Tag: Eating Disorders

No Promises

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

My life is littered with a trail of broken promises, each one giving me more material to shape into self-loathing. Which ones were fueled by bipolar disorder, which ones by being an addict, and which by simply being a flawed human, I’ll never know. But I’ve learned, the hard way, that my promises need to be small, short-term, and specific. That’s why I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that I don’t think setting intentions is a good thing, or that doing so in a spirit of camaraderie with others isn’t helpful. But they aren’t right for me.

So, for 2023, I do not vow to get my first book, or my first two books, published–but for today, I set an intention of doing the next step of cover designer research. I do not vow to lose weight–but for today, I set an intention to eat in a way that doesn’t hurt me. I do not vow to make a little money with my fledgling tarot reading business–but today, I set an intention to participate in my favorite forum. And so forth.

I need to accept that I live in cycles. No matter how many meds I take, my ability to do things–including basic self-care like exercise and eating well–is going to fluctuate. And when I get into shame about that, it only prolongs the down phase, because people who are in shame don’t take good care of themselves even if they can again.

Post-Holiday Rehab

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

The holidays are over for another year, and I survived. Mostly. My family has been pretty low-key about the holiday season for years, so I have it better than many, but it’s still socializing with the added elements of overthinking and societal pressure to be happy and having a good time.

I made a choice to eat without restriction for about ten days spanning Christmas. Let’s have a show of hands from everyone who believes I’m now pleased with my decision…yep. I am feeling the consequences of my actions. Not in the way a normal person might say, with a bit of chagrin, that they gained weight over the holidays. No. What I’m dealing with is the aftermath of what, eventually, became a full-on compulsive eating episode, because that’s what happens when I continue eating a certain way long enough, and how did I think this time would be any different?

Could I have made it through the holidays without doing what I did? I don’t know. What I’m mad at myself about is not the choice I made but my failure to acknowledge the extent of the consequences I would face; my wishful thinking. If I’d faced up to the implications of what I was doing, maybe I could have sought support to help mitigate the damage or help me come out of it before the most painful and punitive ending binges.

Now I have to heal, and recalibrate my broken metabolism, and accept that it’ll take a long time to repair the damage. It’s day one of the “maybe don’t eat yourself sick” plan–and that’s going to have to do.

Is Happiness Boring?

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

When someone said this to me, I absorbed it in a couple of different ways. The first way was the way they probably intended it: the simple fact that happiness is less dramatic than suffering. How many operas have you seen about people having pleasant lives and untroubled relationships? Great writers and artists have spent millennia spinning human pain into beautiful tapestries of vision and thought, and it can’t be denied that without said pain a great deal of beauty would not exist.

Then, of course, I thought about it from a therapist’s perspective. When I was in the field, I sat with a lot of people who said they wanted to be happy but routinely sabotaged any progress toward a life that might make them happier. (Then, of course, I went home and did the same thing.) We (most humans, but especially those who got imprinted with drama growing up) are wired for drama, and when things remain the same we get antsy.

Now that I live with bipolar disorder, I get to see my brain play out a version of this in my cycles. When coming out of a depressive phase, I start to feel happy, even content. Ordinary pleasures have a new intensity as I rediscover them. I can focus on tasks, and I get a lot of satisfaction from completing any. Life takes on a calmness…aaannndd then I’m hypomanic. The calm phase never lasts; my brain is wired to build the good energy up into problematic energy.

My brain does what we enact in our lives. “Things are too quiet around here. I need something to happen.” So we make something happen. We act out with a problem behavior, so we can have the drama of guilt and trying to get back on the wagon. We text that ex. We’re late to something important. We get furious at something that might have barely hit our radar if we weren’t subconsciously looking for a fight.

And we’re back in drama. Familiar, interesting drama. Interesting to us, anyway. Not so much to those who have to watch us spin. Again.

The Bipolar Diet

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

What is dieting success, and who defines the difference between success and failure?

Of all the posts I’ve made on this site, the one garnering the most likes has been my recent post “Soup du Jour” in which I talk about the inconsistency of my eating patterns. Did it strike a chord for people, or was it just that it wandered into a highly populated tag? I suspect the latter.

