Here's what eating felt like when I wasn't bingeing:
Dangerous.
Precarious.
Like I was tiptoe-ing around a sleeping baby.
I used to think that food addicts (as I used to believe I was - I no longer believe in food addiction itself, just addictive behaviors) had it harder in some ways than any other kind of addict because we couldn't quit cold turkey.
Food abstinence isn't a thing. You can't use it to recover. My all-or-nothing brain would have preferred that concrete action plan.
Instead, I had to face food every single day of my life, and hope that one meal wouldn't trigger the domino effect that would bring my sanity down into a pile of rubble.
Eating meals, then, was like handing a baby a pacifier and then taking it away. I honestly felt it would have been better not to offer the pacifierat all, if it was just a tease.
Normal people could eat, enjoy, move on.
People like me? No. People like me (were there any other people like me??) saw food as a gateway drug to more food, and it was twice as hard to stop than it would have been to not start at all.å