Over the past 23 days, I have eyed up food – black and white
cookies, cupcakes, muffins, pizza – but today was the first day I have really,
truly wanted to binge and genuinely feared I might.
I had a late lunch at 2.30 pm with a friend visiting from London:
eggs, pancakes and sausage, which I inhaled. For dinner we had burgers (I had
mine atop a salad – so no carbs, which usually I require to feel full). Maybe
it was that I'd tried on a couple of dresses this morning and was upset to find
that even after three weeks of not bingeing they still didn't fit. Maybe it was
because I almost hoped she'd suggest Magnolia Bakery cupcakes (which she loves)
and was a little disappointed (but slightly relieved) when she didn't -- partly because I didn't trust myself, and partly because I knew if we went I'd be wanting a huge slice of cake, which I'd be too embarrassed to order after the food we'd already eaten.
I don't
know what it was. All I know is that I spent a huge chunk of the movie – we saw the new
Woody Allen one – thinking about food and wanting to binge. (Who knows – maybe some
of the problem was that the movie just wasn't that engaging!) When we left I
thought: Hmmm, I could still make it to Magnolia.
I decided I'd have a McDonalds ice cream cone, which (so far) I
have been able to eat without it setting off anything crazy. As I walked down
Seventh Avenue I popped in to a newsagent to buy a drink, and there were
cupcakes. I thought about them – I did.
I nearly ran out of there.
I bought my cone and ate it, and then went to another newsagent
for some diet soda (a writing crutch for me). I allowed myself to really
contemplate the muffins – going as far as to think about what they would taste
like, which is never, ever a good idea.
And suddenly, after what felt like hours of waiting it out, the
urge was gone.
Day 24.
Congratulations. Seriously, being self-aware enough to think about food, being meta-aware enough to monitor these urges enough to write about them later, and still not binge is so admirable to me. Even when I'm on half-marathon training runs, I still only need an hour and a half of willpower, and I'm definitely not thinking about running constantly. I tune out thinking about running by listening to podcasts. I'm not yet at the phase where I can voluntarily turn down the volume on a binge urge enough to concentrate on other things, and those urges last much more than an hour and a half.
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