Coping - or not

I guess I don't cope with frustration very well.

 

Yesterday was a good day at work, so no frustration there.  Cindy and I went to the yarn store at lunch and I got new needles and yarn to make a vest.  Cindy has been teaching me how to knit and I am loving it!  She is a great teacher and a great inspiration.  She thinks I will succumb to spinning my own yarn.  Yeah right.  We'll see about that.

 

So, once all the chores were done once I got home, I sat myself down and started knitting.  I was just knitting to check for gauge, so nothing that stressful, right?  Wrong.  New metal circular needles, new yarn, struggling with the actual process.  Dropping stitches, uneven rows, which way do I wrap the yarn?  What the heck is going on?

 

This is food-related, so hang in there.

 

I tore out the first sample, and the second sample and the THIRD.  I was becoming very frustrated.  I gave up knitting for the evening (or so I thought) and headed upstairs to check out what was happening on Facebook, but before I went up there, I stopped in the kitchen for a little something sweet to eat.  By this point, I knew I was giving in to the alternate food personality and was going to binge.  I considered the apples in the bin, but no.  Then I saw the low-sugar cookies in the baggie.  Yes!  Only 5 cookies left.  I can eat those!

 

These cookies are a chocolate-filled cookie.  Only 5 grams of sugar per cookie.  I've had one here and there with no problems at all, and was satisfied with only one cookie, but did I only grab one cookie?  Nope, I grabbed the whole bag and headed upstairs, fully aware of the fact that I was going to eat them all.

 

So why didn't I stop myself?  I didn't want to.  I wanted to drown my frustration in food, sugar to be exact.  I deserved to binge because I was frustrated.  That was my old pattern.  Frustration = eat = sugar.  It's kind of like I disconnected from reality when I made that decision.  I knew it was a bad decision, but I let myself go for it anyways.  "Hell, what's 5 grams of sugar times 5 cookies?  Only 25 grams of sugar.  Who cares if I dump?  I'm going to bed anyways.  I can just sleep it off."  Those were some of the thoughts racing through my head.

 

So I sat at the desk eating cookies and after the third one, I started to feel sick.  Not dumping sick, just sick.  My stomach was over-full (I had been drinking iced tea) but I reached into the baggie and pulled out the fourth cookie and ate it.  Now I'm really feeling sick and extremely sleepy all of a sudden.  There was no way I was going to be able to physically handle the fifth cookie, so I went downstairs to go to bed.

 

As I'm getting ready for bed, I feel myself check back in to reality.  My brain felt like it was disengaging from the alternate personality.  I made myself check in with my body as well as my mind.  I did not like what I felt.  I really felt as if I'd let myself down.  Why, oh why, did I let myself slip into that alter ego and do what I did?  Because I'm human and bad habits are hard to break, that's why.

 

I didn't beat myself up.  I just told myself that that was a very quick and real learning experience and went to bed.  In the past (before gastric bypass surgery), once I came to my senses while on the frustration eating binge, I would have said, " fuck it, I've already messed up, why not just finish up the cookies?"  Not this time.  No more. 

 

Not only is my body not physically able to handle the huge food load of a binge as before, but I'm finding that I'm connecting back from the binge personality quicker.  Sometimes I'm able to stop it before it starts.  The feeling of wanting to succeed after this surgery is stronger than anything I've ever felt for a long time.  I do not want to ever weigh as much as I did before.  Ever!  I am learning to deal with the demons as they appear in my life without pushing them away with food binges.  It's a slow process, but I am feeling really good about how I'm dealing with it.

 

I did knit a bit after I got in bed.  I still made mistakes and got frustrated, but I was still so sick from the 4-cookie binge that it served as a reminder that food is not a substitute for coping.  I just put down the needles and went to sleep.

 

I can see that knitting is quickly becoming my current obsession.  Is that such a bad thing?