In addition to wanting to be healthier, one of the main reasons I wanted to stop binging and to lose weight was so that I would feel more confident in putting myself out there. When I was 400lbs, I felt self-conscious. I didn’t like the attention of being overweight. I didn’t have the energy to socialize or to do anything active. Most of all, I didn’t want to sacrifice time binge eating to socialize, despite the fact socializing would leave me happier any day of the week over binging.
So I took action. I quit binging and started working out. And eventually, I lost the weight. Problem was (and is), my addiction says it was all for nothing. No one will ever love you, might as well binge. No one wants to hang out with you, might as well binge. You don’t like people that much anyway, but you sure do love food. And the other day, I bought into it and gave in. At midnight, I rolled out of bed and walked to the gas station next to my apartment and bought as much food as I could carry to the register.
After my binge, I knew I stood at a crossroads: either gain all the weight back by way of binging, or get back on the wagon. I knew I had come too far to quit now. I knew that if I allowed myself a “break,” it would get out of hand quickly, and before I knew it, I’d have gained a significant portion of weight back. So the choice was obvious: stop binging. But the problem was, the hunger had been reawakened in me.
So I decided to reevaluate my current relationship with food to figure out what had gone wrong. And it turns out that I had actually given in much earlier. I had been putting too much stock into my eating, and had basically been doing binge lite for the past couple months.
So a little bit about how I’ve been able to be successful. As the story suggests, I am most tempted to eat at night. During the day, I am busy with work and working out and life in general, and when the food noise pops up, I’m able to (relatively) easily dismiss it. But at night, when I’m just sitting on my couch alone, it is more of an internal battle to get the urges to die down. So how I’ve combated this over the past 4 years is by doing OMAD (one meal a day). The way I view it is, to eat during the day, when I’m not thinking about food anyway, is just a waste of my calorie budget. I might as well save those calories for when I actually want them. And I’ve found great success doing this. Problem is, I got carried away with it. When I had been successful over the last 4 years, I was basically just eating a meal that provided me with the amount of calories, protein, etc that I was aiming for, and made me feel good throughout the day. But lately, I have been looking at that calorie budget by asking myself, “what’s the most volume I can get out of these calories?” And the answer was , you can make that calorie budget go far in volume if you eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Which on the surface sounds like the most innocuous thing ever.
So because I was “taking a break” from being in a calorie deficit, and because I workout 7 days a week and work an active job, my maintenance calorie budget is quite high, and I was using those calories to eat an absurd amount of volume. I’m talking , on top of the OMAD I had been eating for the past few years, I was also eating something like a pound of carrots, 3 giant apples, 2 bananas, 3 cups of strawberries, pretzels, and so on. Basically, I was eating for like 2 hours straight every night. And because of my binge eating addiction, I refused to see the problem with this.
Before I continue, I’m not a dietician, so maybe, despite my suspicions that that was too much fiber and water and sugar and volume in general, eating that every night wasn’t all that unhealthy, from a nutrition standpoint. Second, assuming it’s healthy (or at least not unhealthy) i recognize that volume eating might be a viable adherence strategy for other people. But with all that said, volume eating is a slippery slope for me. Basically, I haven’t been addressing the deeper issues in my life, and using food to cope. I have been using food to fill a hunger that isn’t for food. I’ve been loath to admit the ennui I’ve been succumbing to, and if I’m not to succumb to binging again, I have to address those issues. I can’t just distract myself during those quiet hours at night by eating the whole time, because no amount of food is ever going to be enough. Once I find an amount that makes me feel satisfied, I’ll just want more. And on top of the food not helping, it’s also making things worse. How am I to meet people when I revolve my day around my eating window? “Do I want to go out tonight? Well, I got to eat dinner, and that takes like 3 hours. Also, I can’t skip the gym, because that’ll take calories away from my calorie budget, and that means I can’t eat as much.” And finally, I’m recognizing that if it comes down to changing vs my food addiction, my addiction is going to distort my view on changing. “You don’t want to be social anyway. So just spend those hours eating instead.”
This post ended up being longer than I expected. As a person who writes for hobby, I think I just wanted to work some of this out “on paper.” And if you could find some value in that too, I’m glad. I basically just wanted to say, don’t let your addiction distort your worldview. Even if reaching your goals doesn’t bring you the happiness you thought it would, that doesn’t mean it’s time to give back in to your addiction. Remember what made you want to change in the first place, and cling to that.
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