A Most Unamusing Post about Disordered Eating, I Think

There's nothing lighthearted or redeeming in this one. Sorry. It may be of interest if you deal with similar.

I think I have a food problem. I mean, all right, I obviously have a lot of problems with food, from periods of extremely restrictive eating to binge eating to even when I'm eating normally just having an an unhealthy, warring relationship with food. (Can you blame me?)

In order to maintain a borderline healthy weight (and I don't mean by any external measure like BMI or clothing size but a weight at which I feel healthy and can move my body comfortably, and maintain my PCOS symptoms at a steady level) I have to choose very carefully what I eat, and how much of it. And all my supposed successes with intuitive eating have occurred during early hypomanic phases, when I had very little appetite, but hadn't yet made it to the near crash point when I start eating entire packages of Oreos publicly. As much fun as that is for all of us.

I guess it's not fair to say intuitive eating hasn't benefited me -- I am very aware of how different foods affect me, and (usually) motivated to avoid the ones that aren't helpful. That list is getting pretty big, though. I tend to binge when I have a bite of any of the foods below, and by binge I don't mean two helpings, I mean eat until it's gone and then eat whatever's on your plate and then scour the pantry for the next closest thing and then eat that until it's gone and I am in pain and STILL ready to eat more if it were set before me. And then spend the next three days feeling bloated and gross, BUT obsessing, still, over that same food -- imagining it, wanting it, waging an internal battle to keep myself from going out and buying it. 

It's shocking to me, and more than a little disturbing, how big that list is, and how it's grown to encompass not the standard American crap food that was designed in a lab to make us binge, but healthy foods, foods in their natural state, foods that my dietary gurus would label as acceptable, "safe," unlikely to cause a binge.

Binge triggers that I have discovered the hard way:

• Cookies of all kinds. Thin Mints, Oreos, homemade chocolate chip, sugar free peanut butter, no-sugar-added banana and oats. ALL cookies.
• Cake. Ditto. 
• Pretty much anything made with flour. Donuts, homemade challah, whatever. Baked goods.
• Candy bars. Little, big, whatever. Halloween is deadly.
• Pizza.
• Ice cream, regular, sugarless, all-banana, whatever.
• Mashed potatoes.
• Cereal. Any kind. Even Uncle Sam or Grape-Nuts.

Those seem fairly standard, no? It gets better.

• Meat loaf. Sigh. With or without carbs added.
• Pot roast.
• Cream cheese, added to anything.
• Plain Greek yogurt, non-, low-, or full-fat. Unsweetened, always.

Bummer, especially since those are Primal or Atkins-friendly foods that I "should" be able to handle. But wait! There's more!

• Dried fruit of any kind. Raisins, prunes, figs, apricots, cranberries...well maybe not goji berries
• Cooked fruit, even without sweetener: so apples, peaches, anything you'd put in a cobbler or pie, EVEN if you made it without sugar and used a butter-almond flour-cinnamon crumble topping with no sugar.
• Some fresh fruit: figs, stone fruits, berries.
• Sweet potatoes. Fried, baked, mashed, no sweetener ever.

I have been known to overdo it on roasted vegetables with a little bit of natural sweetness -- brussels sprouts! Cauliflower! Carrots and parsnips! 

I don't really know what to do about it. It's not that I'm weak or lack discipline -- I can keep cereal and cookies and granola bars and berries around, for the other people in the household, since those are so firmly OFF LIMITS in my mind, I don't even consider them food to me. I make mashed potatoes and even homemade baked fries for the rest of the household, and don't touch them. I even bake with the kids, brownies, muffins, and I don't eat a single one! I do have incredible willpower, despite what it looks like!

But anything I think of as "mine" (sugar free, flour free cookies, apples baked with cinnamon, heck, meat loaf) is in danger.

It's awfully hard to be the primary shopper/cook/lunch packer/kitchen manager when you are constantly dancing around your own triggers. If I go too long without eating, like more than 5 or 6 hours, I no longer get shaky or hypoglycemic -- the physical issues are well under control -- but I get my weird disordered eating issues triggered and start thinking, good, that's good, you didn't eat, now you just have to go the rest of the day without eating! Don't eat. You're good if you don't. You're bad if you do. 

Now, on meds, I can step back and know that's not right, can ignore the shrieking in my head and make myself eat something good, an egg or whatever. And then the voices turn off.

Jesus. I don't even know where to start with this shit. I wish I didn't love food, or cooking, or any of it. Wellbutrin is what they prescribe to people with binge eating disorder, but it hasn't done a thing for me in that regard. 

 

 

 

Comments

[Maggie]

I wonder if you were "allowed" to eat all food if your obsession with certain foods would lose power. I have read (and noticed with myself) that food has a much weaker pull when it's not given so much status (ie a good food or a bad food, a food that will make me good, a food I should hide...). It sounds like the bingeing on "good" foods is your rebellious side flipping off your controlled side. It's all sarcastic like, "what? You said I was allowed to eat meat loaf..." I bet you could use that rebellious side to your advantage. It could made the eating disorder it's bitch.

