Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

For the last four months, I have been steadily losing weight. I’ve been keeping my dopamine levels high without eating sugar and watching myself. I’ve learned a very important lesson in these last few months.

It’s never about the food. It’s about WHY I want to eat the food.

Whenever I start to feel uneasy or discontent, then I know that something is wrong with me emotionally. I’m scared about something, or maybe I’m worried about something. The fact that I might be tempted to eat an entire bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups isn’t about the candy. It’s about my emotional state.

This is a lesson that has taken me YEARS to learn. I’ve always known that I’ve eaten for emotional reasons, but I was never successful at stopping the never-ending eating compulsion. I am finally able to feel that feeling of hatred for myself and recognize it for what it is. I’m upset about SOMETHING and it has transmogrified into self-hatred and self-destruction, thus, the peanut butter cups.

The WORST part is that I can’t really teach someone else about this. As much as I might try to talk about it here, that feeling that starts the binge is different for every person. I can’t teach you how to recognize that feeling because I’m sure it manifests itself differently in you. In fact, it might not even manifest as a desire to binge. It might manifest as lack of hunger or the unstoppable urge to cut yourself.

It makes me feel so hopeless as a writer for Starling Fitness, because I feel like I’m healing and I don’t know how to pass on that healing.

This postcard from PostSecret reminded me of how I stayed in my addiction to food for so long.

It reads:

I had to put soap on this so I wouldn’t eat it out of the garbage. It wasn’t even that good.

I knew that putting soap on food was a sign of disordered eating. I remember throwing away cake and thinking, “See, I’m not that bad. I can throw away cake and not have to soap on it like those poor people who are binge eaters.”

It was a way that I tricked myself. I wasn’t a binge eater because I could throw away food without getting it out of the garbage. Of course, nothing was stopping me from going to the store and buying another cake, some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a bag of Munchos. And I did…

The worst part of that postcard is the last sentence:

It wasn’t even that good.

THAT is the wretched betrayal of this disease. The longer we live in it, the less dopamine charge we get from bingeing, so foods that used to taste divine don’t taste as good as they used to. They start to taste bland and we are ever-searching for a better dessert or salty snack.

I can’t believe how many lies I told myself about my binges. Just a few months ago, I would have smugly nodded at this postcard, not realizing that disordered eating comes in many shapes and sizes. Just because I refuse to eat out of the garbage can doesn’t mean that I’m not a binge eater.

The telling aspect of this disease is that last sentence. Wanting to binge and when I did, it didn’t even taste that good, is THE definition of the biological problems that occur with binge eating. If you are noticing this trend in your eating, get some help, because this problem only gets worse the longer you have it.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

I saw the trailer to this new movie, Lucy, and it really got me to thinking.

I really believe that the spiritual side of weight loss is what I have been missing since the beginning and I REALLY believe that spirituality is merely accessing part of my brain that I have allowed to become dormant my whole life. Watching this preview makes me wonder how my life would be different if I had been able to access the entirety of my spiritual potential.

I especially love this visual image from the movie trailer:

She says,

I can feel every living thing.

What if it were like that? What if I could feel the life-force of every living thing on the planet? Would I be a better person? Would I be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of feelings and emotions? Part of me thinks that this extra input wouldn’t create the superhero that they are showing in the trailer. It would create someone so awash with emotions that she wouldn’t be able to react properly. Perhaps she would retreat into her inner world.

If you could access all of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips, would it make you a better person? From just my daily meditations, trying to access that slim part of my brain that has been left stagnant for my entire life, I have found a peace and calm that I never had before. I only wish I had been able to nurture this part of my mind earlier. I might be a better person today.

Or, I might have retreated into my own mind, never to surface…