Ninety Days

Today is ninety days without a binge. I’ve been here before – twice that I know of, and a couple of other times I’m sure of, before the days I knew what a binge was and was only paying attention to how well I stuck to a diet. But it feels different this time around, because I didn’t get to 90 days by restricting food, which is always how I’ve done it before.

It’s been a funny old summer. There are girls in treatment with me – and I say girls because they’re in their late teens and early 20s – who body check, patting their collarbones and their thighs. But I sometimes sit in treatment pinching the tops of my thighs only to check that I am actually here – actually doing this. It all feels unreal somehow, this little bubble so far away from New York and even the London I used to know. I haven’t seen many friends, I don’t often leave the general Earls Court/Notting Hill/High Street Ken/South Ken area, and I’ve only been to a pub a couple of times, for dinner. (As I mentioned, mine is a general addictions treatment program, so we are randomly tested for alcohol and drugs – so I’ve had no booze for 90 days, either.)

Did anyone read any of the other Noel Streatfeild shoes books besides Ballet Shoes? I remember half a line from Movie Shoes, something about how if regular days were beads on a string, the days in America (or maybe it was on a film set) were… well, I can’t remember the rest of the sentence, but the idea was that they were completely different. And that’s how I feel about this summer. The above may sound bad and boring, but it’s actually been kind of nice. I finish treatment in a week – I’m not fixed, I hasten to add – and I’m a little scared about real life setting in again. I’ve fallen off the map with regard to work, and I’m realizing also that I can’t work at the pace I used to – at least not right now. I’m not so interested in the things I used to write about, and am struggling to do a couple of assignments I pitched a few months ago – it’s almost like they were pitched by another person. And I haven’t worried about how long it’s been since I’ve been on anything resembling a date and what that means for the rest of my life. But it’s all starting to come flooding back.

Assuming there are any readers left, you may be wondering what’s happened to my weight in all of this. Well, I am, too. I know I’ve lost at least a little bit of weight, because a dress that was can’t-leave-the-house tight is now wearable in public. I don’t get on a scale, though I’m blind-weighed every week to check that I’m not bingeing or restricting. I’ve found the desire to restrict goes up when the urge to binge goes down, and – although it feels strange to say this on what was once a weight loss blog – I sometimes struggle to eat all the food I’m supposed to. Which is not to say I struggle to actually get it down. It’s just that some days I have to really make myself eat all my snacks, instead of thinking, hmmm, if I could just skip those for a few weeks maybe I could be a little thinner. In the restricting is the roots of the bingeing, I know. I eat chocolate just about every day, but I haven’t been as good as I should be about eating my two puddings a week. I know. I know. It doesn’t sound like it should be difficult. But the desire to lose weight is still very, very strong, particularly so lately. I don’t know why – maybe because it’s still so much work to stick to a food plan that it feels like I should get to lose weight out of the deal, or maybe it’s because there’s still an idea in my head that the people who do know what I’ve been doing here will wonder why I’m not thinner.

But going back to the 90 days: The thing I’ve always struggled with in terms of counting is the idea that nothing happens. That your only reward for getting to 90 days is the chance to hit 91. I like to finish things, and the idea that recovery is an item on a to-do list that reappears every day is hard to, well, stomach. The most days I’ve ever had (in all the years I’ve counted) is 123; at least for now it’s going to have to be enough to work to surpass that. And then, who knows?