After last weekend’s ridiculously horrible binge, I was devastated that I had once again “failed” at my diet. I then spent the entire night moping around the house, beating myself up for being such a bad person, and naturally, eating more junk to reinforce my feelings of failure and loss-of-control. Still in a state of self-pity and loathing by Monday morning, I decided to spend the entire day half-heartedly starving myself as punishment.
For years now I’ve been like this – a binge eater, or a better term I like to use is a “snowballer”. Snowballers have a hard time letting things go. They can’t forgive themselves, accept the situation, and move on. Instead, they make the incident bigger and bigger, worse and worse, until things sufficiently spiral out of control. (Much like the way a snowball rolls down a mountain, gaining girth and speed every inch of the way until it crashes).
This is precisely how I am with food. If I make one slip up – say an extra dinner roll – I freak out, call myself a failure, and BANG! the binge begins. Usually, this is accompanied by some twisted rationale like “oh well, I blew it for today so I might as well go all out now”.
So, after being bitchy last Sunday night, my boyfriend braved it and asked me what was wrong. “I totally screwed up on my diet,” I whined. “I’ll never lose weight.” Seeing as he was a philosophy major in college, I can always expect a good answer from him. His response was, “grab your sack and get over it.” Then he walked out of the room.
Surprisingly, his words-of-wisdom were rather helpful. See, I, like most women, have a screwed up relationship with food. I always have to go and make a simple situation complicated (and often worse) by infusing emotion into it. “an extra dinner roll equals failure, badness, loss-of-control etc.”
Men, on the other hand, like to keep things simple. “an extra dinner roll equals an extra dinner roll”
(I do hope I am not offending anybody here with my sweeping generalizations, these are just my opinions and observations)
In the end, perhaps this is why I am a fat binge-eater/snowballer, and my boyfriend is not. He knows not to make life more complicated than it already is. And he knows when to grab his sack and get over it.
2 responses so far ↓
1 alice
// Jan 24, 2008 at 8:21 am
wow! i just did a similiar post about snowballing and binge eating. i’m exactly the same way. the reason why i keep regaining the weight i’ve lost is that after a long period of being “good” for many months, i tend to suddenly let the restriction get to me and just surrender to a cookie…which turns into several cookies…which turn into several days of “cookie-ing”! thankfully my binge last night was saved by some extreme exercise but that’s not what i would usually do. and i empathize with the whole “one extra dinner roll = failure” approach. it’s something i’m desperately trying to conquer as well.
2 b, the better body blogger
// Jan 24, 2008 at 9:54 am
Hey Alice!
I totally hear ya. Not only do I snowball with food, but I seem to snowball with everything in my life - finances, career stress, relationship issues… (It’s like one late credit card payment equals I’ll never get a mortgage,I’ll end up living on the street, I’ll be forever destitute and poor…) It’s a slippery slope.
I once had a therapist tell me “snowballing” is a form of self-punishment because your perpetually, and purposefully, setting yourself up for failure. I’m not so sure if that’s true or not, but it cost me 150 dollars an hour. My therapist’s advice was to use something called a “stop technique” - basically envision a stop sign and immediately halt the rambling in your head. Personally, I like my boyfriend’s “grab your sack” philosiphy better, it’s funnier.
Best of Luck to you!
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