Not-So-Nice-January

Hi guys! I know I’ve been awfully missing in action lately, and I don’t really have a reason for it. I guess it’s really hard for to me accept when I’m not doing well, it’s way easier (and nicer) talking when I’m doing well, but I’ve figured it’s time for me to admit my mistakes and talk about them.

Let’s say that January wasn’t very kind with me. First because I received the results of my application to university, and even when everything seemed to indicate I was going to be accepted at medical school… I was not. I admit that it was very painful to get those results, it was hard understanding that I won’t be able to start studying what I wanted to this year and that I will have to try again. For now I’ll be studying nursery and I’ll try to be admitted to med school again. Also, a few week ago I was robbed for the first time, thankfully, nothing serious happened to me but it still sucked. The feeling of insecurity after having your things stolen from you is not nice.

And about my eating things haven’t been going well. Saying this is really hard for me but from the start I promised to myself I would be honest on this blog. I relapsed.

There were moments during my recovery that I felt like I was never going to relapse, sometimes I felt like I had beaten binge eating for good and that it was never coming back to me. I thought I would have to work really hard for some time and that after doing it I would never have to worry again (naive, I know). And as you can guess, I was wrong.

But deep inside, I feared a relapse more than anything because I thought it would mean I’d lose all my progress and that I’d have to start form zero, or worse, that maybe I could never get back on track again (black and white thinking again?).

I expected hard days, I expected my weight to fluctuate (like it does in “normal” people), but I didn’t expect to binge again, not after having to face even restriction urges.

Now looking back, I can tell that it was actually something really likely to happen. Compulsive overeating had been present for so long in my life that it couldn’t really be that easy to stop doing it.

I was doing very well again, having almost no binge urges, eating mostly healthily. But then I went on vacations. By then I took the decision that I would start trying to eat intuitively, I felt ready. It was something I  thought I had to do. But I rushed it. My “mindful eating” slowly started turning to over-indulging more often than before. I didn’t really notice (or didn’t want to) until one night I wanted to eat chocolate and couldn’t stop after the first one, so I had another, and another, and another until I “woke up” and figured that I had lost control. I couldn’t really stop because I didn’t see it coming, but the signs had been there for a while. Self-sabbotage is a hard thing to beat for me.

After that I had a couple of weeks of over-indulging and about two days ago a big binge.

What I can see now is that I wasn’t ready to start eating intuitively by then. I still think it is the best way to go, or the way I’d love to eat. But for the time being, I’ll stick to a flexible meal plan and I’ll just see how it goes. It may not be the best thing, but it gives me the structure I need not to lose control and the flexibility I need not to get bored. I will also start working more on my daily meals, I’ll try to cook nice and healthy things so I can keep my cravings at bay.

I’ll see how it goes, maybe I’ll flexibilize certain aspects of my eating on the go as I was doing some months ago. But slowly.

I may or may not be prepared in the future to eat intuitively, but I just won’t worry about it anymore. I’ll do what I know works for me right now. I’ll try to stop focusing on food as much as I can too, I want to start unattaching my identity with my eating disorder. I believe that’s going to help me at this point. I need to work on my self-esteem and “sticking” to my ED is not going to help.

I’m going to enjoy my life with or without an eating disorder.

 

Pol

 

Close To Relapsing?

About three weeks ago my psychiatrist and I decided I could stop taking topiramate, a drug that helps people to fight compulsive behaviors ( including binge eating).

I was doing great by then, I had almost no binge urges at all, I felt like my relationship with food was finally becoming a healthy one, like I was almost recovered. I felt strong.

But since I stopped taking the drug, things had been harder. I’ve found myself trying to eat more than usual and using food to soothe my emotions. I even thought that I was having binge urges again.

The truth is that I didn’t expect this to happen and I’ve felt pretty disappointed at myself, like I was almost done and that I had to start from zero (though I know it’s not true). About a month ago I felt like I could never really relapse. And for the past few weeks I’ve felt like I could binge or restrict on any moment. But this never meant that I had to give up, and keeping that in mind has been really important.

The truth is that (thankfully) I haven’t really binged or restricted. But I’ve been very anxious about this situation and I was scared that food could start being a problem again. Fighting restricting and bingeing urges is hard, and now that I’ve been in treatment for eight months already I can tell for sure that after the initial enthusiasm I had, striving to be healthy, body and especially mind is what has kept me going for this long, and what keeps giving me the energy to carry on.

So after a session with my dietitian and psychologist (they both are awesome, I know they don’t read here but I just can’t not use this chance to say it) I got to a conclusion. I may be actually making this problem bigger in my mind than it really is (and to be honest that’s something I tend to do).

Maybe I have been getting too scared of wanting an extra piece of chocolate or about those times when I just really don’t want to keep eating because I already feel satisfied or full.

I’ve figured out that since I’ve been crash-dieting and bingeing for so long, eating like a normal person is freaking me out, because I just don’t know how to do it yet.

