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.

Heading into Blogland...

Hello there.

I've been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while, though there were many things stopping me from doing it, I finally decided.

There are lots of blogs in Blogland. Blogs about fashion, decoration, healthy living, cooking...
But when I needed to find a blog to which I could really relate, I didn't (maybe I didn't search well enough...). So now, that my own struggle is pretty much reaching its end, my experience might be helpful to somebody out there dealing with the same crap I've had to deal. I will openly talk about my problems, and how I've dealt with them. One of my main objectives here is to be as honest as possible, because bloggers sometimes don't really understand how much damage they do when they lie. So, here I go:

I am Pol, 19 years old, and a student. I love writing, reading, singing, cooking and hanging out with my friends and boyfriend. I don't really like my career so I will probably switch to another one soon. I have a cute hamster as a pet and if I wasn't allergic I'd LOVE to have a dog. I love my life right now, but it wasn't always like this. In fact, not at all.

Because I had/have an eating disorder (and many other issues related to it).

Which one? I'm not even sure. I was always overweight, ever since I was a little kid, I never knew what being thin was. I wasn't obese, just chubby, but my self-esteem was low enough for me to decide falling into the deep, deep rabbit hole of eating disorders.

Long story short, I intermittently gained and lost weight for years, until I was 18, got obsessed with it and lost 26 pounds in 5 months. I don't want to over-dramatize my experience, but it was terrible for me: food was the only thing in my mind, I never went out, I didn't enjoy my life, I stopped wanting to live because 'ew-calories'. I became a terribly bitter person and everybody who knew me could sense it. It was pretty stupid because getting thinner was supposed to make me happy, not to change me into this sick, obsessed, manipulative person.

So like most of the obsessed-with-food people, I fell into a bingeing cycle after my restrictive period... that caught me for a whole year. Once again, the only thing I thought about was food. It was terrible. I gained all the weight back. I tried everything but I just couldn't stop bingeing. I felt like I completely lost control of my life. I tried restricting and ended up hardcore bingeing every single time, it was a cycle I had no escape from.

I have always been an anxious person, but all this food-obsession crap skyrocketed my levels of it. It was so bad that I had to run away from many social situations. I was having anxiety crisis all day long, and thinking that people could discover me made me even more anxious. I didn't want to get up in the mornings, I felt like life isn't something worth living, that each day was a struggle and that I would never feel well again.

A relative of mine passed away under dramatic circumstances. It was an accident. She was pregnant. My family and I were crushed. That was when I decided I couldn't keep hurting myself anymore. I just couldn't be that ungrateful. Sometimes you just can't have everything you want the way you want it, and that's life. I decided that if I had and eating disorder or something I just had to fight it, no matter how hard. Because, shit, it really is hard but I just couldn't keep dwelling on how 'unlucky' I was.

So I stared fighting my demons. My anxiety, my low self-esteem, my bingeing, my obsession with food. It's taken me eight months to get where I am today, but I'm finally finding peace. Seeing a therapist was one of the best decisions I could have made. He taught to me try being more balanced, and to understand that being fat doesn't make me less of a person, but he also encouraged me to take proper care of my health, which I think is the best path. You don't need to be skinny, but you do need to take care of yourself. And your shit too.

I can't say I'm 'oh-so-healthy' and 'soooorecovered' because I would be lying. I still have rough moments, I still have bad days. But that's what they are, only moments or days. The most of the time I'm feeling great, wanting to live and ready to keep fighting this crap. I want to look back and think 'I can't believe how much it mattered'. I want to leave this behind so each time I meet somebody I won't have to worry about them finding out how troubled I am. I just want to be ok.

So I'm working toward achieving it! I'm rebuilding my confidence, self-esteem and health. I'm kicking the binges out of my life, and all the crap associated to them. I'm also trying to lose weight so I stay on an average range that makes me feel more confident - and I'm doing it the healthy way! No shortcuts this time!

As I pointed out before, if my experiences helps anybody out there in the world of internet... I'll be satisfied about writing here :)

Hugs to those taking the time to read me,
Pol