What do I do?
Do I attempt, yet again, to try and eat normally -- to choose mostly healthy and nutrient-dense foods -- to maybe start going to the gym on campus again? I did feel better when I was doing that. Do I try it, knowing that the moment I get stressed out again, which is absolutely certain to happen because I'm a full-time student and school is a major stressor for me, I will probably revert back to old gluttonous or disordered habits, or maybe some combination of the two?
Do I ignore the fact that I've gained even more weight -- this heavy feeling of my thighs, the 95% absence of all bones or hints of bones -- or do I try to minimize some? Will getting fit be enough without losing weight? And, again, can I even possibly sustain any of it? It doesn't seem so likely, given my history, and the way my mood swings around at the least little change in my circumstances. Even if I try to lose a little weight, I am pretty sure, I will just gain it all back again the moment I get stressed, and things snap in my brain, and I start trying to inhale the whole house, the whole grocery store, the whole world. I have some major fucking willpower and control issues, I am convinced, which I lately take out on food in the most negative way possible: eating too much of it AND keeping most of it in.
Disgusting. Horrifying. And yet so much of the time I am just apathetic about how disgusting and horrifying it is. I don't have any concept that I am gaining weight until I suddenly notice that some body part feels heavier, that these clothes are a little tighter, that I have to retire this or that pair of my older jeans because they don't fit properly anymore. The thing that used to terrify me beyond belief a couple of years ago -- gaining weight, becoming overweight -- is happening to me right now, and I don't even care. I don't even fucking care.
Why don't I care? Is it because I am just so tired of the starve-binge cycles? So tired of the bulimia? So tired of restriction in and of itself? Is it because I am tired of the constant anxiety of restricting intake, the fear that slight deviation will make me gain a thousand pounds? Tired of the realization that all my starving and bulimic behaviors and overeating have altogether combined just to make me gain even MORE weight?
Well, maybe that's why I gave restriction, in the eating disordered sense, up. But why is it that I can't see a reduction in food intake and restriction in the disordered sense as separate entities? Why can't I see a healthy, lower-calorie meal plan, in which I actually track what I eat, as something healthy and good for my body, instead of as a ravaging, soul-sucking tormentor that will immediately and with great force bring me right back to the terror, the consuming obsession, of restrictive EDNOS?
Why can't I just eat healthier and in smaller portions? Why does that always, sooner or later, start to feel like restriction, like deprivation, like it's somehow "not the real me"? (The voice in the back of the head whispers: What, is the "real you" a gluttonous fat girl? Is the "real you" the one who eats until her stomach is ready to burst, until she feels incredibly nauseous and indulgent, and then leans over a toilet to relieve the pressure, to avoid the sticky heat and stomach upset of the incredible spike in blood sugar the binge will bring if it stays in? Is that what the "real you" is?)
I feel, somehow, that if I knew the answers to these questions -- if I could figure out the reasons for my fucked-up-ness -- that I could finally conquer the bulimia and COE and binge-eating once and for all. That I could finally figure out how to make the overeating child inside me happy, and she would finally stop trying to fill her emptiness and sorrow and pain with all the food she is able to get her hands on. And maybe then she would leave me alone and let me get on with the rest of my life.
