Talk about a shift in perspective! When I wrote about the weekend this morning, I was feeling pretty negative, but now am feeling much better. The day went well; I didn't have to go to program until after lunch, but ate my breakfast and snack according to program times, and made lunch that would have been acceptable. In Nutrition Planning, we talked about food in the pantry. I spoke about how at home, there is a 'good' side and a 'bad' side of the cupboards. Same with the freezer too, I guess. I buy Luc candy quite a bit, any time he asks for it, or when I want an excuse to binge. He is good about having a few bites, and stopping when he's had enough. Which means I have a lot of candy and sugary stuff in the cupboard, which is generally off-limits for me, except when I was bingeing. Which I always felt awful about when I would binge on his Halloween candy, or Easter chocolate, or whatever was in there. (I know I'm not the only parent who has eaten their kids' candy, but I still feel guilty about it). I'm experiencing the same thing staying at Tony's house; he's got white bread, and peanut butter, and Nutella, and huge containers of salty cashews and nuts, which are 'bad', and I shouldn't be eating them. I don't know that he would mind if I asked him if I could eat it, but the few times that I have it's been during a binge. And I don't want that anymore. So I've decided that living with boys who don't care about calories means there will be 'bad' food in the cupboard, but that's okay. It can just be there. I can eat it if I want to, or not, but it doesn't have to be off-limits for me anymore. If I take the stigma away from the food, then it has less power over me. Peanut butter can just be peanut butter, and I can eat it, and that's fine.
The next group of the day was Emotional and Physical Relationships, although we didn't really talk much about that at all. Some of the girls were feeling quite stressed about going over their expected weight gain, and having to gain more weight on top of the for the next four weeks (so glad I don't have a weight requirement to stay in program, that would be far too stressful). The program wants everyone to reach a healthy BMI, around 20 - 22. The healthy range is 18.5 - 24.9, so this is totally normal. But for these girls, who were underweight, going from a BMI of 17 or less to more than 20 is really hard to accept (each point represents a 5 pound weight difference, so this means about a 20 pound weight gain, which is equivalent to the worst torture imaginable in the eyes of someone with an eating disorder). So anyway, the discussion is about where we find our voices in the struggle between making the eating disorder happy, and making the program happy. We've all had similar struggles, so particular issues we discussed were who decides what healthy looks like, whose choice it is to relinquish the scale to the dietician, and whose expectations are we living up to. I didn't say much at first, so when the therapist asked me how I was feeling, I spoke up about how difficult it was (is?) to live up to my own expectations. I spoke about the secret competition I had with Amy, about how I always felt like I had to be thinner and prettier to be completely better than her. Which I feel really guilty about. Why did I feel the need to always be better than her? Was it for attention? I don't need to be better than her, I am just different from her. If anything, she tried hard to be as different from me as she could. She was the one who was always being compared to me - I always felt like I was living in her shadow, but she had big shoes to fill, following in my footsteps. So she made darn sure to carve out her own path in life! I guess what I feel most guilty about is that in all the superficial competitiveness, I didn't really appreciate her for who she was. Now she's gone, I won the competition because I'm still alive. How awful is that? When she first died, a lot of people said that I would need to grieve the relationship I didn't have with my sister; I disagreed. Not so much now. A set of twins I have known since grade 2 are expecting babies within about 6 weeks of each other; when I first found out, I was really sad that I won't have that experience with my sister. Not that I thought it would ever happen, I am just sad that it won't.
Hmm, kind of got off on a tangent there. I told the group about my success with the scale yesterday - not waking Luc up and dragging him to the gym (or leaving him with Tony) so that I could find out how much I weighed was really a big step for me.
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