Binging

I have been absolutely horrible with my food for the past week. I did my best with Christmas, such as making eggs instead of eating what my parents had for breakfast (brown sugar covered bacon and donuts), but then we had things like this AMAZING chicken spinach lasagna and Asiago toast. I'm not supposed to eat too many carbs or too much sugar because of my insulin resistance, and after a couple days of that, my body was right back to where it was: the hunger, the cravings, the lethargy.

It just kept building and building and building. I've caught myself binging this past week. Even in the middle of a binge, I knew I was binging, but I'd just keep shoving food into my mouth.

I don't want to do this.

Part of the reason was that we hadn't gone shopping before we left for Christmas, so I didn't have any of my low-carb stuff in the house when we came home. I didn't want to go shopping because I was so tired, so I just ate a bunch of snacks and cereal. That was poor planning on my part. We restocked this past weekend, and I started bringing my usual food to work so I wouldn't have to buy cafe food or walk to the McDonald's next door. At night, however, it creeps in again. I did fine on New Year's Eve, but then a friend came over and we ordered Chinese food. Then yesterday, I did fine at work again, but I ate the rest of the crackers and cheese spread from New Year's Eve. At least, now, all of the crappy food is out of the house.

I haven't done this since May or June, so I'm not sure of the reason. I feel stressed/depressed, and I haven't been able to put my finger on why. I need to get back to the gym and re-condition myself to exercise when I'm upset rather than eat. I think the binging made me stressed, which led to more binging, amusingly enough. And then my insulin resistance kicks in and makes me hungry, which leads to more binging, and so on. But now I'm getting it back under control.

Part of me thinks it might have been the stress of the weight loss on top of everything else. Sometimes I feel so much pressure to put up a loss every week or two, and I'm so close to 300. Even though I am VERY proud of how far I've come, I hate being stuck around 310. It's like I needed a break, a week of eating at maintenance, a week where I didn't count calories or wear a heart rate monitor. I know that sounds irresponsible, and it is, but I'm human. I'm sure that, even at goal weight, I'm going to have another week where I just want to eat a ton of horrible food. I'm sure it will happen before then, even. So, I need to develop the tools (again) to stop it in its tracks.

It's the week before my period, so I can't really tell if the extra weight is from that or the binging or both. I know I haven't gone over maintenance, so I'm sure it's all water weight (especially since my clothes still fit the same - my jeans are actually loose). The problem is the scale said 318 after spending a couple weeks at 310, so my eyes practically fell out of my head this morning. That's a LOT of water weight to lose over the next week or two. But, since I usually gain 5-6 pounds before my period, I know most of it will come off. I just have to go back to my plan to get the rest of it off and keep going down, down, down.

My consolation is that pretty much everyone I know ate at maintenance between Christmas and New Year's Day, so we're all dealing with an increase (or no loss at all). So I guess if I was going to lose my mind, this was the perfect week for it. I don't feel so alone. ;)