I am at a point where for at least part of almost every day, I feel incredibly depressed to the point of tears. I also have felt really out of control with food and eating and am in a pretty bad place with sugar addiction. I'm not sure if I binge because I'm depressed or if I'm depressed because of binging. I'm also not sure if it really matters, because I don't want either. I don't have a history of clinical depression, though I have experienced a couple months-long depressive episodes.
Can anyone else relate to or shed insight on this?
First of all, I'm sending you a hug! I know how you feel! And personally, I'm not sure either, but I do know that whenever I consume sugar I feel very depressed. When I cut out sugar completely I feel 100% better. And for me, I know my bingeing started when I was 10 - I had just moved 10 hours away from my old home and I was very depressed. So I turned to food for comfort. Of course, this is a long time ago but it set up patterns for me. Whenever I feel depressed I turn to sugar, which makes me feel worse. Going on a meal plan helped me get back on track. Also, directly dealing with my feelings helped as well. I don't have clinical depression but I don't deal with stress very well (and in college I'm very stressed). I hope this helps in some way. But I do sympathize.
Yeah, not binging can be really tough. I wouldn't consider myself depressed. But I will say that eating good food makes me really happy. And maybe you're binging out of an attempt to self medicate. This is a solution that I myself am most familar with. Have you ever thought about what circumstances make you most depressed or how often you feel that way? It might help you pin point the real issue!
Krampus it is a tricky situation isn't it? For as long as I can remember I've been somewhat "depressed" and somewhat of a "binger." I have been diagnosed with many different things like OCD with eating, anxiety, social anxiety, depression, SAD, and whatev. It's frustrating because each person gave me a different answer. It just makes me think I either have no problem at all, or so many at once. I suppose they are all linked.
anyway, it is a cycle. my depressed feelings do lead to eating, and eating leads to depression. furthermore, i feel depressed when i am trying to not overeat and such. and it's something i think about all the time, i guess that's why i got slapped with the OCD label.
so i suppose most people would tell us, we are eating to fill something within us. i know, myself, i do not really have a passion or purpose in my life. i am in my first year of college, totally unaware of what i want to do in life. nothing really lights my fire yet. and knowing that i have to find it..is stressful in itself.
i have been looking into counseling like i have before but, i hated doing it when i did. for now, i am going to start a food journal. and not one to count calories but one to write in before, during, and after i am eating to record my emotions. maybe it will help me realize how i work.
sorry for the long post but i am not very good at putting things concisely. *hug* and i hope to see you back in trying to get out of the 120's and eventually, into the 110's.
You have my total sympathy and understanding. I finally decided it didn't matter which was causing which. My strategy was that I couldn't control the depression, but I did have control over the binging. I've related in other posts how I finally got the binging under control was to seperate it from dieting. At age 45 I stopped eating candy, my trigger but had to eat tons of other food to stop myself from reaching for the candy. But 4 years later I was able to finally develop a food plan that I could stick to and lost the 100 lbs. I had been carrying around for 20 years.
And the depression? Still with me, but not as intense and not exacerbated by beating myself up over binging.
For me, bingeing is primarily an **expression** of something else. It's a symptom, not a cause.
However, it's not symptomatic of depression. For me, it's a symptom of anxiety and repressed agitation. Rather than confronting the cause of my anxiety & doing something constructive to alleviate it or at least face it square on for what it is, I suppress it. I try to carry on "normally" & be productive. But my playacting only fools the outside world. It does not fool me. The bingeing is the crack in my facade. It's also my psyche's way of demanding my attention: "There's something really wrong & you are not dealing with it. I will make sure you know that things are not right."
That's the role bingeing has now.
When I had an eating disorder, bingeing also expressed something simpler: "Feed me." It was, simply, me failing as an anorexic. It was a biological imperative overriding my attempts at overly extreme control.
I find the more you focus on something (Weight in this case) the worse it feels to fail because you were pinning so much on 1 thing. For a lot of people it seems to be the idea that lots of things in life will happen and improve in 10lbs* time etc.
I am fairly incapable of dieting in a healthy manner so perhaps this isn't relevant to everyone- but dieting makes me miserable. If I'm losing weight and feeling in control, eventually I get upset or unwell from a lack of proper nutrition and if I'm stuck in a binge rut, well you don't want to be anywhere near me.
Perhaps it's not entirely relevant/constructive to this topic, but I have to wonder why we let ourselves get obsessed with small slip ups and in turn make ourselves feel miserable. There seem to have been quite a few posts lately with people struggling with binging, and it's a shame that it seems like people beat themselves up for it when there's probably a great many things about themselves to be proud of.
I'm going through a bad patch too but it's the type that saef described above with anxiety, more than depression, causing the bouts of irresponsible eating, particularly sugar addiction. I know what the causes are for the anxiety but it doesn't matter because they will continue for at least 6 more months. And I can't sustain this crazy eating pattern that long, it feels toxic because it is.
