Things here have gotten slightly dusty as I have been quietly contemplating things.

Okay, not so quietly.

I broke down in front of my husband, asking him what is so wrong with me that I would get so far and lose so much weight only to gain it all back and then some.

He held me and soothed me saying, “Nothing is wrong with you. The important thing is that you keep on trying. You never sit back and say you can’t be bothered. You’re always trying.”

To say my marriage has suffered because of my weight seems like an understatement some days and an overly dramatic statement on others. But to hear him say that made me feel like less of a nut job with a problem and more like a determined woman.

Yes, I lost over forty pounds at one point. Yes, I gained over forty pounds back. But I’m not letting that stop me from anything. There is just something in my brain that doesn’t stop. I try food diaries, I try time on scale, time off scale, I try no carbs, low carbs and raw eating… and through it all, I never stop.

I was doing transcription work for a woman a while back, and she worked as a psychic. In exchange for some of my work, she offered to do a psychic reading on my husband. I am very protective of him, so I sat holding his hand while she read him.

During the reading, she turned to me and said, “Your family… I get… I keep getting a word for you and your family: Perseverance. You’re all survivors.”

She then turned back to my husband, but what she said has always stuck with me because it wasn’t a prediction or some lame general statement. She gave me a word that rang true for my past, my present and my future.

So when my husband hugged me and ran his hand through my hair as I cried, saying that at least I keep on trying, I felt the energy flow into me again.

I don’t know why I’m so afraid of being at a healthy weight. I don’t remember the big ‘event’ that turned me into a binge eater when I was only four years old. But I do know that I want to be healthy, I want to have a child and I will never stop trying.

I mentioned yesterday that I had committed to one month of keeping a food diary (amongst other things) and I thought I would delve into that a bit further.

According to the BED workbook:

To get in touch with your body, you’ll need to eat regularly for at least a month. Three meals a day and one or two snacks. Even when you’re not hungry.

If you thought I resisted the idea of keeping a food diary, then you have no idea how much I resisted this – especially the end: even when you’re not hungry.

The thing about this is that they are right. Maybe give or take on the month thing, but you need to eat regular meals before you really know what hunger is like. Many of us who are overweight/have BED/have disordered eating know two functions: not hungry and FEED ME NOW. I thought it was a good thing for a long time to live that way because, hey, I wasn’t eating when I wasn’t hungry, right?

Wrong. Not only was I eating whenever I wanted to, still, regardless of hunger but I was slowing down my metabolism. Screwing up my metabolism is more like it.

I’m definitely not for stuffing your face if you’re not hungry, but in the few days I’ve been eating regularly scheduled meals and snacks, I’ve been amazed at how much my energy has increased, my awareness/concentration skills have increase and how much my tummy is loving it. My body is still in a state of shock that not only am I feeding it regularly but I’m also not feeding it to the point of discomfort.

At first I thought a month was too long. I would get to know my body before that. I knew was hunger was… Not so much. Now as I discover what benefits there are to eating regularly (as well as healthily) and think about how my life was one big disordered eating catastrophe, I am wondering if one month is enough.

I don’t know how long beyond the month I’ll keep up with the weekly menus and the daily food diary, but I do know that eating regularly is a rest of my life kind of thing. There are things working now that have never worked (no details, just trust me) and this is only after a short time. I feel a bit silly because I feel like this is stuff I should know… but we all have to start somewhere. And more often than not, it’s the simple stuff that trips us up anyway.

A couple weeks ago, I received and finally started working with The Binge Eating and Compulsive Overeating Workbook: An Integrated Approach to Overcoming Disordered Eating by Carolyn, Coker Ross. While I wasn’t sure what to expect thanks to not being able to find books about BED up until now, I have to say that I’m already impressed with this book…

…and resisting it.

It’s funny, knowing myself well enough to know when my resistance isn’t some gut feeling telling me not to do something but rather a resistance to getting better. There is a restless, trapped feeling that I get when I’m working toward a more stable relationship with food that usually ends in disaster. However, this time, something in me seems to know resisting is silly because I need to get better. I need to and the time is now.

I’ve made it through the first section of the book, which concentrates on getting stability through eating patterns and learning more about foods so we don’t judge them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. While I would still argue that Coke Zero is deadly and thus ‘bad’, it’s not real food anyway. And arguing for the sake of being pedantic is just another way of me resisting.

In the case of this workbook, stability comes with meal time scheduling, setting achievable goals, creating a menu and keeping a food diary.

Ah, the dreaded food diary.

The Bloke has been very good at not giving me the whopping ‘I told you so’ that he could give me. He’s been after me for years to keep a food diary. I tried it a few times (hating it all along the way) before finally declaring that keeping a food diary ‘just isn’t for me’.

Well, tough titties, as they say here, because keeping a food diary is part of the regime now whether I like it or not.

It is strange – and somehow fitting – that something I have resisted so hard for so long is now something that I have committed to doing for at least a month (more on ‘why a month?’ later). While it’s not quite like the food diaries I’ve had in the past, it’s still the same thing at heart. And yet, now it has a calming effect for me. My food diary, the amount of paperwork, thinking, writing, etc that I am doing solely for my own benefit right now feels cautiously good.

Part of me still wants to grab a packet of Tim Tams and run for the hills, but it is a small part. More of me – the newly discovered narcissism, perhaps – wants to stay and explore this. It’s like the true spirit of me is sitting in the back of my head, saying, “You’re doing all this for me? All this love, devotion, attention and hard work? For me?”

It’s a new world, there’s no doubt about it. I’m taking care of myself with kid gloves in a way I never have before. I’m devoting time, effort and study to understanding my problem and fixing. It’s aggravating, scary, confronting and a lot more, but it’s also saving my life.

So here’s to one day down and plenty more to come.