anatomy of a binge

There are some days that the Sugar Queen breezes through serenely, almost effortlessly, unfazed by the phantasmagoria of food around her, happily eating her berries and diet shakes, oblivious to the glistening doughnuts in the break room, confident that she will reach her  goal and stand proudly one day as one of the former fatties who "made it."

She could be locked overnight, alone in the Lindt Chocolate Factory, and emerge at morning's light with not a wisp of cocoa on her lips or fingertips, on those days.

Today is not one of those days.

Today is one of those horrible days when her food addiction claws to get out, where she is hanging on by her fingernails obsessing about eating and every type of food in the house.

She is consumed by thoughts of Eating More. Eating Something else. Eating Anything else. Now. Now. Now.

It's not about hunger. It's about a damned frantic urgency of needing to escape. Of wanting to dive into the mind-numbing, soul-deadening dark abyss of a binge where nothing exists but the tasting, the chewing, the swallowing, the continual hand-to-bag-to-mouth motion over and over and over, eating past the point of enoughness.

Eating past the point of fullness, of too-fullness, of not wanting to stop eating when she's feeling stuffed and sick.

Just eating and eating and eating. Oh, if she could just continue eating, unconsciously forever!

But eventually she will stop, will have to come back up from the cavernous dark, blinking in the blinding light, and survey the battlefield, see with horror what she has wrought--again--the terrible ruins of empty wrappers and bags that surround her.

The shame. And the sadness and despair. Hopelessness and defeat.
It's almost unbearable.

Despite all the food that's been thrown at it, the clamoring desperation to escape ... something ... is still  lurking there, but it's a little duller now, weighted down by thousands of empty, unneeded calories and drowned out by the hissing and screaming voices in her head.

"Sick!"
"Disgusting!"
"Fat!"
"Loser!"

Then comes the desperation to hide the evidence, the empty containers and aftermath of her excess, so that she can pretend it never happened and likewise hope that no one else will uncover the depths of her gluttony and depravity.

There were split-seconds during that frenzied eating where she wanted to stop, but chose not to, where she could have put the food down, and said, "no more," but then that frantic feeling welled up inside her again, and she took another bite, and another, hoping that it would silence whatever was screaming to come out.

Feeling sluggish, drugged and bloated, she lumbers to bed, wondering why she didn't stop. Again.

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