Rules of Remorse

I feel utterly weak and at a loss of control.  After getting down to 97.4 pounds on scale, I am back to weighing in at 100.4.  I suppose I did fairly well over the course of the week to wheedle another few pounds off of my frame.  However, yesterday was just awful.  After work, I went out with a few colleagues of mine and got a couple of vodka and tonics.  As I was sitting at our table, getting more buzzed by the minute, and watching the endless array of hands digging into the never-ending popcorn bowl, I started to get...hungry.  And I mean, really hungry.  I couldn't concentrate on what anyone was saying or contribute to the conversation.  All I kept thinking was FOOD, EAT, HUNGRY, BINGE.  It was this little obsessive thought that progressively grew into a screaming roar inside my head and full-fledged anxiety coursing through my veins.  I knew before I even left the restaurant that I would binge and purge that evening.

After trying to compose myself and pay my fare of the check and say my goodbyes to my friends, I got into my car, immediately whipped my GPS out of the console, and did a search for all neighboring restaurants in the area.  Now, we as ourselves, if I was hungry, why didn't I simply order a wholesome salad or even be a little daring and get a dinner plate at the restaurant I was already at while drinking and socializing with the girls.  I can't explain it really, but when I get that craving to EAT, to allow myself the luxury of consuming whatever I want and however much of it I want, it needs to be a ritual that is done in private or else I can't fully enjoy it.  If I ordered a meal and consumed it in front of everyone at a normal pace and couldn't rush home to the porcelain goddess after, in a strange way, it wouldn't have counted.  It wouldn't have lulled the voice or the anxiety or the hunger.  I managed to make it an hour back into my home-city.  Again, it took all the will-power I had to not stop at a restaurant local to where I worked.  I was gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white, speeding like a bat out of hell down the highway, praying for people to get the fuck out of my way.  Didn't anyone understand what it felt like to be trapped inside a bubble of starvation?  MOVE!  The reason I didn't stop at a neighboring restaurant was because I wanted to have the comfort of throwing up in my own bathroom and I didn't want to bump into anyone I may have recognized from work.

Finally, when I was ten or fifteen minutes or so away from my apartment and I literally could not wait a second longer, I flew into a Dunkin Donuts.  Now, another reason I wanted to make it home before I binged was because I really wanted to weigh myself before I ate.  I needed to know where my weight was currently and where it would be after I binged and how much I could drop after purging.  The need to weigh myself daily, multiple times a day, has become a compulsive anxiety and obsession for me.  I usually weigh myself around three times before I leave for work in the morning and immediately after urinating when I get home from work.  Anything that impedes my ability to do this (i.e. staying out over night at a friend's or lovers, going out after work with friends or colleagues, traveling, etc.) have become things that I am slowly weeding out of my life and isolating myself from.  It fucks with my routine, my ritual, and that I just can't have.

Anyway, back to Dunkin' Donuts.  I purchased a half of a dozen donuts of varying flavors, rushed to my car, ripped open the box, and started taking bites of every flavor donut I had purchased.  The fuckers were stale.  Didn't stop me from sampling all the flavors (some more than once), but it did prevent me from eating all of them whole.  I probably consumed two to three donuts with the smatterings of bites that I had consumed.  Then, I drove to the grocery store.  I wasn't even craving sweets which is highly unusual for me.  Typically during a binge/purge episode, I will gravitate towards desserts, cookies, brownies, candies, cakes, you name it.  This time, I wanted FOOD.  I wanted a meal.  I wanted salt and crunch and chips and snacks and FOOD.  Trouble was, I couldn't figure out what it is I wanted to eat.  All I knew was that I was so starving it was as though another force had taken over my consciousness, and I kid you not.  I call this the survival instinct.  When your body is so starving that something deep within you takes over, and it is as though you are one of those little puppets with all the zillions of strings attached to it and someone or something else is tugging on those strings.  Forcing you into restaurants and stores, forcing you to eat.  I knew I was starving, yet I couldn't think of what to eat.  It's like my mind was a total fucking blank.  Like I had forgot what there even was to eat in the world.  I knew I wanted food but what was food exactly?  I also notice that when your body is literally eating itself, you become manic.  Nothing else in the world matters but getting your hands on food and shoving it into your face.  Your safety, others' safety, your general appearance, others' perceptions of you, nothing matters.  You know people are staring at you funny, you know you're mumbling to yourself and your eyes are rapidly moving from shelf to shelf in every aisle of the supermarket, you know you're scratching your arms and tearing away at your fingernails.  You know you're swerving all over the road as you're driving because you're paying attention to what local food places are passing you by rather than whether the light is red or green.  The only voice you hear is GO!  You are short with  people, unfriendly, but nothing matters.  One track mind, mania, starvation says FIND FOOD...NOW!  Except, again, as I was pacing through the supermarket, I couldn't think of what I wanted to eat.  The normal foods that would have practically jumped of their own volition into my shopping basket stayed statuesque on their shelves.  I didn't want pastries or danishes or cookies or brownies or cakes or chips.  So I left. 

