Today has given me a small glimpse into what life before my dieting soon to turn into an eating disorder began. My eating disorder (like everyone else's) focuses a lot on details.. For my ED in regards to packaged food its always having to get particular brands and flavours of things and if I can't get what I need (even if their staples) I will have to go without until I can find them. Sure, I may look around for something similar but normally I will walk away empty handed.. Very rarely I will come away with something different and if I do it will only be because its lower calorie then my usual choice and if it's good then the lower calorie option will become what I always have.
Today has been a lot different. Not having what I would normally have for breakfast (this time I was without apples and sunflower seeds) leaded me to take the plunge and go for the readily available yet higher calorie options of peanut butter and a banana to replace them. Normally I wouldn't have done this especially considering there were a few other lower calorie options that I could have had. But I decided to go with what I really felt like rather then what me ED wanted.
Now onto lunch.. Decided to have soup because it has been such a cold and miserable day but didn't have cauliflower which is what I could normally add in to help thicken the soup and also didn't have bread to have with it. Those may not seem like big things not to have but then my mind went into the whole "well you might as well go without" frame of thinking which really just leads onto a slippery slope. So instead just went without with the cauliflower - since a few less vegetables one day never hurt anyone and instead of having part of the carbohydrate made up with corn and some with bread, just had all the carb made up by sweet corn. Yes, the soup wasn't as thick as normal but it still tasted the same and really that's all that matters.
These are things that I (as well as anyone with an ED) struggle with everyday and really considering it's become such a normal part of our thinking we never even notice it happening. All we feel is the anxiety and dread when we find out there isn't any of X ingredient that you would normally have. On both meals today I actually caught myself starting this thinking and really made me think but why? Why am I so afraid of having something a little different if that's what I truly want or if that's all I have at home right now? Doing both the things is NORMAL while being afraid of them is not. I've come to realise over the past few weeks just how prevalent my anorexia and my preoccupation with food still is even after being over year in recovery and being weight restored for about 9 months. But just because it's still around doesn't mean that I will be living with it for the rest of my life, it just means that I have a lot more work to do on getting through this and being rid of this illness. I'm in no way kidding myself, it's going to be harder then ever especially with different circumstances happening in my life right now. But I am determined to one day be free of this.
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