Window of Power

My Bipolar Geiger Counter is in the green—no clicks after a radioactive week.  But my eating is still nuclear.

This is my lifetime pattern.  When I swing into full-blown mania or depression, nothing can stop my binging.  Then, when the episode ends, I get carried along on the momentum, craving all the addictive foods I fell back into, continuing to eat like a starving person.

This is the place where consciousness makes all the difference.  This is the place where I can choose to pick up Geneen Roth’s Eating Guidelines and actually follow them.  The interval right after an episode is where I believe I can make a real change in my life.  It’s my window of power.

Even though I’ve practiced meditation and bringing awareness to my life for a decade now, I’m only beginning to understand the dynamic of consciousness in relation to my bipolar disorder.  First I learned to create an Observer, that objective part of me who can stand apart from the emotional and mental turmoil to simply watch without judgment or agenda.  It takes effort and willingness to do this work.  It takes practice and persistence.

Only recently did I realize how much delusion plays a part in this process.  I know the illness twists my thinking, but I never considered that it might twist my Observer.  The clarity I’ve been developing all these years might have sand traps in it.  My spiritual teacher brought this to my attention as a possibility, something to consider and watch for.  It made me wonder what else might be in play that I’m not aware of.  I wonder if there are Great Lessons to be learned by finding the sand traps.

I don’t know how to do that.  I’m making this up as I go along.  But it seems like the best place to start is at my edge.  And my edge is food.

So, today I’ll draw on all my resources—my intelligence, my management skills, my creativity, my compassion, my awareness—and bring them to bear on how I eat.  I want to slide off the momentum of this last episode, break the pattern.  Action is required, though I’m not sure what.  Openness and receptivity feel like a key element, too.  This is all uncharted territory.

I’m on a Great Adventure.

Gimme

During this quiet spell between episodes, I’m feeling a real need to tend to my body.  My weight has crept back up to almost 300 pounds.  Yikes, that’s hard to put out in cyberspace, but truth is truth.  I always try to rein in my compulsive eating when I’m stable, but no plan, or intention, or amount of flagellation works for long.  In February, after keeping track of calories and adding more cardio and strength training to my workout, I thought I was finally making progress.  Then the next episode came, and the compulsive eating took over.  Again.

I gave up.  I’ve given up many times over the years—decided I’d just live my life fat and happy instead of fat and miserable—but the discomfort of dragging around so much excess cargo always brings me back to trying again.  So, yesterday I pulled out my Calorie Counter, planned some meals, went to the grocery store to stock up on fresh food, and worked hard at the gym.  And, of course, I ate a container of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby.

If you’ve never seen The United States of Tara on Showtime, the show is about a woman with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, or multiple personality) played by Toni Collette.  One of Tara’s alters is a primal, animalistic creature that comes forward when Tara is in danger, physically or psychologically.  This little creature, Gimme, pees on people it doesn’t like, huddles in corners, scuttles around like a bug.  I think Gimme and my compulsive eating hatched from the same primordial goo.

The only thing I can do is try again today.  I know the primal creature inside me is terrified.  I know the overeating is about control and comfort.  I also know that sometimes, I can choose to not eat.  Sometimes, I can hear my body when it tells me it’s full or when it’s hungry.  Sometimes, I can even act according to those sensations.  Today, I will record what I eat and work out hard.  I will try to make better choices.

In what seemed like a stroke of pure synchronicity, my friend Kathy also wrote about her struggles with food on her blog yesterday and shared a wonderful poem.  Other people have been talking to me about their battles with weight.  The attendance in aerobics class yesterday doubled with women who have renewed their efforts.  Something’s in the air.  Or maybe in the primordial goo.

Training Checklist: Clean Eating

This isn’t Bipolar Boot Camp.  Been there, done that, got the ECT burns.  This is the survival training that comes after that, the Do It Or Die conditioning, the stuff I personally have to do to get myself ready for the next episode.  Part healing, part emotional strength training, part preparing the physical vessel.

The first thing to attend to is my diet.  After being sick most of the winter and basically giving up on eating in any rational, balanced way, there’s lots of mop up to do here.  While I’m not an advocate of any particular diet, there is wisdom to be found in several places.  Dr. Daniel Amen has lots of good advice about eating for the health of one’s brain (just dodge his tacky self-promotion and stick to the articles).

As a compulsive eater or food addict, I already know more than the average consumer about food (hey, it’s a hobby!).  I know all the diets, all the tricks, all the latest miracle cures for obesity, all the medical facts.  Putting this vast knowledge into practice is another side of beef entirely.  But, I’m in training now, and practice is exactly what I need to do.  A non-rabid form of clean eating seems healthiest and easiest for me.  The tenets are these: Eat the freshest food available— fruits and vegetables, lean protein, whole grains.  Stay away from slop (like Cheetos and Chips Ahoy) and processed food.  Drink more water.  Eat smaller, more frequent meals.

Eating clean requires that I cook, which often makes me anxious, but I’m in training so cooking is what I will do.  While in training, for as long as this non-episodic period lasts, it feels vital that I push myself.  How will I ever make important changes in my life if I don’t push?  So, no excuses, no forgetting, no slacking off.  This window of opportunity won’t stay open forever.  I’ve got to get as much out of it as I can.

Feeding Frenzy

At some point in my childhood, I figured out that food could ease the immediate pain of my mood swings.  Not just any old tidbit, though.  It had to be  the good stuff—high fat, high sugar stuff.  I don’t know when self-medication turned into compulsion—early on, I think.  I’ve followed every diet, read every book on compulsive eating and food addiction, joined support groups, monitored, weighed and measured, looked for the psychological pain behind the eating, used willpower, relied on God and still when the Feeding Frenzy rises up out of the Swamp, I cannot stop it.

This winter I launched another effort to hamstring the monster.  I started keeping track of my calories in and out, I beefed up my routine at the Y to include some cardio and strength training along with my water aerobics classes.  I faithfully followed Geneen Roth’s Eating Guidelines in her book Women, Food and God.  I bought healthy groceries, prepared healthy meals, ate healthy snacks.  I bought Bob Greene’s book (he of Oprah fame), The Life You Want and Marianne Williamson’s book, A Course in Weight Loss.  I went to The Haven and faithfully worked through the books’ exercises with the hope that I’ll finally find The Answer.

Unfortunately, no-one has ever addressed the combination of food addiction and mental illness.  Sigh.  The most these authors will say is if you have a mental illness, get it treated.  Duh.  I was on medication, fellas, and gained another 100 pounds.  Medical treatment doesn’t seem to be The Answer, either.

So, okay, I can’t let that be an excuse for giving up on all the Paths to A Slimmer, Happier You promised in these books.  So what if no-one can explain why, when the Feeding Frenzy strikes, I would eat my cat if he had ice cream on his head.  So what if I can follow all the rules when Calm and Steady Mind is in residence, but when the depression moves in I jump in my car when it’s below zero and zip to Kwik Star for Cheetos and Ben & Jerry’s.

Something Marianne Williamson said in her book seems true for me.  All the self-knowledge in the world won’t fix this.

What’s left after self-knowledge, willpower and “good choices” is beyond Time/Space, or at least, it’s beyond my experience and the collective experience of experts in this field.  There has to be another way, a simple way, a solution so easy and profound I’ll laugh when I get to it.  I believe it has to do with alignment, but more than that, I don’t know.

So, while I explore, I’ll do what I can and be gentle with myself.  I’ll do all the right things when Calm and Steady Mind shows up, and I’ll do my best when it gets preempted.

And I’ll keep you posted.