Not Letting My Guard Down Again (An Experience)

Hi people! :)

Today, August the First is my binge-free day number 87! Which is a great achievement for me, but if I wasn't capable of facing the experience I'm going to tell you about in this post I wouldn't have reached that number. This happened to me about two weeks ago. It was a really hard and unexpected challenge that I had to face and I'm still surprised that I actually came victorious from it. 

I met with some friends and we decided we would order a pizza and some garlic sticks, I was very hungry, but it was alright. I had known during the whole day that I would eat more than usual with them and I was OK with that, and since I had faced those kind of situations before and hadn't binged I didn't feel anxious at all.

So, we received the pizza, we payed and we started choosing a movie to watch. While we were doing that my friends started eating the garlic sticks and I saw them and thought "Whoa, they look tasty! I'll have one", I felt no danger, I didn't worry at all, so I grabbed one and smelled it. And in the moment I tasted it. CLICK. My mind went blurry, and I even started feeling dizzy. I hadn't felt like that in such a long time that I had almost forgotten how strong it felt, but there I was. I felt like I was in the middle of binge, but I wasn't! I had just tried a garlic stick! I didn't understand anything, so I started freaking out. I immediately knew that if I didn't find a way to stop feeling like that, I would end up hardcore bingeing for real.

I tried to calm myself down and ate my garlic stick very slowly but even after that I still felt hungry so I had a slice of pizza. Then I was physically satisfied, but "I" wanted to keep eating. In the moment and because I was with my friends the best idea I could come up with was waiting for the urge to pass. So I waited, and waited, and waited. And it slowly started to fade away. 

It was especially hard not to binge this time because I wasn't expecting this urge to hit me like this after being "urge-free" for so long. I had let my guards down, and also because I was hungry when the urge to binge appeared. So in the moment I stopped feeling hungry not bingeing was sheer willpower, thankfully I recognized the urge immediately, that feeling was so different to what I usually feel everyday now that it would have been impossible for me not to recognize it.

While I didn't technically binge in spite of how freakin' hard it was not to, I did feel like I did. My body felt like it did, or at least I felt like that in my head, the feeling was very real. So after that experience I feared that I had to start from 0. I feared that I had to be scared when going out, that I'd tremble when walking outside a bakery, or that an urge could hit me again on any moment. 

But it wasn't like that at all. While I'm still a little nervous that it may happen again, it just hasn't and I feel pretty much like the recovery-me again. I'm back to normal. It was a weird and really scary experience, but that was it.

So... I gave a deep thought to it and after talking to my therapist we concluded that I had an emotional link to garlic sticks -which is true, even if it's funny, I would eat them hidden at nights when I was a child and that made me see them as a forbidden food-. I didn't notice but I was thinking in black and white with this specific food, then you add that I was hungry, plus the emotional baggage and well, and you got a shiny urge to binge. 

My therapist recommended me to make a list of all the foods I still consider forbidden (in my case: garlic sticks, cinnamon rolls, frappuccinos, McFlurry's, and Churros) which will be very helpful in case I have to or want to face them in the near future, to be prepared.  

I can learn from this that even when I'm doing very well in my recovery I still have to keep working hard at it every day. I can't let my guards off. That doesn't mean I have to be worried 24/7, but since I have a past of binge eating, it's just still too soon to stop worrying. Again, there's a balance I need to find.

And well there will be some days that I will have to use my willpower to decide to fight the urges -those who follow me on instagram probably know that I have my own technique to fight my urges but even that technique requires some amount of willpower at some point-, even if those days are the fewer. But here's the brighter side of this: If we keep ignoring these brain's signals, our brains will learn that they are useless and they will eventually just stop sending them. That's how we will eventually break free from these compulsive habits. It will work. But we need to stop hurting ourselves in every other aspect to achieve that (we can't focus on dieting and expect to stop bingeing).


Soooo. This post was (again) very experiential, but I hope you liked it :) Remember that you can always leave a comment, a question or send me a direct through instagram <3 Stay strong, you got this.