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.

What I Have Learned (Recovery Freedoms)

Hi people! It's been a while since I last posted. For some reason I just couldn't get inspired enough to finish all the posts I was working on so I decided to do a different one.

In my posts I tend to stay pretty far from my personal life, I'm usually a pretty private person on my instagram and blog. But this time I'm going to cross that line because this post is going to be basically about how my life has improved since I started my treatment. This is going to be a collection of what I have learned during my recovery from BED, and a comparison between my life before and after it. Even though I cannot say that I'm fully recovered yet, this experience has given so much freedom -and has been very challenging at the same time-.

And well, without any further explanation I'm just going to start saying that during my recovery I...

♡Have been able to learn to enjoy cheat meals: For example, I was able to go to Dunkin' Donuts with my boyfriend without bingeing. Every time I went before my treatment I would a) not eat anything or b) binge. But this time I was able to enjoy myself without obsessing about the food.

♡Have started to eat in social situations without focusing on the food but on the people I'm talking to. Actually being present. I don't know if you can relate to me, maybe you can. But this used to be terrible for me. I used to be stressed when in company because I just couldn't stop thinking about dieting or bingeing even if I didn't want to think about it, so I didn't feel 100% present, but now I do. This has given me the freedom of being able to go anywhere I want and to any event I want to go without worrying about what I'll be eating or not.

♡Celebrated my birthday (two times!): I celebrated it with my family and the next day with my former school mates, and I had lots of fun. I had the freedom of enjoying the company of the people I love instead of being focusing bingeing or not bingeing all the time. Now, the week of my birthday was stressful because I ate extra junk food... but I managed to get back on track the next week. And I didn't binge :)

♡Have been scared, many times: During the first week of my recovery I took a huge leap of faith (metaphorically speaking, of course) that was starting to follow a non-restrictive meal plan. This meant putting an end to my diets, to my "I binged yesterday so today I'll skip dinner" sort of behavior. I had little control, I could only choose between my options for each meal and there was no calorie-counting involved. My first week was really scary, really. I was surprised at the amounts of food I had to eat at every meal, I was scared that I could gain weight but I still followed it. After a few days I noticed that I had fewer and fewer urges to binge. And now, that more time has passed, after 70+ days without bingeing I can say that this leap of faith was a great decision, if not one of the most important ones in my recovery.
Because after all that initial fear of gaining weight because of bigger portions... I stopped restricting, bingeing even managed to lose weight as a consequence of that without it being the center of my life and without harming my body on the process.

♡Have learned "normal" eating behaviors: Deciding what to eat pretty quickly. Since I follow a very flexible and non-restrictive meal plan, choosing what I'm going to eat is very easy now. I pick what I want and eat until I'm satisfied. I'm slowly reconnecting to my body.

♡Regained the ability to focus! I was having issues with my concentration because all my energy was being wasted in my eating disorder, but I can use that energy in my real interests now.

♡Am learning to deal with my perfectionism: I am a perfectionist, which can be helpful but dangerous too if you let it rule your life. So I'm learning to deal with it, I'm starting to "be friends" with it and my anxiety levels are very well regulated.

♡I have (finally) started to enjoy exercise as a part of a healthy lifestyle and not as a tool for weight-loss or punishment: I really used to hate sports, they were only a calorie-burning system for me. But now I get to enjoy my 30-minutes on the treadmill with some nice music, it makes me feel good and it's good for my health.

❤︎ My recovery has been AMAZING for me. I have learned a lot from it, my life has improved in so many ways that I'm still surprised by it. When I look back I can see how tangled I was with my eating disorder and how much it was ruling my life. I was aware of it but now that I can see it with some distance I have better perspective. Now I know how much I was missing. But I also know there was always hope and at least in my case seeking treatment was the best option. The following points are the most meaningful for me in this post.❤︎

❤︎ My recovery made me step out of my comfort zone (of dieting/bingeing): Cliché? yes. But it's true. I needed to do it. But I wasn't really able to until I asked for professional help and I finally arrived to the conclusion that my self-worth can never be tied to my weight. In the end, leaving my old, unhealthy and repetitive comfort zone gave me a new, much better and healthier one which is balance :).

❤︎ Asking for help didn't make me a loser: I am a proud person, and sometimes I can be stubborn, so asking for help wasn't an easy decision for me, it took me about a year. I really thought I could recover on my own and I tried many methods, I read books, investigated about the subject, meditated, tried different approaches, but in the end I figured out that I couldn't do it alone. I wanted to recover with all my heart, but I didn't know how or where to start, it was just too much for me, and looking back, that's ok. When I finally figured it out, I broke the silence. And it did take a lot from me to say those words. It was hard telling my mother that I wasn't well, that I needed help desperately, but by then I knew that to get my life back I had no other choice. And now that I think about it I don't feel like I am loser for asking for help, I feel that doing it was very brave. I was scared, depressed, and disoriented but I still wanted to fight to get better. I chose to recover. I chose to get my life back, and I don't regret it for a single second. It hasn't been easy but has been completely worth it.

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Ok people! I really hope you liked this post. I wrote it so you can see how much recovery can change a person's life, it definitely has changed mine. If you have any questions you can always leave a comment here or send me a direct on my instagram, also if you want me to write about a specific topic related to binge eating disorder please let me know. Stay strong everybody, you can do this!

Pol ❤︎