Compensation

It's Monday morning and I'm doing something I really shouldn't be doing this early in the morning, after a mostly successful weekend, and to start off a new week.

After about 30 minutes at my desk, I couldn't get a pretty terrible knot out of my stomach. I feel very anxious and tense this morning and I think it's because of the amount and type of food I ate yesterday. While it was all delicious, I pushed myself far out of my comfort zone, to the point where I wasn't comfortable with feelings of hunger by dinner time. Instead of listening to my body, I snacked on safe foods - popcorn, granola bars, carrots, and while I did eat enough and feel full eventually, the constant grazing and volume prompted a strong urge to purge. Unfortunately, I didn't think things through and ended up throwing in the towel. I'm really disappointed in general, but also because the rest of the weekend had been so wonderful. I also hate that feeling hungry (and full) still make me anxious.

So this morning my stomach was pretty upset and I have wicked acid reflux. I think my body is so confused by how well I do sometimes, eating enough at proper times, and how terrible I still treat it at others, purging or binging and purging or restricting. I decided to take a walk before it gets really hot, so here I am, 1.5 miles from my office, blogging and actually feeling better. Now I just have to accept blogging quietly at my desk instead of during a compensation speed walk.

Last day of the conference

Today is the final day of the conference I've attended for the past 3 days. I wish I could say that it's been a dream of a 3 days and I've been 100% accountable to myself, but that wouldn't quite be the truth.

In the past, I've spent most of my time at conferences starving in sessions, slaving away in the hotel gym, drinking too much while alone at the bar, then reaching my wits' end and ultimately purging, cycling into binging and purging, the conference away. It's a depressing, devastating cycle, and one that I fall into each time I'm left to my own devices.

This conference was going to be different.  I resolved to avoid eating disorder and compulsive behavior at all costs and choose to enjoy my time exploring a new city instead. Each (very early) morning, I dragged myself out of bed and did my run. I think this was a much better strategy than waiting til the evening after the conference concludes because I'm much more likely to eat what I want, when I want, if I've already finished my run. When I save my run for later in the day, I tend to resort back to safe foods high in protein and carbohydrates and devoid of any fat. I think it's this disordered differentiation of foods as allowed and not allowed that really sets me up.

Anyway, after my run, I ate breakfast at the hotel buffet, free to conference attendees (!!) and it was probably my favorite meal of each day. I love experimenting with different combinations of granola and yogurt, adding a variety of sweeteners like jelly or honey, fresh and dried fruit, and almond slivers or walnuts. I missed my usual oatmeal combinations by today, the last day of the conference, but not too much! I'm definitely going to start rotating oatmeal with the yogurt/granola combo, especially because I feel my weight has dropped over the past week or so. But that's for another discussion.

Each morning at breakfast, I grabbed an apple and granola bar to eat for snack since I noticed intense hunger by 11 or 11:30 am. I'm proud of myself for adding this snack since breakfast concluded at 8 am and lunch didn't start until almost 1 pm, way too long for this revved up metabolism. Lunch was fine each day and consisted of a veggie sandwich and salad from a wonderful spread of food. It made me really appreciate the food I've been keeping myself from for all of these years. I'm truly sad by how much time I wasted and opportunities I let slip by in my 9-10 year struggle.

I ran into roadblocks each evening, mostly due to the fact I had to present my poster and run a booth in a conference room with an open bar. This is still so difficult and anxiety inducing that I'm almost positive the slip-ups I've experienced during recovery have stemmed directly from situations with alcohol involved. Anyway, I managed to get a healthy and tasty dinner each night, but ended up purging since I was alone in my room for each meal. Next time, I have to eat outside or somewhere without a beckoning bathroom, and in the company of others. I did find something to snack on each night before bed though, a small victory in itself.

Anyway, I was hoping to have time for more updates during the conference, but I was very busy, running from sessions to our booth, to my room to finish work, etc. I'm ready to head home to my P and his Lula dog now, and I'm glad I've managed to (mostly) enjoy the conference and show myself I can be somewhat accountable to myself at this point in recovery.

