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.

Cake Tapas

On Sunday, Friend Bearing Chocolate became Friend Bearing Cake.

She’d been to cake school (yes, this is a thing), and when we met for coffee she brought me a container (funnily enough, it was for some sort of horrendous sounding no-sugar ice cream that must have been consumed by her housemate) filled with bits of things she’d made.

I looked at it, wondering if it were six servings? Two? Four? The only thing I was pretty sure was that it wasn’t one serving, which is the only way I really knew how to eat such a thing.

It sat on the table like a bomb. I’d so so SO nearly binged the night before, and one of the ways I’d gotten myself not to was to promise myself I would have something worth eating, not the sort of shite one can buy at midnight in Earls Court, after a really awful week and a rather triggering dinner with a newly gluten-free, dairy-free friend (English, but living on the west coast of America) who also doesn’t eat meat and a whole host of other things.

None of these cakes the friend came bearing were things I tend to crave. They were lovely, sure, but with the exception of the mince pie, none were things that would ever be my top choice. I imagined myself trying one and then the next, finishing them all looking for some particular taste none of them offered, and then ending up bingeing.

I thought about them a lot while we had our coffee. I’d throw them out after FBC left, I decided. She would never have to know. I’d done it before and I’d do it again.

And as we were leaving, I hesitated. I do eat everything these days – meaning no weird diets – and though I try to eat things that are worth eating, isn’t homemade cake the definition of that? Plus, part of what keeps me from bingeing, I think, is truly believing I can eat anything – and that I’ll stop believing that if I pass things up too often. The fear of them will solidify, like liquid turning to jelly.

Plus, plus – I also know I can’t, in the moment, eat things I suddenly start craving. I don’t go out and buy something the minute I think about it. If I’m still thinking about it the next day, then I have it. Usually I’ve forgotten about it. But again, what if I stop believing I can have these things – that I will always delay? That’s a binge waiting to happen. (In case you’re curious, I’m perfectly fine eating unplanned things at restaurants. But I don’t in the middle of the day get up and leave my house and go buy, say, Ottolenghi cake just because I think I have to have it. I know; it’s complicated. I’ve spent 16 months trying to work all these things out.)

Anyway. Just as we were leaving I said to FBC: “I have to ask you something.”

She looked worried.

I confessed I had no idea how to eat the cake tapas, which is what I’d mentally nicknamed the box.

I saw her face: Slightly shocked. But she recovered fast. Then matter-of-factly she suggested what she’d do, and the order in which she’d eat them (some would go off faster than others, which I wouldn’t know – when have I ever kept cake in my house long enough for it to go off?)

And so I had three days of cake. It was delicious. And fully worth the 30 seconds of embarrassment.

The Great Black Jean Freak Out of 2017

Today I went to put on my trusty black jeans and panicked. Like, properly froze and felt slightly sick. I was standing in the gym with no other clothing if they didn’t fit, and I thought wildly about what I would do if they didn’t, since I’d already showered and stuffed my sweaty leggings into a plastic bag with my other sweaty clothes.

I hadn’t worn the black jeans for two weeks – I’d washed them and wore other jeans and then I found myself avoiding them and then, conveniently, it was something approximating summer and so I wore more summery things and avoided them some more.

Until today, when I decided I had to face them.

The craziest part of all this is that I haven’t binged or even especially overeaten (except maybe a little at one Sunday lunch that the hosts didn’t serve until 4 pm and there were no snacks). I haven’t been able to run (issue with dizziness I think I’ve mentioned before) but I’ve been to the gym and to Pilates. It’s just vestigial panic. In the past the only reason I stopped wearing anything was because it stopped fitting, and washing jeans was… uh… not something I ever did if I could avoid it (I know, gross, but true). I mean, what if they shrank even a teeny bit? (If that happened they wouldn’t have fit, and we all know how horrible and traumatic jeans-buying can be. Or any kind of clothing buying, when it is the next size or three up. Because I only went to a shop when my jeans actually busted, which usually meant they were about two sizes too small.)

Oh -- and if I put anything away for a season, I’d always hope it would be too big by the time it came to wear it again. Inevitably it was too small.

Today, when the black jeans fit just fine, I thought about how sad the feelings the episode brought up – and how incredibly grateful I am that for right now, that’s not my life.

I’ve resisted posting again since my last post not because things have been bad, but because I’ve been reluctant to tempt fate. Things feel better and easier -- like something has shifted – but I’m aware of how quickly things can change again, and how little it takes for that to happen. And so I remain vigilant. And also – I need to repeat this again – grateful.

Relapse Drift

Lectures were by far my least favorite part of treatment. This was, in part, because I’d read so many books about addiction that the concepts weren’t new – and in part because the people giving the lectures were better suited to the group therapy they also did than actually lecturing.

Oh, ok -- if I’m totally honest, another reason why I didn’t like them was probably because when they happened, which luckily wasn’t often, they usually were the second half of the evening, when my thoughts had long since drifted to dinner.

But anyway, lectures. The most useful one, which I think may be up there as one of the most useful things I learned there, was about relapse drift. Basically, relapse isn’t an event. It’s a process that usually starts out innocently enough, like skipping small things – meetings, calls, regular grocery shopping, whatever -- that support recovery.

What makes it tricky, of course, is that life happens in recovery – not every time you skip something does it mean anything. But there are all sorts of other signs of relapse drift that are individual to each person – things no one might notice but you, and that may have absolutely nothing to do with food. One for me is when I stop blowdrying my hair, because I can’t be bothered to make the effort. Or I’ve stopped gathering what I need for the morning the night before, so I’m always that slight bit stressed and late leaving the flat. Or – this one is particularly embarrassing – I leave my gym towels on the bench in the locker room for the cleaning staff to pick up, as opposed to putting them in the used towel bin.

How is that last one a sign of anything, you ask? (If indeed you’ve even made it this far.) It’s a tiny thing that makes me feel bad about myself and contributes, even in a small way, to the idea that I’m a bad, unlovable person. Which, of course, is at the heart of an eating disorder. Or at least, it’s at the heart of mine.

I fear I’m in relapse drift. I thought it yesterday morning and on into yesterday afternoon, which is when I started (but didn’t finish) this post because I had to go to my (beginner) tennis course. (If you’re wondering if I have Wimbledon potential, I do, in that my balls are so wildly out of bounds at this point that they could, theoretically, end up there from Chiswick.)

This morning I thought about it more, and it worried me that I wasn’t more scared of it. Earlier this year the mere thought of relapse was terrifying, and I’d have done anything to avoid it.

I thought about how my food has gotten a little messier – and sometimes a lot messier -- than it has been in a year, and how I’ve justified that to myself as recovery from my restrictive side. So tricky to know with an eating disorder, isn’t it? But that combined with these other behaviors, of which there are many, is… worrying.

Because I do not want to go back to where I was over a year ago. I don’t want to buy clothes I don’t like because they’re the only thing that fits. I don’t want to worry about what will fit every morning – that losing battle, where I feel defeated before the day has even started. I don’t want that fear that people are judging me (unfavorably) because of my size and that worry and constant feeling that I need to make up for it. I don’t want to shrink my life again, first with the bingeing and then with the need for everything to be safe in early recovery. I don’t want to feel like I’m not living the life I want because of this eating disorder, which has already destroyed so many things over the years.

I could go on and on. And so I told my counselor today and I’m writing it here. The drifting stops now.