I would think to myself, why can’t I just eat whatever I want? It’s not fair. Why are all the foods that are good for me so bland, and all the foods that are bad for me so tasty? Why does food have to be fattening? Why can’t we just eat whatever we want and excrete whatever our bodies don’t need? I would think about this a lot, and would feel very hard done by that I had to live in a world where I couldn’t eat whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted.

Now I live in reality. I understand and accept that I can’t just eat whatever I want. It might be unfair, but it’s the way it is, and I have to accept it and live with it. There is no point wasting time dreaming up fantasy worlds where food has no caloric value, or ruminating on how much better things would be if I could just eat whatever I wanted all the time. This is “magical thinking” and it got me nowhere.

I hated shopping for clothes because nothing ever fit. It was humiliating and disheartening to try on item after item and have them not fit. The clothing that is made for large people is usually not shapely or fashionable, and it usually looks like it was made for someone twice my age.

I hated having to buy things that were XXL or XXXL. Or even bigger. Just before I started my recovery, I had some 4XL and 5XL shirts. On the one hand, I was happy that I could buy clothes that actually fit on my body, but looking at those sizes was so depressing.

I went shopping the other day and bought a shirt that was sized as “medium”. This blew my mind. And there were so many shirts in the store that fit me. I had an actual choice of what to buy, instead of being forced to buy the only thing in the store that both fit me and didn’t make me look like I had zero sense of how to dress myself.

I didn’t realize that “my life had become unmanageable”. I thought I managed things fairly well. But once the curtain was drawn back, I could see the unmanageability clearly.

One very prominent example is how I thought of time. I basically thought it didn’t apply to me. I would set completely unrealistic goals for myself and my colleagues in terms of time, and then be surprised when the deadline swooshed past. Things always took longer than I thought.

I would also let myself get sucked into projects deeply, losing all sense of time, staying up well past a reasonable time for sleeping, and then wonder why I felt tired all the time.

I still have to keep a careful eye on this part of my character. I can slip into “time blindness” very easily. Having my food in place helps to keep the curtains pulled back, but having a realistic understanding of how time works is honestly very hard for me.