… And I’m a food addict. Even as I sit here typing this, I’m snacking. It’s a horrible feeling when you finally realize that you’re out of control and don’t know how to stop.

Sometimes I want to stop… and I can’t. Other times I stop, only to find myself looking in the fridge ten minutes later for something else. I think about food nearly constantly. I can barely make it through a day without thinking about sugar. My cravings are so intense that sometimes I literally have the shakes. Seriously, I feel like I’m a heroin addict. I hate it. I hate myself.

I wasn’t always this way. In fact, I was pretty much the opposite: in high school, I was so thin that my math teacher sent me to a counselor because he thought I was anorexic. My doctor was constantly monitoring me because he thought I was lying about eating. I weighed 104 pounds and was a size 0 for a good portion of my life. Even then, I thought I could always stand to be a bit smaller, but I wasn’t addicted to food then.

I’m not sure what changed that led to my life being like this. I’d love to blame my ex husband, since I started gaining the weight and eating when I met him.  But realistically, the only person I can blame is me. My psychiatrist and I chatted about the food, and I realize that I’d really like rehab.

Right this very second, all I can think about is peanut butter cups. Actually, Reese’s makes a treat like a Klondike bar sort of thing, but with peanut butter ice cream. That’s what I want.

I feel like a hopeless basket case. At one point, I was seeing a personal trainer, and I literally didn’t budge a single pound in the entire time I was seeing her… 4 months of working out 5 days a week, and nada. Not even in inches (since I know that’s what everyone will say). Nothing. I was so stressed about it that I just stopped going. I figured there was no point if I wasn’t going to see any results. Probably a bad idea, but it happens.

Over the last year I have made some minuscule changes, and have made a very small amount of progress: I lowered my cholesterol. In the long run, that’s something I suppose, but it’s not good enough.

I’ve had to stop doing something that I love because it was affecting my sanity: baking. Everyone who knows me knows that I baked at least 4 nights a week. Lately I bake about twice a month. The thought of fresh cookie dough is practically making me drool right now, and the gum and water I have in front of me isn’t cutting it. That’s been really tough too, because that’s how I took out a lot of my frustrations. Concentrating on getting a perfect cookie would always take away whatever stress I had, and made me forget that I was angry. I have yet to find anything that works as well.

So why am I writing all this? Because I need to see it. I’m making a conscious effort to try to do things differently.  I want to change.