Constant Craving Redux

 I had decided I would wait until I could get to Ottolenghi for my cake. And in the meantime, when I’m in Covent Garden this week, I’d try Prinsesstarta from the Swedish bakery my (Swedish) friend recommends.

And yet the need is still there: for cream, for cake, for frosting, for too-fullness, for… I don’t know. Maybe the certainty that comes with a binge? That shrinking of the world, that excuse not to do anything much but get through the day, that acceptance of crappy things because I feel that is all I deserve, or because I’m too defeated to ask for more?

Life feels scary and filled with uncertainty at the moment. Bingeing is – to paraphrase the director of the treatment center I went to – “shit but it’s warm.”

I left dinner tonight with a friend where I couldn’t eat almost anything on the menu – something that’s never happened to me before, but I was allergic to one ingredient that happened to be in everything, including sauces. But I had a margherita pizza (their normal pizzas have my allergen – bell pepper – in the sauce) and a piece of my friend’s halloumi cheese (which was in the dish I originally wanted but that they wouldn’t make without peppers.) And I was thinking about dessert, which she didn’t want, and we aren’t good enough friends that I felt comfortable enough to get anyway.

I could feel myself detaching slightly from the conversation, slightly impatient, slightly thinking about where I could go for something afterward. I kept bringing myself back around. (For the record, I had gotten some fairly destabilizing news just before dinner; in fact had been a couple of minutes late because I was on the phone.) I could tell I wasn’t desperate – something that’s never happened before – just kind of seeking.

We said goodbye at the Tube, which normally I wouldn’t be taking three stops, but it was too cold and icy to walk the half hour home. Which maybe was lucky. I watched her recede down Parsons Green Lane and turned back to the Coop. I saw Dunkin Donuts, thought about the aching sweetness of a jam doughnut, and then remembered that the last time I’d had Dunkin Donuts I’d decided it was just too sweet. I wandered the aisles and there wasn’t anything that fitted the brief of what I wanted and – here’s the kicker – I just did not want to binge. I didn’t want to feel the way I would feel; didn’t want to wake up tomorrow and have to try to recover.

I bought myself a Cadbury Crème Egg – something I have eyed up several times but haven’t had yet this year – and came home and had my evening snack anyway. Prinsesstarta tomorrow. Ottolenghi… as soon as it stops snowing.

Constant Craving

In the supermarket I pass a small, boxed chocolate cake and I want to buy it and eat the whole thing. I walk down the street thinking about vats of steamed puddings. I eat a ready-made lasagna for lunch and it barely seems to touch the sides. There’s another in the refrigerator and I could pop it in the microwave and just keep eating, I think.

It’s on me right now, this desire to binge. It seemed to come out of nowhere yesterday afternoon. I was walking home from the Tube, having just been to lunch with an old friend, visiting from the US, and all I wanted was cake. Not just any cake, but cake with frosting. Preferably a layer cake or my favorite Ottolenghi cake.

I’d just had a Sunday roast, but I wasn’t full from it. It was in some bog standard pub by Paddington -- because he had to get on the Heathrow Express and go back to New York -- and it wasn’t very good, but I ate the whole thing anyway, almost without noticing. Well, without noticing anything but that it wasn’t that good and – like an old lady in the Catskills – that it wasn’t very big.

I kept walking, trying to think about where I could go. My favorite coffee place, where I always scrutinize the cakes but have never ordered any? No, there’s a reason why I’ve never ordered any – they don’t look sufficiently amazing. I kept walking.

Any of the chain coffee places near the tube? It was freezing and if I couldn’t think of something specific I wanted, I perhaps shouldn’t go looking for it. I kept walking.

The ginormous Tesco? Ditto, plus I’d almost automatically set myself up for a binge, with the quantity I’d have to buy. Kept walking.

Should I turn around and go toward South Kensington and get a Ben’s cookie? It was freezing (and yes, in that moment I was almost grateful it was freezing) and that really wasn’t what I wanted. (Don’t get me wrong; if it were in front of me, I’d probably have eaten it.) Almost home.

For the first time, though, I was considering and rationally discarding options, as opposed to becoming more and more frustrated to the point of a binge by my inability to get what I really wanted.

I thought about eating the random individual Christmas pudding I still have in my cupboard, but I knew it wouldn’t satisfy anything except the need to feel warm, however briefly. Well, that part, at least, I could satisfy. I went home and had some porridge – warm and stodgy – and decided I couldn’t face the cold again (and it was Sunday night) and I’d deal with procuring cake today.

Except it’s snowing and I’m inexplicably exhausted and I cannot face the trip. Cannot face the trip even for cake? I’m somewhat amazed that I can be this person – and also a person who can decide I will hang on until I get what I really want. The only trouble is, I’m not sure – in the face of all these cravings – how long I can sustain it…   

Shades of Gray

I’ve started so many posts about so many things – started them in my head, anyway! – and after this amount of silence, it gets harder and harder even to think about either distilling it all into one post or settling on one thing to write about.

There are things I’m not ready to share because I’m superstitious and other things I’m not ready to share perhaps because following the train of thought required to write them here might take me somewhere I don’t want to go. (Spoiler alert: this entry is the latter.)

If I sound gray, I am, a bit. As gray as a London winter. That post-Christmas nothing-nice-is-ever-going-to-happen again feeling has settled in, especially because I had a trip to Thailand to look forward to right after New Year – and to shop for, since I owned no proper summer clothes -- and now that’s over, too. (It was maybe the best trip I’ve ever taken as well as my first proper holiday in years, and I suspect the abrupt removal of sunshine combined with the record cold here has also contributed to my current low.)

I feel a bit unmoored at the moment; peripheral. After so many years, my industry – on its deathbed practically since I got into it – really does seem to be dying, and I am struggling to work. There’s been a fair share of family drama that is ongoing. A handful of friendships that have really sustained me over the years – or in London over the past 18 months -- just… don’t anymore. Some are because I’ve changed enough that things I used to do – in some cases, because I didn’t think I deserved more – I’m trying not to do or to tolerate. Others are because things in their lives have changed drastically.

One in particular: My closest friend from treatment, who was also one of my closest friends here, seems to want nothing to do with anything recovery-related anymore. All the routines I had with her are gone; when I saw her last – just before Christmas (this is someone I used to see at least once a week and whatsapp a squillion times a day) she had gained enough weight for it to be visible.  I say this not in judgment, but to say I can guess what’s going on with her, and to imagine – no, remember, because I have done this before – that the world of recovery can be excruciatingly painful when you feel you are failing at it.

We weight-loss bloggers, or those of us who started that way, all know this instinctively, I guess. I mean, it was usually the reason for a long since on a weight-loss blog. It isn’t the reason for the silence on mine, though.

For the record, I’ve had my own slips – for the record, my counselor from treatment definitely didn’t believe perfection is possible with eating disorders, or (I think) even in counting days, though she wasn’t allowed to say that. But all it takes is one for some of the shame and fear to start creeping back in; the craving for control that makes me want to manipulate my world so I can stay home and eat safe things. Most of the time I recognize that’s what I want to do and don’t allow myself to do it. At times I’ve dipped into the gray area between overeating and bingeing, and -- on the other side of the danger scale for me – at times exercised too much. I haven’t weighed myself in at least two years, though, and even if no one is going to see me, I get dressed – in clothes with fitted waistbands – every day.  And they still fit, even if one or two days I confess I’m happy to get out of them.

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I’m vowing to be back here more often. This blog and its readers, though few (certainly at this point!) have always been a huge source of comfort to me. In these gray times, I need to appreciate that.