My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 7 - And Pondering the Crossed Wires Between Head and Heart

I don't make my food diaries public - or at least I haven't yet - for a couple of reasons. The reasons being that a) some days I feel like I'm eating too much, and b) some days I think I'm eating the right amount until I look at the figures and they don't look good.

Today's diary, as of 8pm - although I will go eat something now - reads (for calories):

Goal 2190
Food 787
Exercise 971
Net -184
Remaining 2374

I expect to get yelled at for that (and probably rightly so). Intellectually I know that these numbers are really bad. Viscerally, they feel good. To me, denying yourself things - whether it's food, sleep, companionship, sex, love - has always felt good. I wonder if this is what anorexia is like for most people.

Yes, I have an excellent therapist. Yes, we're working on it.

It's not as simple as that, of course, because having things also feels good, in a different part of my brain and heart. Having food I enjoy, having love, having great sex, having friends - these are all things that fill me with joy. I often feel like I'm a split personality: part of me revels in the world and all it has to offer, and part of me shuns it entirely, much like a hermit in the old days. I'd have done well as a self-flagellating monk in the Middle Ages, or maybe a warrior in ancient Japan.

I have phases of each. Sometimes I love people and brightness and life, and I soak up energy from the city and the world; I feel the vitality around me and I feel rejuvenated by being around others. And then I have periods where the world baffles and angers me, not because of anything that's happened but just because my brain chemistry messes up. When I feel like this, it's not irritation or anger with any kind of focus; it's not because I hate the government or the weather or racism or homophobia or Mitt Romney or the banks or consumerism. I just hate people, hate the fact that human lives take so much maintenance, hate that we have to eat and drink and brush our teeth and exercise and go to work and sleep and clean houses and talk and breathe and then the next day we have to do it all again. When I'm in a phase like this, I find it monstrously unfair that we have to keep eating and sleeping and breathing and we never get a moment's rest to just stop; I hate that people are constantly scurrying around like ants, rushing from Big Important Thing to Big Important Thing and yet never really getting anything done, and I just want to turn myself into a mountain and sit and ignore the ants for the next twenty thousand years.

This split-personality thing has been going on since I was brain damaged in an accident six, nearly seven, years ago. My brain works in funny ways now. I'm not ACTUALLY a split personality; I don't believe that I'm two different people. I just have different personalities that come out at different times.

Or perhaps just one strange, complex personality. :)

For all that, I'm a fairly cheerful person most of the time. When I feel like a mountain, I shut myself in my room and read for a few days, and then I'm okay. It usually happens when I'm recovering from a bad illness or infection, and my serotonin levels - low at the best of times - are running on empty.

As for the food - I know I have to eat, so I do. I don't hate food. I like food. I just feel guilty eating it. Since early childhood, I've felt that things like food and sleep are indulgences rather than necessities - things that you can have on occasion, but that you must always be grateful for, and not take for granted, and ensure that you're not greedy with them because you don't really NEED them. I have no explanation for where this idea came from, although Dr Chris and I are working on it.

With some things in life, I've learned that you have to divorce your intellectual knowledge from your gut feelings. First with the head, then with the heart - but if they're at an impasse, go with the head. My instincts tell me I don't need to eat or sleep - or sometimes even breathe - but my rational brain tells me that I have to. So I do. Not always well, but I do.