Thursday 25 June 2015

It's a Bomb

I usually get offered juice cleanses (no thank you!) and food bars/healthy snacks/meal replacements (ditto). I stopped taking the latter because I never particularly wanted to eat them and so they’d inevitably end up part of a binge. I tell publicists politely that I don’t accept food or drink.

But when a publicist related to an exercise/wellness company asked me for my address recently, for some reason I didn’t bother to ask her what for – the company doesn’t sell anything edible.

Yesterday I arrived home to find a box from a cheesecake company, which informed me it contained dry ice and “frozen dessert.” I left it downstairs. I was annoyed – I didn’t want this cheesecake and hadn’t asked for it, and I didn’t feel like spending time trying to figure out where I could donate it so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for throwing it out. (When my dad’s girlfriend sent me chocolate for my birthday, I gave it to the woman who does my eyebrows. But what to do with a whole cheesecake?)

I texted a friend.

“It’s a bomb. Throw it out,” she replied instantly.

And so I did, on my way out the door later that evening.

Unfortunately (well, maybe not unfortunately, because it was fun), the evening included a lot of drinks (and also some singing along to a Madonna medley, which should give you a hint how many drinks). I was just congratulating myself for having resisted the urge for pizza when I remembered the cheesecake. Which was still in its unopened dry ice-filled box, still in the huge waist-high garbage bin by the front door of the building.

Reader, I did it. If I were Bridget Jones, I would have been stuck in the bin with the lid having fallen on me, my arse in the air. As it was I thought the lid was going to snap my neck off. Not that there is any graceful way to go dumpster diving, and no that any of this stopped me. I was imagining smooth, creamy cheesecake. Instead it was highly frozen cheesecake bites. A bunch of which I ate anyway. No thank you, exercise-company-who-shall-remain-nameless (there was a note from them in the box).

This after a day where I saw some pictures of me and was truly appalled by how big I was.

Sigh.


Day 1.

Sunday 21 June 2015

I Dream of Corn Chips

I woke up this morning almost able to taste the crunch of corn chips. Did I eat them at the dinner last night? Were there even any on the table? We drank a lot, so I can’t remember, and it’s not a question I really want to ask.

I have this image of myself eating handfuls of them – they were blue -- but maybe it was the edamame.

I know I didn’t binge last night, so I should just put it behind me, but whatever I did wasn’t pretty. Did I eat more sushi than everyone else? I can’t tell. I think so. Note to self: Next time put the sushi on your plate instead of just taking bit by bit from the platter. You know grazing is dangerous.

It’s been a messy weekend, frankly. Friday night I was down at my sister’s, frosting cakes for my nephews’ birthday. I had to stop and wash my hands at times – I was frankly afraid to so much as smell the frosting, let alone lick a tiny bit off my hands. I hadn’t had quite enough for dinner (some grilled fish and a few broccoli stalks and carrots) and I was hungry, and that meant late at night I ate a couple of handfuls of almonds and some (crappy) cookies. Not great, but not a binge by most standards (including mine). What I consider to be the victory is that I didn’t keep eating. The almonds and cookies could easily have been a binge, but they weren’t.

The next morning I woke up and faced the kiddos’ birthday party – 30 kids and tons of food everywhere. I didn’t eat any of it, despite the fact that my sister and her husband are good cooks (and their friends, who could have dropped off their kids, tend to stay at their parties because of it). I don’t eat between meals (well, unless I’m bingeing), and though 11.30 may have been lunchtime for 5-year-olds, it wasn’t time for me to eat. I was helped by the fact that I knew I was going out last night, and I didn’t want to arrive post-binge, or mid-binge.

I was tired from having gotten little sleep, woken up early, and then the party followed by the three-hour train trip back to New York. I was hungry, didn’t know what would be served (usually it’s snacky food) and so ate a small dinner at 5.30, before leaving my apartment for the hour trip to deepest, darkest Brooklyn. I even stopped to buy a package of almonds for what I expected to be a late night, because I knew I’d eaten early and I’ve sometimes binged on the way home from this friend’s. I didn’t plan to eat at the friend’s, but out came the sushi and I picked up my chopsticks, hating myself for it. (I did at least avoid the ones with cream cheese and fried something.) But I didn’t sneak food and I didn’t eat after this, so again, not a binge, though maybe I am over-justifying myself? Who knows? I think the most important thing is to break the habit that eating unplanned things has to spiral into an all-out binge and then I can work on widening my definition of binge to get rid of some of these other behaviors that fill me with so much shame.

As I’d promised myself, I took an Uber home sometime north of 1 am, justifying it as cheaper than a binge.


Day 24.

Monday 15 June 2015

Open to the Public


There is the idea in blogland that if you disappear, it’s because you’re failing. And that’s not totally true in my case.

Yes, I’m the heaviest I’ve been in awhile. Heavy enough that I don’t like any of my clothes and I’d like to stay home and hide behind my computer instead of going out to meet editors. Heavy enough that I don’t want to get on a scale because I’m afraid it will read a number I swore I’d never go above once I got beneath it.

But I think you can only say you’ve failed if you’ve given up, and that I never have. I made it through to late November without a binge – somewhere north of 100 days, if I remember correctly. And then it’s all been touch and go since then. It was about one binge a week through the holidays, and then January and February were just… bad. March and April I think I’d scrape together about a week without a binge at a time if I was lucky, though there was also a longish stretch in London where I wasn’t eating with much restraint (except at breakfast) but I wasn’t bingeing either. May was full of celebration and so, yes, champagne and all manner of fat and sugar.

I spent the last Friday in May at another big dinner, but instead of bingeing after, as I might have done (because, you know, I’d eaten enough that I’d started to get into the headspace that I should just eat everything I ever deny myself because I’d start afresh in the morning), I went home. Day 1. Maybe not the neatest Day 1 nor one – if I carry on eating that way -- likely to shift any pounds any time soon, but a day without a binge and therefore worth noting.

So here we are. Day 17.


My plan is to post at least once a week, and if any of my old readers are left (hi!) I’ve returned the blog to public. Suffice it to say the reason it was private (I hope) has faded with time. Let’s hope my blogging skills have not…