Saturday September 12

I've always been a big eater, but my problem with binge eating started in the Fall of 2005. It was my sophmore year at NMSU, I was living in the student apartments (i.e. not the dorm, but still on campus).

Something about that year was different from before. I seemed more detached and more alone. I think my freshman year was still an adjustment time, and I lived in the dorms where there was always something going on. My sophmore year, however, I was away from everything (literally, at the very edge of campus), as adjusted as I would ever be to college, and very very alone. I filled the void with food. I was beyond miserable and unhappy that whole year and I started to gain weight with my binge eating.

The next year was my first at UNM and I naturally thought that a new environment would help. As I learned, however, you can't run away from your problems. If you don't actually address them, they will simply follow you, which mine did. My first year at UNM was probably my worst year for binge eating. Most weekends I would eat about 4 pints of ice cream (2 on Friday and 2 on Saturday), a whole pizza, and whatever else I could get my hands on. We are talking 3,000 calories in one little sitting. It would always make me sick and I'd tell myself that this was the last time, but of course it wasn't. This first year was also a problem because I was no longer working out. So not only was I eating a ton, but I wasn't getting the exercize to help control my mood. Naturally, I gained weight faster.

My second year at UNM was much better. I started working out again and some of my self-destructive behavior was mitigated by the fact that I now had a roomate. It's amazing what kind of stuff you won't do when you know somebody else is watching. But the problem really didn't go away, though, because my roomate was frequently gone and when he was, I'd fall right back into my self-destructive behavior.

I'll address the weight issue in a seperate entry, but that's of course part of the story.

Where am I now? I would say that I'm 100x's better than I was when I first left NMSU and my first year at UNM. I still have the urge to binge eat every week, but I'm better at controlling it. It's similar to alcoholism, you just have to attack it one day at a time.