Whatever the case, eating and weight is always an issue worth discussing for me. People with mental health issues have trouble feeding themselves healthfully and consistently even if they didn’t start off with an eating disorder like I did. I’ve spent decades of my life traveling up and down the scales, eating every diet imaginable. At five feet seven inches, my lowest adult weight (for about ten minutes) was 145. My highest adult weight was 315 pounds. Today, and for about six years now, I maintain a weight in the range of 215 to 235 pounds.

Am I a success for learning to maintain a weight at least 80 pounds lower than my highest? Or am I a failure for being unable to sustainably go even lower? Depends who you ask. Certainly doctors, insurance companies, and clothing designers will never be pleased with me. But if you’ve never been as overweight as I have been, you don’t know what a difference that 80 to 100 pounds makes to my health and mobility. It’s night and day.

If anyone had told 17-year-old, 125-pound me, throwing up her Herbalife supplement after packing her 500-calorie lunch, that she’d one day be grateful to weigh 220 pounds, her head would probably have exploded. It would have exploded again if someone had told her that this future 220-pound woman would experience a level of self-acceptance unimaginable to the desperately thin girl.

Waiting for the Other Shoe

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

Uh-oh…I feel good today. The side effects of my meds change have died down, and the new med is looking promising. I’m a bit less hypomanic, I’m sleeping a teeny bit better, and my morale is up. Thinking about my writing projects and publishing issues, while still chaotic, doesn’t feel quite as overwhelming.

So, I’m waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for a relative’s health to take an abrupt turn for the worse, or for the dog to start throwing up, or for the nearby oil refinery to have a toxic leak. Because people with brains and/or backgrounds like mine are wired to expect disaster.

That’s one reason I carry a deep conviction that feeling happy is always the precursor to trouble. The other reason has to do with the deep shame I still battle–not the shame over things I’ve done, but the unexplainable shame I seem to have been born with. It tells me that there will always be a price for any happiness I experience; that in taking anything for myself I am stealing it from the world.

All this makes it harder to appreciate days like this, but I try. It’s a gorgeous fall day here in Northern California. We won’t be on fire again for several months, and the air is crisp and fresh. I got five glorious hours of sleep last night. My favorite jeans are clean. So is my hair. And there’s nothing I have to do for the rest of the day. Life is good.

Soup du Jour

~ Lori Lynne ~ 2 Comments

What’ll it be today? What am I going to eat? When am I going to eat? How am I going to eat?

To live with me is to, periodically, listen to my announcement of which nutritional and/or behavioral hack I have decided to use in my ongoing task of coping with my eating disorder and broken metabolism. To live with me is to notice, at some point, that I’m no longer doing the thing I announced to you a day or week or month ago. To live with me is to listen patiently as, when I get tired enough of things not going well with my eating, I announce my new plan.

I hate it. I despise the fact that I can’t settle on one nice, sensible way of eating and stick to it. Even if it has to be a weird way, I wish I could just pick one and stick with it. There are common threads–for example, being low on carbs is a thing during all but the most fuck-it phases because of my blood sugar issues–but a lot of other things vary.

How low-carb are we talking here? Strict, or more lenient? Am I practicing intermittent fasting? If I am, how extreme? How am I addressing the fact that my body’s satiety signals are pretty much broken, and I therefore need some kind of attention to portion control? Am I using behavioral rules or techniques, such as don’t-read-at-the-table, to help with emotional or mindless eating?

It varies. It varies because I vary. Sometimes I’m capable of certain things, and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes, when things get bad in other ways, being sloppy with food ends up being the least destructive way for me to act out. And, on one level, I’m ok with that. I’m even ok with the fact that all my back-and-forth efforts usually do no more than maintain my weight, because I know that if I weren’t doing my best, I’d be back up at my top weight of nearly 100 pounds above where I am now.

But I hate the inconsistency. I hate the judgment from people who don’t see why I can’t stop the merry-go-round and just eat like a normal person. And, of course, I hate that I can’t just eat like a normal person. Even other people in recovery from eating disorders sometimes judge me for my chaotic relationship with food–surely, if I were doing the emotional work, I wouldn’t flit back and forth like this. I see their point…but it’s the best I can do.

It’s almost as if I have bipolar disorder or something. Oh, wait, I do.

Goldilocks

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

I have come to the conclusion that Goldilocks is not an addict.

It’s not that she is without issues, most notably a lack of respect for others’ personal boundaries. But her behavior is clearly abnormal when considered from an addict’s perspective.

