Frill-necked lizards open their frills when frightened, in order to scare off their enemy.
Cats arch their backs and raise their fur to look bigger.
Even the Pufferfish fills up with water and expands to several times its normal size.
Me? I feel fat. I don’t get fatter anymore, thanks to the therapy that helped me stop compulsively eating, and I don’t physically blow up because I am not a pufferfish, but I feel fatter when I feel threatened.
I always get an image of the Michelin Man when this happens. I swear I can FEEL the expansion. Every time I breathe in and out, my stomach never seems to go back to normal.
Today was Michelin Man day, even though there weren’t any surprises waiting for me. Every time I glanced at part of my body, I was convinced it had grown. The reason? I had my performance evaluation at work. At work is rather a misnomer, because I had it by teleconference. So I wait all day for my boss to get out of bed (he lives 9 time-zones away) and IM me to start the torture. While waiting, I go from size 24 to 32 at least.
It’s not that I spent the whole day eating. On the contrary, I had a light eating day: cereal for breakfast and a single English muffin for lunch. So here I am with the worst of all eating issues: eating very little, yet convinced that I’m ballooning up like a blimp.
It’s all about protection, just like my buddy the lizard. Fat has been my protector for most of my life. My comforter when I was young, and my shield as an adult. Now I just go through the emotions. First I experience the threatening event (my boss will call and judge me to be the worst failure ever on the planet), then I decide that I am fat. It’s impossible to remember that I have lost 32 pounds just by changing my habits. It’s impossible to acknowledge the fact that my size did not change in the last 5 minutes, and I just see my ever-expanding body. And I feel safer, even if my boss does dump a load on me.
The funny thing is, when real stress occurs, as opposed to fantasy (my boss actually said “Good job” and gave me a Eur 2500 raise), I lose my appetite. As the evening progressed, DD and DH got into a big argument, which derailed me emotionally. I had been about to go out and pick up some things at the store, but when the argument occurred, I had such a tightness in my stomach that I could neither think of shopping nor eating. It took a long time before I could calm myself long enough to actually grab something out of the freezer to eat.
The one thing I’d like to learn from lizards, cats and pufferfish is how to quickly collapse my protective measures when I don’t need them anymore, but I suppose that just feeling fat is still better than the cycle of feeling fat coupled with binging afterward.
