Friday 14 September 2007

The Darkness of Portugal

I wasn’t sent to Pavarotti’s funeral. Instead – in nearly the middle of the night – I was given about 20 minutes’ notice to pack up my stuff and get on a plane to Portugal, to cover the Madeleine McCann story.

I loved it.

It is one of the things that makes me so unsuited to this job that rather than sit at the Hotel Cipriani drinking 10 euro diet Cokes (or 30 euro bellinis), checking out who George Clooney is kissing, I would a thousand times rather be at the center of a white hot news story. Really.

So you’d think in the middle of an assignment I was enjoying – inasmuch as one can enjoy 20-hour days, large chunks of which are in the beating hot sun dealing with very reluctant (and often non-English-speaking) sources – I wouldn’t have binged. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Sunday night’s binge in Lagos (15 minutes from Praia da Luz) was the worst I’ve had in nine months, and the first binge I’ve had in that time that really scared me. It involved three ingredients also present in the Paris binge: Several days out of routine and with very little control over where and what I ate and with whom, plus – more importantly – too much alcohol mixed with loneliness/despair on the romantic front.

What was scary about this particular binge? Well, after several months of eating well the idea of bingeing – at least for me – feels remote. You wonder why you did it. You can’t imagine doing it. You have a few episodes of overeating, but not with the urgency and desperation of a binge. You think maybe you’re even normal – hey, normal people overeat, right? Your nutritionist from years ago always used to say so.

Normal people, however, do not do what I did on Sunday night. A bit of background, first. I’d made it through a week in Venice – always a difficult week for me – which perversely may have meant my guard was down a bit. I’d spent Saturday night in an apartment in Praia da Luz that was so remote and lonely and dark and mobile phone-reception-free that I lay awake all night, wondering how long it would take my office to discover I’d been killed. I had all the lights on, and – though I go for months without turning on my television at home – BBC World for noise. I was out of bed and working by 6 a.m., and Sunday was a long and crazy day in the arc of the McCann story.

That night, I switched to a hotel and joined a couple of other reporters for dinner. Beforehand, we drank sangria. Two pitchers, one of them extra-strong. Service in Portugal is slow, and I was very hungry. I adore Portuguese sweets and had spent two days resisting them – not to mention a whole week resisting Italian pizzerias and pasticcerias and the treats left on my pillow each night by the hotel. So I tried to resist the bread and cheese and chorizo on the table, but couldn’t. I drank wine. I tried to ignore the fries on my plate. I found myself thinking about the box of 16 Italian chocolates I had upstairs in my suitcase – they’d been left in my room in Venice and I was bringing them back as a treat, as is our custom with foreign assignments, for the office. In a decision I do think I wouldn’t have made sober, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, dashed up to my room, and consumed the chocolates. The whole box.

On my way back to the table, I spied a couple (maybe it was three) pieces of wrapped pieces of chocolate – the sort given to you with cappuccinos – sitting on a table by the bar. I grabbed those and ate them. I returned to the table. I ate all of my fries and some more bread. I scanned the dessert menu but didn’t see anything like the doughnuts and vanilla cakes and custard tarts I’d seen in the pasticcerias. That’s what I wanted, and nothing else would do. But I had some port with one of the reporters (the other went to bed) and consumed a huge handful of the wrapped pieces of chocolate. When she left, I checked my e-mail. No word from a certain guy (and I don’t mean the Fig, who I also had spent quite a lot of time thinking about).

I stumbled out onto the street. It was past midnight, and there wasn’t much open. I got a piece of flan-like cake that wasn’t at all what I wanted and ate it. Then one Magnum bar. Then another. I walked down the street looking for a bakery of the sort I saw in my head. The Algarve in Portugal is poorly lit, and it was pitch black except for the occasional whoosh and blinding flash of a speeding car. There are few sidewalks. I thought about how I could get killed, and still I didn’t stop.

After a few more minutes, though, I finally decided I wasn’t going to have any luck. I went back to the hotel, scanned the desserts on the room service menu (none looked appealing), ate the cashews and then the peanuts (I don’t even like peanuts) out of the minibar, and went to bed.

