THAT Bitch v Hamplanet of the Week

I was in a better place to write this post yesterday, but I had to put my make-up on and go to campus. Let’s see if I can recapture the ::blech:: feelings. 

Think Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, only for carb withdrawal. Can you say “12 days of Christmas chocolate too many”?

Step 1: The 3-day Headache. Step 2: The total crashing sense of abandonment. Step 3: The loss of inhibition about saying the bitchy things one always wishes one could say if only one weren’t so nice. Step 4: Apparently now, when the headache is a dim memory, the gloominess doesn’t seem to be accessible, and the bitchiness has subsided into a general grumpiness about how meaningless it all is. 

It’s a good thing I took notes. 

I have a theory about carbs, specifically starches and sugars. Carbs are basically a drug, like alcohol. As with alcohol, not everybody is susceptible to addiction, but—to judge from the prevalence of hamplanets—many are. My guess is that, metabolically speaking, the addiction has something to do with the glucose-insulin system, but there is a reason we talk about eating our feelings.* Carbs make us feel better—at least, for a bit. But not in a good way, like salad or meat. Carbs are not about building our bodies. They are about numbing them so that we don’t feel so much.

I think there is a reason that we take bread and wine at Mass. Bread is the prototypical carb, the one on which civilization was built. Refined sugar came later. If bread is coke, sugar is crack. Both lead to cravings. Both—when you withdraw from them—leave you with a stonking headache. For days.

But the headaches are a picnic compared with the feelings. This is where I was yesterday morning before I had to bitch-up and go to class. Basically, in feelings-terms, I was back in high school, feeling outcast, convinced no boy I liked would ever like me, making a beeline to the cafeteria where the bakery sold GIANT glazed cinnamon rolls. GIANT. Glazed. Cinnamon rolls. Pure sugar and starch. Bliss. But at a price.

For a high schooler, it wasn’t much of an eating disorder. Not bulimia or anorexia, thank God. But the shame was there. The secrecy. The aching need to binge. Back in high school, I had no understanding of what it meant, that terrible craving to fill myself up with as many sugars and starches as I could as fast as I could, if only the feelings would go away. 

There was a clear cycle. First, the desire for starches and sugars. The GIANT glazed cinnamon rolls were just the beginning. Once I got home, I would hide in my room with boxes of candy bars I was supposed to be selling for Latin Club, buying them from myself so that I could eat ten at a time. When the candy bars were gone, I would go to the fridge and start on the ice cream. With Cool-whip. When the ice cream was gone, I would make buttered toast coated in sugar. When the bread was exhausted...  

You get the picture. I have vivid memories of lying on the floor in the basement of my mother’s house, my stomach so distended it hurt—and still wanting to eat more carbs. And then vowing, once I finished this binge, that I would never do it again. Only to find myself back on the floor the next day or next week, surfing the carbohydrate high yet again.

It is amazing I wasn’t fatter, but then I was also swimming upwards of 3000 yards every morning with the school swim team. I couldn’t hide the fat between the dressing room and the water, but the swimming did enable me to hide the degree of my bingeing. 

Or so I told myself.

And then there was college, when the campus bookstore became my supplier. Cookies, especially. Pepperidge Farm Chess Men. Whole bags of them in a sitting. And popcorn. And Diet Dr. Pepper, just to make my stomach swell.

Luckily, my sophomore year, I started smoking. Although the cookies were still hard to resist.

You gotta laugh.

Except I couldn’t. It was never funny, only a source of constant shame. It is all in my diaries from that decade or so. “I’m so FAT” (with FAT written in bubble letters). “I’m so FAT. I’m so FAT. I’m so FAT.” As if saying it over and over and over again could somehow snap me out of the cravings. Fat shaming? Been there, done that. Eaten the carbs.

What was I doing to myself?!

I haven’t felt the urge to binge to quite that degree in decades, but I know the carb addiction is still there. It creeps up on you not-so-subtly. The cheese. The nuts. The fruits. The occasional piece of bread. And before you know it, you are sitting with the GIANT box of Vosges chocolates that you bought for the family at Christmas eating bonbon after bonbon in search of that high. 

And then promising yourself you will never binge like that again. 

Because, for a moment, just at the peak of the high, you feel hopeful again. Hopeful that you can be better. That this time you will stick to your diet. That this time you will be able to get thin enough to be beautiful—and stay that way. What harm can one more piece of chocolate do? It is going to be your last.

This—I am here to tell you—is not a case of needing willpower. At the peak of the binge, you feel like you can do anything. “I am going to WILL myself never to binge again! And fix everything in my life that is broken!” It is the grandiosity of the carb high that you have been craving. That release from the pain of the everyday.

Or is it? This is where I was yesterday morning, back with the feelings of abandonment that I remember so well from high school. I could hear the carb-whispers starting, unlike when I was fighting the headache. With the headache, as I said, it was easy. I knew all I needed to do was stick to the salad and soy sauce (for sodium) and the headache would pass. But the feelings are different. Unlike the headache, they seem so real.

Perhaps they are. Or perhaps one time they were. Or perhaps they were always an artifact of the carbs. That terrible longing to be loved. That aching need to be seen. That crushing sense of betrayal and loss and abandonment by one’s friends. What if it were only ever the carbs? What if it were never real? 

Mind you, I am post-menopause now, except for the hot flashes. We are talking hormones—insulin—after all. Who says hormones aren’t real? And the hot flashes weren’t nearly as bad over Christmas when I was eating all those carbs.

I wonder what step 5 is going to be....

H/t Rosiepoo SHAKEnBAKE for the memes. For further meditations in search of Wisdom, see The Lady and the Logos. For Hamplanet of the Week, watch Milo on Friday Night’s All Right at Censored.tv.

*[UPDATE: Friends tell me it also has something to do with gut bacteria: “The bacteria have cravings for the types of foods or minerals they want and tug on your neurological system to get you to eat those things to feed the bacteria. From my understanding, it takes 3-4 weeks of starving the bacteria for it to go away. They call it your ‘second brain’ because it has so much power and control over your body.” This makes sense!]