How do I even begin to describe this week? As you all know, last weekend I created an elaborate Excel spreadsheet documenting the list of "safe" foods I was allowed to consume over the course of the next couple of months and all of their nutritional information. I made a promise to myself that I would only eat foods from this list, that I would only consume 300 calories a day, that I would eat all "natural" foods and not stray from these six pre-designed meal plans I spent so much time devising. I promised myself I'd work out twice a day. I promised myself I would not fuck up. And as you know, I was doing great at the start of the week.
Sunday I fasted. I felt I needed a "cleanse" day after my three day bout of bulimia ranging from Thursday to Saturday. Monday I consumed 188 calories and worked out twice. Tuesday, 250 calories or thereabouts and exercised twice. Come Wednesday morning I was down to 96.9 pounds on the scale from the 101.2 I was weighing in at after my binge/purge episodes. I felt on top of the world. To date, that is my lowest weigh-in number. That is now my number to beat. Except come Wednesday, my body was also starving. I can't remember if I exercised in the morning, I was so goddamn tired. But I made it through the day at work (barely). I was so tired towards the end of the day I could barely stand. And of course when everyone left for home and their awaiting hot dinners, I consumed some nuts/trail mix and had a chew/spit episode with my colleague's candy stash. I felt like such a fuck up and was freaking out about the excess calories and fat grams I had just ingested. Nuts were not on my list of safe foods and here I was fucking up again, straying from my diet, already breaking the rules. I was contemplating whether or not to go straight home or go to the gym as I was feeling extremely depressed, tired, groggy, dizzy, hungry, weak, and the dregs of manic starvation and exhaustion were starting to creep through my veins. I opted for the gym. The elliptical to be exact. I figured if I could just do a half an hour I could be partially satisfied I at least burned off the foods I consumed before the nuts and could burn off the nuts during my morning exercise session the following day.
I weighed in on the gym scale when I got there. It's the kind of scale at doctors' offices. I put the main weight on the 100 mark and the smaller weight on 0. The balance echoed a dull hollow thunk as it hit the metal bar below it. I had to adjust the main weight to 50 pounds and adjust the smaller weight on the top within the 40 pound range. I was officially weighing in within the doube-digits. A woman was waiting behind me to weigh her child, perhaps six years of age. I remember her whispering something under her breath when I stepped off and she realized the scale was adjusted for the weigh-in of a child. She didn't have to move the lever to fifty...it was already there. I changed and hopped on the elliptical. I realized people at the gym were staring at me. I'm kind of used to this by now and still occasionally deny that it has anything to do whatsoever with my weight or physical appearance. I managed to get through a half hour on the machine and burn 200 calories. Then everything started spinning and my hands were shaking and my knees wobbling and I thought, my God, just make it to the stationary bike so you can sit down and rest while you burn your last one hundred. I managed to make it to the bike, turn the machine on, pedal two rotations, and then said, "I can't fucking do this." My legs felt like bricks. Like literal stumps of lead. I couldn't push the pedals on the bike. I could barely walk to the locker room. I managed to make it into the women's locker room breathing like I'd just run a fucking marathon or something. I realized I had left the key to the lock that was securing my locker in one of the machine's cubby holes in the gym. "Fuck!" I shouted and fielded women's nasty glances. People don't understand the massive amounts of energy you must mentally and physically will your body to produce for you to do the simplest of tasks when you're starving. To have to walk back down the hall felt like torture. I got the key, grabbed my shit, caught my reflection in the mirror on the way out of the locker room: dark circles around my eyes, pale as a ghost, a long, worn expression on my face, thin (I guess). As I was walking out of the gym with a pained look on my face and still breathing like a hog, a woman took one look at me, nudged her husband, and started whispering to him and staring at me. Everyone else was staring too though so I figured I must have looked like I was about to pass out, and boy did I feel like I was going to. I managed to drive home (thank God), stumbled into my kitchen, and poured myself a tiny bowl of cereal