Day 6 status post roux-en-y gastric bypass surgery. The past five days of a clear liquids diet has made it abundantly clear to me that if I thought I had turned a new leaf, I definitely hadn't.

Ed convinced me to just try purees a few days before I was supposed to. I did. It went okay, so he talked me into advancing the diet to purees a day early. I countered and decided on full liquids (liquids you can't see through but that still go through a strainer, like milk). Except he talked me into cottage cheese at night, just for fun, and I struggled to resist him.

And then later when I was in my daughter's room:

I'm not trying to shift the blame. There is no other person who is "forcing" me to eat the way I do. These are conversations I have in my head all day long. However, I've begun to read a book called Life Without Ed (Jenni Schaefer, 2004). In it, the author describes how she became the patient of Thom Rutledge and conquered her eating disorder by process of separating herself from these thoughts that had become so very internalized to her and later, as a separate "being" was able to end the relationship she had with the eating disorder/ED/Ed.

I'm hoping that by blogging along as I read the book, I can experience some of the recovery that she has. Although the author describes a cycle of "starving, bingeing, then purging," it is just as easy for me to substitute the words "eating until I can't feel any more." Too easy. I have sought help for the craziness that causes me to eat when I'm not hungry, to eat until I'm stuffed, and then to eat more, but I'm told this is not an eating disorder. Like hell it isn't! So for now, those of us who don't binge and purge or starve ourselves, those of us who just have a problem with "poor food choices," or "portion size" and "not enough exercise" can go through the motions and get ourselves weight loss surgery. But why do so many of us not reach our goal, or gain so much of the weight back, eventually? Because we still are in the grips of disordered eating, or whatever you want to call the process that makes us want to eat when we're not hungry.

I didn't even know that another way of eating existed until I had my third daughter. If she is not hungry, she will not eat. Plain and simple. She "saves up her hunger" when she knows she is going to her dad's for visitation, because she doesn't want to disappoint him by not eating. You see, if she forgets and has a snack after school, then she literally cannot eat dinner at his house, and ends up having a late dinner with me when she comes home. Or she will just skip dinner altogether, since she doesn't like feeling full at bedtime. One time I found a third-eaten Reeses Peanut Butter Cup laying on the counter. I had just enough restraint to ask her what that was all about before I devoured it in one bite. Her answer? "I took a bite and then I wasn't hungry any more." I gave birth to this child? Seriously? She definitely has her dad's genes, those of the calm observation that "If you just stopped eating after supper, you'd lose a lot of weight. It worked for me!" And of course it did. He snacked out of boredom or because he liked the taste of the food, but he really could take it or leave it. So he left it, and reached his goal weight within a month. If only it were that simple for the rest of us.

But I see that I've gone on a rant, so I'll just shut up now and go to bed.