Then I went home, whipped off my clothes, and weighed myself.  97.6 lbs.  I had gone up .2 pounds from that morning's weigh in due to the alcohol and donuts alone.  I then decided I wanted nachos.  So I got in the car and I drove.  Friendly's came to mind so I went there.  Whipped into a parking spot, asked for a table for one.  I always feel like the biggest jackass dining out alone.  Patrons and staff look at you all funny and pathetic like.  Some just feel bad for the poor lonely girl eating all by herself, others look fondly at a girl who has that much self-confidence to brave a restaurant alone, and others know exactly what you're doing there.  They look at you with "the look."  The look that says..."uhuh, a skinny girl in a flurried panic, ordering large quantities of food, and bolting out the door as soon as the check is paid for.  Uhuh, I know what you're doing."  Fuckers.

So, to my dismay, they didn't have any nachos on the menu.  But at this point I was so damn tired and so damn hungry that I just couldn't wait any longer.  I didn't have the stamina to cart myself all over town on an empty tank of gas looking for the perfect array of tortilla chips, cheese, salsa, guacamole, sour cream, black olives, jalapenos, and chicken.  IS IT REALLY THAT HARD PEOPLE?!  So I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, french fries, and two scoops of butternut icecream with whipped cream, nuts, chocolate sprinkles, and caramel.  Before I even finished the meal, the guilt set in.  With every motion my arm made from the plate up to my mouth again, I thought, "You weak, fat, pathetic, ugly, disgusting, loser.  You are a bitch with no self-control or discipline.  Here you are, gone and ruined it again."  I skirted out the door holding back a flood of tears, ran into CVS in desperate search of IPECEAC.  The pharmacist, amid panicked looks, told me the FDA had removed it from the shelves, deeming it unsafe.  I grabbed a pack of laxatives, ate five in the car ride home, and flew up my stairs to my bathroom.  I was nervous I'd throw up the laxatives I just ate, but said fuck it.  There was no way I was letting that food stay down.

I weighed in at 99 and commenced puking my guts out into my toilet.  My eyes were extremely bloodshot and watery, my face was puffy, I was shaking and crying in between heaves.  My fingers were covered in chunks of vomit which was also smeared across my chest and all over my toilet bowl, and when I examined the content of my night's binge, there were swirls of bright red blood mixed into the colorless contents of bile and french fries, and bread, and cheese.  I threw up unti I just couldn't anymore.  Still 99 lbs.

I felt so disgusted and depressed with myself in that moment that I felt like just dying.  I crawled into my bed in a pitch black room and lay there and cried, and cried, and cried.  I cursed my own weakness.  My own phoniness.  And then I remembered I had the appointment at the eating disorders hospital the following morning.  My throat was in excrutiating pain and raw.  I didn't know if all the blood I had tossed up was due to my fingernails cutting up the back of my throat or whether I had gone so hard and applied so much pressure that I had torn or ruptured something.  I didn't care either way.  All I could think was that I was going to be heavy when they weighed me in the next day.  Heavier than what I would have been if I had just held off.  They would see me and see my weight and laugh me out the door.  I was so embarrassed.  Not only that, but my birthday is Saturday and I was planning on allowing myself a treat that day and now I couldn't.  I fell asleep in a swirl of smeared make-up all over my puffy, red eyes, a raw and hoarse throat, a disgusting taste of stale vomit in my mouth, and a haze of guilt, depression, and embarrassment at my own perpetuated failure.

