So I logged into here this morning and was kind of surprised by the flurry of page views. I always seem to get a fair amount but this was a lot for my little fledgling blog. Then I figured out that Charlotte linked to my last post on her twitter feed so thanks for that! I'm glad people liked my why recovery is worth it list. It's so important to me to remind myself why I'm doing this and hopefully the list will help someone else out there too. Anyhow, if anyone new is reading this because of that welcome and feel free to leave me a comment. (That goes for anyone who's been reading for a while too!) I'd love to know more about who my readers are. I know I don't really ask open-ended things that are easy to respond to or anything but I worry about doing that and getting no feedback and then being sad! So just know that I always love to hear other people's input or personal stories.
Now, that all said, I'll get into what I really logged on to write about.
I had a rough evening last night. I got home from work and the boyfriend wanted to eat dinner out with his best friend who's visiting and some other mutual friends. Okay, cool. So he called his friend and the guy (who's notoriously flaky) doesn't pick up. So the boyfriend talks to his other friends and they decide to wait on the guy for a while, see if he gets in touch. Less cool but still okay. I like to eat dinner by 6:30 at the latest but I was fine for a bit longer. It gets longer and longer and the boyfriend tells me I should eat a snack since it's obviously going to be kind of a late dinner. Cue freak-out.
I still have a lot of problems with snacks for whatever reason. If I can call something part of a meal (even if it's dessert after dinner eaten 2 hours later) I'm fine. But snacks scare me. I ate them when I needed to gain weight and then once I was at a normal weight I stopped. I guess my problem with eating snacks even when, like last night, I'm really hungry is that I'm afraid I'll eat the extra calories and then still eat all my meal calories too and get fat. It's so silly. First of all, I don't count calories. Secondly, I'm much more in touch with my hunger cues these days. It's not like eating when I'm just bored or lonely or something. Plus I had beautiful tangerines fresh from my CSA box but I couldn't even manage to eat one of those.
Anyways, I snapped at the boyfriend that I didn't want a snack, I wanted dinner, and proceeded to sit there for another half an hour, until I was completely starving. And I don't know what it is but these days I tend to lose it when I get really hungry. I just flat-out can't function and completely go crazy. It's mostly around dinner-time, maybe because that's when I tend to eat heaviest in the day, but I can actually feel myself losing it. And once I do I can't have a conversation with anyone, I can't focus on anything. The only thing I can do is snap at everyone around me until I eat something. And then I'll feel myself coming back down to Earth. Am I crazy? Probably. It's very weird though. I mean, I used to subsist on such a tiny amount of calories. I remember being irritable sometimes, but nothing even close to this. Maybe it's the fact that my body knows I've starved it before and so reacts very strongly to that threat? I don't know. It does make me wonder if anyone else in ED recovery has dealt with this or if I'm just a freak.
We ended up eating Thai food for dinner at almost 8pm, without the best friend of course. And because I was ravenous I probably ate more calories than I would have if I'd just eaten the damn snack. Grrrrr. Well, lesson learned. Next time this happens, and it will- we have a lot of flaky friends, I'm really going to try to eat something small. The temporary anxiety has to be better than the temporary insanity. (And just saying that gets my heart rate up, sigh.)
I can feel my boyfriend getting frustrated and I don't blame him. It's not nice to be snapped at when you haven't done anything wrong. As much as I'd love to eat at the exact same time every day it sometimes just doesn't work out that way in the real world and I have to be able to handle that. Last night I told the boyfriend that he just had to live with it since it was the eating disorder and not my fault but, as he pointed out, that's not an excuse. It's a reason but it means I need to deal with it. He said I've "come to far to stop now" and he's right.
