Well maybe not...

Okay, so we've given up the gluten free. It didn't seem to be making a difference for my son anyway - with the skin and digestion issues. And it wasn't helping me with the root of my problem...

Hello, my name is Karen, and I'm a food addict....

So, I'm back to figuring out how to help myself.

I've had a particularly bad week, and an exhausting week. It's made me really think about "triggers." There's always a lot of talk about "triggers" these days... what triggers head aches, drinking, depression, other destructive behaviors. So, I tried to pay attention all week to what was triggering my increase in compulsive over-eating.

Yesterday evening, as I proceeded to eat a Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream bar, followed by two left over buffalo chicken tenders with extra blue cheese dressing, a plate of nachos, a handful of dark chocolate Hershey kisses, and a Fresca with vodka, all in rapid succession in a short amount of time... well actually I didn't think about anything while I was in the midst of it. It was this morning, really, that I took a long hard look at it.

Stress, depression, anxiety, fear... basically all the usual triggers. And exhaustion. I definitely deal with mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion with eating. Maybe I'm trying to increase my energy, pump myself up, fill the void I feel when life beats me down, as it has done a lot lately.

But maybe, also, there is a sense of trying to survive. A kind of desperate effort to save myself. Almost as if every sense of my survival manifests itself as the possibility that I could be starving to death. I'm not surviving right now, or barely, so I have to eat eat eat before I starve.

So, then, it's not about what I eat or don't eat, but about finding another way to ensure survival without having the dependency on food.

In the meantime, I went to the grocery store to buy a muffin for breakfast and ended up buying five. But I managed to only eat one and a half. SMALL STEPS.