Woke up in the morning tired as all hell, tried to reschedule my appointment but couldn't, and my stomach was starting to feel the effects of the laxatives I had ate the following evening.  I managed to hoist my fat ass out of bed, wash the make-up off my eyes, brush the vomit from my teeth and tongue, shit out what the laxatives had already pushed to the rim, throw on a pair of clothes, and weigh myself.  98.1 pounds.  I had gone up exactly half a pound.  I drove into the hospital, shit my brains out in the nearest restroom I could find as soon as I walked through the door, and found where I was looking for.  You'd think people would be more mindful of putting the office for the "weight-loss surgery center" across the hall from the "eating disorder unit."  Again, fuckers.

I got my blood drawn, tried several attempts to donate as much of my cloudy urine as I could (after being forced to chug ice cold water until I thought I'd spew it all over the woman's shoes), filled out a questionnaire to which my responses were all 6's...the highest level of disordered behavior and thinking the chart would allow you to circle, and was whisked off by a social worker to have a chat.  I ended up chatting so much, you could tell the woman couldn't wait for me to get the fuck out of her office.  I blabbed my life away to her amidst some tears and fielded her pitied expressions and occasional looks of annoyance.  She didn't really say much, not only because I wouldn't shut up, but because she said there wasn't much for her to say.  There is a part of me that is quite aware what I am doing is not healthy or normal and that I certainly have what she referred to as "disorderd thinking."  However, I also told her I am quite in tune with the fact that I am not currently committed to health or treatment or getting better and know I will get much worse before I throw myself wholeheartedly into getting better.  She seemed concerned and disapointed by this, but what could she do?  So she gave me a couple names of some therapists up my way, wished me luck, and carted me off to the next room where my blood pressure was taken (normal), my weight taken (the woman would not show me or tell me what it was despite my urgings), filled out some insurance paperwork, denied the snacks and gatorade she tried to force upon me, and listened to the nurse rattle off her past employment history.  I was starting to get dizzy and was so hungry and had to shit some more that I didn't really understand what she was saying.  Oh, and did I mention that as the social worker was telling me about my treatment options, all I could think of was food and what I had eaten the night prior and what I would do to lose the weight?  The most enjoyable part of the whole experience was getting the opportunity to chit-chat with a fourty-year-old anorexic in the waiting room whose mother kept shooting me death glares as we giggled like school girls about wanting to check the nutritional info. of all the snacks in the waiting room and pouring ourselves cup after cup of black coffee and smoking cigarettes and saying how we wanted the obsessive thoughts and behaviors to go away but how we did not want to lose weight.  She talked about the divorce she was going through, and I told her of my boyfriend dumping me days prior.  We got along really well and she kept looking at her mom shouting, "see mom, there ARE other people who think the way I do!"  And, "You speak my language!"  The professionals never told me I had a problem, never that they were concerned.  I didn't need them to after that.  The anorexic in the waiting room told me indirectly that I was disordered.  It's funny because we first met when I went up to the food counter to pour myself a cup of black coffee and started handling all of the snacks.  Picking them up, examining nutrition labels, putting them down.  I heard a scoff behind me and thought it was the anorexic laughing at me.  I thought she thought I was actually going to eat them and was scoffing at my level of weakness.  When I sat back down, however, she engaged me in a conversation by saying, "they thought I was weird for doing the same exact thing you just did."  "Pardon?" I asked.  "Looking at all the labels on the snack tray," she said.  "I did the same thing and everyone here thought I was a loony toon."  We were friends after that.

I left feeling incredibly annoyed that I had gone and wasted my time there for nothing.  I knew I wasn't going to enter myself into treatment, but I was at least hoping a medical professional would tell me, "look honey, you're fucked."  I got nothin'.  I did learn that if I ever do need to take a leave of absence from work, it is illegal to fire me for that, and I also learned that my stay in an inpatient hospital would be unlimited and my insurance would not max out after a set number of weeks.  Good to know for future reference.  As I drove home, I started feeling awful that the social worker asked me quizzically three or four times, "you only work out once a day?"  Driving home, I started to berate myself for being such a weak bitch as to not work out more often and harder and wondered if that was weird.  Maybe that's why she didn't think I was fucked enough.  I only work out once a day and don't chug coffee from dawn to dusk.  And so, that officially ended my attempt to seek treatment and/or help for my current situation.  Every avenue down which I have ventured has found me in a barren and desolate landscape without a helping hand or a further path towards salvation down which to turn.  I've reached out.  I've tried.  I've gotten nothing in return for this.  I'm done.

