Grasping for control: I think the Beast is awake...

Image courtesy of the Stock Exchange

Once upon a time, I conceptualised my eating disorder... disordered eating... whateverthehellitis... as a sleeping beast in the dark.

I commented, a few days back, that I'd been going for just over a year without really feeling the seductive siren song to just give in and go all out into calorie restriction and compulsive exercise.  Apparently, the universe took that as a challenge.

Yesterday and today... possibly with the frustration of maybe-possibly having buggered something up in my hips/adductors injury-wise, or possibly some other kind of persykologikal stuff, I've been hearing that soft whisper inside myself.  Again.  And there's no denying it. The Beast is definitely awake.

What's started as "hey, let's allow yourself to feel hunger mindfully, and then to notice what it feels like to satiate that hunger with healthy food", keeps turning into, "Hey, let's *enjoy* the hunger. Let's prolong it. Let's not eat and satisfy it until you're ready to let it go in your time on your terms. Let's stay in control."  Then there was the tracking my food yesterday and realising at the end of the day that I was well under what I'd set as my target. And instead of deciding to eat something (despite feeling hungry), I started thinking about just going with it. Because hey, more deficit = more loss. Especially since I'm doing less exercise this week. And... and... and...

Yeah. We can all see where that's going, can't we? 

I'm conscious that I have three immediate possible responses open to me here:

• I can dive headlong into it:  there's that oh-so-seductive promise of weight loss and those pretty muscles I want. And I can decide it's just too hard to keep fighting it, so I'm going to USE it to get me to my "goals" faster. That just requires a slight change in mindset. And a complete ignoring of the goals that don't fit in with the decision (like, oh, the running one, for example. Not to mention the balance one).   But it's an option. It's the tempting one right now.
• I can freak out and back the hell off from anything that resembles "dieting":  it's understandable, after all, that I'm scared. I've fought the Beast before and lost... running away when I notice it waking up makes perfect sense. But y'know what? If I don't face the battle, the Beast still wins. I give up on my goals. I let it define what I can and can't achieve. It's the path of least resistance, and something I've learned is that that path very rarely generates results I can be proud of achieving.
• I can notice the Beast and simply let myself be with it : I can acknowledge that it's there and hear it without doing what it says. I can thank it for sharing without accepting its goals as mine. This is my own mind, and the only power anything within it has is the power I allow it. If there are epic, dramatic battles to be fought, they're only dramatic and epic because I'm bringing the drama to them.

Just reminding myself that I have that choice of responses helps me to reframe the Beast from the slobbering, threatening monster about to leap out at me like the one in the image above, to something... more manageable.  Maybe the voice of that annoying kid in the movie theature who just won't shut up, when I'm trying to focus on what the characters are saying.  Maybe there's even some metaphor that acknowledges that the Beast wouldn't be there unless it was serving a purpose, so maybe it's some kind of dodgy friend that's trying to give me a constructive message, but has appalling communication skills and hasn't figured out how to tell me in language I know how to understand.

Meh. Not sure. But one thing I do know. I'm less afraid of realising that it's woken up than I was at the beginning of this post.

And that can only be a good thing.