As I sit here in my post lunch food coma, belly full of my recent lunch, I reflect on my morning trip to Starbucks. I went in for coffee (we’re out) and left with a large iced (skinny) caramel macchiato, a slice of lemon pound cake, and an everything cheese bagel with butter.
And I ask myself… what the f***, self? Why, exactly, are you filling yourself chock full of nutritionally void, heavy foods that make you feel slothful?
And so, as I am learning to do, I tried to sit with it for a bit to suss out the feelings behind the now abnormal actions. Right or wrong, I decided to give myself permission to eat those foods, heavy and slow as they made me, in the attempt to placate the feelings and, perhaps, identify their source.
Finally, and honestly after two champagne cocktails at lunch, I pegged the source.
See… there’s a thing. It’s something I can’t talk about in detail right now, but there’s a thing that I want very much. (It’s not another kid.) But…. I don’t honestly believe I deserve it. I can’t come up with a legitimate reason why I don’t. There are no facts to support my feelings. But still, I don’t believe I deserve to have this thing, this thing that I want SO much.
And so yes, I ate too much today. I mistreated by body a bit. It isn’t ideal, but I’m only just getting to the point where I can recognize these feelings for what they are, hunt them down and identify them as the culprits.
I’ve got a ways to go in figuring out how to solve the self-esteem problems I suppose, but it’s oddly comforting and goes a way toward more confidence when I realize I’m closer to knowing myself better, to being able to act on my feelings. I don’t know how to come to terms with not feeling like “enough” to deserve this opportunity I’ve come across…
I’m open to your thoughts and suggestions, but please be gentle. I feel fragile right now.
BRILLIANT!! This is really what it’s all about. There is a victory here and it is that you allowed yourself to experiment with eating and it’s affect and it’s “why’s”. You learned something that you wouldn’t have otherwise learned if you white-knuckled it OR if you had beaten yourself up for eating.
If you want to delve deeper, try asking yourself why you don’t feel like your’re “enough.” With each answer, ask yourself again…peel back the layers.
My post-separation therapy has sort of evolved into disordered eating therapy (coincidentally, and happily, the therapist that my EAP matched me up with is an eating disorders specialist), and we have been tackling this a TON. Last time I saw her (prior to today), she gave me a chapter from a bulimia workbook that offered what seemed like rudimentary suggestions of strategies to use when you feel a binge coming on. Some of these don’t always work for me, as my binges are usually pretty mindless, and these require some mindfulness, but I have had some success with them the last two weeks. The first is to delay. When you get that “chatter” in your head that makes you want to reach for food (in your case, the idea that you are not good enough), the workbook suggested waiting ten minutes to see if the feeling passes. If it does not pass, then give in to it MINDFULLY (which it sounds like is what you did today). The second is to distract. I have a list of things I can do instead of binge (check my email, do a sudoku puzzle, play a game on FB, read a chapter of my book) to distract me from binge eating. These two things in tandem actually have left me binge-free for the past two weeks!
Today, we talked about visualization. I had a bad weekend at work and felt like there were M&Ms calling my name for all three days that I was at work. However, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to go and actually purchase and inhale the M&Ms. She suggested that, next time I get that M&M feeling, I go in my mind to a vacation destination that is peaceful to me (I chose the coast of Maine) and close my eyes and spend 15-30 seconds “there” (visualizing the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings).
It’s such a daily struggle, and I do have to say that therapy has been helpful for me. The ending of my marriage left me pretty broken, and it is with the help of my therapist that I am starting to see that it will someday be possible to put the pieces back together again. And I already engaged in completely disordered eating prior to my marriage ending, so the 2+ years of weight loss success I had enjoyed quickly devolved back into my old unhealthy and disordered eating patterns once again. You are not alone in this…and if you ever want to talk about it further, I think you have a couple of ways you can reach me!