Fast Days, Quick Triggers

Fast days, even though I no longer fast for my mental and physical health still trigger my semi-dormant binge eating disorder. It triggers this fear my eating disorder wields as power “the fear of not having enough food”. The stores close here for the holiday and Shabbat but the fast day of Yom Kippur was the trigger. The fear that I woke up with of running out of milk or any other food, for the one 26 hours of the week felt irrational (i mean I was low on these products yesterday as well). Until I sat with the thought and trigger and tried to understand what running out of milk for my theoretical morning cup of coffee was being brought up. The sister thought to this trigger comes running to join “don’t eat anything else, you need to save it, make sure you have enough.” This thought isn’t about one specific food, rather any food I just try to eat, for any meal. It triggers years of hoarding food and creating stashes listening to those voices saying “you won’t have any food tomorrow you need to save it all.” The binge voice comes in swinging and replies with “if you don’t know if you will have food later, you should definitely eat now and you should eat it all now!” When my eating disorder was running my life, this cycle of needing to hoard food and then eat it all, was one I would fall into through unconscious and sometimes conscious triggers of food safety. I sometimes would eat just copious amounts of food of whatever was in the house tasting nothing, and then not eating for the rest of the day and sometimes the next while feeling plenty of self-loathing feelings. The holidays hold many triggers for me for many different reasons. Specifically with food and my eating disorder and the many different points that are triggered. The triggers aren’t as intense as in 2016 and 2017 when I was in the throughs of my eating disorder, but they are there. This isn’t the whole emotional and psychological struggle with my eating disorder but it is a large one that comes up during holiday times.