Confessions of a disordered eater.

I don’t know how to eat.

I mean, I know how to take food and put it into my mouth, chew and swallow it. I demonstrate that ability on a daily basis, often to excess. Therein lies the problem.

I’ve been interested in Intuitive Eating since I first stumbled upon the FA movement a year ago. In that time, I have “tried to start” eating intuitively at least a half-dozen times. It usually last a few days, this whole eating-when-I’m-hungry, stopping-when-I’m-full thing, and then I binge and say “screw it, if I want to eat this, I’m going to eat it,” ignoring fullness cues.

I don’t think I’m a compulsive overeater, but I am a binger, and it’s more than occasional. I like to eat. I like tasting food. I often eat too quickly, so that by the time I’m done, I feel that I denied myself the chance to enjoy what I was eating – so I eat more. Other times, I spread my eating over a long period of time in order to trick my body into avoiding fullness. I can spend two hours on a large bag of chips, eating slowly enough that I never become overfull, thus justifying it to myself: “well, I was never uncomfortably full, so why shouldn’t I continue to eat this snack food I enjoy?” I know I’m making excuses. I know I’m justifying unhealthy eating behaviours.

I don’t know how to fix it, because I don’t know how to eat.

Feast or famine: this has been my eating pattern since I was sixteen, and apparently a year isn’t long enough to shake those habits. I know how to diet, to restrict my eating into neat little Points-shaped categories, measured with teaspoons and food scales. I know how to binge, eating entire packages of snack foods because I can, because I’m not dieting, because if I’ve already eaten two-thirds of the package, why stop now? I used to joke during my dieting years that it was all-or-nothing with me, that while others could “watch what they ate” and lose a few pounds, I didn’t know how to “eat healthier” without going on a strict diet. It’s not a joke anymore.

This is me reaching out for help. This is me admitting that my relationship with food is out of my control, that in the absence of rules, I don’t know what to do. It isn’t that I can’t feel my own hunger and fullness cues. It’s that I ignore them and can’t seem to have a moderate relationship with food.

I’d like to see a nutritionist. I think that the only way to get myself out of this cycle is to actually set some rules – not hard and fast ones, but guidelines that I need to follow. My fear is that it would turn into a diet, another challenge with myself to see how “good” I can be. Maybe some of the problem is that when I know I’m no longer hungry, but I want to eat some more, I worry that not allowing myself to eat some more is akin to dieting, that I’m depriving myself, and so I go overboard in the other direction. I know that depriving myself has the potential to turn into a game of “look how virtuous I am,” and there is no winner in that game.

I guess what I’m looking for, aside from empathy (because I know I’m not alone in this fucked-up relationship with food), is any tips or suggestions on how to moderate my food intake without dieting. Is such a thing possible for someone like me?