Roulette

One of the big symptoms of my stress, anxiety and panic is chest pain. I often fear I’m having a heart attack. Before I went on meds, I was in the ER several times convinced I was having one. My Dr was good enough to order all kinds of tests to rule out cardiac issues which temporarily put my mind at rest. I do have a risk factor. Though I’m only 39, I am overweight and that scares me. If I did not have my DD, I’m not sure how much I’d care. But I have a horrific fear of dying and leaving her at a young age. It terrifies me to think of what would happen to her without me since she doesn’t have another parent to raise her. I know my mother would take her and I guess that scares me more than anything....thinking my mother would somehow fail to protect DD the way she failed to protect me. Fearing DD would end up just like me.

You would think this would make me uber conscious of my health but it does not. I continue with my eating disorder. I haven’t done much to deal with it. I’m avoiding some blood work my Dr ordered months ago because I know things have changed for the worse. Really, I bide my time. If you could hear inside my brain, it would go something like this:

“Grandmother was XX old when she died. Aunt was XX old when she died. Father is XX old and he’s still alive. There is [this person] who is XX old and he’s morbidly obese and he’s still alive. And then there’s this other person who was only XX when he died of a heart attack. Now….I know my cardiac workup was perfectly fine 2 years ago so I’m probably still okay. If I can just make it to XX age, then DD will be XX age and she’ll have had enough of my influence to be okay for the future.”

How sad that I don’t demand more for my life. How sad that all I do is calculate the odds like a big old Russian Roulette. How sad that I’m only trying to eek out a certain amount of years and, in the meantime, accepting feeling like crap and allowing my addiction to consume me, quite literally.

With no big fanfare, this morning I looked in the mirror, disgusted at what I saw and just knew I had to try again to face the demon of addiction. Usually, I have a “planned” restart day (generally a Monday morning) and I binge like crazy before hand in “preparation”. Not so this time. I just want to feel good again. And I want to make better choices and I want to be healthier to enjoy more years and more activities with DD. Why is food so much more powerful than those wishes? As I looked at myself with these thoughts in my head, I thought with every bite and every binge, I make my addiction more important than my life. I make food more important than my daughter. And that is unacceptable.

So I start again. Day One. Last time I made it to 60-something days. I lost motivation because I wasn’t losing any weight. I think that might have to do with the Effexor I’m on. So I go into this not expecting a loss but rather with the mindset of facing the reasons I make the choices that I do. Frankly, once I can face those, I can probably come off the meds and then hopefully I can start losing again. As Oprah says "It's not what you're eating....it's what's eating YOU." I know this is emotional in origin and I want to get to the bottom of that so that I no longer feel the urge to stuff it down with food. But for now….back at square one.