Goals

To update; I did finally manage to calm down last night, although it took forever.
Blogging proved to be quite cathartic though, and major thanks to Ancora and Athanasy for your helpful and supportive comments, love you guys to bits! <3

Despite no sleep and feeling utterly shitty, I also passed an oral exam today - but it was rather gruesomely embarrassing, I only just made it by a narrow margin.
Did I feel relieved when it was done with, anyway?

Let me put it like this - say you spend several months being brutally tortured in a dungeon by some absolutely merciless abomination straight from the depths of hell; you might rightfully abound in joy when you are finally freed and the entire ordeal is over.
Much more likely though, you will be too scarred and traumatised by the experience to feel any relief at all - and that was what that exam felt like.

(obligatory PC addendum: I am not a complete moron, and I do realize no actual real-life torture experience compares to something as trite and mundane as an exam. I'm doing this for comedic hyperbole, obviously - and because, in my crazy pathetic mind, it really felt THAT bad to get another chance to show myself just how much of a worthless worthless loser I really am.)

Anyway, I digress, so on the topic of goals:

I want to be carful about setting them weight-wise - disappointment is already a major theme in my wretched little brain, and I don't want to set myself up for more of the same.

Still, there is this:
In less than a month, less than three weeks really, I will be attending a concert of a band I adore.
I happen to have reasonable cause to suspect, nay fear, that this concert might also be attended by The Coward, the Boy That I Still Long For Despite Knowing That I REALLY Shouldn't.

And his new girlfriend, of course.

From what I hear through mutual friends, they never do anything separately anymore.
So if either of them is there, the other will be.

And then I will be meeting a personalized nightmare of loss and rejection in double force, instead of enjoying a relaxing evening where I shut everything out of my brain except for the music.

The thing is (and I use that phrase way too often lately), that I know weight is pretty much the one issue where I can get to her.

I happen to know that she is equally messed up as I am in the food department, that weight and clothes sizes hold the same morbid appeal for her, and that she defines herself, much as I do, through the space that is or isn't visible between her thighs.

So of course, the petty bitter side of me dictates that I have to be super skinny, that I have to fuel her insecurities by nourishing my own, that I have to beat her at being thin at least if I can't beat her at winning his love.

If I have to run the risk of running into her, into them, then I would love for her to be shocked and envious at the sight of me.
I know that I am grasping for straws and that my attempt at physical superiority to her is petty; but that's what you would expect from a bitter person, it's the best I can do.

I am unsure what my goal for those three weeks should be though, how much I would want to have lost by then.
I'm out of touch with what is even realistic, what I am actually capable of achieving.

So, I think I'm going to give it a few more days, see how I'm doing and where I'm at, then try to decide what goal would be achievable and sufficient for my petty revenge.

Operation Skinny For The Wrong Reasons starts tomorrow... (There's always another reason to starve, isn't there? And right now I'm damn glad about it, I need incentive to stay on track; I could pretty much use incentive for a lot of things these days.)

Positive Thought of the Day:

I absolutely adore the girl I'm stealing for today's picture, her outlandish glamorousness, her almost inhumane body posture in that glittering suit - very David Bowie Ziggy-Stardust-era; also reminds me of the foam-spilling poise of his alien character in The Man Who Fell to Earth in a way.

(Bowie himself never seems to eat, does he? Certainly didn't during the seventies, when he lived on "red peppers, milk and cocaine"...
Alas, that doesn't really seem like a recommendable long-term plan either.... still, I wouldn't mind to posses the otherworldly razor-blade-ish grace of the Thin White Duke.)

Cal count standing at 550 and I'm actually going to bed now, because I feel like a walking trainwreck - so that's quite agreeable!

Eldritch Abomination

So... I sorta kinda majorly binged today.
It wasn't even just one giant binge, but continuous piling on of calories throughout the entire day in absolutely unnecessary amounts.
I had every intention to keep counting, though, so as to hold myself responsible.

