Challenge Accepted

I’m not sure why, but the last couple days, I’ve been issuing myself “bulimic challenges”.

I didn’t call them that until I went to write this post, but that’s essentially what they are. I’ll say to myself something like, “I’m going to try eat this whole box of cereal tonight” or “I wonder if I can eat that 5 pound jar of peanut butter in one sitting”.

Then I try.

I don’t know what started this, or what made my brain think this was a good idea. I didn’t even notice I was doing it at first. This is definitely a new thing for me.

I’m going to try to stay aware of it and stop doing it. The last thing I need right now is to be issuing myself dangerous food challenges.

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I’m not really bulimic because…

1. I purged about an hour after eating. I didn’t purge because I as trying to remove calories, I as purging to get that damn food out of my stomach.

I do this a lot: purging to remove food instead of calories.

Honestly, a lot of the time, I don’t care about the calories in terms of purging. I tend to assume that after I eat it, it counts. I have no definitive way of telling how many calories will be absorbed and how many will be purged, so they just all count.

I just hate that feeling of having food in my stomach.

Sometimes I try to wait it out. It rarely works. I’ve purged several hours after eating. At that point, I don’t even know if it’s a physical feeling I’m trying to rid myself of or a psychological feeling. The knowing that I didn’t purge.

2. Sometimes I don’t even try to purge everything. I just purge until I get a certain feeling in my stomach and body. There have been times I’ve known there’s still some food in there, but I just stop because I achieved what I was looking for.

Strangely, other time I need to get everything out, taking extra precautions to make sure I do. (I won’t go into that because I don’t like giving people ideas.)

3. My desire to exercise doesn’t outweigh the pain and fatigue from my fibromyalgia. I am incredibly lazy.

I used to spend hours in the gym. I used to walk/run miles each day. Now, I’m doing well if I walk to the bus stop half a mile away. I consider walking around the store to get binge food a workout. (Though, don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent an hour or more walking around the store being indecisive.)

I could keep going, I have a long list of reasons why I’m “not really bulimic”. However, these are the 3 main ones that bother me the most. It’s not uncommon to bent over the toilet and think to myself, “I’m not really bulimic.”