Countdown running

There´s a goal, and then there´s the time to reach it. With the latter running out fast, I have been cutting out carbs completely for about a week now, and find myself, by today´s weigh-in, 700 grams ( 1.54 pounds) away from my minigoal, with four days to go. Of course, just in time, there´s Aunt Flo visiting, too, which usually means my weight going up about two pounds, so I still hope for some of that dropping off again, but still, it looks as if I am going to miss my target by a mere fraction of a kilogram. I´ll stick to no carbs anyway, and see just how close I can get to that magic limit of just overweight, or even cross it.
Seeing how slowly my weight is inching down, and how fast it would go up whenever I went off plan even for just a weekend, brings a disturbing reminder.
This is for life. I will never again be able to eat the way I have been used to do, unless I want to regain all I have lost. And it takes willpower. Plenty of it. Somebody for whom food has always been just food, and not the cure-it-all antidote to any kind of intense feeling, perhaps won´t be able to understand that.
You see, when I was stressed out, I ate. When I was angry, I ate. When I was worried, I ate. When I was looking forward to something good, I ate. There simply wasn´t any situation in which I would not reach for food in order not to feel what I was feeling. The sensation of being stuffed, the sugar coma that comes after downing that bag full of cookies or that vat of ice cream, were, for the longest time, preferable to feeling what I felt, and to being there in my life. I kept a veritable pantry at my office, so as to never be without something to wolf down should stress arise. My handbags were holding bags of nuts and chocolate, and my coat pockets were rustling with empty wrappers from candy bars.
To get where I am today, I had to stop all of this. No more eating myself into a chocolate coma, no more crunching down my anger with the contents of a bag of peanuts.
I am, now, forced to do what somebody who never had an eating disorder is doing all the time: face my feelings, live through them, even if it makes me uncomfortable.
Food, for me, may never again be anything but what my body needs to be nourished. It isn´t a cure-all for bad feelings. And it isn´t a replacement for those elusive other things I might want from life. Things like being loved, or being comforted, or even just taking a break when my energy is running low.
Whenever I feel like digging into that vat of ice cream, or doing something similarly stupid, I must now stop and look at what it is that set me off, and what I could do to deal with it that doesn´t involve eating.
Sometimes, that´s quite difficult. But I´m getting better at it, and that´s why I still hope that I may be normal-weighted again some day.


Julia