I finish eating my plate of mac & cheese and notice it’s empty. My stomach feels full, and definitely didn’t need seconds. A voice in my head goes “but I still want to eat.” I debate if I want to keep eating or not. I think of the pros & cons (or more like rationalize the cons of eating). There’s a decisive moment where I think “hell yeah I’m gonna have seconds”, and that’s when the fat switch turns on.
To eat, or not to eat — this is a regular conversation I have on a daily basis, and almost at every meal. I am trying really hard to re-train myself to only eat when I’m hungry. Damn it’s hard. How is something so basic to “living” so difficult for me? Oh also, let me clarify one thing. I’m not anorexic, or bulimic although I might have very mild tendencies towards the latter. I binge eat. Not every meal I have leads to a binge, but I contemplate binging almost after every meal.
Whether to turn on that “fat switch” is a battle I face at the end of each meal. It’s also a battle I fight when I’m bored, stressed, anxious, or sad. Throughout my life, I always looked at food for comfort. Feeling full dulls the emotional pain. It’s easy to turn on the switch, but obviously it has many consequences. Gaining weight is one thing (and I struggle from being a tad overweight), but the shame and guilt is so much worse. My self esteem gets buried under the shame and guilt and I know my everyday demeanor shows my lack of self confidence. Even though I know how much hate and regret I have after a binge, the urge to eat is stronger.
Once I turn on the switch, I don’t care about anything. I don’t care how full I am, the calories, how much guilt I will feel after. The switch only turns off when I’m physically in pain from eating, and I come to realize the how much food I inhaled. As I mentioned earlier, I am not bulimic, but I have moments where I debate if throwing up is worth it. Maybe the shame and guilt will go out without the food too? I’ll admit I’ve tried this a handful of times, but thankfully the act of throwing up was so painful that I decided I didn’t want to keep on doing it.
I’m still in the process of relearning how to eat and when to stop eating. Throughout my journey with therapy, I learned that muscle memory is stronger than we like to think. For example, I tend to binge when I’m watching Netflix in my bed (yeah I eat in bed and it’s gross). Over the years, my muscle memory convinced my brain to eat when I’m in bed. As a first step, my therapist recommended me to stop eating in bed. I mean this is something I shouldn’t have done to begin with, but let’s be honest, we’ve all done it at one point. While this isn’t a magic fix, I do have fewer binge eating instances-granted I only started a couple of weeks ago, but hey at least it’s less than what it was before. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have those “should I eat more” conversations with myself, but it seems like the voices to eat more are talking to me now as opposed to yelling. I always wonder if binge eating will be a permanent part of my life, but I guess I need to live to find out.
