As always, I left his office with not with what I thought I wanted, but instead, with what I needed.

First of all, most of what I’m going to write about here, he has mostly already told me. As the days and months pass, (and hormones take over =)) I sometimes forget all the great things he has brought to my awareness, so I really needed this session to get grounded again in fighting this eating disorder.

So in no particular order….

What stood out to him from reading my blog and talking to me yesterday was that for me, the important things in my life, in my recovery right now, is that I give great value to the fact that I have been binge-free for 26 months and that after all of these weight struggles, I’m happy with how I look and feel and that I don’t want to gain any weight back. He told me that I should be really proud of my accomplishments and there is nothing wrong with these items being the things that I give value to and are of great importantance to me now.

He said that it was his opinion that I was not ready to totally follow the Intuitive Eating path. Quite frankly, this was a huge relief because I am currently only dipping my big toe into the Intuitive Eating waters (allowing myself to enjoy foods that are worth it and listening to my hunger cues) and was scared to jump in with two feet for fear of bingeing out of control, gaining a lot of weight and being back at square one.

He said that he knew that I was looking for the special “tool” for my belt that would take away the food-frenzy feeling I get around buffets. But like the awesome therapist he is, he said that I needed to get to the core of what was REALLY drawing me to the food and that would give me the tool I was looking for.

We talked about how it’s all in MY PERCEPTION of the food, not the food itself. I have made the food mesmerizing, I have created that in my head, I am the one who is allowing it to have so much of my focus and attention. He likened it to me putting this giant spotlight on the dessert table. I was putting the spotlight on it and that’s not where the spotlight should be.

He asked me why I would give my sense of power over to the food? The desserts can literally and figuratively make me sick. As he has thrown out there in the past – I need to ask myself – will eating the dessert do something “to” myself (that would be against my better judgement) or something “for” myself?

At a dessert table, the need to satisfy the impulse that we think is about the food, we’ve actually confused with love and self-soothing. He encouraged me to question myself – what is going on in my life that is not satisfying me? No amount of decadent desserts is going to satisfy what I truly need at that moment.

He said that food is just a moment in time that I make into a huge event. I make it bigger than the more important things like how I feel, that my body is healthy and strong, and that I’ve worked so hard to get to my current weight. THOSE are the important things in my life, not some silly food.

I’m going to continue this post tomorrow because I’m still processing the rest of what he said, so please stay tuned…

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

My therapist totally rocks and we talk about tons of things that are very meaningful and I know it makes up the pieces of the puzzle that make me who I am. I know that all these new awarenesses I gain via him are making me grow as a person and I am so grateful for that. I know that these new awarenesses are helping to allow me to expand my life and LIVE, which will help reduce the compulsive eating part of my life.

However, when I go to my monthly appointment tomorrow, I feel like I need to do some hardcore therapy about this eating disorder because I HATEDHATEDHATED that frenzy that took over my body in the room / near the dessert buffet. I have lived through the eating frenzy more times than I can count, even while I’ve managed to stay binge-free (thank you, “forces of good,” that kept me from crossing the line!)

I’m at my ‘happy’ weight and I’ve been maintaining it for about 17 months. I feel good in my skin. I don’t hate myself or my body. However, I want this struggle to stop being so damn hard when I’m faced with buffets.

When I’m home, I’m pretty much fine most of the time. When I eat at a restaurant, I’m mostly fine. So, OK, I admit it, I’m looking for the quick fix. These frickin buffets are so troublesome before and during the event, and I want SO badly for that frenzied, out-of-control feeling to stop, like, yesterday please!

I know that that is what separates me from being a “normal” eater. A normal eater doesn’t have a tangible, physical yearning at the mere site of a dessert table. A normal eater certainly overindulges sometimes, but this palpable yearning is a special feeling that, well, I believe comes from my ED (I can’t speak for all compulsive eaters), I have that I REALLY want to kick to the curb.

While I have gone over 2 years without bingeing and have managed to put on the brakes somehow when the frenzy for food clicked on in my head, I want to get rid of it entirely. Is that too much to ask?

I admittedly follow the intuitive eating to a point. I’ve let go of the reigns a bit and allow myself more treats than I have in the past and I have no regrets when I do. So that is a big step. However, intuitive eating (and it’s way too much to get into here) says you should totally go for it and eat everything you want and once you allow yourself to have them, they will no longer be a big deal because they won’t be forbidden.

