I just want to binge eat all day long

So the title pretty much says it all, folks.  Except I think that when you binge eat all day long it stops being binge eating, moves past pig-ish, and goes straight to disgusting.

This is not to say that what I do is binge eat all day long.  It's just what I want to do. 

Let me blabber on a little bit more.

I am not super, duper, disgustingly fat.  But I'm still, what I consider to be, embarrassingly fat.  Since giving birth to Resa, after all the sweating and peeing, my weight is 19 lbs lighter than when I became pregnant with her.  So that's good.  But I still have a kabillion pounds to go.  Or, like 40ish, which pretty much feels like kabillion.

You can go ahead and tell me this.

I try to stay positive and look at it like this: 
- I've lost Resa.
- I've lost JF.
- I've lost the NICU.

Those things are great!  Eh... but Ben's and L's pregnancies were the worst and, I'll just say this, I really want to be under 200lbs again.  Like squarely, perfectly, if I overeat one day I won't go back over 200, under 200lbs again.  Like 195.  That's my first goal, which I haven't met yet.  Because while I don't binge eat all day, I do still binge eat.

Even though I've already told you this next part, don't stop me because I'm going to finish it off by telling you something I might not have shared before.

In college I lost 50lbs.  How fat I am now, that's how fat I was in high school and my first two years of college.  And then May after my sophomore year I decided I couldn't take it any more and I started to run and eat better.  I worked my way up to 3 miles - they were slow and rare but they were mine - I could do them!  And I looked good.  My weight would flux a little on each side of 155 and I looked good.  In fact, a lot of people thought I was lying when they'd hear how much I weighed because I didn't look like a woman who weighed 155.

But, the thing is, I didn't just use diet and exercise to lose that weight.  Because I still kept binge eating and you can't drop 50 lbs in 5 months that way.  So I adopted the purging part.  Yes, I could eat two pieces of cake, go throw it up, and still lose weight.  In a lot of ways it was perfect.  Puking never bothered me when I was sick and so I didn't mind doing it to wear a size M for once in my life.  I didn't do it every day, maybe 3 or 4 times a week.  Just enough.

For a long time it was a secret I could keep but college life meant other people heard me puke.  The truth slowly came out to a small group of people, but I just kept doing it so I could maintain my ideal weight.  A bunch of other things happened my senior year that brought a lot of stress and anxiety to my life.  Panic attacks and purging were happening a lot and I zeroed in on my weight as a way to make myself have a sense of control and calm.  But the day I walked briskly across campus thinking only about how thin my thighs could be, ignoring everything else around me, that was the day I decided I needed to stop.  I went to confession, asked my friends to keep me accountable, and stopped.

And so just like I had turned it on I turned it off.  Over the years I would be tempted to do it again.  I'd binge  eat something - usually because of stress - and then stare into the toilet.  Sometimes I gave in to the temptation, usually not.

And then I had a baby girl and I never, ever wanted her to ever learn to hate how she looked so much that she'd do anything it took to feel beautiful.  I never wanted her to learn to binge and purge like me.  I wanted - want - her and her sister to know that they is gorgeous on so many levels, perfect and lovely and beautiful.

My daughters will never hear me vomit my cake into a toilet.  Never.

I just wish I could control my stress eating, my emotional eating, my binge eating.  I'm working on it.

Pardon my French.

So I don't know why I've wanted to write about all this.  I guess because I think about my weight all the time and I want to continue to lose it.  But sometimes I don't do anything about it because I'm afraid of getting caught up in it again.  I'm afraid of giving in to the thoughts to "just throw it up" - thoughts I still have almost every day.  Every day, people, even after almost 8 years.

Maybe in the end this is me sharing my demon hoping you'll pray for me or encourage me or just be really nice to me.