Night time used to be my ED's favorite time.
Like most people, especially people with weird work schedules, I often used to look forward to the midnight hour as my only time to myself.
It was only then, when I was in college, and my roommate was asleep, or as I grew older, after Beard went to bed, that I felt I could breathe a sigh of relief and reflect on the day. Sometimes this meant reading, watching movies, or catching up on social media and weird blogs. Sometimes it meant getting done what little writing I had the energy left for.
One thing was certain though, it was always the right time for a binge.
See, when I was in the deep dark jungle of my anorectic behavior, I had a strict eating routine. I could only eat food at the two specific meal times I allowed myself. It had to be specific foods, and it had to be all consumed in a specific time frame.
Dinner was complete by 6pm, and I was not allowed to eat again until 8am the next morning.
Let's review for the cheap seats:
After a measly salad and one cookie (my "daily indulgence"), I was to go a minimum of fourteen hours without so much as a snack.
To do this, I kept myself busy. I was a member of a dozen clubs and I always had meetings to attend, events to plan, functions to organize, and then homework to do.
By ten or eleven at night, my stomach would be screaming for food, but to distract myself, I would begin an arduous circuit of visiting friends in their dorm rooms.
Often, they would be nuking ramen bowls, sharing pints of ice cream, or snacking on popcorn while watching movies, and I always declined, feeling lighter and more virtuous with every, "Oh no thank you," I stuttered through.
In the year and a half of my worst restricting, I recall three binges. At the time, they were monumental. Afterwards, to atone, I would tot up my calories for the day (I obsessively kept my calories between 800-1100 every day, my goal was always 950), and after a binge, they would often run as high as 1900 (remember, the average human, with no physical activity, requires about 2,000 calories every day, but to me, coming it that close to normal eating levels, was catastrophic), and I would berate myself for being so indulgent, so weak and pathetic. I would need to "make up" for those excess calories, and so the next day I would fast.
When the pendulum swung back, and it swung hard, I still couldn't shake that need to compensate for a binge. It became almost religious, the cleansing feeling I associated with lightheaded hunger after a day of not eating, and I would do every trick in the book to get through it.
Then, when night came, and I was all alone, the feelings of loneliness, worthlessness, and often the voice of reason too, finally came through.
"Why are you doing this?" my common sense would ask.
"To be better," was always my reply.
"But you're not," my ED would answer.
"But I want to be," I would say.
"You can't sleep this hungry you know," my common sense would counter.
"I know," I would say, already on my way to the kitchen.
"Just a little snack," my common sense would say, "something to get through until tomorrow. It's not good to go this long without food."
I would agree.
I would portion myself out something healthy, something I could call "good", and I would eat it.
At first, slowly, trying, with every ounce of my will power to make it last, to make it enough for an entire day of restriction.
The problem was, it was never enough, and my ED would seize on this little snack as it's moment to completely destroy me.
It would hit me with shame, with failure, with the sense that I couldn't even make it 24 hours without eating, then it would play it's trump card, "You've already fucked up" it would say "you might as well fuck up big."
And then I would basically turn into a werewolf and demolish the contents of my kitchen.
For a while I even stole food.
I already felt so guilty about what I was doing, it was my ED's reasoning to plan for the next day's atonement, while I was in the middle of a binge. My ED would make me eat every last crumb of something that wasn't mine, a roommate's, my Beard's, if I was at someone else's house, sometimes an entire box of cereal or a container of ice cream that even while I was doing it, I knew would get me in trouble. Someone was bound to find out and force me to face the consequences. My ED was counting on that shame to start the cycle over again, because it was shame that kept me fasting the next day.
My head was always blurry with these three voices. They constantly fought for dominion.
My ED wanted to rule. My common sense (what I now recognize was my body's natural hunger and fullness cues) was trying so hard to tell me what I needed as an organism, and my own voice, that felt silenced and unimportant compared to the others.
In the thirteen years that this disorder ruled my life, I never ate anything because I was hungry, because I wanted to, because it looked good.
Food was a loaded weapon, and I viewed it as the enemy. Either to be avoided at all costs, or used ritualistically to hurt myself.
It didn't matter what I did, my interaction with food never changed, and that's because my needs as a human being never changed.
I needed to eat to survive, and I was denying myself the means to do so.
It was that simple.
I overcomplicated it to the point of madness.
I raced around and around in my head trying to figure out
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME?
But in the end, it was the simplest thing of all.
I was fighting my body, and my body knew what was best for me.
Imagine caring for your body is like taking care of the cutest, sweetest puppy in the whole world.
