When it's time to find something that fits, somedays are better than others.

A few weeks ago I was sitting by myself in the one bedroom apartment I share with my mother and I mentally cataloged all the foodstuffs I had ingested in my time alone. My roommate (re: mother) was in NW Ohio for the better part of the week and it occurred to me that my eating habits had spiral-rocketed out of control.

As I thought back on all that I had eaten, I became more and more upset--not only about what I was eating, but also because I began thinking of the reasons I had eaten in the first place. This is one of my primary problems: I don't just eat when I'm hungry, I eat to fill voids, ease frustrations, and soothe hurts. When I sit down and think about all the food I've stuffed into myself, I can't avoid the reasons I found to do said "stuffing," and of course that leads me down that same path again--only now with the added angst of realizing that I'm shoving calories down my throat faster than a hurricane uproots a palm tree.

The night I hit my breaking point was my last night "alone" for that week. I'd went to the store with ten dollars (ten dollars that I very much did not have to spare) and I bought all the high-calorie goodness I could manage. I left the store with two Totino's Party Pizzas, one (40-count) bag of generic pizza rolls, and a quart of Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I'd purchased all these items and returned home by 9:30 P.M. and I ate the two party pizzas and half the ice cream that night, by 2:30 in the morning. The next day I woke up, ate the pizza rolls, and finished off the ice cream. In less than 24 hours I'd eaten that much food and I wasn't so much "ashamed" as I was conscious of the fact that I should have felt ashamed.

Actually, I did feel a bit of shame when I ate the second pizza when I was already full from the first and then went on to eat the half quart of ice cream. What really set me off in the "shame" department is the fact that the pizza rolls were absolutely disgusting; they had a terrible flavor and the texture was mealy, and even though I had told myself at several points that they were the worst things I'd ever put in my mouth, I ate every. single. one.

Though that night was a low point (or a turning point?) it was not an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination. In the past few months I've had so many moments of inhaling a high volume of food in a short amount of time. The bright side is that the "low point" prompted me to do a little search on disordered eating, and what I found seems to fit. According to the information provided by the Mayo Clinic, I've got a very clear-cut case of a Binge-Eating Disorder. I say "clear-cut" because it all fits. The depression, the anxiety, the eating alone, the secrecy of what/why/how I eat, and all the thoughts and worries I have "post-binge."

I'm here though, to sort through all that because it's not enough just to say "This is my problem." I still need to figure out the whys and hows of it so that I can fix the way I think about food; I want to understand this so that I can, someday in the future, be truly better. I just have to take it one step at a time and I'll get where I'm going, eventually.

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[Katy Perry: "Firework"]