Round and Round

All I have wanted to do this weekend is binge. Bizarrely, I don't crave the actual food so much as the sensation of eating as an activity, and the total release that comes from the push-pull of should-I-or-shouldn't-I, the second where I give in, the plotting and acquiring and the glee mixed with disgust and fear, and finally, the exhaustion, when even I – who am never, it seems, full – cannot eat another bite.

It's been nagging at me all weekend. I see foods I tend to eat only in binges and think about what they would taste like. I consider them almost objectively, without the usual panic involved.

It happened on Friday, when I received a package of natural snack bars I may or may not try anytime soon (I'm focusing more on real foods and less on bars, which I tend to reserve only for travel.) The publicist rather cleverly had put a Snickers bar in with the mix, as a comparison for how much these bars satisfy you as opposed to the "packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies." I thought about what it would taste like; the gooey bit, and how fast, inevitably, I'd eat it; how bits of it would get stuck between my front teeth and my upper lip.

Yesterday I looked at some cake pops at a birthday party and imagined how one would be too many but not nearly enough – that heavy consistency; the sweet chocolate coating. This morning I finished breakfast and promptly wanted to repeat the experience. Ditto with lunch. The minute I swallowed my last bite of pizza it would have been so easy to pull another out of the freezer, heat it up, and keep on eating. I imagined finishing everything in the (rather full) freezer.

I'm not sure where the feeling is coming from, or why, this time around, there isn't all that much panic associated with it. As for the "where," – I wonder if there isn't anxiety that I seem to be putting on weight this week, despite having followed the diet perfectly. This morning I got on the scale at 6:30 am (not sure why I was up at that hour) to find myself at 151. Then two hours later I was 152. Huh? At no point this week have I been 150, the weight I was last week.

I'd probably care less about the actual number if I weren't feeling so unbelievably – for lack of a better word – fat. Last night, I struggled to leave the house, partly because I'd gotten so insanely fingers-turning-white cold on a run in Brooklyn earlier in the day that I was exhausted, and partly because I didn't want to face figuring out what to wear. This morning I went, half-heartedly, to the gym and kept noticing my stomach pooching out. What is this freakish capability I have not to notice quite how heavy I am on the way up, yet at 150ish pounds – not really grossly overweight (if overweight at all) by anyone's standards except New York's or Hollywood's – I am must-hide-from-the-world fat? I don't get it.

Apologies for the solipsistic whining. I can't help feeling like if I could isolate where the urge is coming from (often I can, but this time I can't) and why I'm feeling so rational about it I would (for once!, I'm sure you're thinking) have some useful information.

Is it related to my fears of what feels like an inevitable binge in London in a couple of weeks – the old let's-binge-now-because-I-might-binge-then? (Don't think so.) Dread of several months of tough choices (when to leave, what to say, what they'll say, and a return to constant fear of what will be in my bank account and whether it will be enough)? Existential where-in-the-world-should-I-be and doing what? Or is it just simple avoidance of life – I don't feel like doing quite a lot of things I need to do (cleaning, getting Time Warner cable to explain why my Internet speed seems slower than the pony express, doing a run-through with our editor-in-chief tomorrow, contracts, blah blah blah?) And if so, why – when everyone else's life is filled with not-fun bits, too – do I seem to think I should be exempt? (Possibly, I guess, because I think on some level that my life is hard enough. Which, in the scheme of lots I could have drawn, I know perfectly well that it is not.)

Right, that's enough. Off to do something more productive – at this point, probably anything I choose to do (besides binge) would qualify!