I think the worst thing one does when bingeing is to get that feeling of complete abandon, like the world could end in a fiery blaze and it wouldn't matter, and fuck it, I'm not even counting the calories right now because the balance is so obviously shot to hell.

For me that's always a way to avoid feeling properly horrified, to avoid facing the consequences of my actions - I don't even want to know that devastating number in irrevocable precision; I do not want my head to spin at the exact account of what I have just devoured.
It's like a Lovecraftian Horror - the mere sight of it will make you go insane with frenzied despair.

So, I stop counting during a binge.
But , as we all know , sticking your head into the sand doesn't accomplish anything - I need to face up bravely to what I have done so that I can do better tomorrow.

... yeah, so far for theory.
In praxis, of course, I couldn't handle it.

I did have every intention to, but finally stopped in abject horror when I was starting to inch past 2000 and still could not bring myself to quit.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, the Eldritch Abomination that is my bingeing calorie intake wins again.

Basically, it adds up to me consuming a quantity of food that could have fed a small village of less idiotic individuals. (Much the same as a Cthulhu-ish monster would consume the village itself, ha. Bet that adds up to a lot of calories... not to mention that I totally feel as huge as Cthulhu right now.)

God, I shouldn't be joking about this.
It's gross. Utterly disgusting, despicable gluttony in its purest form, a real proper binge after not even 3 days of moderate restricting.

... which is, yeah, pretty fucking miserable.
I know I need to step away from this kind of behavior if I ever want to stop being cripplingly unhappy with myself again.

Yet I mustn't allow myself to wallow in my failure and be overwhelmed by self-hatred and despair. There's always a chance to do better tomorrow, and I need, no I WILL be focussing myself on that.

As a side effect since starting this blog, I have noticed that the general re-focussing on food avoidance and weightloss has served to pointedly alleviate the acuteness of my depression.
Maybe that's why I'm always happiest when I'm doing this, "getting skinny"... yeah, I know, revolutionary thought, that - the entire calorie-counting game is just something we do to keep our minds off of more unpleasant things anyway, big fucking surprise there.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit of the cheap-mouthed cynic right now due to my own (literally) enormous failure.
I'm feeling deplorably weak; I just wish I was one of these girls that simply don't eat without making a fuss about it, firm resolve and no bitching about the struggle and the slip-ups.

One "nice" thing that I binged on were frozen strawberries though, which was good because a) they barely make a dent in the calorie count obviously and b) sucking on frozen berries on a hot day is one of my favourite pastimes in general.

They also colour your hands a lovely shade of purple/red when you are grabbing them out of a cardboard box one by one, so you can look like you have just committed gruesome slaughter while walking along in the sunshine or sitting down in a park.

Mmpfh, wish I'd stuck to them...

Sunday's essay rant: Food and I, the endless dance

I know that my relationship with food isn't exactly "normal" or healthy, that it hasn't been for ages - certainly not since I was a 12-year old kid, with my parents begging, yelling, threatening, pleading with me to have "just a few spoonfuls of soup, please!", and me crying into my soup as if that was the end of the world, wailing like there was no tomorrow, thinking that they were torturing me, trying to destroy my life; that they wanted to purposefully turn me into a fat and hideous monster.

Here's the thing though - I have never felt "hindered" by that, I have never felt restricted in my liberty by the desire to be slim, the desire not to eat.

I have felt, instead - perhaps falsely - that the times I was most at liberty, most at peace with myself, were those where that desire came to fruition.

Times when I was fasting every other day and going to the gym often twice in 24 hours, were the times when I felt "right" and freed from the oppression and restriction that masses of fat and the crushing failure associated with them impose.

Really, it is the other end of the scale, no pun intended, that has always made me feel trapped, imprisoned.
The moments when I'm bingeing, eating far too much although I'm not even hungry, eating and eating because if I'm not eating nothing then, hey, I might just as well eat everything.
Because I am unable to distinguish a margin of "just right" in between extremes, because there's either all or nothing, so every bite that passes my lips seems "too much".

