On Wednesday, I posted about being at my second-highest weight ever. That evening, I binged for the first time in 93 days. I’d almost made it a full 100 days, and it was the longest I’d gone without binging since I began to binge in the fall of 2014. The thing is, it wasn’t a huge amount of food – half a bag of natural popcorn and four chocolate chip cookies – but it was still a binge. The unstoppable urge to eat, regardless of hunger, in order to fill some kind of void. When I can identify what the binge is trying to fill, I’ve gotten better at addressing the issue rather than eating, but on that night, I had no clue. It was upsetting enough that I had the worst kind of insomnia that night because my brain just wouldn’t stop being anxious about why I’d been anxious. How’s that for ridiculous?

Anyway, because of insomnia and binging, my diet was all over the place the yesterday, coupled with heartburn and blood sugar fluctuations and all sorts of things. That was the first wake up call. I must get my nutrition in check, if not for weight loss, than for decent sleep, getting rid of heartburn, not suffering hypoglycemia, etc.

Beyond that, I’ve been taking daily photos since July 10th, wearing a pair of leggings and a cheap ribbed black tank top from Walmart. The top and bottom both will cling to my body and show its shape 100%, so that as I lose weight, I can keep longterm comparison photos in similar outfits all the way down. Yesterday, the day after my binge, I looked at my daily photo. It wasn’t much different from any of the days before, of course. I wasn’t expecting it to be. But while I looked at it, a photo popped up on my laptop, which rotates photos from my files every half hour. The photo was of me right after my birthday trip to the thrift store (for fun outfits) in 2014. And seeing those two photos together was a really huge wake up call.

There are four years and 77 lbs between those two photos. The thing is, I don’t spend a lot of time hating on my body these days. After my abdominal surgery in 2014, my shape has been pretty consistent, even as my size has changed. And I don’t want to hate my body for being big! I also know that sometimes I delude myself into thinking I’m smaller than I am because I’m used to bigger-me with a pre-surgery shape. It’s one thing to see a picture of my sister and me standing together, because with our body shapes, I will always look bigger when right next to her, no matter how thin I am. It’s another thing entirely to see a picture of myself next to the Manda of four years ago.

Both of these things together equal one thing: something has got to change. That thing has really got to be me.