Lately I rarely make it through a weekend without a binge. Today I had eaten 2 good healthy meals and I was feeling good and optimistic. I had no urges to snack or eat off protocol food. Then at around 6 pm just when I would have started cooking my dinner I was suddenly called to go to work and deal with an urgent patient.

I immediately started eating.

My thoughts were:

I deserve some chocolate.
It’s not fair.
I’m not even on call and I really need to rest.
I never get to relax.
It’s been such a tough week already.
I ate half a slab of chocolate and 2 pieces of bread with mince and 2 pieces with honey. And I grabbed 2 small chocolates as I arrived at work.

This is a common pattern for me. I get called to go to work and in the few minutes before I get in the car I stuff some food down.

When I get to work it is almost never as bad as I thought or it’s stressful for a bit and then I gain control of the situation. This time it was almost fun. Did a bit of work helping out and then on the way back from work I thought I should get some more ‘cheat’ food since I’m off protocol now.

But I didn’t have that intense negative emotion driving me like on the way to work so I could use my rational brain and decide to not continue.

Since I’ve got home, I’m having mild continual urges, like suggestions popping into my head, of things I could eat. They are mild enough to just let them pass.

I so badly want to stop using food to buffer my negative emotions. Sometimes I am successful, but often like today I have a storm eat. And I have steadily gained weight over the past year right back to my beginning weight. My impossible goal is to find peace with food and my body and stabilise my weight at a very normal realistic weight but I have still been doing this at least weekly. I’m aiming for kind compassionate curiosity. But in this moment I feel discouraged and tired.

I thought I should write down my observations although I resisted it and now that I’ve written it down I feel worse than when I was just trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. (Probably because I’ve added the thoughts about my weight gain and how often I’m doing this.)

Any advice would be very welcome. I feel like I’m failing and failing with no progress.