It's an easy scenario to fall completely off track. Yesterday was Saturday and looked something like this. Wake up at 9:00 am. Make a sugar-free chai latte with almond milk, 45 calories, and eat a tiny handful of peanuts, no more than 50 calories, and do work even though my dissertation stipend has been suspended for now. At 11:30 am, run 10 miles at a 7:00 minute mile pace. Come home energized and feeling great with an awesome lunch restaurant in mind, since I haven't stuck with my meal plan at all today.
Instead? Drunch has been planned in my absence. Drunch is drunk brunch. The restaurant offers brunch food and very cheap mimosas. There are 4 of us and we drink 4 bottles of champagne and 2 fireball shots a piece. I eat 4 sweet potato fries and half of a caprese sandwich, picking out the mozzarella and reducing it to tomatoes, basil, balsamic vinaigrette, and the restaurant's (thankfully) thin wheat bread.
Drinking does two things to me. It reduces my appetite to nothing, giving me an excuse to be full on booze and not hungry.
Alcohol also reduces my desire to come across as normal with my eating habits - essentially making me not give a shit that everyone sees me restricting.
At 4:00 pm, we are finished with "brunch". My boyfriend (I'll call him P from now on to make him seem more real to you readers), takes us on a tour of our neighborhood to house hunt. He is going to buy a house soon, which is very exciting, and a fun way to spend the afternoon with our two friends, who get really into it. After, everyone is tired from day drinking so we nap.
I wake up at 9:00 pm with a hangover. I pick at snacks... popcorn, peanut butter crackers, cereal... all of which come right back up. Purging is so easy when you're hungover and eating food with liquid. I don't even use my hands anymore, making it such a destructive, addictive, and impossible to overcome habit in recovery. I go back to bed. At 2:00 am I wake up again. The hangover still exist, but has quietly subsided. I prepare a bowl of oatmeal. Eat it. Vomit. Not pretty. I crawl back into bed, a sad and defeated mess. P cuddles me up and we fall asleep until now.
This is not a good day for me. I did everything wrong. Overexercising, drinking til near blackout, severely restricting food intake, and purging anything I ate in the evening. While I am proud I did not engage in binge/purge like many previous weekends, I am still very disappointed in this. I am already facing additional Boosts at treatment this week to speed up weight gain, something I've literally had nightmares about this weekend, and drinking/not eating/purging the weekend away is not going to help with weight gain.
Where do I go from here? In recovery, I am trying to learn from my mistakes and create action plans for future similar situation. Next weekend, I will say no to drunch, and instead voice my opinion about where I would like to go, what I would like to do, how impossible it is for me to "just don't drink that much". I have already figured out that scheduling meetings during the week around 3:30 pm or 4:00 pm for school or the various projects and activities I'm involved in helps reduce engaging in symptoms after day treatment, so I will continue with that.
I will not consider this weekend a complete failure. I do recognize a very small, and mostly insignificant in the scheme of things, successes.
- I only ran 10 miles yesterday. Most days, this number is more like 15-16.
- I ordered a caprese sandwich with sweet potato fries because that's what I wanted to eat in the moment. Didn't eat much of it, but still ordered what I wanted, not a salad.
Small steps, people. We can do this.
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