And once that first bite of too-much, of more-than-nothing has been consumed, the day has turned into a bad day anyway, and I might as well, no I actively need to make it official by wrecking it with ridiculous amounts of food, so as to punish my transgression, so as to show myself just how properly I have messed up.

I am sure a lot of you are all too familiar with the mechanisms I am talking about...
The thing is, that I cannot bring myself to see the restricting/starving side of things as the oppressive, abusive partner in that dance.
I realize it is a masochism tango on the whole, still only one participant seems hurtful, the other endlessly liberating.

The days were I actually manage to consume few enough calories so as not to trigger that switch in my brain to flip, as not to trigger a binge because "it has all gone wrong, anyway" - those are the good days.
I feel proud then, like a bulimic who has manged to keep their food down for a change, has managed to eat little enough so they won't feel the need to purge.

Only I don't purge when that switch gets flipped, when I've had that one piece of fruit salad too many, I simply start bingeing where I have been eating "reasonably" before.
I've always hated the thought of purging enough to avoid it on most occasions (I go out of my way not to throw up out of "natural" causes even), which I guess is some kind of blessing - and still I engage in that ridiculous "all or nothing" scheme, where everything spins out of control as soon as I feel I haven't stayed completely in the straight and narrow with restricting my intake.

I don't know what that makes me or where it will lead; all I know is that I want to go back to the good days, where I keep myself in check and keep my intake in check, where I starve myself just enough to be skinny and free.

And I know that am unable, at this point, to see those days as anything other than liberating, highly desirable.

PS: Getting graphic on the subject of food, I'll add today's estimated calorie intake which stands at about 620 (Half a grapefruit, a cup of steamed veggies, 170g of soy yogurt mixed with applesauce - they incidentally list the same calorie content per 100g -, a 70g piece of a boiled potato, a smoothie at 133 cals, 2 cocktail gherkins, half a slice of brown bread and 40 g of Gouda).

Meh, that's ok, about same as yesterday; yet I feel full and vaguely guilty.

So much for the no-binge-days being liberating, eh? I guess it only makes me feel that way when I am already skinny, otherwise the hideousness of the bod cancels everything out.

Oh well, gotta think positive though, and a moderately successful restricting day is certainly good news.

"I'll do what I can..."

"...nothing more, nothing less."

It's a mantra my therapist has me repeat as a means to avoid anxiety attacks and counter perfectionism.

I'm not sure it is helping - but then again I know she didn't mean for me to apply it to food intake, either.

So, did I do well today, did I do everything I could?

I ate some stuff, namely 160 g of soy based yogurt (57 cal/100g, which means 91.2 cals), half a banana (medium size, so let's say 50 for half of it), a 10-cal cup of broth I drank in the morning, half a grapefruit at maximum 50 cals; for lunch I went out to have sushi with a friend, so I had a miso soup plus an avocado and a shinko maki roll.
(Taking into account the differing numbers you find on the calorie content of sushi, I estimate I come in at somewhere around 600 cals total for the day, perhaps even below.)

All in all, that adds up to considerably more than I wanted to eat in an ideal scenario; but on the other hand it seems pretty reasonable for a "first day back" to restricting, and is definitely better than the fiasco I have indulged in lately.
Still, I just don't know what to think.

I feel low.
No, that's not right - I don't feel either or, really.
Mainly, I feel disgusted with my body, despite doing relatively well today where food is concerned.

I have that kind of feeling where you want to peel off your own skin so badly, shed it like a reptile, that you have to restrain yourself hard not to take a kitchen knife and cut it open from top to bottom so you can wriggle out of it.

In positive news, I like the fact that spring is beginning - the first sightings of crocuses (crocus? croci?) and lilies of the valley, the re-awakening of the world, the metaphorical rebirth of life and all that sappy crap.
I'm just very fond of this season, whenever I step outside it elevates my mood by a tiny fraction.

I hope, if you are reading this, that spring has set on wherever you live, too, and that it is bringing you some amount of pleasure.