It became crystal clear to me at the end of October that I had relapsed. In retrospect I relapsed long before that. I was “abstinent” much longer than I was “in recovery”. Crazy thoughts and longing for food had crept in over time and I began to feel the insanity of rethinking what I needed or wanted to do in terms of my program over and over, time after time.
On Friday, October 29 I had an unpleasant (okay, traumatic) experience. It shouldn’t have been a big deal…just something I needed to work through. But, in the process of taking care of it, I had a melt-down. I tend to get stressed out, but I don’t melt down. I never cry. That day I did both. I cried up to the Oakland airport to drop my daughter off. My husband happened to call to see if I was all right. I couldn’t talk in a normal voice and didn’t feel like crying into the phone, so I hung up on him. I cried all the way home. I assumed I could calm down long enough to go into Costco. Not so.
I drove directly back to Milpitas and went straight for the yogurt shop. I purchased the largest size sugar-free strawberry yogurt (flour and sugar is the only line I still hadn’t crossed) and sat in the parking lot to eat it. I’m not going to lie. It worked wonders. My eyes were still red but I was able to stop crying. Before I humiliated myself by trying to make it through an errand at a store, I impulsively drove to a nearby friend’s house and knocked on the door. I didn’t even care that she had her daughter and grandchild visiting from out of state. She could tell something was wrong and invited me in to finish my melt-down on her living room sofa for the next two hours. My husband called my cell phone two more times and I ignored it. When we finally heard him call her answering machine and ask if there was any chance his wife was there I realized that he was genuinely concerned about me and I had better pull out of it and try to move back into the world of sanity.
Friday was rock bottom for me. It concluded a month of intense emotions—many happy ones and well as some good-old fashioned stress. But I realized more clearly than ever that I was still a food addict. The more stressed I got, the more compelled I felt to eat, having this subconscious sense that food would make everything okay. I got back to the point where the pain of addiction was bad enough that I again felt ready to go to any lengths to overcome it.
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