How All or Nothing Thinking Almost Ruined Me

All or nothing thinking consumed me for most of my young adult years into my early adulthood. I grew up a fat kid and developed anorexia at the age of 10 after battling with my weight and overeating for the majority of my life. at the time I had no idea I was overeating or that my eating habits had anything to do with how much fat I had on my body. I just knew I was overweight and I hated it. I cried about it to my parent's numerous times and eventually started exercising as a means to "fix" my body.

The main factor to me being an overweight kid was that I grew up in a household where very little was known about nutrition, we lived off of food stamps, my mom worked three jobs and was rarely home and I learned how to feed myself with mostly packaged foods. Bagel Bites, Ravioli from a can, pop tarts, cereal (with powdered milk), granola bars, etc. I remember eating large amounts of food from a very young age, always needed so much more than everyone else around me to feel full. 6 granola bars, 4 huge bowls of cereal, 3 packages of pop tarts. I loved food and the way that it made me feel. I didn't know I was overeating or binge eating, but I knew that if I ate enough food I felt better. I would sneak food; I looked forward to huge meals of having a lot of food to eat in one sitting.

When I lost all the weight for the first time, that is where the perfectionism started. the positive reinforcement I got from seeing progress was enough to fuel me for a long time. Eventually my family saw that I had a problem and weight gain came as a result of attempting to heal from this disorder, that is when the binge eating began again, and I told myself that it was okay because I was trying to gain weight, but I just went back to where I began with having to control over how much I was eating. That brought me to a place of being overweight again which led to another episode of anoxia and then eventual binge eating. The shift in switching from starving to having no control over food got shorter and shorter. it started with being years apart, to a year, to several months, to a month, to weeks, and before I knew it to days. where the beginning of the day would begin with me restricting as much as I could and would end with me binging just to do the same thing the next day. I felt completely powerless and kept telling myself that I just needed more control.

The need to do everything perfectly consumed me. If I didn't eat perfectly the whole day was ruined, If I couldn't exercise the way I planned to the whole day was ruined. It created this mentality where performing perfectly was necessary for peace and the second I messed up even a little bit, I spiraled. One bite of something off plan became a binge, only 30 minutes to exercise became an excuse to not move my body and the cycle fed itself. Instead of realizing these small and insignificant setbacks for what they were and getting right back on track with my next decision, I let fell into this mental spiral where any action (or even thought) that didn't meet the unrealistic standards that I set for myself, nothing mattered after that because I believed I had already ruined everything.

My desire to be perfect had the opposite effect. This all or nothing mentality stalled my progress for months if not years. It made consistency impossible because I was starting over every morning just to fail and spiral by mid-morning. I was constantly riddled with guilt and anxiety, and I was stuck in this never-ending cycle of binge eating, restriction, and restarting.

I knew for a long time I had a problem, but I didn't know where to start if I wanted to heal from it and I didn't know if I even wanted to heal from it because I was afraid of losing control. But the second I made a decision to heal is when I started to. I didn't have a plan, I didn't know where to start, but I did. it began with a lot of journaling. This allowed me to identify the thought patterns, the source, and my triggers. This took months. But I started to learn about tools that I could use and that is when Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was exposed to me. I started implementing it that day, journaling for over an hour a day and rewriting my irrational thoughts into reasonable ones. I am actually going to go back into my notes app and see what I can find and I will attach the screenshots to this post.

I had a lot that I needed to work through, and I still don't know exactly why all these disordered thought patterns became my reality for so long, but healing from this was mentally exhausting and I never thought I would be in the place that I am now. a place of peace. For the majority of my life I was so restrictive that people told me I had great discipline, but discipline wasn't what fueled me, disorder was. I was terrified of food, I was terrified of my body, I was scared that I would lose control again. But I have been binge free for half a year now. I am no longer afraid of food, a cookie doesn't hold power over me the way I gave it power in the past, overeating doesn't define me and I don't spiral anymore. I am not consumed my thoughts of food and exercise all day. I am no longer controlled by an obsession to be perfect, and no I do not have the most beautiful physique, or the biggest muscles, and I am not the leanest compared to people online, but I have made a transformation in my mind to finally have peace from something that I thought would consume me for the rest of my life.