Treading Water

Why can’t I appreciate a day off like everyone else? I had this list in my head of things I wanted to do today, but now it’s 2 pm, and all I’ve done is eaten, taken some selfies of my body as a sick form of self-torture, watched “Lost in Translation” three times, and obsessively worried about getting another migraine - three this week - while hating myself for not getting my a** out of the house to do SOMETHING - like, ANYTHING - and for repeatedly talking myself out of doing something because then I’d have to drag my sweaty, foreign-looking body out in front of other people and that might be worse.

I just donated more than 50% of my wardrobe. I think I’m really doing this.

Cool!

Um...so there are probably many effective ways (?) to avoid a binge. Eating an entire head of celery is not one of them. It will not make you less ravenous and you may end up with a giant green bezoar in your intestines the next day that will give you such bad cramps that you will want perform seppuku just to relieve the pressure. Thanks for listening.

No, I am not supposed to be that person; I don’t WANT to be that person; and I am fighting - more and more successfully - NOT to be that person. And, if you’re reading this (or not), you’re not supposed to be that person, either.

At the moment, even when I’m stuffed to the gills, all I can think about it food - buying it, cooking it, organizing it, etc. I’ve spend hours arranging and rearranging the fridge and cupboard. The spices are in alphabetical order. Each shelf in my fridge belongs to a different food group. And so on.

I cannot remember when I last posted. Most people following me probably don't remember who I am. The end of last year was such a blur: it was my last semester of university and I decided to "not be too hard on myself," which basically gave me license to relapse. I mean, how can I be expected to eat and perform well at the same time? (Sarcasm) But then school was over and my excuses no longer applied and I was getting very uneasy glances (and comments) from friends and family during the holidays. So, I decided I was going to do the absolute minimum and at least maintain my weight rather than losing any more but that's not as simple as it sounds. For whatever reason, my appetite is far more suppressed when I'm losing weight than when I try to maintain a low weight. So, I basically went crazy. I was ravenous all the time and I started b/ping like a maniac. I was throwing out 40-50 lb garbage bags of puke EVERY day. The garbage cans became so heavy that I thought the garbage collectors were either going to hurt themselves picking them up or just refuse to pick them up, so I started sneaking out at night behind restaurants and throwing them in dumpsters. The few times I tried to tally the calories in my binges - I don't usually count calories of things I plan to purge - the totals were 30 to 40 THOUSAND. In late January, I went to a cousin's wedding and b/ped the whole time, then left the reception at 11 pm and wandered around until I found a bar that served nachos until 2 pm...binged there, then went back to my hotel and purged for hours in the bathroom in the empty hotel lobby. And, all the while, my weight was STILL dropping. There's more but, well, I think you get the point... As this was going on, my quality of life was so poor that I was rapidly becoming suicidal. My life was so bad, in fact, that I thought, "What the hell? Why not try to get better? Could anything be WORSE than this?" That was February 24. To be continued...