Never 320 Again

“He who makes paradise from his bread makes a hell from his hunger” Antonio Porchia once said. Moderation is the most difficult thing in the world. Everyone talks about weight loss being difficult, but when I was actively losing weight for the last year, I abstained from nearly all of my desires. I wouldn’t eat peanut butter, I wouldn’t eat pasta, and I wouldn’t eat anything fried. Now, I have moved into what I call my PWLJ, my passive weight loss journey, and I am eating those things, and sometimes moderation isn’t the easiest thing in the world, hell: most of the times it isn’t anywhere close to easy.

I don’t have any tools, no words of advice, I just have the cold heard truth: emotional eating, binge eating, mindless eating is a horrible thing that we are going to have to live with together. We will just have to learn how to work through it. I find that I want to binge eat when I have nothing to do, when I am bored, when I am alone. If I am with someone, if I am sharing a room with someone I do not binge eat, I eat as if I were a normal human being, satiated with what is in front of me, not looking around for food like a mad man.

My latest uncontrolled feakout?: Three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, followed by General Tso’s for lunch, and a BBQ Chicken wrap with French fries for dinner, and an ice cream sunday for dessert. This happened the day before I was going to weigh in for my reality check. (CONFESSION ALERT) I stepped on the scale and saw 185lbs. I could not let you all see that, because that wasn’t where I knew I was the day before, I woke up weighing 180 pounds, I knew I weighed 180 pounds. You need to find what emotion binds your binge eating. I have three emotions that control my binge eating: feeling alone, feeling helpless and feeling like a failure. I usually have to have at least two of those feelings to binge eat, or at least feel like binge eating, and when it’s a trifecta: watch out!!

Last night, I had the trifecta, the mother of all binge eating cravings. I wanted something, I didn’t quite know what it was, but I wanted to EAT! I behaved myself, I ate salad for dinner with my friends (knowing that being with people would curb the cravings—and it did, for a little while), then they were going out on the town. Being an RA, I can’t go out with my residents (3 of my friends are my residents), risking bringing destructive behavior back into the dorm, never mind me coming back drunk with three other trashed individuals. I went back to my room. Uhoh, the cravings came back. I really wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, like REALLY bad. If I had a jar or peanut butter in my room, it would have been gone, completely gone. Then, I kinda wanted to order Chinese food. The craving grew, I saw a P.F. Chang’s commercial, and the craving exploded, I began searching my room for the menu for Chinese food—I was going to order, until a knock rescued me. Someone knocked on my door and distracted me for about an hour, thank you Super Resident! I went back to my room, it now being around 11PM, knowing I had to wake up for the 6am shift at the desk, I decided to go to sleep. I laid in bed thinking about food, all sorts of food, ice cream, peanut butter, lasagna, all the take out places that delivered this late at night, the pizza smell coming from the lounge on my floor—I thought about all of it. I fell asleep, and awoke this morning laughing at my binge eating problem. While recounting it, I do feel like it is a joke, but now I am positive that others feel the same way, they have cravings and they give in, perhaps not binge eating cravings, but they have those cravings, and they break diets for some people—not for me, trust me, I don’t always so elegantly avoid catastrophe, but I did last night, it was my success story.

Do me a favor, and if you have a binge eating problem, find a way to work through it. My emotions directly impact what I eat, I can’t always feel successful, I can’t always surround myself with my friends, and I cannot always feel in control—its life. Find your catalysts and the best ways to combat them—you won’t believe the difference it makes. The leading articles on the study say that it’s the all or nothing mentality that puts you in such a place—the place in which you need to binge, I found that I would still binge even when I occasionally gave in to my cravings, so I am going to try and balance my cravings and my life, let’s see how this goes—it fits into my life style changes, not diet changes.

Well, maybe I do have tools