Disapproval

I guess the disapproval is for myself. I feel like I've crossed a line today.

It's only in fairly recent years that I've realised that I have a disordered relationship to food, but I don't think I ever had an actual eating disorder.

Up until my early 20's I was very thin. It was always commented on; how tall and skinny I was. I realise now that my mother subconsciously reinforced these attributes as not just physical attributes with no connotations, but as moral attributes. Without realising what I was doing, I adopted her habit of sustaining myself of coffee and cigarettes.

Further into my 20'ss, after moving out of home, being in a long-term relationship, I gained some weight, but merely went from being underweight, to normal.

In my late 20's I started martial arts training, and this came with some incidental weight loss, some incidental weight gain, and an obsession with the scale because weight classes mattered. Diet became a constant. Calorie counts and macros and fuelling for performance and weight cuts and bulks.

I trained fairly obsessively for a few years, but when I stopped training as much my weight blew up. I guess I continued eating as though I was in the gym 2 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Since then, I've been in a constant fight to get my weight back to a level I'm comfortable with. I'm not trying to get to my 20's weight, or my fight weight. I just want to feel like this anymore.

I've had periods of weight loss, but they've never been done in a particularly healthy way. It's always been some kind of extreme diet that isn't sustainable.

This year, I felt like I'd reached a good point. My weight has been shifting in the right direction gradually, and I've found a manageable balance between not consuming too many calories, getting a decent amount of movement, and still being able to eat the food I enjoy.

This last week though, I've just wanted to devour everything. I'm not hungry, it's not physical hunger, and it's not for a particular food. I just want to shove food in my face until I get that stretched stomach feeling and feel sick and sleepy.

I've been fighting against it, trying to give myself a little bit of grace and eat a bit extra, have a bonus snack, to try and curb this craving. But today I ate a lot more than I usually would.

And then I did something I've never done before.

I made myself throw up.

I feel ashamed of the fact that I'm 42 years old and I've started making myself throw up in the work toilets because I think people won't like me if I'm fat.