The journey begins

Very recently I was diagnosis with an eating disorder known as binge eating. It is weird to be diagnosis with an eating disorder that is not bulimia or anorexia. Fatness is seen as a sign of weakness, laziness, greediness.  Not to mention the ill health effects that comes with being fat. I never considered myself to have a problem with over eating or that I even binge because I have anyways been pretty active and while I have always considered myself to be overweight, it seems that my physical weight in the past was healthy. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I started to realize my obsession with eating. I could never get enough. I could never be full. I was never satisfied. All I could think about was what I was going to eat that day and everything else just didn’t matter. The need of food was so intense I started taking out credit cards so I could fed myself. The stupidest part is I was spending outrageous amounts of money on the takeout website Grubhub. I rationalized to myself that I was not gorging on fast food and that takeout was “better” and “healthier” for me because I could order salads and sushi. I would spend from $25-$100 on a single meal for myself. Of course if I did go for the “healthier” food options I would always cancel the healthy aspects by ordering so much. For example if I ordered Japanese I would order a sashimi plate, which in moderation is healthy, but then I would order 2 maki rolls usually with mayonnaise and some appetizers as well so I would be full. I didn’t cook at home because it was time consuming and I found I would eat all the food I had brought within a day. I figured that if I kept was fringe empty I would be eating less. That of course was not logical and my Grubhub spending got so out of control I some maxed out all my credit cards. Worse of all, I took to stealing credit cards from those I loved the most.  I pretty much destroy the trust of those who love me and who I love back in order to not deal with my over eating in a constructive way.

Many would ask, how come you didn't just stop? That I don’t really know. I think part of it was not wanting to deal with the problem, wanting to not deal with problems I didn't know how to solve. The other part was the immediate comfort food brings me. Unfortunately, the comfort is always followed by the shame and guilt of being out of control, with makes you want to eat again to be comforted. Then there were the days in which I tried not eatin

g at all to make up for the gluttony and the feelings of being out of control. Those days would always lead to binging and thus failure, failure to control my fat lazy unmotivated body. It is hard to see how your actions affect others when you are too busy shaming yourself and then trying to avoid working with and confronting your problems of eating beyond your means and stealing to cover up the problem.

Things started to improve when I finally went to a weight therapy group. The most important thing I took from that experience is to be compassionate to yourself and confront your problems instead of avoiding and hiding. Being compassionate is the hardest thing to do especially when you have done such horrible things to yourself and others, but I think the point of compassion is to guide you to a path of betterment instead of the one of destruction that shame and guilt bring. I think compassion lets you be able to find solutions and motivate you to be a better you. I think this makes sense seeing that while I was hating on myself, the only solutions I was able to come up with were not those of stopping the bad habits, but those of continuing to dig into a deeper hole of awfulness. Maybe negative thinking also makes you forget that there is more than just you in this world. Negative thinking just picks at an already infected sore. Compassion seems to bring hope into the equation. But of course, it is so difficult to think that you are worthy of hope when you have brought those you love into that pit of destruction. I find it interesting that in my current situation the thing that is the hardest to do is not eat less, but is to be compassionate to myself so that I don’t think I need to use food to comfort the challenges in being a better person. It is moments of self-pity that I feel the urge to overeat and to spend money to buy food. It is in feeling bad that I lose focus on what I can do instead I find myself only thinking about all that I can’t do.