Loving Meals

Last night – a couple of hours from being 22 days since I’d last binged – I started a post about my success. I started to write about how it had been since early spring or late winter since I’d gone so many days, and about how it had seemed if not easy, then not supremely difficult, either. I wrote about how I didn’t want to say it had been easy (it wasn’t), and how I feared getting overconfident.

I didn’t have much else to say, and I was uninspired to write more. So I deleted it and went off and ate a chocolate-covered biscuit – I was genuinely, un-ignorably hungry, and the biscuit didn’t put me much above my usual calorie count for the day.

A couple of hours later I went to bed, congratulating myself on the 22 days, but already thinking about the pancakes I’d bought for breakfast the next morning. I was slightly hungry already, so I knew I’d probably wake up starving, and I was pretty sure that the pancakes – though delicious – wouldn’t be filling.

What to do?

This morning after much internal debate – this is why, sometimes, I like to keep my food routine and safe, because it prevents this sort of angst – I ate half the pancakes. It was a struggle just to eat half. I cast about looking for what else I could eat, teetering on the verge of a binge. I had a small bit of yogurt (protein, which I’ve been experimenting with making sure I have at breakfast), a banana, and finally – knowing I had about 100 calories left – dove into a packet of chocolate covered raisins. I started eating them on autopilot. Suddenly I realized they tasted, well, indescribable. Not indescribably good or even indescribably bad – just sort of sharply sugary and not really like raisin or chocolate. Nor were they at all filling or satisfying. I shoved a few more in my mouth. I thought about a comment I’d heard at the weekend, about loving meals. This, I thought, is not a loving meal.

I stopped eating the raisins. I made myself a cup of tea and settled down to work.

* * *

Loving meals. What are those, exactly?

Different things to different people, of course. As for me, I used to cram so much cheap sugary stuff down my gob when I was bingeing (am bingeing?) it was almost my way of punishing myself, or certainly my way of telling myself that if I was going to eat, it wasn’t going to be anything nice. That I didn’t deserve anything nice.

Now I am fussier about what I eat because I eat a lot less of it. But I think I could be even choosier, and I’d like to be. I think I need to move beyond what is going to fill me up and not provoke a binge (let's just say I wouldn't be delighted to have to photograph every meal -- on second thought, maybe I should try that) to what I really want to eat – to what is satisfying on multiple levels. I do this every once in a while, but not quite often enough. On one hand I fear too much contemplation of what I want – it has been a binge trigger in the past – but on the other I know that I’ll never beat the binges for more than a few months if I don't try.