Really struggled with my old behaviour today, I only just made it through and am feeling totally washed out and shaken up tonight. You see a lot of my behaviour with food is triggered when I feel out of control of a situation I try to cope by doing one of two extreme behaviours.
Restrict - I would take total control over my eating and stop altogether.... because of course that proves I have supreme control over what I eat and therefore I must have control over the other situation right?
or Binge - Saying to myself 'I'll show them' (whoever that maybe) They don't control me, I control me. Then eat a vast amount of crap food to show I have control of what hurts me not them. I don't really talk about just how much food that used to be but will explain it would be soft food so I didn't have to chew to much (which takes longer and fills you up) and so it wouldn't hurt to much if I over compensated for my behaviour later.
Now over the years different lots of therapy and soul searching I learnt to curb these behaviour so if they did happen a restrict didn't last as long and a binge was a fraction of the size (more like what a normal person would call a pig out) and it has been many many many years since I have over compensated. But truth is despite how under control my issues have been, when I am in a situation I have no control over my default setting is to still go one of these two behaviours.
Since starting the eating plan I have coped with a couple of little things rocking me, but nothing like today. I am stuck waiting for my results and its not the results that are causing me anxiety it is the total lack of communication from the college as to when and how I will get them. As a result I feel I am on constant alert every time the post comes, every time I open my email, will I find out today? next week? Made worse by the fact one of my peers has theirs and I can only theorise as to why that is the case. Today I picked up the last of my work and half hoped there would be confirmation of the total grade with it.... there was not.... and I crashed as a result.
On the way home I couldn't stop crying and that feeling of being totally out of control of something so important to me was overwhelming. I had to stop to get something for tea and that's when I found myself in a supermarket surrounded by food and in my worst frame of mind. I lost count of how many times I looped around the cake section but I focused on the syn value of the things I passed and I didn't pick anything up. Then I tried to remember what I was supposed to be getting but kept getting distracted. In the end I was shaking and fighting tears as hard as I was fighting the urge to grab a mountain of chocolate. I ended up heading for the safety of the fruit and veg section and grabbing random stuff and more pointedly a punnet of grapes. Then I just had to pay and get out of there, my head was pounding and I felt really upset and dissapointed I had let myself get that badly effected even though I hadn't picked anything up.
As I still had a strong urge to stuff chocolate into my gob in order to feel calmer I decided to pretend the grapes were malteasers. Yeah ok I know they don't taste the same, but by thinking of chocolate and letting my body eat something, I dont kow somehow it kind of helped. Maybe it was feeling virtuous that I hadn't gone for the chocolate, I don't know, but I calmed down after a damn good cry. I will have chocolate cake again at some point in the future, my birthday for example! But today was the wrong reason to have it and I know I would have regretted it. So I'm glad I didn't let the daemon win today, but am paying the price now, strong emotions go straight to my tummy and I have felt sick since this afternoon. I have managed to eat a sensible dinner though rather than restrict and that feels better, but not great as I feel full which brings up its own set of destructive thoughts.
I need to calm down, get a handle on why I feel the way I do about the results and either forget about them, or contact the college *again* to try to find out a due date for them. Though past experience tells me I wont find anything out and self preservation tells me to not try. Sorry no food pictures tonight, camera battery died. But even if it hadn't I don't feel like photos of food today.
Good night sleep should sort me out, positive attitude will return, I am both stubborn and determined, after all I did the hard bit walking out of the supermarket with fruit not cake
That was a tough day. Well done for finding something to help you through it (the grapes) when you really wanted the chocolate binge.
ReplyDeleteYou need to draw a positive out of this experience - you were able to recognise what was going on and find a coping mechanism that wasn't destructive, even while you were under a lot of stress.
Well done!
I've found that recognising what's going on emotionally with my intellectual/analytical brain has allowed me to dampen down the emotional symptoms of a situation. It's not always easy but being your own therapist in a time of crisis is a good thing to try to master.
Thanks for sharing a difficult experience :)
Thanks honey, Def the hardest part is hearing your calm advice to yourself in that moment of crisis. But practice makes perfect they say :-)
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