For the past few months I had been following a flexible and non-restrictive meal plan that my nutritionist gave me, and I felt under control because of it, it became my safe zone. But the truth is that people who have a healthy relationship with food just don’t really go following a meal plan permanently. Since I want to be able to respect my body and it’s hunger cues I’ve slowly stopped following the plan (this doesn’t mean I don’t have regular meals, it just means I’m being way more flexible about the things and amount of things I’m eating). So after being so under control with what I ate and what not, listening to what my body craves is being difficult.

Yes, having stopped to take the drug has made me crave more calorie-dense food. But it doesn’t mean that without it I’m going to binge like I used to.

Also facing this has made me realize how really important is to keep trying, even when we don’t feel like we’re making progress because in the end we discover that we actually were moving forward, we were learning even when it didn’t seem so.

And I can even say that the little victories we achieve when we feel everything is against us are the most important ones, because they remind us how capable we are. And if we feel like we’re having a setback, we’re not losing all we’ve done until now. We’re just learning a new lesson. But it never means that we have to stop trying. There are ups and downs in life, there also are going to be ups and downs in recovery.

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I hope you enjoyed this post. Now that I finally took the test that was haunting me, I’ll try to write more often.

I hope you’re all doing fine, and wherever you are, whoever you are, don’t forget that you’re amazing, you can do this!

Pol

Not Letting My Guard Down Again (An Experience)

Hi people! 🙂

Today, August the First is my binge-free day number 87! Which is a great achievement for me, but if I wasn’t capable of facing the experience I’m going to tell you about in this post I wouldn’t have reached that number. This happened to me about two weeks ago. It was a really hard and unexpected challenge that I had to face and I’m still surprised that I actually came victorious from it. 

I met with some friends and we decided we would order a pizza and some garlic sticks, I was very hungry, but it was alright. I had known during the whole day that I would eat more than usual with them and I was OK with that, and since I had faced those kind of situations before and hadn’t binged I didn’t feel anxious at all.

So, we received the pizza, we payed and we started choosing a movie to watch. While we were doing that my friends started eating the garlic sticks and I saw them and thought “Whoa, they look tasty! I’ll have one”, I felt no danger, I didn’t worry at all, so I grabbed one and smelled it. And in the moment I tasted it. CLICK. My mind went blurry, and I even started feeling dizzy. I hadn’t felt like that in such a long time that I had almost forgotten how strong it felt, but there I was. I felt like I was in the middle of binge, but I wasn’t! I had just tried a garlic stick! I didn’t understand anything, so I started freaking out. I immediately knew that if I didn’t find a way to stop feeling like that, I would end up hardcore bingeing for real.

I tried to calm myself down and ate my garlic stick very slowly but even after that I still felt hungry so I had a slice of pizza. Then I was physically satisfied, but “I” wanted to keep eating. In the moment and because I was with my friends the best idea I could come up with was waiting for the urge to pass. So I waited, and waited, and waited. And it slowly started to fade away. 

It was especially hard not to binge this time because I wasn’t expecting this urge to hit me like this after being “urge-free” for so long. I had let my guards down, and also because I was hungry when the urge to binge appeared. So in the moment I stopped feeling hungry not bingeing was sheer willpower, thankfully I recognized the urge immediately, that feeling was so different to what I usually feel everyday now that it would have been impossible for me not to recognize it.

While I didn’t technically binge in spite of how freakin’ hard it was not to, I did feel like I did. My body felt like it did, or at least I felt like that in my head, the feeling was very real. So after that experience I feared that I had to start from 0. I feared that I had to be scared when going out, that I’d tremble when walking outside a bakery, or that an urge could hit me again on any moment. 

But it wasn’t like that at all. While I’m still a little nervous that it may happen again, it just hasn’t and I feel pretty much like the recovery-me again. I’m back to normal. It was a weird and really scary experience, but that was it.

So… I gave a deep thought to it and after talking to my therapist we concluded that I had an emotional link to garlic sticks -which is true, even if it’s funny, I would eat them hidden at nights when I was a child and that made me see them as a forbidden food-. I didn’t notice but I was thinking in black and white with this specific food, then you add that I was hungry, plus the emotional baggage and well, and you got a shiny urge to binge. 

My therapist recommended me to make a list of all the foods I still consider forbidden (in my case: garlic sticks, cinnamon rolls, frappuccinos, McFlurry’s, and Churros) which will be very helpful in case I have to or want to face them in the near future, to be prepared.  

I can learn from this that even when I’m doing very well in my recovery I still have to keep working hard at it every day. I can’t let my guards off. That doesn’t mean I have to be worried 24/7, but since I have a past of binge eating, it’s just still too soon to stop worrying. Again, there’s a balance I need to find.

And well there will be some days that I will have to use my willpower to decide to fight the urges -those who follow me on instagram probably know that I have my own technique to fight my urges but even that technique requires some amount of willpower at some point-, even if those days are the fewer. But here’s the brighter side of this: If we keep ignoring these brain’s signals, our brains will learn that they are useless and they will eventually just stop sending them. That’s how we will eventually break free from these compulsive habits. It will work. But we need to stop hurting ourselves in every other aspect to achieve that (we can’t focus on dieting and expect to stop bingeing).

Soooo. This post was (again) very experiential, but I hope you liked it 🙂 Remember that you can always leave a comment, a question or send me a direct through instagram ❤ Stay strong, you got this.