What do you do when you're hungry?

The good news is that my meal plan no longer seems like it's enormous quantities of food. My body has adjusted; I can eat a bowl of cereal with milk and a cup of berries and a piece of toast for breakfast, and then have a big salad with a half-cup of quinoa and tortilla strips and 2/3 cup beans and so on and so on.

The bad news? I'm now hungry. I think. I don't know. All of last week I was feeling stuffed--I don't think I genuinely felt hungry until Friday (I started the plan on Monday). I was so focused on the stuffed feeling that it took me a few days to realize what I wasn't feeling: irritable, lightheaded. I wasn't ever feeling that floaty high I'd feel when I was eating what I thought was right and not bingeing--I do miss that feeling, I admit--but I wasn't feeling the negative side of hunger either.

So this week I'm feeling cranky and a little lightheaded and spotty, and I don't feel that way immediately after eating. I think it is hunger--but if over- and under-eating has been masking my emotions for so long, what if I'm just actually feeling like a big ol' grouch?

"Eat something and find out which it is, hunger or true irritability," says my sensible mind.

"You should relish this meal plan until you're bumped up to a higher-calorie one," says my eating-disordered mind.

They flip a fictional coin. Last night sensible won; today the other half wins. I am following my meal plan, after all; I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. On Monday I will be honest with my nutritionist, and I suspect she will move me to the next meal plan--right now I'm on a "transitional" plan, which is used for people who restrict, or for people who are very short. That is: It's not supposed to be quite enough. Not yet. So: not yet.

I don't know what to do when I'm hungry--are you "supposed" to eat when you just had something that "should" have filled you up? Or are you supposed to wait? Are you supposed to eat fruit, or string cheese, or graham crackers? Are you supposed to have whatever you want? What if you don't know what you want? What if you feed yourself and you can't stop?

Heading into week 2

Eating "so much fucking food" has gotten easier over the past week. I was incredulous--as in, I literally did not believe it--when my nutritionist said that she thought my binges were provoked in part by hunger. But already I am seeing that she was right. Certainly hunger is not the entirety of it, but it's a much larger chunk than I was able to see, in part because I WAS HUNGRY AND WASN'T THINKING CLEARLY.

I mean, I was just as likely to binge after a full meal as I was after a skimpy one. I don't think I'm triggered to binge by hunger or by a big meal; it's more complex than that. Days of not eating enough cloud one's judgment, making one more prone to not-great choices where the primary focus on one's mind--food--is concerned. (Note that the people in the oft-quoted study that re-created dietary conditions of concentration camp victims--the one that showed that they all became seriously preoccupied with thoughts of food--were given food. They just weren't given enough.) So when I'd finally get proper nourishment, instead of feeling sated, I felt somehow wronged for what I hadn't been eating--like I wanted to go on a roll, but not with healthy food. When full portions are denied, they become the forbidden. I'd heard plenty that denying yourself one food was the surest way to make sure you'd eat in in the future. And I've only rarely denied myself any particular food; I'd just deny myself enough food in general. So food in general would become my preoccupation.

At some point I hope to be more focused in this blog. For now, I'm just sort of putting my thoughts out there.

I didn't follow my meal plan this weekend as closely as I'd planned to. I decided to make pancakes on Saturday, which required a trip to the store, and then it took a long time to actually make them. More than two hours passed between waking and eating; that's too long. I was ravenous and exhausted by the time I ate (I did eat an apple, but it wasn't enough). Not eating until noon threw me off for the whole day. I got in all my portions, but questioned myself more on Saturday and Sunday than I had the rest of the week. My weektime meals tend to be pretty structured--I welcome the variety that a meal plan steers me toward, but a structure is just easier to follow. So instead of "follow meal plan," I think my goal for this week should be to "plan meals." I was telling myself I shouldn't over-plan because that's not "normal." But the fact is, I'm not a normal eater yet, and won't be for a while. Years from now, I hope to not have to plan out every meal. But for now, I need to.

That's actually a recurring theme--two, really--normality, and patience.

1) Normality: NOBODY IS FUCKING NORMAL ABOUT FOOD. I hung out with a friend on Friday night, someone I consider "normal" about food. At one point she said that a coworker brought in a bag of candy corn specifically for my friend, because the coworker knew that my friend loves candy corn. Which she does. But it was Halloween last week, so my friend had had her fill of Halloween candy and didn't want any more. In order to not hurt her coworker's feelings, she put the candy corn in a bowl between their desks, and my friend makes a show of grabbing some whenever she walks by. She then throws it away.

Now, this is "normal" in the sense that she recognizes the emotional connection to food (her coworker doing something nice for her), and "normal" in the sense that she's not eating more sweets than she would like to consume (she had had enough candy for the week and didn't want to have more). So this behavior is normal, because she's a normal eater. But it's also weird! It's just weird! Weird in general that anyone would have to put a show into taking candy corn. I get why she did it, and obviously it's not disordered eating. But for me, it would be. My boyfriend will throw a fit if there's mayo on his sandwich. That's not normal. He's totally normal about food, but not in that way. Nobody is fucking normal.

2) Patience. I don't consider myself a patient person. I'm not necessarily impatient, but during my time in therapy I would repeatedly get frustrated by how much time it took for something to sink in. Like, I'd intellectually recognize that X was a problem for me as a kid, which makes me do Y now. I'd get that. But I'd still keep doing Y. I couldn't understand why an intellectual understanding of it wouldn't just make it poof go bye-bye.

