I am dealing with what I have come to realize is a bit of an epiphany.
So I’ve been going out to bars/restaurants with people and having water while they eat/drink. I’ve been sitting with people at office having lunch. Half-facetiously, I’ve been asking to borrow their food and booze to take a deep sniff of it to ‘practice’, to steel myself for doing this.
I’ve realized something fucking mindboggling.
In the entirety of my memory, maybe my entire life, I have never, ever, not once, not been hungry.
I say this because I’m not hungry now, and it’s something I’ve never before experienced.
When you’re hungry and you smell food, there’s that instant hindbrain connection that starts you salivating, makes it smell amaaaaazing, etc. etc. I had assumed this always, always, always happened, and always at full intensity.
The only times I’ve not eaten have always been because some countervailing but unrelated factor was stronger. Guilt. Pain because I’d just finished a meal and my stomach was distended. The desire not to puke in the restaurant from overeating. Maybe I was too drunk.
Every single time in my life I’ve not eaten something when presented with the possibility - from being offered a burger to walking past a Chinese restaurant and sniffing the air - I’ve literally been fighting with myself.
But never, not ever, did I not passionately and physically want to eat the food right then.
So for the first time in my memory, I’m Not. Fucking. Hungry.
I am now facing precisely how physically broken my body is/was.
I spent my life in a sea of fucking misery as a failure, because I was treating every single time I came across food as a separate and unrelated test of will. I considered that every time I ate food I didn’t need to eat, I failed. There were no successes. Ever. Because if I managed not to eat it, I told myself, ‘oh, I’m not hungry.’
Bullshit. I was hungry. And I chose not to eat it. And I won the fight way more often than I lost. But the wins weren’t wins, because I understood the phrase ‘not hungry’ as ‘chose not to eat.’ And that’s what normal people did when they weren’t hungry.
I feel like a goddamn methhead who just got hit with a dose of Narcan, and for maybe 30 minutes the drug has absolutely no physical hold on me. I’m realizing that I’m eating things when I eat them purely because my brain is telling me to eat. I’m struggling to eat more than 400-600 calories a day because that plus guilt plus the desire not to ‘waste the honeymoon period’ which they talk about after the surgery is so strong.
Now I’m fucking petrified that when the honeymoon period is over, the hunger will come back the way it was before, and the only weapon I’ll have is the restrictive quality of the surgery.
30 years of being an utter failure every day. Every. Single. Day.
(I mean, I still feel I'm a failure, but I hadn’t even thought about how much of it was due to that, it was just like air. Every day.)
This is weird.
Weight: 298.7