In my first post I talked about losing “a lot of weight”. Let me stand corrected. I won’t tell you the exact number but it was somewhere between 25-30 lbs. In this “Biggest Loser” world my weight loss is really insignificant. I have never been close to bring morbidly obese, obese or even really that overweight. But that doesn’t negate the problems I have with eating.  At my worse I was having McDonalds at least three times a week. I called Ronald McDonald, Dr. Ron, my therapist.  I am an emotional eater. I binge. I am compulsive. I use food as reward, but also to mask my inner feelings. Tired, sad, boredom, guilt, grief, pain… you name it, I’ll eat to suppress all these feelings.

The more I try to control the food, the more it controls me. Losing weight is not the hard part for me. The hard part is keeping the weight off. When I lose weight I have a goal in mind and I set my mind to it. But things get rocky once I meet my goal.

I recently read (or at least listened to the audio version) the book When Food is Love by Geneen Roth. Highly recommended if you are a compulsive eater, emotional eater or if you binge eat. When I eat compulsively, I eat when I am not hungry, and then when I am full that I can’t eat another bite, I eat more, and more and more. I have no control of how much I eat, what I eat or how long it will last but I never binge on vegetables.

Question: If I eat well 5 days out of the week, will two binge days negate all that? Is depriving myself of sugar and fat throughout the week leading me to this behavior? When I binge I am completely out of control. Something else takes over and I can’t do a thing about it. Afterwards I feel guilt, shame and sadness that I lost control and ate so much.

Today was one of those days. Tomorrow will be better. I hope.