Father's Day 2011

Wow yesterday morning was so so hard. SO hard.

First of all, after that great weigh-in early in the week, my weight kept inching upward. The perplexing part was that I was, as far as I know, doing everything right. I had the best week of workouts I've had in probably 2 months. I tracked every single (non-point) thing that I put in my mouth. As a bonus, I even made a conscious effort to drink less pop (successful but still room for improvement). However, in the end I was up 3.2 lbs for this week.

My main reaction was confusion, not anger or disappointment or wanting to give up. I was (and still am) perplexed, but my focus remains on doing the right thing -- eating nutritious food, tracking my points, and exercising regularly and aggressively. The weight will follow. I will only get concerned about the scale if my gains continue over the course of, say, a month. For now, there could be a myriad of causes -- water weight, hormones, stuff caught in my system, etc. Nonetheless, it got the morning off to a lackluster start.

That morning, our regular pastor was out of town. His pinch hitter is, at best, weak. Sometimes he's so glib he's even offensive. It is tough to sit through, and gets tougher with time. For this reason I wasn't excited to go to church. However, I texted some people and decided I should go. One of my friends texted me:

It's father's day and you know he loves his kids a lot so maybe it won't be so bad.

Then it hit me: "Oh shit, he's right. It's father's day and they will talk about this in church." And that's where the REAL fun for the day began, and I had an immediate and very very strong inclination to binge which I haven't done in a good 2-3 months thanks in no small part to OA.

I was a messy flood of tears, mostly sad and angry about my poor-to-non-existant relationship with my father who is an emotionally vacant and even emotionally abusive shell of a man. His behaviors have had long lasting and very deep implications on our fractured family. In addition to being mad about how much he had let me and the rest of my family down, I was mad at myself for my eating disorder and dysfunctional relationship with food which was making me want to binge with everything inside of me.

My reaction in the past would have been immediately to jump to the "screw it" stage and to soothe myself with food. I was determined to do what I could to avoid this situation from playing out let again.

I asked God for help. "Please let this compulsion pass."

One of the things you hear about in compulsive overeating circles is the need to "sit with the feelings" -- you have to really feel your feelings rather than just muting them or covering them over with copious amounts of food. Well I can tell you, in the moment, sitting with (binge food of choice) is a hell of a lot more comfortable than sitting with feelings when the feelings are so deep and hurtful and so shitty. But yesterday, I sat with my feelings. For a good 45 minutes to an hour I sat with my feelings on my bed and cried and cried and cried. I held tight to the serenity prayer, and I prayed for the compulsion to overeat to pass. And after awhile it did.

I was so grateful for God's help in surviving the compulsion to overeat -- the strongest compulsion I'd had for a long time. It also made me think, wow maybe it is actually possible with God's help to be restored to sanity when it comes to food (step 2). While I believed this step in my head, I think I am starting to actually see evidence of it in my life, and for this I am very grateful.