I finally (doh!) figured out that what I am dealing with this week is not either hunger or cravings, but something else: emotional eating. I’m not surprised by that fact, but I am surprised it took me this long to figure it out. Last night (Wednesday night) I was not hungry and in fact when I got back from my night class I did not eat anything. But I sure thought about it, and in thinking about it, I wondered WTH I was thinking. I knew I was not hungry as I ate a decent lunch (the usual rice/veggies/beans mix) and had a few more peanut butter pretzels too, and for dinner I consumed a whole bagel (which I actually forced myself to finish). Body check: not hungry.
Still, I was thinking about going home and stuffing my face into a bag of chips. And that’s when I realized that this desire had nothing to do with hunger or even cravings, because I knew for a fact that I was NOT going to go home and stuff my face into a bag of chips. The physical desire was not there (thank you, SLD!), but an emotional one was. I wanted comfort and oblivion, and used to be I found both in food.
My father was an alcoholic. It runs in the family — his father was a mad crazy drunk, whom he didn’t talk about — but moreso, my father had a lot of daemons to deal with. He was a veteran Air Corps pilot of WWII and that experience was the defining period of his life, which is sad, because it was a horrific experience. 70% of the men he trained with in 1942 were dead by 1944; my father’s hair was literally turned permanently snowy white (yes, really, it does happen); and he refused to talk about the time he tried to help out at Dachau (he lasted 2 hours, and never told me what he saw). He came home to find that his mother had spent all the money he sent home, which he had been planning to use to start a business with his brother, and that the job market was so soaked with vets even pilots could not find work. He never really recovered. He went back into the military when he got the chance and tried to drink away all the bad things.
I always wondered why, until Mother died. Then I got hooked on prescription codeine (we did not have Hospice — long story — so I got to stash her drugs) and I understood: oblivion. Drink and drugs do a great job of helping you to not care. It was a marvelous feeling to be blank for a while, after all the trauma I had gone through, which in comparison to my father’s experiences was not much after all. The prescriptions ran out and I turned to food. Not quite as strong, but less damaging overall, and very easy: get sad or upset, eat a lot, become subsumed by food coma. Nice.
So last night I wanted chips and a beer and some chocolate but really what I wanted was to just stop thinking, stop hurting, stop crying. Just stop it, stop it all, stop it forever.
That is a hunger of a different kind, entirely.
