Technicolor Meltdown

There are lots of qualities about myself I am proud of. I am very smart, I am funny, I am sharp witted (or sarcastic depending on your point of view) and I am great a my job. I can see solutions that others miss, I can think outside the box and I am incredibly inventive. I am also loyal, dedicated and an incredibly hard worker. I would give my life for those I care about and never give up without a fight. I have a lot of strengths, many of which I am only slowly growing to truly appreciate.

But I have to admit one of my least redeeming qualities is how black and white, hot and cold, I seem to run about things. I am 100% or I am 0%, I am all in or not at all, I have incredible self control and discipline, until I don’t and then it goes terribly bad.

This last one is probably the hardest with food and my eating issues. I have great control. I can stop myself from eating EVERYTHING. It is how I ended up, I believe, being anorexic. I can easily control my food intake to the point of over control, where I eat nothing. For the last 6 or so weeks I have lived on the same foods every single day without a problem (protein shakes, pecans, almond butter and one small serving of fish, chicken or turkey a day). Not a problem. I can be that controlled. It is not hard for me. But once I cracked that, I am in free fall, which is where I am right now.

The last two weeks have been really hard for me schedule wise. I have done two straight weeks of travel (home for about 17 hours in between one week and the other). While from a work perspective that is nothing for me, from a food and workout point of view this is a major undertaking. Part of being regimented is being on a schedule, able to control my life and my surroundings, but doing this level of travel that all fell apart.

I thought I had put safe guards in place. The GM at my local LTF went out of his way to get me a pass to a higher level club in NJ (thanks Tony), my trainer worked up workout guidelines for me to follow (thanks Nick) and I even put a workout with another trainer in that 17 hours I was home (thanks Todd) so that I wasn’t going as long without working out. Nick and I had talked about food, I packed my protein powder and almond milk. But despite that all I knew it was going to be hard, and it was.

I did ok the first week, but the second week has not ended well. I am currently on my flight home and today already I have had a “bourbon breeze” (bourbon, cranapple juice and orange juice), sun chips, 4 reeses peanut butter cups and a gingerale. This is on top of the bagel and cream cheese at my client this morning. And honestly, I am pondering a Big Mac on the way home. The wheels have completely fallen off. And I knew it was coming is the sad part, yet I still couldn’t stop it. How did I know it was coming? Because yesterday I had no where near the calories I was supposed to. When I did eat I had to force myself. I knew I had swung back over to the anorexic side yesterday, and the rebound of that is usually the binge side. Again 0 to 100! And sadly the hard part of the overeating side is that it is not usually a fast repair. It usually sets off a long run of days of eating like crap, which then swings back to not wanting to eat anything because of how many calories I have put on while eating all the garbage.

It frustrates me completely that I can sit here and logically say I know this is all wrong, that I shouldn’t be doing it but I say that with a gingerale in my hand and thinking about what I can eat next. I hate this. I hate all my eating issues. There is not a lot in my life I would change or say I regret, I believe our struggles make us who we are. But I have to admit if given one wish it would be to have a normal, sane, relationship with food, to be able to erase all the things from my childhood, all the being teased, all the slams by my father over my weight, all the pain of growing up fat, so that I hadn’t developed this messed up mindset around eating. It is the one challenge in my life that my stubbornness and tenacity don’t seem able to just overcome.

I have done so well for the last 6 weeks or so, I have easily eaten the calories I needed to, I stayed away from foods I shouldn’t, I managed to lose 22 lbs in a month. I have been perfect. And I know before I even get near the scale tonight that I have thrown all that away this week. That I am probably 10 lbs up and more importantly I am back to struggling with not wanting to eat, or eating completely out of control. It’s horrible because I know what I need more than anything is to go workout tonight, to tell my trainer how far off track I am (he pretty much knows from conversations earlier in the week, but not about the binges today yet) and that I need to be in the gym tonight, have a workout and get my head on straight. But at the same time, it is the last thing in the world I want to do or face. I want to go home at this moment, curl up on the couch and just hide from the world and myself.

People who have never faced an eating disorder are probably reading this thinking “well just get back on track” and I wish it worked like that. Food is so much harder than that when your brain is warped about this stuff, logic and behavior become a world apart. I know I have days or weeks ahead of me to get back to where I was before this week, and sadly I know that even when I get back it will be the point of over control again, because I can’t seem to be anywhere in between no matter how hard I try.