consisting of blueberries, skim milk, and Quaker oat squares with a touch of brown sugar. I promised myself if I'd only have a little tiny bowl to boost my energy, everything would be okay. But one tiny bowl turned into another medium-sized bowl which turned into another large-sized bowl, and pretty soon I was bingeing on all the cereal I had in my apartment. I was freezing cold and shivering at this point also. So...get the visual here...I am sitting, first in my kitchen and then when I mustered up enough energy to haul my ass to the couch in the living room, wrapped in my winter pea coat shivering, shoveling heaping spoonfuls of cereal into my parched mouth, rocking back and forth with my gaze fixated straight through the Family Guy episode on tv. (Let me break here for a moment and mention the irony of the universe and my connection to it. The episode was the one where the town of Quahog suffers from a nuclear blast and there isn't any food anywhere and everyone is starving and all they do the whole show is try and find food and talk about how much it sucks to be starving. I find it ironic this episode was on when I myself was starving and scrounging for food. I also remember the irony of my fortune cookie in that sushi restaurant I went to before my ex and I broke up...my word to learn was refrigerator and my fortune read, "Keep your mouth shut." I also find it ironic that the notebook I designated as my food diary says "FAT BOOK" in big chunky letters across the back. I did not see this when I bought the book nor when I designated it as my food diary. I didn't notice this until weeks later when I had already started recording my daily food intake.) I then realized I would have to purge all that cereal. I was still so cold, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and stand under the hot water of the shower while I vomited down the drain (plus I think the couple who live in the apartment below me can hear me gagging and wretching if there isn't a sound filter). I discovered that cereal is really easy to purge. All that milk consumed with it ensures you already have a lot of liquids in your tummy and that the cereal is already mushed up nice and good. So I heaved out bowl after bowl of cereal and milk and blueberries onto my shower floor and prodded it down the drain. I immediately felt better, less bloated, and was still only 98.9 on the scale the following morning and swore I'd start anew.
However, Thursday, I binged again. And Friday. Thursday, I managed to make it through work again (barely my energy levels were SO low). I stopped into the faculty lounge to pee before my commute home but got distrated by a birthday cake sitting out on the table and cut myself a huge piece, and stuck it in my lunch bag "for later." I never peed. Waited until I got on the highway, then had a chew/spit episode with this ginormous piece of chocolate fudge cake. Because some of it had possibly seeped in and I ingested calories anyway, I then stopped at the grocery store, McDonald's, and Dunkin Donuts a few miles away from my apartment. Funny thing is, I kind of didn't even really want to. I kept telling myself, "just go home and go to sleep. You're going to regret this." But instead, I got a Debbie's coffee cake at the market along with a cookies n' cream hershey bar, loaf of banana nut bread, two flavors of icecream, and bag of candy corn. Stopped at Dunk's and got a sugary latte, some cream cheese, and a danish. Then Mcdonald's, two cheeseburgers and a medium fry. In my embarraassment and haste to not be seen in the parking lot (God forbid anyone was acknowledging my human act of neediness and weakness and saw that I was in fact the fat slob I try so hard to cover up and starve away), I drove straight over the fucking curb dividing the parking lanes and thought for sure I had popped all of my car's tires and ruined the undercarriage of my car. Everyone now WAS staring at me of course, and one asshole gave me a cocky thumbs-up. I was fucking humiliated and dreadfully worried about my car. I raced home, pulled into my driveway convinced my car was sitting much lower and was lop-sided, buried my head in my hands, and cried. I just sat there with the rain streaking down my windshield and pounding on my car's roof sobbing into my hands like a blubbering baby. Bags and bags of food and wrappers littered my car. I kept thinking how I didn't want to do this anymore. That I COULDN'T do this anymore. Wasting my money. Ruining and trashing my car (there was chocolate fudge from my sticky fingers all over everything in addition to dried, crusted sugar frosting that accompanied my cinna-stix last weekend). I was scared to go inside. I wasn't hungry. I didn't want to binge. I felt extremely alone and scared and pathetic, and I didn't want to purge.
