depriving depravity

"I was like the wild animals in my Homes and Habitats of Wild Animals book who spent their lives hunting down other animals and eating them raw. Nobody much liked me, I thought, because they sensed that I wanted to bite into their bare arms and bare cheeks and rip off chunks of them and chew and chew and swallow. I wanted to eat them not because they looked particularly tasty or even because I was hungry, but because I was empty and I needed to feel full."
-Fat Girl by Judith  Moore

After all of these years of struggling with my weight and writing about it and thinking about why I am the way that I am when it comes to food, I am still such a mess.  As much as I feel I have learned a lot and have come a long way in my struggle, I still keep losing out to food.  Maybe I don't know as much as I think I do or maybe I know enough but I'm just not strong enough to face it.

I already know that I'm a stress eater.  I already know that I use food to comfort me when I'm sad.  I use food to celebrate when I'm happy.  I'm a glutton.  I'm a carbaholic.  I like sweets and sweets like me.  Food is the only thing in my existence that makes me happy.  God doesn't make me happy.  People don't make me happy.  Writing, painting, drawing doesn't make me happy.  But food does.  Every.  Time.

Food is my comfort.  It's my crush.  I'm in love with food.  I think about it constantly.  I crave the textures and smells and spicy zing.  I'm in love with the process of biting and slurping and chewing and swallowing.  It fills me up inside in a way that nothing else can.  It's an event.  It's an experience.  It lowers my blood pressure and temporarily distracts from the hate that boils away inside me.   It's calming.  It's soothing.  It's destroying me in the best way.

Food always answers me when I call.  It never disappoints me.  Maybe I just can't deal with people like I can with food.  People are fallible.  Food is immaculate.  Maybe I'm playing the victim and making food my savior.  But it's so much easier, isn't it?  Especially because the people I cared about the most, the ones I thought would be around, left me.  Left me for reasons I'll never know.  Left me for other people.  I was a penis placeholder until someone better came along.  I feel pretty abandoned and it's something that I've struggled with for a long time.  The why.  The not being able to understand how everything went down the way it did.  But food can't leave me like that.  It's always there to listen and make me feel better.  It fills those spaces that people left behind.

But food isn't all that great.  Food has caused me to gain a significant amount of weight since my college graduation in 2009.  I don't want to go anywhere or see anyone because I feel I look disgusting.  I don't want to see old high school acquaintances because I don't want them to think I was just another classmate that got fat over the years.  I hate that they missed all the weight I lost after high school, how I looked decent and thin for about three years before I came home and put all the weight right back on.

I hate myself for getting this way.  But I hated myself before it even happened.  Which is why I ate.  And now I eat to not hate myself so much.  And that's how people get trapped in that cycle of pain and self-soothing.   I've realized I've caught my sleeve in some machinery and I can't wriggle myself free.

I've become lazy.  I feel like I've come pretty close to pinpointing my problems with food and people and myself but I just don't feel I have the energy to deal with it.  It's just so much easier to grab food instead of legitimately dealing with what's going on.  I don't want to deal with the fact that I'm a college graduate working in a shitty retail store.  I don't want to deal with the fact that I'm one hundred grand in student loan debt.  I don't want to deal with the fact that I have never had a meaningful relationship in my life.  I don't want to deal with the fact that my Christianity is hanging on by a thread.   I don't want to deal with the fact that I have no idea what I want to do with my life because the things I thought I was passionate about don't mean anything to me anymore.  I don't want to deal with the fact that I'm fat.  Maybe my mind can't handle it, can't comprehend the crap heap I've gotten myself into.  So I ignore it with food.

I try not to eat so much but I've become so accustomed to this lifestyle of funneling food in every second that if I'm not eating, my body responds.  I get flushed and nervous.  And I tell myself that it's no big deal, that I'm just cutting back.  I'm not giving up food forever.  I'm just not going to eat as much.  But my body doesn't believe me.  I get anxious.  I try to ignore it, to focus on other things but my brain gets busy and it stirs up thoughts of eating until I literally can't concentrate on anything else but the fridge.

EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT it tells me.  It fills my head and consumes my concentration until I bust into the kitchen to soothe the sirens that blare incessantly.  I give in one more time, give it what it wants, and wait for the temporary feeling of euphoria wash over me.

And then the inevitable crash.  The hatred.  The loathing.  The sadness that sweeps in and takes over my body until I hear the EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT again.

It'll make you feel better.  You won't be nervous.  It feels good.  It feels right.  Do it.  Do it.  Do it.

I don't mean to downplay the significance of an actual addiction but in some ways, I do feel like I'm addicted to food.  It might be more of a psychological dependence than a physical one or maybe I'm just dependent on the way food makes me feel rather than the substances themselves but it's all I can think about.  I wake up to breakfast and wait out the hours until it's time for lunch and do the same until dinner and go to bed thinking about breakfast again.

And then there's the snacking and the indulgent sweets and the high that I get from eating them.  And just like an addict, the one snack high wears away after a while and then I have to have two, and then three, and then that's not enough and I have to keep eating to sustain any form of anesthetization.

I've tried replacing food with some other form of stress relief.  Yoga.  Meditation.  Writing.  Drawing.  Listening to music.  Petting a cat.  Nothing does what food does for me.  Nothing feels as good or as fulfilling as eating.

Most people treat food as fuel but I treat food as a friend.  I know I have a tendency to personify objects.  Not just stuffed animals but televisions and bedding.  I create personal attachments to inanimate objects without thinking anything of it so is it that much of a stretch to think I would personify food as well?  To think of food as an actual something that I can see and talk to and touch?

Maybe the reason I can't stop eating is because I'd feel like I was leaving the only friend I ever had, the only person who made me feel good inside.  The only one who never left me.  I wouldn't want to leave the way I've been left.  I wouldn't want to turn my back on food.

Or maybe I just don't want to give up the one thing I feel like I have left.  If eating is the only thing that makes me happy and I give up my favorite indulgent foods, what do I have?  Nothing.  And how would that make me feel?  Devastated.  Angry.  Impossible to handle.  I'm already on the verge of snapping at everyone and if I can't self-soothe with food, I might just blow up on someone or find life even more unbearable than I already do.  I don't want to deprive myself because it's too hard but I know I have to because it's also too hard being in this body.

I feel like I can't control it.  There's just something inside that clicks.  All of a sudden, I get it and I can diet and deal with it and lose the weight.  And then whatever it is that keeps me in control goes away and all progress is lost.  I've lost weight before and I can do it again.  I just have to wait for the click.  I can feel it coming.  I can do this.

I just have to stop self-sabotaging.