Never out of the woods

For the longest time, I had been getting along without consuming cookies, bread, or sweets. If I did have some, say, at MIL's, I was able to stop eating after consuming just one slice, or one piece, without having cravings for more. 

I had been certain that I could, by now, handle that stuff. 

I was wrong. 

That week of enforced feeding on carbohydrate-rich foods has been wreaking havoc on my self-control. 

For one, I am almost continuously hungry. Even worse, I crave carbohydrates, to a point where I gave in and bought a big tin of chocolate cookies. Not only that I ate most of these over the course of the last week, yesterday I had a veritable binge for the first time in years. One of the kind where I keep going in and out of the kitchen, returning for another handful or bowlful of food as soon as I finish the preceeding one in spite of my stomach already feeling uncomfortably full. 

What saved me from an even bigger caloric desaster was the fact that my former favorite binge foods were not in the house.   

The whole thing has been scaring me, badly.

I can still remember what it felt like, many years ago, to be stuffing my face with two pounds of spaghetti aglio e olio, while begging my boyfriend to take me away from the house because I could not stop eating, or that other night when, after scouring my pantry for the literally last crumbs of dry cereal, I drove my car ten miles to the next McDonald's (tm) drive-in and bought twenty of their standard hamburgers, and began wolfing them down in the car while driving, dripping ketchup and grease all over me and having finished off half that giant bag of food by the time I came home. 

In that kind of situation, it is no longer about willpower, because that just got short-circuited. The only chance I have of interrupting that kind of binge, other than reaching the point where I literally can't get any food into my body any more, is physically removing myself from food. 

Re-experiencing that kind of out-of-control food craving is scary. 

If I don't stop this fast, I will regain, big time. 

I had not thought that the effect of eating sugar and wheat several days in a row and in larger amounts would be so drastic. 

Obviously, it is. I am acting like a dry alcoholic who has been made to down a bottle of something 80proof and ends up craving alcohol as if he'd never been dry. 

Which is probably the lesson for me in this. My body doesn't react normally to wheat and sugar. If I consume more than a minuscule amount of either, the cravings for crap food I thought were gone come back full force. And I, especially when there are other stressors around, may not be able to resist them. 

So, what I need to do is detox again. Go cold turkey on anything wheat and sugar. Fill up on real food. 

If I don't, I'll be back where I never again want to be. 

Todays WI: 83.3 kilograms. 183 pounds. 

Again.

And I never wanted to be back up there, either.

Back in morbid obesity.

High time to pick myself up and get back on the tracks. 

Julia