Hot Flashes, Hunger, and Crappy Baristas

Over the past couple of weeks, it has become very obvious that my body is just as bewildered as my brain about this whole recovery thing.  First, my metabolism is erratic and unpredictable: I am having flashes where I'll get super hot all of the sudden. I'll just be sitting in class and my system will rev up and I'll feel like I need to peel off two or three layers of clothes.  After spending so many years teetering on the edge of hypothermia for weeks/months at a time, I don't take heat for granted and this symptom isn't too terrible, I can deal with it.  The one that bothers me to an extreme degree is that I am hungry All. The. Time.  This is true stomach-gnawing hunger, not just post-starvation appetite, believe me, I am so f-ing tired of food.  I am more than a little pissed at the irony that as I gain weight I'm spending much more time hungry than I did when I was starving myself.  

It's also ironic that all I have to do to turn off the hunger is to not eat.  Yes, the scientist in me knows that hunger means my metabolism is up and kicking, and that skipping meals is a sure way to slow it down to the pace of a snail, but old habits die hard.   Yesterday I was completely fed up with feeling fat and stuffing myself with food I don't want, so I rebelled and scrapped my meal plan. I was a little hungry at first, but it quickly settled down into that slightly achy yet oh-so-familiar hollow feeling.  I know this is completely disordered, but that honestly seems like the most comfortable state of being for me, it just feels like default mode.   My hair is blonde, my eyes are blue, my stomach is empty, the earth is round, etc.

And so today, I told myself I had to get back on track and stick to the meal plan.  I had my full breakfast at 7:30...and was famished by 10:00, literally so hungry I couldn't concentrate on my work.  I went to get coffee, and had a terrible time with a stupid campus barista that doesn't know coffee from the dirt in her garden.  She completely messed up my drink, and then yelled at me for it.  I refused to take the drink, which wasn't what I'd ordered, so she remade it, but then I didn't trust that she'd made it right since she was pissed at me, so I ended up throwing it away anyway.  (I was worried that she hadn't used decaf, because caffeine freaks my heart out, or that she hadn't used skim, because unplanned calories still freak my brain out).

That put me in a bad mood, and I was still coffee-less, and even more frustrated because I was mad about the barista incident (and $4 poorer with nothing to show for it after I threw the drink away) and still super hungry.  I told myself to get a grip, drank a Fuze, and stuck it out til lunch.  I ate before my afternoon lab, around 12:30, and stomach was growling again by 2:00.  Snack before I went to my other lab at 3:00, and insistent hunger pains by 4:30.  Another snack when I got home at 5:15, barely took the edge off before dinner at 7:30.   So basically I am eating all the time, getting pudgier every day, and spending virtually all of the time hungry and thinking about food.  If I wanted to be hungry and food-obsessed, I could have stayed in ED-land and still fit into my favorite jeans, instead of having the worst of both worlds like I do now.

Yes, that line of thought is disordered, and no, deep down I don't think I mean it.  Really deep down, at least, so deep that I sometimes lose sight of it until I make a conscious effort to look.

Why am I putting myself through this?  What's the point?  Some things off the top of my head: I have gone beyond the intial stages of the novelty of having energy and have moved onto actual strenth, my memory is much better, my heart isn't fluttering erratically, my fingers aren't cold with purple nailbeds, my hair and nails are shinier, and my temperament feels much more stable.  I can do spontaneous activities like dancing with my dog, helping a neighbor carry stuff in from their car, etc etc without being constrained by my ever-growing energy debt.  I am most definitely more engaged with people and the world in general.  I don't count hours until I can crawl into bed every night, completely depleted and already dreading the next morning.  Days are still long and often hard, but I feel like I am starting to go beyond searching for the light and am starting to actually stick my head out of the proverbial tunnel, squinting in the brightness, forcing myself to deal with the pain of the new light until I can adjust enough to appreciate it.  

So, my body and my mind agree that recovery is confusing and frustrating, but when have I not been confused and frustrated?  I don't know, this whole thing is just strange, my feelings about the whole situation seem to see-saw constantly.