Le Bingeing

Wednesday night – after an evening where I’d already consumed wine and part of a 200 euro bottle of champagne, plus steak, potatoes dauphinoise, and a chocolate dessert – I stumbled up to my room and finished the complimentary box of chocolates the hotel had left there. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I ate one and a half chocolates of the nine in the box earlier in the day, freaked out that I would finish the box, and so ran water over them and put them in the trash can. So I finished a box of chocolates I first had to fish out of the trash.

One after another, I ate them, unable to stop. I kicked myself for not having flushed them down the toilet. I hated myself.

After the chocolates, I debated nuts and chocolate from the mini bar, but firmly and resolutely shut the refrigerator and went to bed.

On Thursday I woke up feeling sick and bloated, and returned to my Paris fashion week diet from March, which consisted largely of mango chunks and bananas plus lentil salads with poached egg and mustard sauce (much yummier than it sounds) from the Monoprix. I drank lots of water. I felt better.

Friday, after a long, stressful day that included hours and hours in the company of a correspondent I loathe (and who spends time repeatedly and very deliberately needling me) plus residual feelings of despair about the state of my love life, I had a couple of glasses of pink champagne. At dinner, I had lamb and some kind of feta cream and truffled potatoes (perhaps better described as butter, more butter, and possibly a little potato somewhere in there) and bread, and finished off with a cheese plate. I drank Chablis and then a dessert wine made – of all things – from rhubarb (it was delicious). I was very full, but I didn’t stop there. I ate the bag of candied nuts we’d been handed as we left, then went upstairs and pulled the chocolate from the mini bar. I ate a few bites, put it down, ate a few more bites, and flushed the rest down the toilet. (At least I learned something from Wednesday.)

Saturday I woke up feeling horrible and dragged myself to the hotel gym where – feeling and looking like something the cat dragged in – I got to work out next to Jessica Alba and her equally cellulite-and-fat-free pal. I stared at myself in the gym mirror, feeling huge. I wondered if – when I got back to the room – my clothes would fit. I feared the dinner I had to attend that night, and the long worknight that probably wouldn't end until crazy o'clock Sunday morning.

And I thought about what I have learned from this experience.

1. Feeling trapped and miserable makes me want to binge.
2. Being too hungry makes me want to binge (Paris dinners are very late).
3. Being drunk combined with any one of the above means I will binge. Must remember this.

And now the more positive:

Neither of these binges reached anything close to the intensity of my old ones. The feelings were still there – the fear, the jumping off the cliff feeling, the surge of disgust – but the consumption wasn’t. Last year I would have made my way through the whole minibar – nuts, chocolate, and all. Only as I write this now to I realize that it never occurred to me last night to order room service or try to go out and get more food, both things I might have done last year. I overate and I feared people were looking at me as I couldn’t stop overeating. But I did stop. I felt powerless, but I wasn’t. Must remember that, too.