Living With Binge Eating Disorder

I’m absolutely crazy about these candies that come out around Easter called Robin Eggs.  They’re basically a Whopper malted milk candy coated in a layer of chocolate, then coated again with a hard, sugar layer on top.

One serving is 8 candies, and there are 180 calories in a serving.  There are seven servings in a bag so the bag contains a total of 1,260 calories (a day’s worth).

I am completely capable of polishing off the entire bag in one sitting.  Feel free to gasp in horror, but that’s the ugly and occasionally shocking reality of binge eating disorder.

I love these candies and don’t want to live the rest of my life without ever enjoying them, but I also don’t want to hurt my physical and mental health by binging on them and I know that if I buy them and put them on the shelf with my other snacks eventually I will do just that.  If I’m lucky I’ll manage to eat them in two sittings instead of one, but that’s still not an acceptable amount of empty sugar calories to consume in one day.

So here’s the coping method:

I bought the bag when I was not hungry, brought it home, opened it up and immediately divided it into seven appropriate serving sizes.  There were four candies left over so I had to even them off (yum).

I placed a single serving into my cupboard, and Ted hid the rest away somewhere in the house.  When I want a serving, I need to ask him to bring me one.  It’s up to me when I would like a serving, but dividing them up and hiding them cuts off my ability to turn them into a binge.

Obviously this method is tricky if you live alone, but if you have a good friend who lives close by or a neighbor you trust who are willing to help out, that would work too.

I will always have an eating disorder, but I want to be a person living the rest of my life in recovery from it rather than being a slave to it.  Balancing things I enjoy into my life in a way that I can live with isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.