If You Eat It, KEEP It

I am holed up again, in a coffeehouse haven, having had a victorious day.
First, I did NOT purge last night. I made it through until this morning, and woke up feeling proud and ready to stay on the healthy track.

In group therapy we've talked a couple of times about something called "apparently irrelevant behaviors." This is stuff that isn't necessarily directly related to my eating disorder, but enables me to continue starving and purging. So, when I schedule lunch meetings and then don't have time to eat lunch... or when I forget to bring my cream of wheat breakfast to work (which happened this morning), and then can't eat because nothing else feels "safe."

So, I skipped breakfast. I thought about trying to eat something else (I was in a bakery, for the love!), but I couldn't get to a place where I felt safe enough to eat something else without my anorexic brain labeling it a "binge." I didn't want to end up purging, so I didn't eat. I figured I would get home from work around 11AM, eat an early lunch, and have a bigger afternoon snack.

Enter more "apparently irrelevant behaviors." My coworker was having a rough day - I offered to finish her morning work so that she could go home and take care of herself. So, I didn't get home until almost one. I called my coworker when I got home and asked her if she needed a buddy - and she came over. I changed my clothes, planned on eating, and before I knew it she had arrived and we were deep in conversation. My stomach rumbled around 2:30, and I figured it was time to drink an Ensure.

I went to therapy at three, and told my therapist that I had eaten lunch - because I really thought that I had eaten. It wasn't until right before dinner when I realized that the food I had put out to eat was still on the counter, untouched.

So I skipped two meals. Now that I'm writing about my "victorious" day, I'm realizing that I wasn't as successful as I thought. I feel powerful when I'm starving - being hungry and empty makes me feel worth loving and enables me to "function" in the world. I thrive on adrenaline and the rush that comes when I know I'm "succeeding" at non-eating - something that most people strive for and cannot attain. Thus, it is often the case that on the days I label "good," I haven't eaten anything - my sick brain sees those days as success stories. Writing now about missing two meals, I still feel like today was victorious, but I'm also starting to see that I wasn't "recovering" at all.

Tonight I had dinner at the house of some friends. I had an enormous amount of anxiety about going - my friends both know I have anorexia and think the solution is simply "to eat!" I was worried about feeling pressured to eat lots of high calorie foods and feast with them - and worried about having to go home afterward and throw up their kindness.

The dinner party was wonderful. A bit stressful. A little uncomfortable. I felt a little bit too full, but I tried really hard to relax and embrace their generosity. It felt good to be "taken care of" and even better to let in the love offered to me. All in all, I had a good time, and even had ice cream for dessert. And I will not throw it up. I'm here waiting out the panic.

All night I've been thinking about something that Megan - my therapist and doctor - said to me this afternoon during our session. We were talking about trying to "sit" with the "binge" feeling, and replace all of my "food rules" with the simple rule that "if I eat it, I keep it." Meaning, NO PURGING. I wonder if this could work, because usually when I purge, it happens because I "decide" that I have eaten too much (or thought too much about food, or whatever), and then need to "finish" the binge in order to make purging physically possible. Essentially, I subjectively decide I have "binged," and then either objectively or subjectively eat in order to purge. But if purging is out of the game... then when I decide that I have "binged," I won't have throwing up as an option. Instead I'll have to think about whether or not I have truly "over-indulged." And Megan thinks that even if I really do overeat, I should try and "keep it." Which now seems impossible, but if the rules change and I follow them (goodness knows one of my strengths has always been rule-following), then who knows?

Whoa. This concept is big for me. Because if all of my food rules get replaced by this one... I HAVE to eat regularly. Otherwise, I'll get too hungry and push myself into compensatory eating, or I'll get terribly fat because I'll be eating huge quantities of food (that are, I think, sometimes just subjectively huge and are other times truly enormous). This could work.

Megan also thinks I should try and eat something every three hours. She suggested having an entire muffin for ONE snack; this blew my mind. It seems like WAY too much. But last Tuesday night, I purged because I felt hungry and didn't have a snack planned in the evening - so everything seemed off limits and unsafe. This week I am going to try having a "muffin snack," and even tonight at this little coffeehouse, I ordered a dessert bar with apricots and oatmeal because I knew that our dinner party happened hours ago, and that I'll still be awake for several hours. I am trying to ride this out, and so even though I'm not entirely hungry, I'm going to try and push the food.

I feel like last week went well. It wasn't perfect, but apparently, no one is. I had some victories, and made some progress. But most importantly, I was honest, which is a new and important tool in my arsenal for this war.