Troubled Waters

I imagine it starts in a similar way for an alcoholic. You’ve acquired the tools, you’ve cleaned up your act and your are going to « meetings/therapy ». You are feeling good, healthy – you let your guard down.

Then comes the trigger – the thing that catches your attention and sets you off on an unhealthy, yet oh so comforting, path. 

For me, there were 2:

• Coping with the challenges, insecurities and loneliness involved with starting a new job; and
• Trying to get through the Christmas holidays without gaining weight.

These 2 stressors were difficult to deal with. So much so that I struggled. In the past, when I struggled, I turned to restriction to cope. I knew restricting was not the answer…

But I convinced myself it would be ok if I just did it a little. « Nothing bad will happen, » I told myself. « You are different  now. You are stronger, you know better than to lose control to restriction. You wrote a book about it! »

Hmmmmmmm

So just like the alcoholic, you have your first taste, confident you can remain in control…just a little bit and I will stop.

You are fooling yourself but you don’t realize it. And as with someone who is recovering from substance abuse, one sip becomes one drink, becomes many, and nothing ever seems enough. Just cut out one more food, just lose another pound, just…

THEN, then, you’ll stop.

At this point, the illness has spread like a cancer throughout your body and taken over your brain. Your weight plummets to levels you have not seen since your twenties. You wake up on day, look back and wonder how everything unravelled so quickly. Still, you can’t stop. You don’t know how and you are petrified of trying. 

You wake up in the middle of the night, doubled over in pain, a heaviness on your chest. You are afraid. Is your heart giving out?

You panic; I don’t want to die. You contemplate knocking on your sister’s bedroom door to beg her to take you to the hospital. You tell yourself to eat something and see what happens. You go back and forth until the strong soothing voice inside your head says: « shhhh, don’t do anything, just sleep. »

And so you do what you are told.

You know you need help but are in denial about how badly you need it. Help will likely mean going into treatment, which will topple your world yet again. The girls need me at home; I can’t leave work AGAIN; my team needs me; I can’t disappoint family and friends even more than I already have…all those proud faces  at the book launch.

The logic is flawed. There are no proud faces at a funeral; the kids and the team won’t benefit from my help if I am gone. I know this…I know…

This is the time to dig deep and turn it all around. This week, we are leveraging our vacation to try a reboot. If that does not work, Charles and I will have some tough decisions to make.

Let’s hope some of Disney’s magic sticks.