Come on–she samples two bowls of porridge and finds the third one to be “just right.” She eats it. Satisfied, she goes and finds a nice place to take a nap.

What’s wrong with her? Why isn’t she rummaging through the bears’ kitchen, trying to find more of that perfect stuff? Or trying to mix the hot and cold porridge to capture that “just right” again? Or just gulping down the too-hot and too-cold porridge, because it’s better than nothing? How is it possible that she is moving on?

After decades of living with an eating disorder, I know how to eat in a way that my body and brain like. I’ve learned, the hard way, that starving myself sets me up for an inevitable compensating binge. I’ve learned, through much trial and error, which foods trigger cravings and are best avoided. I’ve learned not to deprive my body of fats and other things I used to be trained to withhold. When I eat the right way for me, I feel stronger, calmer, and in less pain. I don’t obsess about food between meals. My body and mind send me messages amounting to “About time, dumbass!”

There’s just one problem–I’m nothing like Goldilocks. The concept of moderation, of just right, of enough...my addict brain squirms in discomfort. No quick gratification from weight loss? No resolutions to starve virtuously after the latest episode of binge eating? No “tomorrow will be different?” Weird.

Embracing the reality of my eating disorder, and the need to deal with it even while other conditions might seem more urgent, is a balancing act I will never master. This process will never end, only ebb and flow. And I have to love myself anyway. Weird.

Eating Disorders Have Weird Rules

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

Yes, lest those who read my stuff ever forget: I’ve lived with an eating disorder since I was thirteen or so. It coexists with my mental health issues and with my life as an addict in recovery. It’s there to a greater or lesser extent every day of my life.

I’ve been blessed in recent years with being able to take better care of my body in some ways. Many days are relatively free of compulsions, many other days are moderate, but a few still take me back to the worst days.

A couple of days ago, I felt myself teetering close to a binge and didn’t want to go there, so I tried to do some “harm reduction.” At the grocery store, I bought a couple boxes of artificially-sweetened treats (yuck) to bribe myself out of buying other things.

So there I am, yesterday, with a terrible stomachache from the treats my body is not liking. I decide, disgusted, that I don’t want them around any more. I don’t want them around tomorrow, because if they are around tomorrow, I will eat them and have another stomachache and feel like crap all day.

This where the awful rules kick in. You see, I am not allowed to throw the treats away. No. I bought them, I made that choice, and now I have to pay for it. If I don’t want them around tomorrow, there is only one allowable way to get rid of them. I have to eat them. All of them. Tonight.

I hate the rules.

Doing Nothing

~ Lori Lynne ~ Leave a comment

My job today is to do nothing. Specifically, my job is to do nothing self-destructive. I hate days like these, where I’m just trying to get back to zero by letting my body and mind recuperate from whatever abuse I inflicted on them recently.

But the days when I’m actually doing the harm are, of course, worse. After nearly a year and a half of grace on my let’s-keep-diabetes-in-remission way of eating, I began to struggle in the spring and have not yet recaptured the blessed place I was in. A week or two of difficult abstinence has tended to be followed by a few days at a time of the hideous and painful rituals of binge eating. Although I haven’t relapsed on drugs, the eating disorder brings plenty of suffering in the form of sickness, shame and secrecy.

Sharing about this is important, because I don’t ever want anyone to get the idea that the work I’ve done on myself has solved anything. It hasn’t. I’ll be dealing with my issues for the rest of my life, just like I’ll be an addict in recovery the rest of my life.

If you think that’s a defeatist attitude, I understand, but I must disagree. Understanding that these things are a part of me and my life, rather than some demon I can exorcise forever if I just get it right, has been vital in acquiring more self-acceptance.

This is only day two back on plan. If and when I rack up a few days and get my mind clearer, I may look at whether to get in touch with my psych team over the general pattern I’m seeing (sleep worse than usual, biting nails until they bleed, anxiety spikes.) It’s the usual dilemma: are my struggles a sign that I need more help with my symptoms, or do I just need tough love and other attitude adjustments?

But today, the goal is nothing. Like the old story of someone who’s deep in a hole crying out to their God, “Please, God, get me out of this pit!” And God replies, “Okay, but I can do it faster if you stop digging!”

I’m not digging today. And that’s going to have to do.