I laid out all the food on my kitchen table and knew I was out of control. I ate everything, tried to purge. But I was too tired and too emotional. I called a good friend of mine instead and sobbed to him over the phone. "I'm fucking out of control," I whined. "You need help," he said. I told him how everyone at work can't stand to be around me, that no one talks to me anymore. I told him how everyone stares at me no matter where I go, and I feel so othered. If I'm going to look at this from a psychological standpoint, I binged Thursday not because of starvation (like I did on Wednesday) but because I was feeling anxious and I was feeling lonely as fuck. I was feeling so ostracized at work by my colleagues and friends and so I turned to food as a comfort. I could fill and satiate the emptiness I was emotionally feeling physically with food. Except it didn't work, and I only felt like more of a pathetic loser. I ate three laxatives and told myself I wouldn't eat for the next three days to make up for not purging. I was 101.2 pounds on scale Friday morning...exactly back where I fucking started at the beginning of the week. I debated getting a coffee with skim milk (could I really consider that a fast?). Decided I would in fact get the coffee and that I would even go so far as to brave walking INSIDE the coffee shop so I could prove to myself how strong and controlled I was by resisting all of that temptation. Exept the line was so long that it gave me TOO much time to stand there contemplating the rows of muffins and I ended up buying the coffee and two muffins to boot. Got to work, ate the muffins with cream cheese and then in the faculty lounge found PLATTERS of brownies and cookies. PLATTERS. I grabbed a huge plate of sweets and started cramming them into my mouth until a colleague of mine came into my room to find me and give me a brochure on the confidential employee assistance program we have. I was so embarrassed. "Sorry I'm just being a pig right now," I sheepishly muttered. She said, "please honey." She sat down and me with my big mouth started crying again and told her I wasn't even supposed to eat today and I purposely went inside the shop to prove to myself how much control I had and look at me! I told her how my anorexia is now spiraling into bulimia. I told her I'm sad for myself and feel out of control. I told her I feel like everyone at work hates me. I told her how sometimes at night I feel like I'm dying my chest is so tight and my heart fluttering and my stomach in so much pain and my breathing haggard. I told her sometimes I wonder if I'm not just better off dead because sometimes I think it would HAVE to be better than this. That I would finally be able to find some sense of peace in my life. I SHOULD NOT have said that. Some things are better left unsaid, let me tell you.
The next hour I was in and out of the bathroom burning up and feeling the writhing effects of the laxatives. The next hour I was being called down to my boss' office. Uhoh. I walked in smiling and chipper, asking if everything was alright. My boss sat down, clearly nervous, and said, "We're all very worried about you." I, playing dumb, "My gosh, whyyyy?" I wheedled. Fucking charade was OVER. My co-worker told my managers what I'd said and what I've been doing and that she was scared I was suicidal and/or was planning on hurting myself and we needed to get me some help. I told my boss I shouldn't have said that, that the comment was misconstrued, that I had no purposeful intent of harming myself. I told her I just push myself too hard at times and get overwhelmed and that I'm just tired and need a rest. She said my job performance is not the issue, she in fact said everyone knows what a wonderful worker I am and that I should not worry about that as they are not worried about that. Instead, they are worried about me the individual because I have so much potential and I'm such a good person and they don't want to see me struggling or end up in the hospital (or dead). She said they couldn't live with that guilt and want to help in any way they can. I, of course, start crying again and saying how embarrassed I am and I feel like I have this big neon sign that's flashing FUCKED UP across my forehead for everyone to see. She said no one was judging me and not everyone knew but yes, that people had approached them and expressed their concern for me and my health and my behavior and they too were aware of some things but just didn't know what to say or how. She said my weight loss has become quite noticeable and I'm worrying people. I said I didn't think I looked like a concern which in turn made her look more concerned, and she said if I don't get help something's gonna crack. She said I'm going to pass out or get dizzy (I almost burst out laughing here and told her I'm dizzy all the time but decided against it). She said I'm wreaking damage on my body and my health and pretty soon something is going to snap and all the things around me, my job included, are going to start suffering as well. The sick part of me thinks as long as everyone else thinks I'm "working through my issues" and seeing a therapist, they'll think someone else is worrying about me and keeping tabs on me so they won't have to. So in a way, I'm kind of relieved. She walked me to the psychologist's office, and I spoke with her for a bit. I have an appointment to meet with her Tuesday afternoon so we can figure out a "game plan" for me moving forward. I wanted to say my game plan was to work on the bulimia and become a better anorectic but again, I thought of the "some things better left unsaid" rule.