[Jo]

I thought the same thing, Maggie, and it didn't work for me, sadly. The binge behavior has been in place since I was a little kid and I suspect there's some chemical thing at work (my dad has a binge disorder, among other things). Plus I really just physically cannot handle most carby stuff. Even little bits have far-ranging effects.

Well, wait -- it worked very well when I was hypomanic. That was the only time it worked. Tip the scale a bit either way and kablooey.

Don't worry, I am TOTALLY going to bring it up with my therapist, who has no idea what she's gotten herself into. :)

[Patch]

I'm pretty sure there is a lengthy German word that would sum up the way in which I agree with you. xx

[Jill]

I am reading, for the second time, Women Food and God. It's about our relationship with food and how it isn't about the food. There is a lot of wisdom in there, and no creepy God stuff, but good stuff. You might take a peek at it.

[juliag]

Hmmm...never really thought of myself as a binger...but you kind of just described me. Great. And to be honest, that's another thing I like about pregnancy: the morning sickness is the most natural appetite control I've ever had. It makes me eat a small meal every two hours and I absolutely can not overeat. I've wondered if they could make a synthetic morning sickness drug. I eat so much more "naturally" and am forced to listen to my body.

[Dan Aharon]

Wellbutrin didn't help me with that either. But what do you think is in play here really? I'd reflexively say that you have two common things leading to overeating; depression leading to self-medicating with delicious things, plus an addiction to sugars perhaps not related to mood. Do you suspect something else?
I'm starting to think that meds that raise a person from clinical depression can't really help with eating disorders if the person is still fundamentally convinced deep down that he or she is a putz. You'll still run to the half-gallon carton of Blue Bunny Bordeaux Cherry Chocolate Chip and slurp on that reassuring tit till its gone. Which would imply that talk therapy is the way to self-love [snicker] and a svelte body, but so far my years of therapy have helped fuck-all with that. In any case, you should maintain pride that you can do what so many find impossibly hard: running, exercising, working off the food. In my eyes, it's as if you somehow quit cigarettes and cocaine cold turkey with every run.

[Jo]

You're right, Dan. Cigarettes and cocaine ARE the answer.

I have to make a phone call.

But seriously: I think there are at least 2 things at play, and one of them is purely physiological and has to do with my insulin resistance. Carbs, especially refined sugar and flour, to someone with metabolic problems, are like crack. As in they light up your brain in exactly the same way. For real. So that's one thing. The other thing is that I *do* sometimes use food to take care of myself when I am feeling, I dunno, undernurtured? Like it's the one way in the universe that I am going to be cared for. Which is not true but blah blah you know how it is.

[Heather]

Me to a T. And so far I'm ignoring doing anything about it. It is flat out ridiculous how many prunes I buy. And many sweet potatoes worth of roasted fries. Oh, yeah, and I love meat loaf.
Oh, yes, and beer.

[May ProblemUterus]

You sound EXACTLY like me in terms of the foods and the PCOS. Carbs are crack. I wish so very much that I could eat moderately of these items.

[jilbur]

I guess my lame observation on this is, it's the typical frustrating complexity of co-morbidity: I'd wager there are psychiatric, psychological and endocrine issues all in a gorgeous, mind-fucking orchestration here. The 'list' is pretty much all-inclusive, right? it's not as though there's anything that you could digest that could NOT be on the list, but some of them (e.g. insulin-triggers) much more problematic than others. And to top it, it's inaccurate to distinguish absolutely between 'endocrine' and 'psychiatric', since there's such a strong integration of endocrine factors in neurochemistry. And then, even if a behavior starts out psychiatrically, the negative experiences resulting form a pattern that has a psychological effect, a 'story' that it's hard to interrupt. I think if my shrink were eavesdropping on this one, she'd put in a strong bid for trying some new behavioral techniques while you're sorting out the rest of it--because they can really have some powerful psychiatric benefits as well. Even stuff that sounds incredibly stupid, like the ole rubber-band-on-the-wrist, or stocking an inventory of tangible immediate (non-food) rewards for re-directing behavior patterns that make you miserable (and this would include re-directing the impulse to ignore hunger in order to be 'good')--these methods sound like crude Skinnerism, but they can really provide a lot of relief and keep your momentum in the right direction. Maybe a fat iTunes card, and you download a song from a wish list when you succeed in redirection? Don't know if this is helpful but I hope so.

[roo]

I don't have too much to add, but I recognize this dynamic in my own life, in different ways.

Anyway, my understanding, as a still relative n00b to bipolar, is that most antidepressants are actually pretty dangerous, and can kick off rapid mood cycling. Not sure if that applies to Wellbutrin, but I thought I'd pass along what docs have told me.

Also-- I kinda wish there were a way to medicate so I could just float in early hypomania forever. Wouldn't that be great? Like being a superhero, minus the actually thinking you're a superhero part.

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