Binge

I’ve made this analogy before but for those of you who haven’t heard it: being a food addict is exactly like being an alcoholic who MUST swallow half a shot of vodka per day in order to survive, but in order to maintain sobriety – may have no more than that.

So, every day, for survival, you must indulge in your addiction just a little bit and then walk away.  Sometimes at every meal.  Sometimes every minute.

You’ll do great for a month, or a week, or a day, then something like being denied a nights sleep on account of your bedmate’s loud snoring might cause you to eat an entire sleeve of club crackers and a big glass of milk.  Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything…

That may not sound so bad to a normal person so let me enlighten: I have just consumed 1,100 calories with almost no nutritional value (milk has a LITTLE calcium, but it’s actually far from the best source for it).  I get 1,451 allotted calories per day.  That means that it’s now almost 7AM and I have 351 calories remaining for the entire day if I don’t want to go over.  Which basically means I’m going over today, probably by a lot.

A binge feels great while you’re doing it, after it you feel sick – emotionally and physically.  Right now it’s like having a doughy rock in my stomach that’s so nauseating it’s making my throat ache, go figure the physics behind that one.  Worse than that I know that I’m a failure yet again.

As I’ve mentioned before I have a normal stomach and normal hunger impulses, so when I overeat it hurts just like it would for a thin person, and that’s combined with the emotional guilt of knowing that all the hard work I did that day, week, month is now gone.

I would NEVER do this, but I understand why people become bulimic.  It does cross my mind that one quick trip to the bathroom and a minute of unpleasantness would undo what I’ve just done to myself.

Right now it feels like getting through every hour without a binge is a victory, some days it’s every minute.  Right now my resistance was lowered by exhaustion.  One of the “keep you alive” systems that our bodies possess is to hunt for energy whenever possible.  When denied sleep, the hunger impulse will ramp up to try to compensate for the lost energy you should have gotten from resting.  Tonight, that’s what felled me.  Or I guess its morning now.

Later I’m probably going to regret blogging when I’m this strung out and exhausted.  Right now?  Meh.