I read a book.

Tonight I read a book called 'Brain over Binge' and it helped me to realise that sometimes therapists guide their clients to look too much into their behaviours and emotions. Sometimes there is an answer and sometimes it's simple and not altogether linked to your other psychological bullshit issues.

I had always thought that my binge eating was the last thing on my list, the least dire of all my issues. The likelihood of me eating myself into a coma wasn't as high as my suicidal thoughts and plans one day reaching fruition. So I put my energy into the many types of therapy, treatments, medicines etc and about six years after I was first diagnosed I could confidently say I was a mostly stable and functioning human being who didn't have the inclination to live under a duvet forever or consistently fuck the most inappropriate people I could find anymore (to name just a few things I did in the past). 

It turned out that binge eating couldn't be dealt with like all my other issues, it wasn't about my emotional baggage (because for the most part I had dredged through and worked through most of that in years of therapy), it was about my lower brain's desire to reinforce a bad habit/addiction. 

I'm not going to go over the entire book but in essence, all the things I'd tried (OA, therapy, diets etc.) had failed dismally. Giving up control, taking control, none of it worked for me and I thought I was alone in that because OA is full of people who are living with the 'illness' and consider themselves to be recovering. I always hated that idea, that I'd always be stuck with yet another fucking illness. It took me long enough to come to terms with my Cyclothymia and stop hating it and myself for being wired differently to most others. 

This book sets out to try and help people who have had no success in the other programmes on offer and instead of making it complicated and super personal and gut wrenching (ha, pun), it makes it simple. Not easy but simple. To stop binge eating I have to separate myself from my lower brain which keeps telling me to eat all that shit and to not stop until I feel like vomiting, and not argue but sit with those thoughts. Listen but not react or interact with them, as it's main goal is to get me to eat but me, myself and my higher more evolved brain doesn't want to. So I will choose not to do as it says. 

I will choose to not binge eat anymore, because I've done it since I was 11 and I FUCKING hate it and myself for doing it. I'm 28 years old and I refuse to listen to that stupid self-sabotaging voice in my head any longer. 

Will keep you posted on the outcome of this new-found realisation.