I'm glad I met with a nutritionist before jumping into the program. Because that showed me that I really don't even have an intellectual understanding of eating disorders, or at least of mine. I had no idea I was restricting to the extent that I was. I was utterly blind to that. I saw quickly and dramatically how I had to just sort of close my eyes and put myself into the hands of this program--that is, I have to do the work. And I have to put my own individual effort into it, and it has to be real effort. It will work. I don't know exactly in what ways it will work; I have no idea, realistically, how I will be in five years. But it will work in the sense that I trust that my life will be more livable because of this program. I have to do the faith fall. That means following all the rules and listening to myself while doing so. That means not brushing off my reactions as overblown or inauthentic; that means not creating food issues for myself where there are none. That means not looking at raw food diets; that means not entering my intake into calorie calculators. That means using my food diary. That means planning for meals, and planning for weekends, and not spacing out in group. That means effort, and I will do it.

Day One, or: The Wheat Germ Meltdown

I entered Renfrew because my binge eating felt out of my control. So I pictured my treatment plan as focusing on stress-relief techniques other than bingeing ("take a walk!" "call a friend!") and, I don't know, drawing some sort of picture of my body that would then give me a Big Happy Magic Moment when I realize that my body is just fine. The nutrition part I figured would be a snap--my meals are complete and healthy; the problem comes after 10 p.m. on nights when I'm alone.

What I didn't expect was that not only would I be put on a meal plan, but that it would be SO MUCH FUCKING FOOD. When my nutritionist began asking me about my meals, I interrupted her: "I know you haven't seen my chart [my nutritionist was switched at the last minute] so you don't know this, but mealtime isn't my problem; it's bingeing." She asked me to articulate my meals anyway, which I did, expecting gold stars for my daytime eating: six ounces nonfat yogurt with berries and two tablespoons muesli for breakfast; spinach salad with bell pepper and chicken or beans for lunch; five prunes and eleven almonds for a snack; dinner, depends. (Yes, I know that eating the same thing pretty much every day is also a sign of disordered eating. What can I say--that works for me.)

"How many calories do you think you're taking in on a given day?" she asked.

"Probably 1,600 to 2,200, depending on my dinner."

"You're not taking in anywhere near that amount." I felt--proud, tight in my solar plexus, scared. Then she began saying what I should be eating, how I can make my meals more complete: Add half a cup of muesli instead of two tablespoons. Have bread with lunch. Have a cup of rice with dinner instead of "a bit." These are all things I've purposely cut down on in order to either lose or maintain weight. The thought of having bread with lunch--not because I'm at a restaurant and the bread basket is good, not because it's homemade, not because I'm choosing a sandwich over a salad, but because bread is a part of a normal meal--fills me with panic. I thought panic would be reserved for the mythical anorexic 12-year-old I had in my mind; I'm a big girl (heh heh), I can have a goddamned piece of bread without freaking out. This is a part of my recovery; I'm signing up for this.

But I had underestimated how strong the power of restriction had become for me--how easily I'd made it a part of what I considered "normal" eating. I didn't think I'd done any restricting for years--but then, my definition of "restricting" was "not eating," not "not eating enough." I had been so focused on the enormous volume of food I had been consuming that I hadn't looked at what I hadn't been consuming.

I looked at the sheet of meal plan guidelines, looking at how I could update my breakfast. A half-cup of muesli is a lot; I could instead have...three tablespoons wheat germ? I pictured three tablespoons, saw the fullness, the richness of wheat germ--a health richness, a nutrient-filled richness, a richness I had forbidden myself more than a tablespoon of, ever, without really thinking about why.

I occasionally make breakfast bars for my boyfriend, who used to be prone to skipping "the most important meal of the day" (there's an irony in there, oui? He's not the one with an eating disorder). I pack them full of wheat germ, thinking that will help him power through the day. I usually give him the whole pan minus two bars, which stay in my freezer until I throw them out. My preteen-sized nonfat yogurt is waiting.

"You're flushing," the nutritionist said. I hadn't noticed; instead, I was noticing my shallow breath, the tears, the world seeming vivid, almost hallucinatory, my nutritionist's face coming into hyperfocus. A panicked reaction I never thought I would have--a reaction, in fact, that I'd read about in my "learn all about eating disorders so I can learn how to do it right" and both wanted and couldn't at all imagine--a reaction to three tablespoons of wheat germ.

"Does that seem like a lot?" she asked. I nodded. "It doesn't seem like a lot to me," she continued. "You have an eating disorder. You've had one for twenty-five years. This will seem hard at first, but this is what will help you know what's normal." We went through the meal plan, me recognizing that my reaction was borne of those twenty-five years--of a whole box of cereal in one sitting, of day after day of starvation, of Amy's Organic Brown Rice Bowls for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which was during a period I thought I was being sensible.

So I'm sitting here with index cards, putting together meals that I think I can eat, enjoy, finish. I had two of those meals today. It is a lot of food--I went onto a calorie-counter website (which is probably verboten, but hell, the literature said "No diet books" so...) and by the end of the day I'll have consumed almost 2,100 calories--which, as it happens, is about my daily caloric need. It seems like a lot of food, but it is what I need. More than that, doing this--sticking with it, slogging my way through a full serving of yogurt with the goddamned wheat germ and toast--will help me figure out hunger, and need, and satiety. I won't have to have two grains, one fat, one dairy, one fruit every morning for the rest of my life. But until I know what my body needs, and until I have worked my way through my food compulsions, until I know what is actually, truly, really normal for me, this is what I have to do. I am already dreading when I have to step up to the next level of meal planning, which will be even more food. The nutritionist assured me at the beginning that this meal plan wouldn't make me gain weight, and I believed her--until I figured out what my caloric intake would be (which, duh, is probably why they don't want us reading diet literature). I will figure that out, with her aid, when I get there.

I thought the hardest part would be sitting through the nights when I wanted more than anything to black out with food. That might be the hardest part, eventually--I don't know; I haven't had that kind of night yet. But this part--the eating part--is already harder than I'd imagined.