Well, to be honest, I’m afraid of gaining weight from doing that. I’m afraid that if I let myself go like that, I will go back to my old ways of bingeing/compulsive overeating and that hunger cues will fly out the window. I’m also afraid to give up calorie counting, another intuitive eating recommendation. I don’t want to have to go by myself a whole new wardrobe as I experiment. I want to have my cake and eat it too dammit!

So I’ve been taking baby steps. As I said, I’ve loosened the reigns on having some extra treats and feeling no regrets. On Friday I will get on the scale for the second time in two months. As a once-, or sometimes twice-a-day weigher for decades, that is huge for me.

I just feel like I need some more tools in my tool belt on how to better deal with the buffets/parties/events. I’m pretty much ok when I’m just at home on my own or just having dinner out with friends where everyone is given a single serving of something. I need more hardcore tools to deal with time when I’m faced with multiple foods laid out in front of me.

I hope my therapist is ready for me.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Even after being binge-free for over two years and feeling really good lately – making some big strides with not getting on the scale for a full month, listening to my hunger cues and my general awareness increasing, I had a rough day yesterday.

The compulsive eating ‘voices’ that had become a whisper for the most part, laying pretty low in the background of my life, for some reason chose to make themselves heard yesterday, loudly.

I really wanted to eat even though I wasn’t hungry… I never felt satiated when I did eat… I wanted moremoremore…I could feel all components in place, lining up for a binge.

Though I had to keep going into my “bag of tricks” to remain binge-free, more than I have had to in a long time, thankfully I was able to not let the food get control of me. I somehow had the strength to stay in control of the food. But wow, it wasn’t easy.

At the end of the night, I tried to think back to why I was getting such a strong need to eat, why I felt insatiable. I know that later in the day I was annoyed with my son for being (what I thought was) very disrespectful to me and that really got under my skin. That made my dinner/dessert a trial, but I couldn’t figure out what had been going on in my life to make the entire day leading up to then make me feel the need to stuff my face. The only thing I came up with was that “Aunt Flo” was packing up her bags and maybe it was a hormone thing?

It just goes to show that no matter how well you are doing with staying on top of the eating disorder, no matter how long you go without binging, the sickness is always lurking right there, “this much” away from the surface, ready to pounce on you.

Here’s hoping for an easier day today!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

When you lie, sneak, pretend to others, you lie, sneak, pretend to yourself. When you tell yourself that you are not worthy of eating in full view, you tell yourself that you are not worthy of being seen and known in full view.”

2) As I’ve mentioned before, my mother was not the biggest nurturer and while my memory could be wrong, I don’t recall her being a person who ever empowered me as a female. She certainly applauded my good report cards and sports achievements, but she didn’t pass down to me the real stuff -that I should believe in myself, I could be anything I wanted to be, I was a good person, I was beautiful, etc.

3. Lastly, my father gave me a lot of compliments, mostly relating to athletics, that were over the top. I knew it was his way of being proud and probably trying to be a good father who thought his daughter was talented, but I always saw his compliments as being not real because I knew that in reality, the level that he put me at compared to other people was untrue. I recognized from early on that they were well-meaning, but superficial.

So I think that all these things combined, that went on through my childhood and even through today, have contributed to my lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. But now that I am aware of this, I now have the opportunity to try to reverse all the stuff that was (or was not!) put in my head for all those years and figure out how to plug up the hole in my cup so that I can be a woman, wife and mother who is confident in herself.

So I have started to come up with a list of things I love about myself. I think that would be a good start.

Are you good at accepting compliments? Any advice on how I can have one stick with me?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

My Journey Through Compulsive Eating

My journey began when I was about 8 or 9 when something in my head had me thinking that I wasn’t getting enough nurturing from my parents, so I turned to food to give myself comfort. My mom would go to the market, buy junk for the family to enjoy, and then hide it from me. I would scour the house looking for it, but could never find it. I was not overweight, was always playing sports, but she knew that I would never just eat my “fair share” of snacks, and that I would not leave enough for the rest of the family to enjoy.

My mom’s message to me (which of course I didn’t understand until 30 years later in therapy when I was trying to get to the heart of my eating issues) was that I was not to be trusted around food. At around that time, when no one was home, I began my ritual of going around the corner to the market, buy bags of junk food, eat it all, then stuff it back into the market bag and bury it in the trash so no one would see what I ate.

Years went past and the binging continued off and on, and subsequently my weight would go up and down. At 5’3” I graduated high school weighing about 152 lbs. I can’t imagine what I would have weighed had I not played all sports during that time.