I woke up feeling sick and full, both physically and with self-loathing. Immediately – and knowing the number it displayed would upset me -- I wondered if the hotel’s gym had a scale. But I was too full and ill to work out, and I’d woken up too late. The empty box of chocolates taunted me. I worked. I had a toasted sandwich (made with too much butter) and then some fruit. As terrifying as the binge itself was, the feeling I had the day after was at least as terrifying – it was the oh, fuck it one. The I’ve-binged-once-so-I-might-as-well-keep-eating feeling. I haven’t felt that in nine months, either.

I was hungry all day. I went to dinner and was unable to resist the cheese and bread. I sighed inwardly and thought about how much I’d wanted to go to the US next week the slimmest I’ve ever been. I mentally riffled through my closet, wondering what I'll wear to the wedding I have to go to, and wondering what on earth I'll wear to our New York and LA offices. I pushed it all out of my head. I was still hungry after my fish, so I ate my potatoes. I ate a bit more bread, but it was a decision, not a binge.

The next day, after a long hot day in Praia da Luz, I stood at the bakery counter asking the attendant in a mixture of Spanish and pantomime what everything was. Finally -- after I pointed to about the eighth cake -- he handed me a three-bite-size piece of something to try. "Obrigada," I said. Thank you. But I felt anything but grateful -- I nearly wanted to cry. I ate it and debated leaving, but I’d come in there to have one piece of something I wanted, and I hadn’t chosen that. After much deliberation I ordered a piece of the vanilla custard cake, and ate it too quickly.

That day, I got an e-mail about a Rosh Hashana dinner I was expected at in London Thursday. I debated lying and telling them I’d still be in Portugal (anything’s possible with this job, but I was supposed to get home Wednesday at midnight) just so I could stay home and eat something safe. I hated that I would even think of doing that; that I would let food rule my life just that much.

Yesterday I went to the gym and did my first yoga class in two weeks. I went to the dinner, where I skipped the wine but had a small piece of ginger cake and some vanilla ice cream for dessert (despite the fact that I’d originally decided I wasn’t going to have any.) Today has been OK – I took it one meal at a time. I took a Pilates class.

Tomorrow I’ll get up and eat my breakfast and go to my favorite class at the gym and follow it with sushi from the place I always eat at on Saturdays when I’m in town. I’ll hit the sample sale of one of my favorite shoe designers and meet up with some friends.

It’s not as dark as it was in Portugal, and slowly I’m finding my way back.

6 comments:

  1. Damn, I hate this. I wish there was something to say but I know you know everything. I'm just thinking about you, rooting for you.

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  2. Thanks for your honesty. I have also been fighting this lately. I did a whole post on moderation and binged late the same night.

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  3. I have a tendency to binge right after I make it through something without binging. That is, if I'm worried about a dinner, but I make it through just fine, I might come home and binge.

    Or I'll make it through a trip, then binge once I'm back. . . that kind of thing.

    I think you're doing AMAZING, overall. One binge doesn't change that. And anyway, eating more calories than your body needs every once in a while is good for your metabolism and will help you lose weight - so long as the one binge doesn't turn into a series of them (as it seems to do for me, alas).

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  4. The combination of alcohol and hunger is always my undoing too. I like to remind myself when the wheels come off that it only takes a few days to start feeling good again. It really does. Just three good days and the emotions begin to calm right back down.

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  5. I could truly feel your anguish. I am also holding on so tight not to give into these negative feelings. They are scarier to me than the binges they lead to. I just hate the feeling of being down so fighting them is a source of anxiety. You'll be fine though. Remember you can feel bad and recover so this too shall pass. Cheers,
    Karine

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  6. hi, i just found your blog! LINKED! i just started a weight-related blog of my own and it's really nice to find others who are in the same boat as I am.

    Portugal is bad but Venice is KILLER. I was in Venice a month ago and because I ate so badily there, I ended up falling into a binge hole and have been eating poorly ever since and as a consequence gained 15lbs! UGH.

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