Thursday, June 11, 2009

Peeling the Onion: I Haven't Been Self-Medicating with Food

Great. Now that I've announced that I haven't been self-medicating with food, I may just go on a wild binge soon and start self-medicating with food. I just like to clear the air beforehand because in no way do I want it to appear like I've actually learned how to control myself. That is a complete and utter fantasy. 

Let me begin at the beginning though. In the past month I've had two highly anxious, kind-of-dark weeks. Meaning I was panic stricken about some work and school responsibilities and I spent a couple of days holed up in my jammies watching nonsensical movies to ease my troubled mind. My typical modus operandi has been in the past to eat my way through such a week. To eat and eat and eat and eat and then eat some more to distract myself from the pain and dark misery that I'm experiencing.

Then I went on the allergy-elimination diet and my dark weeks turned into semi-troubling and painful kind of weeks where I still wanted my jammies and movies but no longer was their misery and pain and intense darkness because there was no fallout from my out-of-control bingeing.

Cue a complete and utter miracle in my life. 

Yes, I still have bad days and bad weeks and no, things are not always hunky dory in my life, but my miserable weeks just don't seem to produce the high emotion and spectacular drama of misery that I used to be able to wrangle out of them. 

I think I was a bit shocked this last time that I wasn't bingeing. I was surviving on the grapes and rice cakes and almond butter. And I was getting hungry one day and didn't want to cook and thought "Who cares? I'm just going to go buy whatever I want and eat it." Which got modified to "Well, at least if I'm going to buy something, I want it to be pretty spectacular food because if I have to feel miserable for two or three days after that food I want it to be really, really good." Which got modified to "Well, if I really want to eat something spectacular that isn't made out of factory-farmed, antibiotic-laced beef, I should just make it myself from grass-fed beef. Those taste better anyway," which moved me to "Well, if I'm going to all the trouble to make this burger than I'm going to go whole hog and do it up right with fresh guacamole, nitrate-free bacon, sauteed onions and mushrooms and almond cheese," which brought me right back to the fact that making it myself was likely going to taste better and I would be happier with the end result than going out and buying a greasy burger and trans-fat full fries. 

Which meant I wasn't going out to buy food. Which nixed the bingeing in the bud. 

I have plenty of options at home if I want really good food: coconut milk smoothies, spinach turkey burgers, almond butter brownies, almond chocolate chip cookies, roasted potatoes, fried onions, salmon with avocado slices and the list goes on. I've already vetted every ingredient in those meals and know exactly what I'm putting into my body. I don't have to wonder if the guacamole has a gluten filler or if the sauce has high-fructose corn syrup or if the potatoes were deep fried. I don't have to pull cheese off the burger or wipe away the bbq sauce that I asked them to hold and they forgot. I don't have to wish that for all of my effort and time I was eating something that actually tasted so amazingly good that it lit up all the cells in my body with good vibrations. 

Plus, when I do eat food that is full of sugar, dairy, corn and wheat and all kinds of other additives and chemicals, I get started on this pretty awful treadmill that is hard to get off. Those foods set off cravings in my brain that tend to overpower every other thought inside me and turn on powerful biological and chemical components in my body that make me want those foods over and over and over again all the while making me sick and unhappy and unhealthy. 

It is such a powerful cycle too that it is hard---very, very, very hard--for me to pull myself out of its vortex as I get brain fog, feel depressed and feel lethargic. Then nothing tastes good or sounds good or is good for me. Right now, it just isn't worth it. 

All of that logic and reasoning and suddenly I realized that I had talked myself out of bingeing. 

It doesn't mean that tomorrow I won't binge. It doesn't mean that I won't ever eat a greasy burger and fries from a local burger joint sometime soon. It doesn't mean that I have it all figured out. 

All this story is for me is about one time when I was stressed and overwhelmed and tired I didn't choose into my old behavior pattern because suddenly the cost of that behavior was much higher than the benefit. 

Really though even for that to happen one time for me is a miracle. So, I had to document its reality because I know that sometime in the future when I'm brain fogged and lethargic and full of cravings, this kind of stuff will help remind me why I'm choosing to live the way I'm living and why it really does matter after all. 

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