Watch It Spin Round to a Beautiful Oblivion

So, the scones? Not that great. Or filling, for that matter. (If they tasted fantastic I guess I could deal with the latter.) I've eaten 3 of the 4, and the last may have to go wherever not-so-great scones go to die. By which I mean the bin, not, say, used merely as a conveyor belt for clotted cream to enter my mouth.

Meanwhile, the Nice Jewish Boy responded to a press release I'd forwarded about some amazing new tasting restaurant's soft opening that I missed (I'd already agreed to attend the opera with a friend, and so spent 4.5 hours listening to baroque music and the approximately 95-year-old man to my right alternately drum on his program and then suddenly, narcoleptically, fall asleep and then jerk awake). NJB is the world's cheapest person – well, among them, since I think my dad definitely is a contender – and so suggested I contact the PR, say I'd missed the dinner, and try to cadge a free one. Can you say ugh? Besides, American journalists (or American journalists who are not beauty editors) don't do that. Or at least, I don't.

Anyway, he then began asking me about new restaurants worth going to and I could see where that one was going – he never steps up to the plate directly. Then he suggested one off my list and I told him quite honestly that it was out of my budget. Keeping in mind one of the most useful things I ever learned from BN2 (namely: if you offer a practical objection instead of the real reason your bluff can very easily be called), I then told him this wasn't a shameless ploy on my part to get him to pay, only that I had very limited funds (so horribly, scarily true – it weighs on me daily) and that going out to eat wasn't really a priority for me. Which I knew full well was a practical objection of its own. And my bluff was called. He suggested a film.

Which I confess I agreed to, mostly because I've been feeling generally overwhelmed, exhausted, and yes, lonely. Plus, frankly, I do love going to the movies – actually going to the movies, as opposed to renting one (you never give a film the same respect at home as you do in a cinema. You get up, get a snack, answer the phone...). We're going on Saturday. Yes, I shall be keeping a film in my head of last Friday to keep me from doing anything I shouldn't. Not that I think it will be that hard to resist.

***

Debbie asked: "When the notion to binge strikes, do you think it can be totally extinguished? Or merely delaying the inevitable?"

I guess the answer depends on whether I view my own binges as reactions to times I have restrained myself from bingeing – if the seed of a binge can be sown, say, two weeks before it happens. That's something I'm still trying to figure out myself. I do tend to binge on things I deny myself (or really, have only rarely, because I don't deny myself anything completely), but very rarely is it on the food I have most recently not allowed myself to have the minute I wanted it. Of course, what I actually binge on is probably a function of the time of day that I binge (late – most shops shut) and the fact that I will go to town on just about anything once I take the leap off the cliff.

So, the answer is, I'm afraid, I don't know. I'm still trying to work out why I binge – what purpose it still serves after all these years. I think it used to be for the oblivion. My brain goes a million miles an hour at all times (sometimes I want to cut off my head and throw it across the room), an elaborate chicken race of acute self-consciousness, fear, anxiety, and often, self-loathing. Bingeing doesn't eradicate those feelings, but it quiets them down considerably as I go through the ritualized steps of a relapse: the plotting, the acquiring, the eating. And then the fullness – combined with the fact that I usually binge at night -- makes me so exhausted that all I can do is go to sleep.

My most recent binges I think are rooted in escaping a cage, whether BN2's or one of my own devising. (Yes, I guess "oblivion" would still technically be the reason). As I've said, I struggle daily with limits – financial and caloric – that at times feel like a straitjacket. Objectively, the caloric ones are not crazily limiting – hello, I ate two scones as planned snacks yesterday. But sometimes I look at my week and see a lot of meals out and lack of time to work out and I despair of keeping weight off. And that is what feels limiting: The constant give and take and general thought and planning that is required to maintain a weight loss. Sometimes it's very easy and almost second nature. And at other times it feels like the most unbearable weight in the world – a heavier burden than the 90-plus pounds I lost. And sometimes, I guess, I want a break from thinking about it.

Hmmm. Not sure I've answered the question. The editor in me says I should delete the above as verbal diarrhea.