I feel better now...

OK, I am feeling better than I was when I wrote my last post; but I had to wait until today to feel good enough to actually post something.

After reading the sage advise I found in that book, I could not help but feel...overwhelmed. Panicky. Totally and completely freaked out. Which was probably why it was a good thing that I read it. This is probably how people feel when they are hit with an intervention for their drug or alcohol abuse. It is everything that you know to be true, right, and sound; but it is everything that you don't want to hear. I know that I am an emotional eater, and my mom has been telling me for YEARS that I should stay away from flour and wheat (something else Mom was right about. Dammit!). When I was a child, she said that my head and hair smelled weird, but when she took me off of wheat it was normal. And I remember the hellish times when she took me off of the wheat products - it was horrible!! But I was a kid then, and other kids tend to make fun of you when you have a sandwich in your lunch with no bread, and other "weird" "health food" "freak of nature" type foods in your Charlie Brown lunchbox (maybe it was the lunchbox that was the problem?). I am an adult now, and I fully understand that life is unfair, and sometimes you have to suck it up and do things that are unpleasant for your own good. No one will laugh at my lunches now (and I am sure that no longer carrying around the Charlie Brown lunchbox will help that as well) so there should be no issues. Right? RIGHT??? Well... The problem is that everything I like to eat has sugar, flour or wheat products in it (yeah, and that is why you are FAT!) (Can someone please shut this voice up? Thank you.) and if I eliminate all of them, then I will have nothing to eat at all and my life will be joyless and empty.

Oh...wait...right.

My life is already joyless and empty because I hate myself for allowing my weight to be so out of control. That's right. I forgot.

But the more I thought about what I should do the angrier I got. On top of the panic I felt by the anticipation of having to cut all the foods that I love and cannot live without, I was feeling put out with someone I care about, I had a crappy day at work, and since I have been home from vacation I have been so homesick that I am "this close" to calling U-Haul to rent a truck and move back to Oregon. All of that just accumulated until I was feeling TRAPPED BY EVERYTHING - people, employment, finances, all of it and I just wanted to SCREAM!!! I threw the mail all over the living room and stomped around a little bit. Then I sat at my computer, pulled up the Domino's website, and angrily ordered a medium deep dish pizza and two lava cakes (omg - they are the DEVIL). Oh, and a Coke Zero. Lord knows I don't want to add any extra calories to this love fest if I don't have too! (It is soooo ironic; when I was a teenager I worked for a deli owned by the parents of a school friend of mine [the Stovepipe Deli, Livermore, CA] with a bunch of my other friends from school. We used to laugh when overweight people came in, ordered the biggest and fattiest sandwiches we made along with a Diet Coke. We thought it was the dumbest thing we ever saw. Karma's a bitch.) When it arrived, I ate all of it in about a 20 minute time span. Oh man, do I need help. And the worst part of this behavior is that I know it's bad, I know that I am punishing myself for other people's behavior towards me, but I still can't stop myself. It makes me feel helpless and hopeless.

Late last night, after the guilt and the pain had subsided some, I picked up my other new book that I bought before I left for vacation and started to read it. I wish I had read it FIRST. (Please see the right hand column for info.) The first book was very good and extremely important for me to read, but it was very cut and dry, no funny business, and cut straight to the heart of the matter in a rather un-empathetic and clinical way. This new book is written by a therapist instead of a clinical doctor, and it appeals to me very much. One of the paragraphs in the introduction, under the header of "How Does the Book Work?", really spoke to me and the work I am trying to do on myself: Once I began to explore the question of powerlessness as related to weight, I realized that powerlessness over the urge to eat was simply a superficial layer of powerlessness. It actually covered up for five other ways that people felt powerless in their lives. People feel powerless when they doubt themselves, when they feel frustrated, when they feel vulnerable or unsafe, when they feel rebellious or angry, and when they feel empty. Yep. That sentence should have been followed by an 8x10 glossy of me. That is EXACTLY why I ate that pizza last night. I felt powerless, frustrated, angry and empty. Four out of five. Some days it's all five, and some days it's all five plus eleven more. Sometimes it's only one of those reasons, but just one is enough to send me running for food. Well, not running exactly. But you get the idea.

I look forward to reading the rest of this book, hopefully over the weekend. I will keep you posted (no blog pun intended) on my progress. I hope that, if there is just one person out there that reads this blog and suffers from food addiction like I do, you will find that you are not alone and perhaps you can start your own road to recovery too. Life is too short to suffer like this, and suffering like this will only make it shorter.

Until later, TTFN.