Well, technically I’ve been back for over a week now (got back into town on the 10th). I did go off-track while I was on vacation, but not in a binge-eating way, mostly in a “I don’t normally eat this” kinda way.

And then once I got back, I did do the one more day thing for nearly a week. This time, I managed to mostly get back on track on my own…no raging fever required.

So I’ve got just under one week of being mostly on track (I’ve done a bit of takeout Chinese this week that doesn’t really qualify as truly on track). I’ve decided to give myself two full weeks of being on track before stepping on the scale again, so the next planned weigh-in will be March 5th.

All in all, the time away was a big win. The flights down and back were way more bumpy than I prefer, but both planes were only half full, and my friend and I had the row to ourselves on both flights.

The plane was a new model (one of those Airbus something or others), but alas, I’m not yet free of the seatbelt extender. But asking for that has never been a big issue for me…being asked to buy two seats has been (I watch way too much Airline).

I didn’t figure that would be a problem this trip; we weren’t flying an airline known to be hard-ass about that, and I was flying with a friend, so I didn’t need to worry about an annoyed passenger next to me.

Anyways, so the flight (aside from the turbulence) was pretty uneventful. The rest of the trip was spent doing touristy things and mostly eating out. I didn’t go nuts, but nor did I try and do my on-track eating.

So for example, we wound up doing breakfast at a place like Denny’s one morning. While I did order an egg-white omelet with veggies and fruit instead of home fries, I also had one pancake with butter and syrup. Gotta love moderation!

That said, once I got back home, it was very easy to slip back into my old patterns, which weren’t at all moderate, and included inhaling a bottle of wine and then chowing down way too much of unhealthy Chinese food (General Tso’s chicken really must be the Chinese equivalent of the Big Mac).

I’m not sure how I got myself back on track this time. One of these days I’ll have to get over the embarassment of “failing” and actually blog this stuff as it’s happening live. But I must say that Krisanne does a really great job of describing the anatomy of a binge:

It starts off innocently, as many do… a stressful afternoon, and a brownie as a reward. A cookie, a bagel, dessert after the expensive dinner with your work teammates. It ebbs and flows, staying mostly at bay through the weekend though there are indulgences here and there… a waffle at the breakfast buffet, a slice of sweet potato pie after BBQ. And then it’s Monday and a renewed commitment to stay on your food plan comes in. Until the afternoon, when suddenly one cookie doesn’t seem like such a bad idea even though you know, intellectually, that it is.

A renewed commitment until. How true!

My version of this looked like this: Okay, the plane landed late on Thursday afternoon, so what the heck, let me just do Chinese for dinner tonight and I can go shopping tomorrow.

And then you go shopping, but boy, maybe one more night of overeating wouldn’t be that bad, and you’ll have the whole weekend to get back on track. And you make a really healthy pilaf of beans, rice, tomatoes, and spinach to pump up the nutrients.

But then Saturday something else comes up and the pilaf sits in the fridge in a bowl and it’s another call to the Chinese takeout. Ditto Sunday. But hey, we’ll just start fresh on Monday, right?

Well no. And then Tuesday is Valentine’s Day and what the heck, you’re alone and it’s depressing so one more night, okay?

You make plans for Wednesday night in order to try and break the pattern. But when push comes to shove, you just decide that driving all the way for a concert isn’t what you want to do.

And then, on Thursday, something finally clicks, and you get through one night on track. Hallelujah!

Curiously, though the temptation is back the next day, it’s not as strong. Then again, maybe it’s the fact that you have to schedule surgery for your fibroids that helps. Or maybe, it’s the fact that you go and buy a new laptop and commit that you’ll stay on track until you pay off your credit card bill :).

Anyways, I did come up with one interesting theory while going through this. One of the supposed truisms about compulsive overeating is that we’re going for the serotonin and/or dopamine and/or beta endorphin rush. And that the problem is that it takes twenty minutes to go from stomach to brain. Alas, the amount of food you can stuff in in those twenty minutes. :(

But what if that isn’t it? What if we’ve trained ourselves that we need to eat to the point of pain?

Obviously that’s not the only issue; people aren’t stuffing themselves on carrots. But while eating the stuff we eat surely has a physiological effect, maybe the whole point of the binge eating until stuffed is simply a way of stopping the anxiety faster. Waiting twenty minutes for the digestion to do its job becomes less and less tolerable.

What’s really interesting to me about Krisanne’s story is how much it’s like mine after vacation, and how much it’s like Adriette Ward’s story in O magazine: it starts innocently enough, and then before you know it, you’ve slip-slided your way into gaining back some (scary) number of pounds.

It seems that there are four possible ways of dealing with this:

1. Never, ever go off track (the OA HOW concept).
2. Slip slide and die (ref: the pitcher plant metaphor from Allan Carr).
3. Cycle between #1 and #2, with a lot of feeling bad about oneself while trying to get back to #1.
4. Be able to get back on track easily.

It will be a happy day if I can ever do #4 consistently!