[Medusa]

Wow. Tons of amazing posts in here lately! I have been trying to catch up and wanted to respond to several things so forgive me if this is disjointed:

JoSchmooze - Welcome! I am glad you are doing something for yourself and support you in taking charge of your health! I know that traveling all the time can be incredibly stressful and hard on the body so I am very glad you are figuring out ways to make it more manageable. I have heard of the hcg diet but haven't done a lot of research on it. It sounds incredibly low calorie/carb. Best of luck to you, please let us know how it goes!

Anya - Girrrrrrl, do I ever feel you. Not only with the binging but with the LDR triggers. I remember back to when Jack and I were dating long distance. It was 18 months of roller coaster highs and crushing lows and always that crappy feeling of "when will I see you again" immediately after I flew home. Its a lot of work and it's expensive ( I took a second job to cover my exorbitant phone bills, travel costs, and to help save for the move and Jack kicked her business into high gear to do the same).
I think that kind of stress and feeling of longing is a huge trigger for some of us and can often lead (and did for me many times) to binging.
It really helped me to think about what the "pattern" of the relationship would be so that I could plan accordingly for the feelings. If I knew I was going to be moping and feeling shitty for 10 days after leaving Jack in California, I made sure I had a full schedule of 2nd job and going out with friends to fill my time so that I wasn't sitting around with the feelings. Might have been "escapist" of me but it was the tool that worked at the time rather than sitting with the feelings.

On binging, I'd like to say this: I am a lifelong binger and I will BE a binger for the rest of my life. I don't know if this will be the same for anyone else here but I have resigned myself to realizing that no amount of "work" I do or weight I lose is going to reset that part of my brain because I learned binging as a tool so early in my life that it's just part of my marrow.

Admitting that is not a failure to me.

When I accepted the behavior as something that is going to crop up from time to time when I am triggered in certain ways, I feel more power over it because then it's "just part of my stress reaction" and not an angry monster terrorizing me.

I might not ever binge again in my life and will celebrate that heartily but if I do binge again, I'm going to treat it like hitting a nail on the highway. You change the tire and keep going. By changing the tire, I mean that we gain awareness every time we binge. Pretty soon, we can see the nail on the highway coming and might be able to change lanes to avoid it.

Changing lanes might mean changing our routine, or checking in extra often with ourselves, or going to a support group, or etc. Different strokes for different folks.

I have had 5 binges in the last 9 months. And don't get me wrong, these were bad mothers that meant thousands of calories, lots of self-deprecation, and feeling like giving up. All of them lasted 3 days or more because when I talk about binging, I don't mean I overate at one meal, I mean that I went on a food rampage and ate exhaustively for days to the point of wanting to throw up (and sometimes doing so). This also meant that I got to repeat my cycle of binge, weigh, freak out because I gained however many pounds, rinse and repeat.
Because the cycle helps us *stay* in the cycle if that makes any sense.

We become swirling eddies of food addiction where we get to have our food and our self-loathing too.

Fuck. That. Shit.

The world feeds us enough bullshit so we have to do better for ourselves. That takes believing that we are worth the fight.

That shit is HARD.

Just wanted to give huge props to every single person in this thread (and to the folks who read and don't post). This is an amazing thread and has been an amazing source of inspiration and support.

Much MUCH love.