This is Important

This is one of those posts that will be so important to my recovery, and as I'm writing I have tears welling up in my eyes.

After work a couple days ago, I noticed how helpless I felt. I anticipated a few days of feeling low, but I didn't anticipate what would happen the next day. I felt really depressed and I was staying in bed. I got up and made something for myself--off my plan. When I say it was downhill from there, that's an understatement. This turned into an all-day binge. I kept eating and eating, and I was terrified to stop because I was terrified of the discomfort and shame I would feel when I did. So, I kept on eating.

Woke up this morning, did the same thing. Finally stopped by the afternoon, and I was running ideas in my head about what to do to move forward. Simply return to my eating plan, change my eating plan, get rid of it so it's more flexible, and so on. But I read something online. When we fall we want to work harder and that's usually not the solution. When it comes to hard work, I should really get some kind of metal for it. The key is working smarter. 


I allowed my disordered eating to win a couple days ago. I can still feel how out-of-control I felt, and I wish I could just reach in and give myself a hug for how awful I feel, to really believe that I don't deserve to feel awful. That I deserve to feel loved, especially in the midst of a binge.

Moving forward, I learned that one of the things that really helped me stay binge-free for the weeks before a couple days ago was that I knew that giving in would make the compulsion more powerful, and the only thing that would lessen it would be to sit with the discomfort of not giving in, again and again. And I did that, and this binge can't take away that work. The hard part for me seems to be when things get so overwhelming that the compulsion is just too powerful.

I don't know what the best next steps are, and I'm not going to make a decision now just to feel some "control." I'm not in a rational place to make any choices. I'll give it a couple days. But I think in terms of working smarter, what I need to do today is really love myself. Treat myself to a big bowl of love, extra love sprinkled in. A hot bath, a book, some deep breaths.