Monday Morning

magnolias

On the sewing front, I started on a pair of jeans for Chungita. It's an Ottobre design. I'm using the same fabric as my jeans jacket. The buttonloops use a 1.75 inch wide strip folded in thirds, and this gives me a rather wide beltloop. I decided to just go with it, but I keep second guessing myself. Should it be thinner?

On the eating front, this weekend was terrible. Letting myself get too hungry on Thursday set me up for binging on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. However, I did not get up in the middle of the night and eat the cookie dough that is in the fridge. So, some progress from previous behavior has been made.

I really like the ED group that I'm going to. It's based on Cognitive Behavior Theory. The idea is that you have to "break" the behavoir before you can deal with the underlying emotions. So far, I haven't been able to break my behavior. I haven't found OA to be as helpful to me. The first step is:

We admitted we were powerless over food - that our lives had become unmanageable.

The first part is really hard to remember. I mean, I know that there are many foods of which I can't have just one. If I eat one, then I will want to eat them all. I'm always forgetting, or maybe it is that my obsession takes over any reasoning ability that I might have regarding food. But the truly difficult part of this step is the "my life has become unmanageable" part. I don't believe that my life has become unmanageable. I'm in no danger of losing my job. Sure, my marriage is stronger since I've started therapy, but that in large part is because I'm not so depressed anymore. I think the rest of my relationships are strong. My kids are doing great, and so on and so forth. Sure, not having an eating disorder would make things better, but that isn't the same as being unmanageable.

I did have an episode that is indicative of what it might be like to have my life be unmanageable. On Friday, after I dropped off Granny and Chungita at the library, I went to Starbucks and had to have a maple oat scone. The compulsion was ENORMOUS, but I would not have dragged Granny and Chungita with me if I couldn't have left them at the library. I mean, the compulsion was a secondary decision. It didn't override my responsibility to my daughter. If I had felt like I would do just about anything, including neglecting my daughter, to get that scone, then my life is unmanageable. Is it just denial?

It turns out that my husband had left 2 checkbooks in the truck, and they were stolen. That's a much bigger deal than loosing the electronics. Our mortgage payment is supposed to come out of one of those accounts today.