By Thanksgiving break from college I was up to 172. Cue the 20-year montage… lots of binging, my weight yo-yo’ing up and down, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, no backbone, but almost always on a regular regime of working out.

By my late 20’s I met the incredible man who I was lucky enough to marry and have two beautiful children with. I weighed about 142 when we met. (Interesting how I always know my weight at different times in my life!) Though he gave me the love and nurturing I had been missing for so many years, my compulsive overeating habits had sadly already been deeply engrained. All those years I thought I just had a “sweet tooth.” All the times I would stuff myself to the point of sickness or eat things in secret; for some reason it never occurred to me that I had some kind of food problem. It was just my norm.

It wasn’t until a little over two years ago, when I was close to turning 40, that the idea of “compulsive overeater” popped into my head. I quickly went on my laptop and found myself at the Overeaters Anonymous website. They have a list of questions called, something to the effect of –“are you one of us?” I answered just about everything with a “yes” and the reality of what had been going on all these years had finally hit me. It was terrifying, yet at the same time comforting, to know my food issues had a name and better yet, I could now get help for myself. The first thing I did was sit down and write a long letter to my husband spilling my guts about this disease that I realized that I had. In that letter I shared all of my food secrets and behaviors. It was all very shameful to me, yet at the same time it was a huge catharsis. I shed MANY tears over MANY days about this.

I remember hearing on Oprah that any addiction is just someone’s way of filling a void in their lives and I also remember her saying on another show that when you seriously cry, it is your body finally releasing feelings that you have stuffed down (in my case with food) for many years. So back then, and still today, I feel very strongly about being honest and accountable with my food intake.

So then the real journey began. For me, honesty, embracing my eating disorder, getting therapy, going to OA meetings and continuing to exercise is what has turned my life around.

I have not binged in over two years. I have certainly had some slips here and there where I went a little overboard in my eating, but it never resulted in me eating everything in the house that was not nailed down, as had been the case in the past. The mindset of – well, I already blew it by eating too much of xyz, might as well keep going – has not happened in over two years. I have gotten down to a weight that I have never seen before in my adult life and I have maintained it for over a year now. I feel good when I look in the mirror at my body.

I am a work in progress, learning new things every day via journaling, my therapist and the wonderful blogging community. I am always on the look-out for new “tools” for my tool belt to help me to become closer to being a “normal” eater. I know I will never have a totally normal relationship with food, but I am going to do all I can, now that I have this awareness, to get as close as I can.

I certainly still have a lot of issues that I deal with every day. I have been a calorie counter ever since I was a teenager and that is really hard to give up. I worry what my kids see when I’m weighing and measuring my food. I know they are sponges and are taking in much more than I think. The last thing I would want to do is pass on an eating disorder to my children.

Things have gotten a little easier over the last two years as I have learned a lot about myself. But every day, depending on hormones, sleep, and stress, is a struggle to some degree. I am trying to nurture myself more and have more awareness of what and when I eat, trying to listen to my body’s cues of when I’m hungry and sated. I am a work in progress, trying to take things one day at a time.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

I asked…nibbling my kids snacks or stealing a bite of this or that, is it ok to just chalk it up as “normal” behavior as opposed to my thinking that it’s me being a compulsive eater? I’ve heard from “normal” eating friends that they and their spouses often anxiously await and finish their kids’ desserts, pick at things, etc., so that is why I’m asking. I realize that my obsession with desserts is definitely a compulsive issue, but if I’m not binging, just having bites/pieces of things here and there at home that don’t add up to much, and that I account for in my calorie count, can I stop thinking of that as part of my eating disorder and just chalk if off to “normal” eating behavior? I just think it would be helpful for me to look at that type of picking in the correct light, I need to put it in the right compartment in my brain. : )
<br/>

The therapist responded… The way that I think of it is like this…it only presents as a problem when we become overwhelmed by having to have something that it distracts/preoccupies us from living our lives…such as engaging in with our family and friends, getting things done, etc. Also, if not having it, after focusing on desiring it, we become very disappointed.

His reponse was really helpful for me as my bites do not fall under his description. It makes me feel better to know that this nibbling is really a “normal” behavior. It makes me feel better about myself, that I don’t always have to chalk up putting food in mouth as having something to do with having an eating disorder.

What do you think? Do you agree? Does it make you feel better about a nibble here and there?

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

One day at a time. Nurture myself. Awareness. Letting Go.