Chocolate Afternoon: another scrumptious bite of cake after work.
Chocolate Evening: lots of mini-eggs on the drive home from class.
Chocolate Dreams: coming up!
And I feel awesome about it. I wanted it, I ate it, I enjoyed it. This is a giant success for me.
I had a good check-in chat with Dr. C yesterday. I was nervous to tell him about my mangled March Break, but I was completely honest. I also told him about the successful week prior to the Break, and my back-on-the-wagon week so far. Overall, he said he is very pleased and thinks I made some excellent progress. It was exactly what I needed to hear. It's so hard to think about recovery as black-and-white; success and failure. But the journey is long and there are bound to be detours, pit-stops, even accidents. (My apologies for the lame metaphor - it's late. I promise better next time.)
There are a couple of reasons I allowed myself so much chocolate today. It didn't have to be chocolate, you see, I just wanted to eat for pleasure and without guilt. After talking about the past weeks, Dr. C reminded me that my current goal/challenge is to get rid of the purge, not the binge. It's too much to try to cut out both at the same time. Now, he's not saying that I should sit and binge every day as much as I want, only that I should not be restricting my eating as much as I usually do when I'm 'in recovery' or eating healthily. Usually I have to limit myself to very wholesome, healthy foods in order to keep the purge at bay. You see, it's difficult to rationalize the chocolate, or any other 'junk' food, as part of my regular eating. It usually leads to an unstoppable momentum of ED thoughts, and the inevitable binge. Followed by the evil purge.
Really, if I take away the purge, I'm not going to binge anyway. Sure, I'll occasionally overeat, and maybe I'll binge a bit, but I certainly won't plan to binge in nearly the same way. If the possibility of a purge was eliminated from my life, I am quite confident that the binges would disappear, too. I know I've said this before, but I feel like it's important to remind myself. Exploring my recovery from the purge point of view is still pretty new; I've always thought the binge was the problem, and that I had to stop the binge in order to stop the purge. But it makes so much sense to stop the purge first. I am so much happier without purge in my life.
He haunts my thoughts, he's pissed I've been ignoring him. Which leads me to another reason for all the chocolate. I had to go to the grocery store tonight. I was hungry and tired. Talk about asking for trouble.
As I wandered the aisles, at first I purposely diverted my eyes from the tasty items.
And then I peeked.
And then I started thinking about just giving in and buying a few things.
And then I really started to plan a binge.
And then, I decided that I would just buy some mini-eggs and allow myself to eat as many of them as I wanted.
I gave myself chocolate permission.
And then I was fine.
ED backed off, almost right out of my thoughts. Just that simple self-allowance, knowing that I would buy the treats and eat them, planning to do it out of pleasure and not out of guilt, well, it saved me. It might seem like a small, passing moment in a grocery store, but I am certain that it was pivotal. If I had broken down and given in to ED tonight, I guarantee it would have been the start of a terrible downward cycle. I wouldn't have gone to the gym tomorrow, I would have binged all weekend, and then I would have really been a mess the next week. But instead, I gave myself chocolate permission, and all the sudden ED didn't find it quite so fun. ED is my rebellious kid who wants to get a tattoo behind my back, but the second I say, sure, I'll even help you pick out a design and drive you to the shop, he doesn't think it's quite so cool anymore. I've taken away the element of secrecy, I've taken away the all-important "don't do that" that every kid invariably sees as a direct challenge.
Today, I had my cake, and I ate it. Twice.
Happy St. Chocolate's Day!
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