So my own problem is not "which came first?" but "what in heck can I do about this anxiety other than destroy myself (at home and alone) with food?" And as soon as I figure something out I'll let you know.
Thank you everyone for your insightful posts and supportive responses. Like most of my recent threads I am both happy and sad that other people out there can relate to this garbage.
I woke up this morning so full of hope (like so many mornings...). There aren't external support groups conducted in English for this stuff around, so I'll have to be my own support group. The depressed feelings this time around are supposedly tied to many things, but I suspect I am just randomly assigning them to things when the real culprit and the real downer is weight and food. I have such envy and longing to be a "normal" eater. I spend all day reading positive-image sites about intuitive eating and people who have recovered from eating disorders.
serendipity, "but I have to wonder why we let ourselves get obsessed with small slip ups and in turn make ourselves feel miserable."
well, for me, i have it instilled in my brain that being "fat" is the worst possible thing a person could ever be/do. and especially for my age group, everyone is teeny tiny and i am not so much. it is the first thing everyone notices. it is the first thing anyone comments on when someones name is brought up. i hear my guy friends talk about "fat" girls all the time and i notice that quite often, they arent fat and in fact look sort of my weight. even girls are just as horrid. they will say a girl is fat and then when she loses weight they say she's too skinny and anorexic. and then i get sucked into sites with celebrities being bashed for having a sight of cellulite. like, i thought it was known that most woman have it? it kills me. i feel like no one could ever take me seriously unless i were a skinny girl. until then, i am just the chubby funny girl.
i can totally relate. i binge too and mostly on sugar. the binging causes depression and the depression causes me to binge. it occurred to me this morning that when i get the slightest bit stressed or annoyed, i look for something to comfort me, and usually it is food (when it's available)...i thought of this when i was getting stressed on my way to work, and i took out my Iphone to check my email (i compulsively check email, just like i compulsively eat) while driving, thinking that would make me feel better.
so then i got to work, and i am having the strongest urge to binge. i'm trying really hard not to.
Its funny how I just noticed this thread. I binged majorly last night; not a first time for me. I have binged ever since I can remember and been depressed since 13. Some people don't eat at all when depressed not I I go for the gusto. Some days are better then others; and I feel that both are go hand in hand together You binge because you are depressed and depressed because you binged. How do you find a neutral stomping ground? I find that when I don't deal with stuff and bury it deep down thats when I binge. We all need cornfields to go stomp on and yell and scream at the top of our lungs. I am in situation now that I can't find that cornfield so I blog. Yeah I feel like doodoo right now but tomorrow is another day. Will it be a day that another binge happens? Can't predict that; so for now I say I am having a good day even though I feel so crappy about the night before.
inteventionn that's why I stay FAR away from Skinny vs Curvy and all those sites. It's not the articles or the pictures, but the comments from other readers that make me feel like someone has put my self-perception on a cheese grater. Like a car crash I can't stop reading and by the time I get to the last comment (typically lambasting someone for claiming to wear a size 4 with a 26 inch waist or something else that no one should ever give a darn about) I feel like absolute garbage.
Today I want to share that I feel pretty for the first time in weeks. Overanalyzing everything is silly, especially for moody people like me, but here are a couple things about yesterday that may explain why I feel awesome today:
-I didn't count calories and I didn't weigh or measure myself - no numbers I can use for self-validation/deprecation.
-I packed a nice breakfast/lunch and went out to dinner with two normal/healthy eaters. I ate when I was hungry.
-I didn't binge because I felt satisfied (and also, I binged the day before...).
-I woke up a little hungry as opposed to feeling like I swallowed a cement block, the post-binge hangover.
-I took a hot bath and painted my nails last night, and today am wearing an outfit I feel confident in. None of this "hiding under fat clothes" business.
I know that I have some kind of "revelation" or "sudden inspiration" several times over the course of one week and it won't be a straightforward one-way street to recovery and happiness, but I'm just soaking in the good feelings for today. I hope the rest of you are also having an easier time or a better day!
For me, it was definitely depression that caused bingeing. Actually, depression caused feelings of inadequacy, which lead to self-starvation, which in turn lead to bingeing. Over time, I became used to the "bingeing" lifestyle, so after I quit starving myself (I have not done that in over 2 years), the bingeing habit stayed with me. Hence, my problem now!
Ah Krampus I am comforted to hear I am not the only person who has done that. I know it is so self-destructive but it is so addicting because I just always hope for something positive. Never happens duh. and the people's comments make me think, am i the crazy one, or are the people commenting crazy? seriously.
and I am also glad to hear you're feeling some good vibrations. I have yet to feel some for awhile and I really blame the weather. I just gotta keep on keepin on.
Binging and Depression - Chicken or Egg?