It loves everything about life.
It wants to play, to go outside and romp around.
It hates being too cold, too wet, or too hot.
It loves eating when it's hungry because food tastes good, especially when it's full of the things you need most at that moment, protein or carbohydrates, fat and sugar, or vitamins and minerals.
The fact is, you would never deny a puppy food to punish it.
Even if it pooped on your floor every day.
Even if it bit your ankles, chewed your shoes, and tipped over the trash at every opportunity.
It would never occur to you to do something so cruel as to deny the creature food as punishment.
You might use other methods to discipline the animal, but because you love it, because it's just a baby doing what babies do, you never think to actually, willfully hurt it, which is what starving it would be.
Now apply this to your body.
This was a revolutionary concept to me.
I couldn't learn.
I couldn't improve.
I couldn't just be a better version of myself.
Because I was using food as a means of reward and punishment, which it has no business being.
I had to take everything I had taught myself about the meaning of food and throw it out the window.
My body was an adorable puppy, and when my stomach growled, it was the same as that puppy scratching at an empty food dish.
It may sound silly, but this metaphor saved my life.
When I started thinking of my body as something that deserved my care, something that I was put in charge of and deserved to be treated as well as it could be, I stopped hurting myself on purpose.
And that meant listening for those tummy growls.
It had been so long since I had actually responded to my body's hunger and fullness cues that it took me a really long time to be able to understand them. I had to look and listen for the obvious physical symptoms, because the more subtle ones couldn't get through to my brain at first.
If my stomach growled,
I ate something.
I reached for the thing that looked the best to me at that moment.
If it was a yogurt and a banana, then that's what I ate.
If it was tortilla chips and salsa, then that's what I ate.
If it was chocolate chips, then that's what I ate.
Nothing was off limits, it just had to be the honest answer to the question: What do you want the most right now?
If the answer was a glass of water, then I drank that, waited ten minutes, and if my stomach growled again, then I asked the question again.
I kept doing it.
And every time I finished eating the thing, I took ten minutes and then I asked, are you still hungry?
If the answer was yes, then I went back and got another thing.
If the answer was no, then I didn't
If the answer was, I can't tell, then I waited ten minutes more and asked again.
But there were never any foods off limits, and there was never a 'wrong' time to eat.
So for a long time, my body was confused.
It formed weird habits.
It craved foods I had previously denied myself.
I ate a lot of chocolate and peanut butter because those were huge trigger foods for me.
Then one day, I reached for the bag of chocolate chips, and my body said, "no, that's not what I want."
So I waited.
And instead, it directed me to the bananas, and the peanut butter, and the bread.
I made a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and it was exactly what I wanted.
And I didn't feel like I had to eat the rest of the peanut butter with a spoon afterwards because I knew that it was there if I wanted to do that. The question was, would that make me feel good? Was that really what my body wanted me to do?
Last night,
the baby got me up at 11pm. We'd been asleep for about two hours, and he wanted to nurse.
Since I've been going to bed early with the baby, my schedule's kept me away from my trigger time (the deep dark hours of night).
I've been either too tired to think about eating, too lazy, or not hungry.
Last night, I could see the trigger moment coming toward me as clearly as a pothole in the road.
I thought to myself:
It is 11pm.
Nobody is awake.
My stomach growled.
My ED said, "You should go binge on something you would not allow yourself today," which ten years ago, would have been everything, but the magic of listening to my body meant that I had an answer for it.
"But I allowed myself everything today. There's nothing I missed out on, or need to make up for."
My ED got quieter, "Yes, but..."
Instead, I asked my body, "Hey puppy, what sounds good to you right now?"
My body said, "The sweet potato pie leftover in the fridge from thanksgiving."
I said, "Okay."
So I got myself a slice of pie.
I had some plain yogurt in a container, and I liked the idea of a nice, tart, cool counterpart to the sweet richness of the pie, so I plopped a blob on top of the pie.
I ate it slowly, while the baby nursed, enjoying the feeling of the food filling my stomach.
I drank a glass of water, and about half an hour later, I went back to bed, and I slept wonderfully.
I remembered, as I lay there, the baby snoring next to me, how in the depths of my ED, I used to never be able to sleep when I was hungry, and then I was never able to sleep when I binged.
Both ways, I was so uncomfortable that all I could do was think obsessively about why why why I was doing this to myself.
Last night, I had a nice, happy tummy. I didn't feel overfull, and I didn't feel hungry.
I felt content.
And I fell back to sleep in no time flat.
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