Yesterday, I brought a box of chocolate chip cookies.
This is a significant occasion: it has taken over 14 months to trust myself with food again.
After so many planned – and unplanned – food related disasters, I have been slightly wary of anything resembling temptation.
Bulimia’s as corrosive on an emotional level as it is on a physical one : bingeing steals your self control – and then it undermines your self.
If every trip out seems to sidestep into a supermarket and good intentions are blown away by the first scent of food, then you start to feel like a bit of a liability.
When a sudden craving knocks you sideways and tunnel visions you towards food – and away from the things you’d been planning or the arrangement you’d made or the people you wanted to see….well, it kind of makes you feel a tad untrustworthy.
And when, by lunchtime, you’ve talked yourself round from the promise that you’d made to yourself in the morning that “today, just today, I will manage to stay in control”; well, it’s more than a little disheartening –
It’s another colossal example of how you’ve let yourself down and where you are unable to exert a little self control.
This is part of the trap.
The one leads to the other – and we’re back to the beginning. Again. With a little less self confidence and a little more self scepticism; which just makes it easier to give into the pull (“because you’re going to anyway”), and only makes the self betrayal even more painful (because you know how much it will hurt), and just makes the frustration more and more intolerable –
And I’ll re-direct the anger from me – to the bulimia – because I’ve been punished enough already.
And, when you’re whispering in my ear that I can’t be trusted, then I will remember that I am stronger than you are –
Because one day a box of biscuits will prove me right.
Yesterday, I brought a box of chocolate chip cookies.
This is a significant occasion: it has taken over 14 months to trust myself with food again.
After so many planned – and unplanned – food related disasters, I have been slightly wary of anything resembling temptation.
Bulimia’s as corrosive on an emotional level as it is on a physical one : bingeing steals your self control – and then it undermines your self.
If every trip out seems to sidestep into a supermarket and good intentions are blown away by the first scent of food, then you start to feel like a bit of a liability.
When a sudden craving knocks you sideways and tunnel visions you towards food – and away from the things you’d been planning or the arrangement you’d made or the people you wanted to see….well, it kind of makes you feel a tad untrustworthy.
And when, by lunchtime, you’ve talked yourself round from the promise that you’d made to yourself in the morning that “today, just today, I will manage to stay in control”; well, it’s more than a little disheartening –
It’s another colossal example of how you’ve let yourself down and where you are unable to exert a little self control.
This is part of the trap.
The one leads to the other – and we’re back to the beginning. Again. With a little less self confidence and a little more self scepticism; which just makes it easier to give into the pull (“because you’re going to anyway”), and only makes the self betrayal even more painful (because you know how much it will hurt), and just makes the frustration more and more intolerable –
And I’ll re-direct the anger from me – to the bulimia – because I’ve been punished enough already.
And, when you’re whispering in my ear that I can’t be trusted, then I will remember that I am stronger than you are –
Because one day a box of biscuits will prove me right.