The Parliament of the Mind

Even after the Best Lunch in the World – all boozy 14 (tasting!) courses of it – I still lost 5 pounds this week. Despite the long queue (ok, ok, line!) of weight watchers behind me, I insisted on getting on the scale a second time to double check – and if I thought I could get away with it, I might’ve asked to check the reading on another scale.

That I lost 5 pounds in week two of a diet both thrills and terrifies me. It thrills me for the obvious reason. And it provides endless opportunity to procrastinate while I reconfigure my mental “I’ll weigh X by Y date” calculations, and try to decide if a trip to Vietnam in March will be a trip where afterwards I'll cringe at all the photos of myself.

Losing 5 pounds terrifies me because I know myself. Besides the tendency to binge I have the tendency to starve. People who know this about me tend to marvel at the willpower (and there have been times during particularly horrific periods of bingeing where I have desperately wished for the ability to summon the willpower), but frankly, it is not a feat that should be cheered. It leads straight back to bingeing.

So that I have lost 5 pounds is scary. It means I do what I always do when I don’t have a nutritional label with an exact number of calories and fat – it means I grossly overestimate what I’ve consumed because I’d rather be safe. I ate in restaurants no fewer than four times this past week – meaning I spent an embarrassing amount of time overestimating and worrying and wondering whether I should eat a couple of points less the next day.

I’m trying hard to fight against that insidious urge. I had a 20g chocolate bar twice this week – in an attempt to prove to myself that I can eat what I want, as long as it all balances out. And I’m trying to take it easy on the exercise – 3-4 times a week for 40 minutes, a far cry from the hour six days a week I used to demand of myself. (It helps that injury prevents me from running – my favorite form of exercise.)

On both the days I’ve eaten chocolate bars I repeatedly asked myself – as though poking at a spot in my mouth with my tongue to see how badly it hurts – “Can I live like this?” Can I eat my vegetables and balance out my meals so I can have one tiny treat every day? Honestly, I don’t know.

* * *

I had another appointment today at the Royal Free Hospital about my binge eating. A nice Israeli émigré doctor had sympathy for me, I suppose, after I waited a year for an appointment only to be told it would be at least four months after that before I can get any help. So he asked me if I’d like to come in to talk – mostly, I think, so I can feel like I’m not getting lost in the system. (And also because I must have seemed desperate, which in December I was. I think part of what made him sympathetic is that I could quote from every book on the suggested reading list I was given. When I was first handed it, I felt like crying: "Don't you think if I could self help my way out of this I would have by this point?")


I’ve thus far been skeptical about the English mental health system (and the scary-looking, 50s era hospital equipment doesn’t help), but I enjoyed talking to him. It was like I was a person with a brain and not just Madam Binge Eater – and he was a person with a brain who wasn’t just going to spout information about how to stop binge eating. Over the course of an hour he alluded to a recent Raphael exhibit at the National Gallery, the battle for Helen of Troy, and the Song of Solomon – without pretension, either. And he talked about the urge to binge eat as an extremist voice in the Parliament of the mind that I should want to be there – because you can listen to the voice, acknowledge it, and then vote against doing what it says. If you don’t acknowledge it, it causes radical action. (His real-life example involved Palestinians.) I also laughed at the example he used to illustrate the point that binge eaters shouldn’t feel despair that they’ve been bingeing their whole lives, so why should they be able to do something now? “Gaza,” he said. “Thirty-eight years of occupation and when they decided to sort it it was over in 10 days.”