May 9, 2002
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All right–what am I doing here? I started this thing because there were times I felt the need to talk to someone but didn’t know who to bother with my BS.
Results were laughable the last time I emailed a small circle of my friends and told them some about how my mind had been circling around my diet issues. Answers came from all over the place. My problem was the Devil, or God’s will, or Spiritual Foodyism, or addiction or nothing to worry about. I couldn’t really argue with any of it, because all I have is questions, no answers.
I spent years learning about my condition. I found some contradictory info, but finally settled on a few facts I could generally agree with. Among them is this one: some of my worst symptoms (fatigue, vertigo, incoordination,…the list is long) get better or go away when I stay on a strict diet to control my blood sugar.
The diet itself is a killer. Many foods act as drugs to me and have to be avoided completely. They are, of course, all the foods I love and crave. Every day on that diet is white-knuckle time. I dream of food. Every ad or package of forbidden food I see triggers cravings. Little tunes come up and get stuck in my mind–things like, “pizza, pizza, gotta have a pizza.”
I suffer one way if I diet, another way if I don’t. So far, I have gotten tons of support and encouragement from my family for ditching the diet. They love my cooking–not the boring diet stuff, but the tasty addictive things. Any support I’ve gotten for trying to stay on the diet has been weak, distant, ambivalent. My dear friends and mere acquaintances think I make a lot of fuss over nothing much.
On the diet, I obsess over food. Off the diet I am ill, exhausted, sick and tired of being sick and tired. Guilt over not being able fully to take care of myself doesn’t help me stick to the diet. I hate needing to ask for help. I drag myself around to do what I can, and I do without whatever I think I maybe don’t really need.
Long ago I went beyond caring about dieting to lose weight. Function is more important than form. But feeling, apparently, is more important to me than any of it. Feeling, sensation, the taste of sugar, the feel of gooey glutinous stuff going down, the jolt of energy as my blood sugar spikes…these are the things that hold me enslaved.
I don’t binge in the sense of stuffing myself. It’s never binge-and-purge for me. I pace myself, limit portion size so that the blood sugar spikes don’t knock me out. Like an old junkie or alcoholic, I know my capacity, my maintenance dose, and I don’t OD. In all honesty, I don’t want to give up my food-drugs. I just want a solution to this problem of the effects of my addictions…a solution that may not exist.
