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.