Binge Power

My therapist says that I give a binge too much power. Her advice for not gaining weight is to do exactly what I’ve been doing, except without the binge and purge. Pick a goal weight, allow yourself a little wiggle room to use if you binge, and compensate for it by eating less the next day or exercising more.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MS. OBVIOUS. That’s what I was doing at the beginning of the school year, when I had no energy and was always hungry. There are a couple problems with what she advises.

1.     My goal weight, although it is a healthy weight for my height, does not come naturally to my body. She didn’t have anything to say about the goal of 115 pounds, and I’m not entirely sure why. This failure to address it says to me that that’s a reasonable goal, which gives me permission to try to achieve that goal by any means. I have proven to myself that achieving 115 pounds takes restriction for weeks on end, and then I have to keep restricting to maintain that.

a.     The obvious solution to that is to choose a healthier goal weight, but hell no. I don’t feel comfortable in this weight, and I never will. I look relatively normal, but that isn’t good enough. I need to look and feel my best, otherwise my life is a living hell.

2.     There is no wiggle room. Wiggle room is an excuse to fail. If I allow myself to use that wiggle room, by gaining a few pounds after a binge, then I feel like there’s no way out. I give up, because any shift upwards in weight is a colossal failure. It means I have to start all over again to achieve my goals, and thinking that is so demoralizing, especially after a string of successful restriction days. I do not accept wiggle room. In addition, the wiggle room becomes my existence. Do you know how long it takes to recover from a binge if you eat normally afterwards? At least a week. And even if I scale down my binges to their lowest ever, once every two weeks, I spend half my life in freaking wiggle room! Fuck that.

I need to stop binging. Forever.