I then ate an entire bag of goldfish at my desk and binged when I got home on Taco Bell, Olive Garden, 7-11 and mini=marts treats and candies. I purged once and took 6 more laxatives and now I'm weighing in at 104.4 and feel like a DISGUSTING cow and a big PHONY. I mean here everyone is concerned about me having this eating disorder and worried that I'm not eating when in fact, I can't STOP eating. A part of me thinks everyone, myself included, is over reacting and that I'm fine. I just need to get the binge eating under control. If I didn't have that than I really would be fine. Because I don't think I have a problem when I'm restricting. I'm strong and powerful and very much in control...just health conscious. It's when I'm waving my credit card around like a fucking flag and shoveling food into my face to either throw it up, explosively shit it out, or fast my stomach flat again that I think I might have a problem. But even then, I'm eating so what's the big deal, really? A part of me is secretly relieved that I got called out 'cause now I feel like the cat's officially out of the bag and I don't have to feel so tense around people anymore. I'm also relieved I'm going to have an official go-to person to talk to. I think that's what kills me half the time. I am a blabbermouth and I NEED to be able to talk to someone once in awhile. I can't to my colleagues anymore. My family can't know the true extent of this. And I have no more friends. So that leaves me this blog which during the week I don't have the energy to write on and none of you ever say anything anyway, so I'm not sure if anyone's even reading what I write to begin with.
Anywho, I have a new plan. (P.S. I just weighed in at 103.5. Down exactly two pounds from last night.) I am planning on fasting today and tomorrow. So Saturday and Sunday I do not eat. I figure this will partially make up for all the calories I consumed over the course of the past few days. I will also take laxatives each day (I already took some Thursday night and felt the effects Friday morning and took some again last night where I felt effects around 4am this morning. I recently took three more and will take more again tonight heading into tomorrow.) I may purchase diurectics and take those the beginning of next week as well depending on what the scale says Monday morning after my two day fast and laxative attack. I then devised a new meal plan for myself. I'm realizing that allowing myself various meal plans is way too much choice for me. It's too complicated to have to figure out what I'm in the mood for and then what if I make the wrong choice? So I came up with a 300 calorie meal plan that I will eat Monday through Friday. Yes, I do have other foods in my house, so I figure Saturday will be my "free" day. Meaning, I can have a baked potato or yogurt or my fat free cottage cheese/cucumber wraps or soup or chicken and chow-mein. In other words, any of the "spare" things I have lying around my house as long as it's still within the 300 calorie range and healthy. Sunday is still my fast/cleanse day and weekends (Friday and Satuday nights) are still devoted to laxatives too so I can flush out what I consumed throughout the week. I'm going to wait until Friday night rather than Thursday night to take them though so I don't feel sick at work on Friday. It really sucks being sick like that at work. Like really sucks. I'm going to aim to try my best to work out twice a day still: strength training in the morning and cardio in the evenings. However, I'm going to try and ease up on myself a bit if I'm becoming overly hungry, tired, and weak especially as the week progresses. I'll see how this week goes with the exercise, but I may have to devise a plan for that as well like rotating every other day with strength traning calisthenics and gym cardio. So I'm still getting both kinds of exercise but rotating the schedule of when I do them and only working out once a day. The less you eat, the harder it becomes to work out more than once. I really wish that fucking bitch of a social worker I talked to at that eating disorders hospital didn't stress that question so much. It makes me feel awful having to say I only work out ONCE a day (God forbid) if I ease down on my exercise regiments. I figure that just might help me a little bit with feeling so hungry and weak and tired. We'll see.