Can't wait to be back in Atlanta for my next post! P and I and another couple are going to the Lion King this evening!

Recovery Ain't Easy

I haven't posted in a while because I've been so busy and focused on the momentum I carried out of residential. Luckily, I'm still on track and feeling positive though a stint in residential is ny no means a quick and easy fix. While P, my friends, and my family are easily convinced that I'm fixed as I scarff down breakfasts of oatmeal, lunches of veggie wraps with cheese and mayo, and dinners as wild as BBQ pork sandwiches, I still hear the eating disorder.

My biggest struggle has been resisting the urge to compensate for my daily food intake through exercise or sobriety. I'm over 45 days sober, but sometimes I worry it's the calories I'm avoiding instead of the fact that I'm likely an alcoholic. Either way, sobriety is helping me in every way except inducing hangovers bad enough to prevent over-exercising. Today at therapy, we worked on exploring how I'm still compensating and yes, occasionally purging and the impact of these behaviors on my recovery. I've vowed to keep a food and exercise log in an effort to keep myself in check, reimplement an escort system at home to make sure I'm not given the chance to purge after meals, and take a Boost every day I'm running to gain the weight my body lost after residential.

I am not going to have a completely perfect recovery process and that's okay. As long as I'm moving in the right direction, exploring the triggers underlying slip-ups, and trying my best to challenge all eating disorder thoughts, I can be very proud of myself every day.

Plans

Plans are always just plans without action.

First, I planned to lose weight by not eating anything but cereal and fruit as a senior in high school. I planned to run 8 miles every day, in addition to intense soccer practices and tournaments for my competitive soccer team. I planned to avoid social situations and restaurants where eating is not avoidable. I planned to have control, be perfect, and look the part. After I succeeded in losing 20 pounds, reaching a goal weight of 104 right before college, I was skinny enough to raise some red flags around school and home, prompting my pursuit of thin even more.

In college, I planned to maintain my thin physique and even lost weight during my first semester as a freshman soccer player. 100. What I didn't plan for was the introduction of alcohol to my lifestyle. Alcohol took hold in a way I could have never anticipated, made me relax, and loosened my grip completely on controlling my diet and exercise. The more I drank, the less I cared. Until drinking because the norm and the feelings of fat, ugly, and out of shape set in.

What I also didn't plan for was learning how to purge. I learned to purge during college by trying it once. I was somewhat of a natural, or at least had the ability to purge food fairly easily. Having the wherewithall to purge changes your life forever. It provides a guaranteed sense of guilt for keeping anything down. This aspect of an eating disorder can make everything so much more complicated. You don't want to eat, but you know you can and have minimal consequences on weight - at the expense of heavy consequences on health and quality of life. Learning to purge set the stage for the rest of my life. I type this blog 7 years after learning to purge and the repetitive emptying of my stomach has resulted in an inability to hold anything down. I purge hands-free now, simply bending over and releasing. Try recovering from that, even if you want to.

I have always planned to start living my life without my horrifying habits and binding eating disorder. I've always thought I could shake it if I really and truly tried. In recent years, I have started to hate feelings of fear and anxiety that accompany every bite of food and obsession with burning calories through exercise. I desperately want to be like my friends and significant others, giving zero thought to planning meals, exercise, and calories. No more calculating and recalculating calories in and calories out. No more undereating, overdrinking, and obsessive exercise. No more obsession over deviations in life that cause deviation in plans.

I planned to get over my eating disorder in college as a Nutrition and psychology major, then as an intern studying to be a Registered Dietitian in graduate school, and then as a PhD student studying, you guessed it, Nutrition. But as life progresses through ebbs and flows, trials and tribulations, and constant stress and strain, the eating disorder and associated issues persist, flaring up and subsiding slightly, but always existing.

