So incredibly bored by food
Getting off the dopamine roller coaster and tolerating boredom in recovery
Hello! This week we’re talking about dopamine.
In my eating disorder, I was obsessed with food. I thought about everything I could and couldn’t eat. I planned my carefully controlled dinner at lunchtime. I counted every bite I ate and pre-counted the bites I planned to eat in the future.
Restricting, planning to eat, and eating food were in many ways the central excitement in my life. Food was stimulating, exciting, and incredibly rewarding to me.
Of course I wished it were otherwise. “I just wish I didn’t love food so much,” I said. And then I went into recovery, and suddenly I didn’t love food so much. When I started eating intuitively and feeding myself what I really wanted, as much as I wanted, I stopped wanting and craving and dreaming of food.
I was BORED with food!
“What’s going on?” I asked, panicked. It was as if all the color had drained from my life. The excitement and joy were toned waaaaay down. Food became uninteresting, uninspiring, gray in every way.
This created a recovery crisis for me. I didn’t want to go back to my eating disorder, but it felt impossible to live in this state of doldrums with food. “Something must be wrong!” I thought.
I spent most of my life getting pleasure and a sense of power and control from restricting, planning to eat, and eating food. In recovery, I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, however much I wanted. Suddenly food lost its power, and it was incredibly destabilizing!
When food was no longer the central character in my life, I could see just how unbalanced I had become. For so many years, I had defined my happiness, success, and wellness on the basis of how I was eating. Without food as a way to define myself, I felt lost, confused, and frustrated.
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