar and flour. I made it around 5 more months binge eating only “abstinent” foods. In truth I was just one resentment away from the right excuse to start again.

I am an intelligent woman. Logically I know that eating bread “at” someone is not going to help my hurt feelings. My heart was broken, and I thought I just deserved some bread. I ate bread 3 times that day, and swore I would stop the next day. Addiction will wipe out all reason and logic. Over the next two months, I rationalized that I would stop soon, and I would at least abstain from going back to refined sugar. That ended the day I picked up a pint of ice cream at a Walgreens while picking up cold medication. My rationalization this time was that it was okay to eat ice cream because I was sick.

It is now another month and a half later, and my weight has ballooned once again. My headaches and back pain returned. I wake up with hangovers that demand sugar as a remedy. I find myself sneaking spoonfuls of sugar into coffee while no one is looking. I binge eat in my car to avoid eating with other people. When I do eat with other people, I attempt to eat a sane meal, and then binge as soon as I am alone. It wreaks havoc on me emotionally, physically, and spirituality. It affects my performance at my job. I am tired of the secrecy, the pain, and all of the damage that comes along with this addiction.

It is now 1:37 PM. I have not had any sugar or flour today. This is the longest I have gone without either since May. I am not back to weighing and measuring or the specifics of my food plan yet, but I know that is what I need. I just have to start somewhere.

Relapse

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Relapse. It crept up on me in small increments, disguised as small exceptions. A skipped snack here, an extra ounce of protein here. I never ate anything that was no on my list of approved abstinent foods. Nothing major happened. And then I figured, nothing major happened, so why not stray off the plan a little more. An extra 2 oz here. Skip the fruit, keep the protein. Double the protein. Then eating dinner twice. And finally, on the last day of my 3 week slide, it was dinner 3 times in one night. That was last Friday. That day as a I drove home, the fast food places on the highway started to look appealing after a year and half of not noticing them. Food was on my mind all the time. Fortunately, I did not dip back into sugar and flour, but there was still damage done.

The first two weeks only amounted small trips off of my food plan. The last week was much worse, not only in the amounts of food I consumed, but in the shift of my mind state. The almighty obsession to eat grabbed hold. Food was on my mind every moment of the day. If I knew something was in the refrigerator, I had to eat it. The obsession to eat defies all reason and knowledge. I have full intellectual knowledge that it is detrimental to me. The obsessive thought must be acted on less for physical fulfillment than to just make the thought stop. I don’t know how else to describe it. I cannot be left to make judgments about appropriate food portions on my own.

I woke up on Saturday morning, fortunately with the will to do battle. I made a decision immediately to stop, and to return completely to the constraints of my food plan. I knew it would bring me back to sanity again. It was tough, but I hung in. I reached out to my closest friends in and out of recovery. I admitted to what had happened, and let them know that I was committed to getting back on track. It was a relief to talk about it. The desire to follow my food plan steadily increased. It is still amazing to me that following the plan provides such a mental safe haven for me. It frees me from the vicious cycle of the obsession. Today is my 7th day back on track.