Sometimes, more often than not, facing your fears requires changing your plans. Day treatment was an attempt to change my plans by facing my fears, but it's not enough for me. On Monday, I start residential treatment for my eating disorder, exercise addiction, and alcohol abuse after relapsing heavily over the past week and a half. Today, I've run 19 miles, thrown up 4 times and keeping no food down, and weigh 98 pounds. I am ready for treatment and I'm ready to be healthy and happy. I am ready. I am terrified, but I am ready.

Tips to reduce the binge/purge urge

Snow day alert! This means two important things. The boyfriend's white dog looks brown and I have a whole day to blog and reflect!

Today, I want to focus on several tips we discussed yesterday at treatment to reduce the urge and ability to binge and purge. Since this topic hits very close to home for me as an Anorexic binge-purge type, I was really interested in the discussion and hope to provide some helpful hints to anyone who may suffer from bulimia or is prone to binging and purging.

I've discussed briefly in several previous posts how triggering the process of weight gain and eating a lot of calories is to my binge/purge habit. Yesterday, sitting on the couch with P, I delved a little deeper into my binge/purge issues. I told him I didn't want to open a bag of mixed nuts in the kitchen on account of I'd want to eat the whole thing. He laughed and said, that's what you should be doing! It certainly makes sense to someone who doesn't know the extent of the problem and only knows you need to gain weight to eat a lot of something with a lot of calories. 

Unfortunately, eating an entire bag of mixed nuts, calories aside, would not work for me. It's practicing the binging I'm so prone to, and also not practicing self-control and preventing the loss of control feeling associated with binging and purging. Instead, I need to learn to listen to the new hunger and fullness cues that I've been experiencing through treatment. Hunger cues are wonderful and I'm actually excited to be writing this blog at 11:20 am (after having breakfast around 7:00 am), and feeling hungry again already, without having exercised. I feel comfortable relying on them to accurately instruct my body on how much I need. In the beginning of treatment, I was never hungry, though I'm not sure if this was my eating disorder or my half-starved body speaking. Regardless, this is no longer the case, and a huge achievement for me. 

For those of us prone to binging and purging, binging, or purging through self-induced vomiting, here are some of the tips to reduce or prevent these urges. Some are very small, but may have some impact on your process to recovery, even if just preventing an episode for 15 minutes. 

Preventing the opportunity to binge/purge

• Identify what time of day and what situations you are most prone to binge/purge.
• Plan activities, outings, events, anything to keep you busy for every 15 minute increment during this vulnerable time.
• Schedule someone to be with you at all times. Do not let them let you out of their sight.
• Choose an accountability partner. Take them to the grocery with you while shopping, or go alone but take a certain amount of money that won't allot purchase of binge food, or provide your accountability partner with all receipts.

Preventing the urge to binge/purge

• Wear a ring(s) on fingers you use to self-induce. This very simple trick has helped me tremendously.
• When you feel the urge, sit with it for 15 minutes. The feeling can subside if we use mindfulness, deep breathing, meditation, relaxation, etc in these 15 minutes and you may feel less of an urge.
• Get online and read a recovery blog like this one. Or check out a Youtube channel like Kati Morton, an excellent and free resource.
• Listen to my recovery playlist or make your own.
• Think of the consequences of your actions on yourself, on others (significant other, family, kids), on your recovery, on your long-term goals.

Keeping yourself safe if you do binge and/or purge

• If you slip up and binge, do not purge. This sounds crazy to me at this point, but it's something I've considered if I have another slip up. If you don't purge, even once, following a binge, your body will feel so uncomfortable you may not ever want to binge again.
• If you do purge (and I am certainly NOT promoting this behavior at all), please replenish your body of lost electrolytes immediately after. Drink pedialyte, gatorade, powerade, or another electrolyte containing beverage as soon as possible. Stay hydrated. 
• Reach out to a friend or your treatment team. Stay safe. 

I hope some of these tips are useful if you're struggling with urges. It's SO difficult to overcome, but you can do it. Today marks one week of being binge/purge free for me - the longest streak I've had since this disease set in many years ago. I think that calls for a snow day celebration!