Remembering Recovery

I binged last night in a major way, and felt like absolute shit afterwards.  It really makes me miserable.  I want to stop.  I pulled out an old workbook from one of the psychologist I used to see, and was reading about normalizing eating patterns.  I want to be better, but I also just want. That. Number. To. Go. Down!  When I look at myself, I feel disgusting.  I just do not see what is evident to everyone else.  Sometimes in pictures I see that I am a small person, with thin arms and legs, but when it comes to looking in the mirror I miss it completely.  I hate my legs especially. 

In the workbook I was reading it says that the major cause of binges is restricting, and if you can eat a normal amount when you are hungry than you can stop the binges; This is so difficult, though; I think I’ve trained myself so that feeling hungry is very positively reinforcing.  I love that feeling of being hollow.  The last thing I want to do when I feel that way is ruin it by eating.  This is common when someone has an eating disorder, and the solution is a meal plan, so that you know when and what to eat.  I have had so many of those, and I do find them hard to stick to, although when I was in recovery for almost two years, I began that recovery with a great nutritionist and a meal plan.  She was sensitive to what I wanted, and she was flexible about when and what I ate.  I was living in New York at the time, and I did get some excellent treatment there.  I saw that meal plan last night, and it made me cry a little.  I do not know why, but I just want…I don’t know.  Here is that meal plan:

Note:  Keep in mind that this is a summary, when I first started on the meal plan I was not eating this much food at all, and I worked up to this over time.  This is a limited diet, but it was what made me feel comfortable at the time, and I use the word comfortable in the loosest of terms.  It was what I knew I had to do to get better.  It did take me a while to gain back weight, but I did slip up and not follow this all of the time.

·         Breakfast: 1C of bran flakes with 1/2 C of almond milk, 2 pieces of multigrain toast with a spread, usually peanut butter, and a piece of fruit.

·         Morning snack: some berries or other fruit

·         Lunch: A wrap with vegetables and hummus, or a sandwich with tofu salad of some sort, a side of vegetables, like broccoli or a small side salad, then a dessert, like yogurt

·         Afternoon snack: some nuts or pretzels (this usually did not happen, because nuts are a fear food, and I don’t really like pretzels).

·         Supper: a vegetarian main dish, usually something with beans or garbanzo beans and vegetables, a starchy vegetable of some sort, a bread, like a roll or a pita, with a spread, and then either a heavy or light dessert depending on the night.  Heavy dessert would be soy ice-cream, and a light dessert could be fruit salad or yogurt.

I am eating nowhere near this much now.  I also was flipping through my journal from the time when I was recovered, and I was so happy.  I was not binging at all, or very rarely.  I just can’t recall for the life of me how I got to that point.  I sometimes have moments of clarity when I know I want to get better, but they never last long, and my ED voice can usually obliterate them quickly.  I can feel it inside of me, though, I do want this to stop, I see the evidence of what being recovered means, but I just do not have the road map to get to the point where I feel the utter conviction, and know for sure that is what I want.