Anyway, Monday through Friday will go like this:
Breakfast-
1. Large coffee with skim milk and splenda
2. 13 medium sized strawberries
Lunch-
1. 3 cups of spinach
2. 1/2 cup grilled chicken
3. Mustard for dressing
4. Diet soda
Dinner-
1. Popcorn with salt and spray butter
2. Raw pepper with mustard
Snack/Dessert-
1. Sugar free jello or a sugar free popsicle
Equates to exactly 300 calories and eliminates fat and sugar for the most part. I figure I have a fruit in there, a carbohydrate with the popcorn, some veggies, protein, and a dairy with the milk in my coffee. Pickles, diet soda, coffee, and tea are obviously fair game as those don't have any calories. I've made a serious promise (I know I say this every week but seriously) to let go of the binge eating and the bulimia. I figure if I am EXTREMELY hungry I can also have some trail mix to give me a boost from a natural food/fat or cereal because it's low fat and easy to purge. But those are my ONLY two cheat foods and cereal is the only thing I'm allowed to binge and purge on. My goal is to be back around 100-101 by Monday morning like I was last week and to be 96.9 by Wednesday like I was last week. I wanted to be 95 by the end of this month which leaves me exactly seven days....sigh. I don't know if I can do it. I figure if I can at least be 95 by the end of the first week in October and then it is my goal to be 92. That's like my long-term goal for now, 92, and 95 will be my short-term goal. I just have to stop creating more work for myself and realize that if I really need more food, I can have another bag of popcorn or a fat free cottage cheese wrap or some broth but that I MUST avoid fatty, processed foods and that I CANNOT under any circumstances go inside a Dunkin Donuts. I also have to avoid the faculty lounge as much as possible. I have to reason with myself that even a chew/spit episode makes me feel like I fucked up which triggers a binge for me because I feel as though I already ruined everything. So I simply CANNOT touch these foods. I can't chew them and spit them out, I can't hoard them, I simply don't have the self-control to be around them. I try to remind myself that Thanksgiving will be so much better if I'm feeling thin and won't have to suffer the guilt. That I can eat stuffing and cranberry sauce and turkey and gravy and greenbean casserole and rolls with butter and apple cider and pie and cookies, etc. That I have something to work towards. I also bought a pack of cigarettes and am going to start smoking again. I figure for the car rides home when I'm anxious and stressed and tired and hungry and pissed and when the mania starts to kick in. Rather than buying food and bingeing, I'll save money by buying the cigarettes and just smoke and smoke and smoke all the way home and all through the night if I have to. The chewing gum wracks up calories (it's five calories per stick) and only makes me hungry. I also realize that when I'm feeling extremely tired, I binge. So if I can just lie in bed and relax or go for a walk instead, it will help. Maybe I should chalk up these past few weeks as a learning experience where I'm reflecting on my patterns and behaviors and devising a strategy that is going to work for me. I figure this first month back to work has been stressful and has been a trial/error period for me. So now that it's almost the start of a new month, if I can just get back to 96.9 and go from there, it'll all be okay. So there we have it folks. I feel so fat and heavy and bloated and sick and like I have a huge double chin. I really truly mean that October is going to be a fresh start for me and I'll get even lower than 96.9. I mean it was easy to starve over the summer, I didn't have shit to do. And this was my first month back to work, so I had to figure out what's doable for myself. Now that I know what will work for me and what my traps are, I'll be a success! Do I sound like the boy who cried wolf or the girl who cried food?
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