Remember and repeat

Overeating is the biggest trigger of binge eating. In other news, in terms of stress and distress, I have been trying to focus on my breath. I don't think this technique is working, because it actually tries to distract me from my distress rather than acknowledging it. Need to try harder at simply sitting with feelings.

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Plans

A few months ago, I was explaining the psychology behind my problems with food to someone close to me, and they replied, "But isn't this just so boring? Aren't there more important and more interesting things you could think about?"

Yes, there are. I often grow weary with my own self-centredness, and the self-centredness of the bloggers whose prose is a testament to nothing more than their own struggles. Being obsessed with weight loss and never losing any weight has been a way for me to put my own interests on hold for years. Yet if I didn't try to work on my problems, I would be an angry dysfunctional mess. I think there's a fine balance. Talking and thinking about food so much is boring! But I try to remind myself that food is just a proxy for all the ways I struggle to process anger and sadness and sensitivity to criticism and rejection. I also try to remind myself that life and the real world outside my skull is pretty exciting. I might try to inject some of that here.

But for now, we come back to the food. I spoke to my therapist and the plan is to eat whatever I want - not following the PCOS diet or any kind of restriction - but not emotionally eating or overeating. In other words, eating mindfully. I have to admit, food mindfulness makes me a sullen girl. I throw silent tantrums because focusing on food is *boring* and I just want to read on my phone or watch TV or flick through the paper. Also, the moment I am served a meal I didn't prepare myself, mindfulness tends to fly out the window. I guess this is why we are focusing on mindfulness eh.

To be honest it is a bit difficult to let myself enjoy an icecream when I am the absolute fattest I have ever, ever, ever been, objectively well into the obese category. It is really hard to accept the fact that my face is a ball of fat. Still, it is what it is. I am sure that becoming more mindful is one step closer to being comfortable; setting restrictions on myself is one step away.

Not good times

And so the prodigal daughter returns. What happened? I finished my project, went overseas for a month, came back, and continued to struggle. I have my first appointment with my therapist in several months today, but I wanted to complain beforehand.

I have almost (maybe even entirely) lost sight of the concept of recovery. It just feels like another diet I started and failed. This might be a product of focusing too much on the meal plan they gave me - maybe it is better to just focus on eating when hungry and stopping when full and tracking thoughts and feelings, instead of trying to eat the perfectly nutritionally balanced meal as well. I can see that I'm in a situation where a meal like pasta, without protein and veggies, feels unbalanced and thus bingey. Eating more potatoes than salad feels unbalanced and thus like a breakout from my "diet". Snacking on fruit instead of the healthy biscuit and cheese, fail. Dessert at a time of the day that isn't dinner, disaster. There are a lot of maybes in this sentence.

I am basically good at intuitive eating when times are good and vice versa. When I was overseas, I decided to not eat Western sweets and just enjoy the food there. This plan went well for a week as the first country I was in had delicious food, until I headed over to a second country whose cuisine I *hated*. I actually can't think of a cuisine I've encountered that I've enjoyed less.  Dishes, sure, but not a whole nation's food. I spent mealtimes in full panic mode, believing that I would starve or go without even though intuitively and logically that was not true. Worse, I was trying to force myself to eat only local food, believing that it would be a copout to seek out Western food (it wasn't really available anyway except at McDonalds). After a week of that I caved and went to a Pizza Hut in a bigger city, only to get food poisoning from Pizza Hut. Needless to say, if I ever visit that country again - and I hope I do, because otherwise I liked it very much - I will be eating my own food. I had another 1.5 weeks on my trip, but any concept of intuitive eating was ruined after that.

Then there's the weight gain, a dress size's worth. Emboldened in my belief that this recovery shtick is just another diet in disguise, I've gone back to proper low-carb dieting. Of course it fails. Of course I feel miserable and stuck and hopelessly fat. When I go to sleep at night I fear having a heart attack and I feel like I can't breathe. With all of my compounding health problems I am scared that I will die at 40 and not 80, the diabetic whose foot had to be sawed off because she couldn't stop eating. Yet I feel totally out of options and out of hope. I know logically that I am the only person who can save myself, but I feel so disempowered. Help.