the long, slow binge

one of the reasons why gastric bypass surgery was so right for me is that binging has always been at the core of my problem, and the surgery makes it literally impossible to binge. i am totally certain every day that my ability to binge needed to be removed so that i could heal and recover from what is most certainly an addiction, a disorder, an illness. i often liken it to a drug addict who needs to be forcibly removed from drugs in order to withdraw and participate in any kind of meaningful therapy or healing or recovery. it's the exact same thing with binging for me. although the obvious metaphor for the drug is food, it's not so for me. my drug was never food, it was binging. i realized in the road leading to my surgery as i explored why it was so hard to let go of food in that way, that i was not addicted to food...i was addicting to eating -- to the sheer, merciful, numbing act of eating. binging was the ultimate form of eating...stuffing myself so full and often so fast that it was a total paralysis...in the best, and worst, of ways. so when people ask if i miss food...i don't. there isn't a single food i truly, truly miss. pizza smells good sometimes, bagels sound delicious. but it's not temptation, and there's no sadness. what i do miss is the way the food made me feel and what it did for me. clearly it did a lot of things that weren't so great too, but it worked. i don't think i would have done it for so long that way if it hadn't.

so i can't binge. and thank god. as grandmothers everywhere would say...kenahara. AND HOW. 

what i can do, though, is graze which is basically a long, slow binge. one of the cardinal rules of weight loss surgery success (and probably with any weight loss success, period) is not to  graze. several small meals a day, yes. snacking throughout the day, NO. i'm learning i have to be careful not to do this, because the few times i have found myself eating a little here and there, i've found that it's a way to numb myself just a little here and there. it's in no way the way it was before, and definitely doesn't achieve the same wonderful, horrible effect, but it does it's own kind of work, and i've learned quickly to be mindful of it. 

so much of the appeal of the binge was the anticipation...the looking forward to it, the mental rehearsing, the blissful moments right before, and then the moments of actual consumption...of course afterwards it was all downhill, but that didn't seem to matter. so if you look at those components..the anticipation, the mental rehearsing, the moments of actual consumption...they all exist in grazing, and can exist every hour on the hour since i can only eat a little at a time. i could see how a binger could become a grazer...it's like beating the system and it's not okay for a few reasons...first, because you could easily consume enough calories to GAIN weight rather than lose, even with a stomach the size of an egg. and second, and most importantly, because it's not a behavior and a need i want to allow forever. 

i need to learn to make choices...if i'm in the mood for a pb&j and also a shrimp and veggie salad, i have to be okay with choosing only one, not choosing instead to have the shrimp salad now and have a taste of peanut butter later. even if it's calorically okay for me, it's not behaviorally okay. 

it's a long fucking road.