Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Day 16

"We ate to sate the fears, the angers, the disappointments. We ate to escape the pressures of our problems or the boredom of everyday life. We procrastinated,we hid, and we ate."

Oh my god. This is the passage that really hits me in reading Step 1. It describes me exactly. I ate over everything. Every emotion, even some good ones. That summer in D.C. I ate to block out my loneliness and depression over feeling fat and feeling like I didn't fit in. That first year out of college I ate my way through my terror that I had no idea what to do with my life and the fact that my life post-college felt like this huge, empty void. What did people DO on weekends without friends around and studying to do? Life seemed like a vast emptiness with no end in sight. And my job was miserable, I hated it so. And so I ate. It wasn't conscious at all. It was just how I subconsciously knew how to make myself feel better.

Later on I ate to ease my depression and boredom and loneliness. Which of course only exacerbated all of those things. I had no friends, and spending Friday and Saturday nights binging and watching TV gave me an activity, and allowed me to blot out the fact that I had no real social life. I didn't have to think about it when I was high on food and drunk on alcohol. After a while I realized that it was wrong. I knew that I was not behaving in a way that was healthy, normal. In fact, I used to make trips up and down the stairs of my apartment building to the vending machine thinking all the time "here I go, feeding my eating disorder." Literally. Somehow I thought that taking the stairs instead of the elevator would be better for me. It meant I was getting some exercise in (I lived on the 7th floor) and maybe in some way that would make up for all the crap I was shoving in my body. It didn't of course. And it certainly made me worse mentally.

I did, at one point during these years, go to OA. But my thinking was that Step 1 was a bad idea. "If we tell ourselves we are powerless over food, then we program ourselves to go right on eating compulsively!" It's too negative, I thought. I think I lasted a month.

Later on, once I had become much more aware of what I was doing to myself, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, it became even harder. I knew what I was doing was wrong and I made lots of efforts to stop. But in those periods when I did manage to stop, "life without food seemed unbearable." Both because it meant I had to deal with situations/problems/emotions without numbing myself out and because it meant that one big activity in my life - the one thing that kept me company when I was alone - was the one thing I wasn't allowed to use. And I couldn't do it. It seemed impossible. And so I gave in. Every time I gave in, for one reason or another. I remember one time relatively recently when I didn't have plans on a Saturday night. I knew I shouldn't be eating - I'd been going to OA meetings but not really working the program - but I didn't know what else to do with myself. Lying on the couch without food to numb my loneliness out seemed like an unpleasant prospect. So what else could I do?

I have to deliberately, every minute of every day, make a conscious decision to choose to live my life differently. And that's what I'm trying to do.

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About Me

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Virginia, United States
I'm a 30-year-old girl just trying to figure it all out when it comes to life, love, and food.