Cecilia

Day 6 status post roux-en-y gastric bypass surgery. The past five days of a clear liquids diet has made it abundantly clear to me that if I thought I had turned a new leaf, I definitely hadn't.
 

Me: I'm hungry  

Ed: Oh, that food smells so good, doesn't it? It would be so good to take a bite. Look at it, just sitting there.  

Me: I'm going to turn away and not look at that  

Ed: Yeah, but whoops! There it is again. One of your kids left a perfectly good bowl of noodles drenched in Alfredo sauce just sitting there. Oh, the thought of eating it!  

Me: Distract! I'm going upstairs!  
Ed convinced me to just try purees a few days before I was supposed to. I did. It went okay, so he talked me into advancing the diet to purees a day early. I countered and decided on full liquids (liquids you can't see through but that still go through a strainer, like milk). Except he talked me into cottage cheese at night, just for fun, and I struggled to resist him.
 

Me: One cup, and that's enough.  

Ed: Fill you up! Fill you up! Oh, it feels so good to fill you up! Don't you love that stuffed feeling? Don't you feel better now? Go take another cup. You can, you know, it's legal.  

Me: But I felt sort of full even before I finished the first one. I won't have a second one.  

Ed: DOOOO IT! Get up! That's right! Go over there and get another one, and make sure you pack it tight too! Level it off so it looks legal. There. Make an excuse now.  

Me: (to my daughter) "And I even get to have seconds! To think that this would have been two bites in the past -- haha! -- sigh ." I don't want to eat another.  

Ed: But it does look so good. Really savor it. That's how you can justify it. You have 30 minutes to eat and it's only been 15, so you may as well.  

Me: But it doesn't taste so good any more. And I feel full.  

Ed: EAT IT!  

Me: Okay.  
And then later when I was in my daughter's room:
 

Ed: Look! It's those powdered rice crispy things. What are they called? Puppy chow? There's three on her desk -- no SIX! Jackpot! You can take them without her looking. Do it!  

Me: I am not going to take them. They are soooo not on the diet!  

Ed: Take those three! There. You got them. Now the other three, right back there. She can't see you.  

Me: Why am I doing this. I'll throw them in the trash can. She noticed I'm doing something.  

Ed: No you won't. Walk out. Hide your hand. Real casual like, by your side, as if nothing were in it.  

Me: I'm going to dump them in the trash when I get out. This could really hurt me if I eat them.  

Ed: Eat them. Just chew them up good.  

Me: But the carbs! It's pure refined flour and sugar!  

Ed: Eat them! Good, good, now another... and another... Chew them slowly if that makes you feel better.  

Me: God. I hope I don't get dumping from this. How can I have cheated the first day I'm off clear liquids?  

Ed: Except you weren't, right? We ate that baby food meat for two days now, didn't we?  

Me: I feel so awful.  

Ed: There you go. You blew it. You didn't need any more food, but you had it anyway, didn't you. Didn't it feel good though?  

Me: No. It didn't. I feel horrible.  

Ed: You should. You never really will learn. You're going to start a blog, aren't you! You think you'll stick to that daily schedule you made today? You won't. You'll get bored like you always do and walk away. Sure, sure, maybe you'll get published some day, or maybe you'll just help someone. But really, you're going to quit like you quit everything else. You probably just gained back some of those pounds that you lost. And you didn't exercise today either. Hah! Fat lotta motivation you had for that, right?  

Me: But I thought... I was at least trying...  

Ed: But you failed as usual. Put it off. Screw this. Go to bed like you always do.  

Me: Okay.  
I'm not trying to shift the blame. There is no other person who is "forcing" me to eat the way I do. These are conversations I have in my head all day long. However, I've begun to read a book called Life Without Ed (Jenni Schaefer, 2004). In it, the author describes how she became the patient of Thom Rutledge and conquered her eating disorder by process of separating herself from these thoughts that had become so very internalized to her and later, as a separate "being" was able to end the relationship she had with the eating disorder/ED/Ed.
 
I'm hoping that by blogging along as I read the book, I can experience some of the recovery that she has. Although the author describes a cycle of "starving, bingeing, then purging," it is just as easy for me to substitute the words "eating until I can't feel any more." Too easy. I have sought help for the craziness that causes me to eat when I'm not hungry, to eat until I'm stuffed, and then to eat more, but I'm told this is not an eating disorder. Like hell it isn't! So for now, those of us who don't binge and purge or starve ourselves, those of us who just have a problem with "poor food choices," or "portion size" and "not enough exercise" can go through the motions and get ourselves weight loss surgery. But why do so many of us not reach our goal, or gain so much of the weight back, eventually? Because we still are in the grips of disordered eating, or whatever you want to call the process that makes us want to eat when we're not hungry.
 
I didn't even know that another way of eating existed until I had my third daughter. If she is not hungry, she will not eat. Plain and simple. She "saves up her hunger" when she knows she is going to her dad's for visitation, because she doesn't want to disappoint him by not eating. You see, if she forgets and has a snack after school, then she literally cannot eat dinner at his house, and ends up having a late dinner with me when she comes home. Or she will just skip dinner altogether, since she doesn't like feeling full at bedtime. One time I found a third-eaten Reeses Peanut Butter Cup laying on the counter. I had just enough restraint to ask her what that was all about before I devoured it in one bite. Her answer? "I took a bite and then I wasn't hungry any more." I gave birth to this child? Seriously? She definitely has her dad's genes, those of the calm observation that "If you just stopped eating after supper, you'd lose a lot of weight. It worked for me!" And of course it did. He snacked out of boredom or because he liked the taste of the food, but he really could take it or leave it. So he left it, and reached his goal weight within a month. If only it were that simple for the rest of us.
 
But I see that I've gone on a rant, so I'll just shut up now and go to bed.