So I went home, crawled into bed, slept for a few, woke up and shit out the rest of the laxatives, and weighed in at 98.1.  Boo.  After tossing and turning in bed again, I started to get more cravings to eat.  Thus I found myself once more, after throwing up my stomach lining and shitting my guts out all night and morning into the toilet bowl, sitting by myself at an Italian restaurant scarfing bread and oil and butter and creamy pasta off which I could literally smell the fat wafting up through and burning my nasal passages.  After this, I went to another restaurant, scoffed down some popcorn and two mudslides.  Then ate three more laxatives, and bought a pack of smokes.

I was smoking up to half a pack a day when I quit cold turkey two months ago.  Fuck it.  I tried to throw up.  Couldn't.  And am now a plump 100.4 pounds.  My one line of reasoning here is that the voice inside my head is finally silent.  I have no more cravings.  No more thoughts of food.  No more feelings of deprivation.  And instead I feel a newfound sense of determination and vigor and below are the new rules I have made for myself which are in effect starting tomorrow...my birthday:

1.  I am going to fast for the next three days I have off of work (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday).  This means that I will not be able to see anyone or go out for my birthday so as to avoid temptation.

2.  I am going to do a cardio DVD tomorrow morning in addition to going running as a double incentive for today's guilty pleasures and in replacement of throwing up.

3.  I will also exercise Sunday and Monday and everyday throughout the course of next week minus one day.  I must give these exercises my full devotion.  No slacking!

4.  Starting tomorrow, I am beginning taking three diet pills/fat burners daily regardless of work and how shaky they make me feel.

5.  When purchasing coffee the mornings I work, I will no longer order it with skim milk.  All coffee will be drunk black with splenda in order to avoid the excess calories the milk puts into my diet and the extra pounds it puts onto my frame.  (If coffee on top of fat burners are a bad combo, I will drink tea instead, no milk).

6.  I will purchase Keurig coffee and bring a mug to work.  I will brew and drink black coffee throughout the day if I am feeling particularly hungry or low energy.  Else I will chug diet soda which I will bring with me to school each and every day.

7.  I am going to start recording my daily food and caloric intake in a notebook as as to see and have a record of what I am putting into my mouth, how often, and at how many calories.

8.  I will only eat 200 calories a day.

9.  I will only eat the foods I pack in my lunch box and take with me to work.  Thus, I will not be allowed to eat the smatterings of food people offer me, excess food lying around in the teacher's room to sample, nothing from the vending machines, and no food from restaurants.

10.  The calories I consume during the day must be consumed during the time I am at work only.  Once I leave work, I will not be allowed to eat.

11.  I will begin smoking cigarettes and chewing gum and/or chugging diet soda as meal replacements after I leave work.  Thus, if I am anxious or hungry on the car ride home or when I arrive home, I will smoke and chug and chew and work rather than eat.  Or I will go for a jog.  Anything to alleviate anxiety, keep my mouth and hands busy, and avoid the temptations of the refrigerator and eating.

12.  I will be in bed by 9pm the absolute latest.  Thus, by the time I get home from work, I really won't have that much time to be awake and idle.  And I will get a good night's rest to ensure my energy is there for my daily 4am work outs and that I am getting enough sleep which will help me to stay energized, keep my metabolic rate high and burning calories, and LOSE WEIGHT.

13.  I will not binge or eat anything I myself do not prepare (i.e. no restaurant food) for at least two weeks. 

14.  I will no longer discuss food or anything pertaining to it with anyone or attempt to seek treatment.  Everyone is over exaggerating and I am too fat to warrant such help or concern.

15.  I will avoid going out for drinks after work with the girls.  A.  because I am no longer allowed to consumer alcoholic beverages (it has calories and makes you put your guard down enough to feel hungry and okay eating) and B.  because I usually eat when I do or binge after I leave.

16.  I am going to isolate myself from others over the course of the next couple of weeks at least (no dates, no going out with friends, no celebrating my birthday, no outings, etc. so as not to be exposed to or be tempted by food).  This includes avoiding the ex boyfriend if he contacts me or attempts to see me (which I doubt.)  (Refer to above rules)

17.  I will be 92 pounds by the end of September.  That is approximately eight pounds in four weeks which is approximately two pounds per week.  By the end of October, I must be nearing 84.