Screamers

I woke up this morning feeling tremendously hungry. I came downstairs and had a low-carb protein bagel with cream cheese and my morning meds, then took my son to the last day of elementary school. I hung around for a couple of hours because there was an awards assembly, and then headed out, still feeling bottomless gnawing in my stomach.

I've come to recognize this feeling as part of not only my bariatric lifestyle changes but also my eating disorder recovery. So much of my life, I interpreted it as hunger and so I treated it as hunger - eating unhealthily and in excess to numb the feeling and make it disappear. The reality is, though, that it's a panic and anxiety response more than anything else. It's not my stomach that is wanting right now, it's my soul, my brain, my heart ... something is hurting or feeling empty, and needs soothing.

Something I have found to be a little therapeutic but also helping me recognize my body's cues is to give myself full, unrestricted permission - something I never would've imagined allowing myself to do in my dieting days, let alone seeing it actually work. Whether I am at home or in a grocery store, I tell myself: you can have whatever you want. Look at every item, consider every choice, and if that really speaks to you as what you feel you need, then go ahead and enjoy it.

The remarkable thing is, I almost never end up eating anything at all. Because I look at this food or that, and recognize that it's not truly what I want in that moment. Even though I have given myself full, guilt-free permission to make whatever food choice I want, the reality is that food isn't what I want at all, and allowing myself to recognize it is a big step.

It kind of reminds me of my old days of weight loss, when I was really into Geneen Roth books. She talked about giving into cravings to take their power away, because even if you have cookie dough for dinner, you're not going to have it every single day for the rest of your life, eventually you will get sick of it and it will lose its magic and its hold over you. If I really wanted pizza, I could have pizza - this is me realizing that it's not actually the pizza I want, but the feelings I associate with pizza: reliability, comfort, memories of good times.

There's so much on my mind right now. I've got another six days before my pregnancy test at the fertility clinic, and I am full of nerves about what it's going to say, and whether or not I should test at home ahead of time to mentally prepare myself. Today is four days post-transfer, and my test first thing this morning was negative. It was crushing, but I'm trying to stay hopeful: yesterday's bloodwork was very good, and in terms of numbers, I am only technically three weeks pregnant today, so it's really quite early still. With my son, I had tested around this time also and it came up negative but then I tested again at about five weeks and it was a clear positive. So ... once day at a time, and I'll try to continue to nourish my heart and my brains and my soul in the meantime so they're not feeling so starved.