I Wanna Eat Spaghetti Bolognese/ And Not Feel Bad About It for Days and Days and Days*

This is the way the holiday ends – not with a bang, but with a whimper.

That whimpering would be from me, standing on the scale Sunday morning – after nine days of rich food, puddings, wine and chocolate. I put on a stone and a half (Americans, that's 21 pounds.) Yes, you're reading right.

I haven't eaten the way I did in Dorset in years. I didn't binge every day, but I'd say I did on at least half of them. And if I wasn't bingeing, I was overeating.

When I got back to London I started writing a post about how I'd jumped off the bingeing cliff in a way I haven't for at least three and a half years, except I didn't jump off the cliff. Every morning I would get up and eat my usual London breakfast (porridge) and have my usual morning snack. Lunch was nothing outrageous (soup-apple-ginger-cake/soup-apple-graham-crackers/soup-grapefruit-two-finger-KitKat) and the afternoon snack wasn't, either. After we got back from a walk usually I'd go for a 40 minute run. Only once or twice when dinner was really late (and hey, I turned down fish and chips once) did I have an extra snack.

But then I'd start eating – and drinking – at dinner, and I wouldn't stop, especially because it was all so delicious. (Seriously, if I had to rank the dinners I would be unable to. Yum, yum, yum. None of the titular spaghetti bolognese but Peridot's boyfriend makes the best spaghetti carbonara I've ever had, homemade by gorgeous Italian guy in Turin included.) If we had pudding (which we did every night, and which I'd also be unable to rank in order of yumminess) I'd also have chocolate afterward. Lots of it. And sometimes I'd sneak into some extra snack food I'd brought. Which is ridiculous, because I'm sure neither Peridot nor her boyfriend would particularly have cared what I decided to eat (well, at a certain point P would probably have asked me if I were OK, since I'm usually quite measured about what I eat). But there it was, that vestigial sneaking behaviour, born of years of having to hide eating from my mother.

More terrifying than the reappearance of the sneaking behaviour was the reappearance of the other thoughts and feelings that go with repeated bingeing and overeating. (A couple of the days I went out for my run and thought: Hmmm, I could just run to the petrol station and binge and nobody would ever have to know. I'm proud to say I never did that – that would really have been jumping off the cliff – but it's the sort of thought I would have laughed at in recent years and used as an example of how far I've come, but instead this past week I seriously considered it.) I thought I'd never forget how awful the binge thoughts and feelings can be, but clearly in the past few years I did. (In recent years, I have binged a day here and a day there, but have always picked myself up the next day and actually been happy to get back to healthy eating.) I forgot about the lethargy and despair that comes with feeling like one will never be able to break the cycle.

The only day I truly jumped off the cliff? Saturday, the only day I ate what felt like all day – what a dietitian I once consulted referred to as "last-chance" eating. I woke up and couldn't face squeezing into my jeans – I remembered they'd been tight the night before. I looked at them and wondered if I'd ever fit into them again. Then I buried the fear and shame by eating graham crackers (I'd brought them from the US to make S'mores, which we did one night) and my last 3 Neuhaus mini eggs before breakfast. Then breakfast (a bacon and brie sandwich at a farm shop). Then chocolate. Then cream tea. Then a lemon muffin. Then some muffins at the train station. I gave in and pretty much ate the entire train trip back to London and then more when I hit Victoria. (I so did not need to discover that Starbucks sells apple fritters – I loooove apple fritters.) I actually set a time (9 pm) at which all eating had to cease. Somehow I stuck to it.

The next morning I got up and saw a number on the scale I haven't seen since 2008 (when I was a whole lot more delighted to see it because it was part of a downward trend.) I couldn't get my jeans on. And yesterday evening – after four clean days of eating and exercise – I could barely squeeze into them. Not fun. Nor have I enjoyed the panic and fear – maybe even terror – that kept seizing me for the first couple of days I was back in London. I could barely breathe because my winter coat was so tight, and each time I breathed I'd think: I have put on 1 and a half stone and will therefore put on the other 5 and a half stone I lost, maybe more. After all, although I've never lost 90 pounds before, I've lost 40 or 50 several times, and then piled back on all the weight, plus more.

Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but frankly, had I written this post Sunday or Monday or even Tuesday, it would have been an even more depressing post. Tonight I've finished five days of clean eating, and I do feel better. (Probably helped by the fact that I scale-hopped this morning and I'm down half a stone – so just a stone, aka 14 pounds, to go.) I feel determined, absolutely determined, that I will get through this. The lovely Peridot sent a text saying that I needed to remember that I was still slim in the eyes of the world, and although I don't feel it (or necessarily believe her), I've saved it on my phone. I wrote one back saying: What I need to remember is that even if I don't lose a single pound of what I put on, it does not mean I have to put on another five and a half stone. It just doesn't have to be that way.

And it doesn't, I know it doesn't. I know it's a story many of us are all too familiar with in the blogosphere: Someone loses a stack of weight and starts putting it back on, kicking and screaming the whole way upward that she (it usually is a she) won't go there, that she's doing something today, that already she feels stronger. And then suddenly she disappears, and you the reader know, just know, that it is because she's put on so much weight she can't even bear thinking or writing about it anymore.

I am not going to be that woman. Maybe I'll never weigh 10 stone again but nor will I ever again weigh 17 stone.

***

I'd forgotten how putting on a stack of weight just makes me want to hide. I can picture myself in my apartment in DC, despairing the arrival of spring because I just wanted to hide in my winter clothes (and feared – usually with good reason – that none of my spring clothes would fit).

I am resisting the urge, though. I did keep fairly quiet this week, but tomorrow I've got to attend a fancy dress party (yes, the old fear of not finding anything that fits has reappeared), and on Saturday I have to fly to the US for my sister's baby shower. Oh joy. The shower is her day, I know, but no one in my family has ever been tactful when it comes to comments about weight.

You think I'm exaggerating? Get this gem from my grandmother to my sister the other night: "So how's my fat granddaughter?" (For once in my entire life, Grandma meant my poor pregnant-with-triplets sister, not me.)

*Lily Allen, "Everything's Just Wonderful"