On Desperation, Dining in the Dark, Depression, and Deliberate Action- Part 1

What’s your crazy? The definition of crazy has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. How long have you been living in crazy-land? It might be about food. It might be about spending too much money on shoes. It might be some form of long-suffering with your significant other; that crazy fight that happens over and over. For years. The object of insanity doesn’t matter as much as the process of it. What I have learned is that the flesh is a many tentacled beast. Our fleshly selves prompt us to do all kinds of things that reveal our animalistic natures. As you probably know, my brand of personal lunacy is compulsive eating. This article explores my struggle through desperation, dining in the dark, and depression and offers another option that has for the first time served as a system-wide pattern interrupt for me. As I will discuss, deliberate (and prayerful) action has been the best solution I have found to step off the crazy train.

Desperation

What is “desperation” within a compulsive eating context? What I am talking about is a powerful, uncomfortable feeling of being out of control. It is a panicky realization that we need to make a radical change. It is by definition reactionary, hurried, and based on our own sense of powerlessness. The word “desperate” literally refers to action that is spurred on by a loss of hope.

I submit that desperate action is itself compulsive and therefore actually prompted by our flesh. It is a frenetic attempt to undo our dirty deed. It is running on the treadmill for 2 hours to make up for eating an entire pan of brownies. It is choosing to “fast” for a day to get our weight down before a scheduled weigh in. It is deciding “I will never eat X again” after eating piles of X in a massive binge.

Desperate action is reactionary and therefore not well thought through. It is the “Hail Mary” pass. It’s “jumping the shark”. It’s throwing the ball toward the basket at half court as the buzzer sounds. Because of this, such action is pretty much nonsense. In real life, desperate actions miss the basket, are unsustainable, and are misguided. Such actions are based on magical thinking and Hollywood endings. Worst of all, these desperate steps lead naturally into the next thing…

Dining in the Dark

So….you’ve been “fasting” or cutting out half your daily required calories or categorically avoiding entire food groups or doing a “cleanse”; these are each desperate acts designed to rescue you from poor food choices. The trouble is that these frantically instituted prohibitions are based in willpower and tend to make us pretty resentful. If you’re like me, you can’t keep absorbing strong feelings of resentment and food FOMO indefinitely. Your flesh is primed and ready to provide you with all manner of justification for going off your extreme plan. And because your rescue plan is hardly rational, the flesh will tell you “Can you really stop eating cake forever? That’s not healthy” or “You only live once” or “Make this one exception this time then get right back on track”.

So we find ourselves grabbing that extra chicken nugget off our kid’s plate and popping it in our mouth. Or grabbing that two-bite brownie at a church potluck and popping it in our mouth. Or slipping the cookie off the counter at our workplace, sneaking it back to our desk and popping it in our mouth. We choose to ignore the fact that popping things in our mouth (even subtly or quickly) is about to lead to our unravelling. We believe the lie that it is just one, just this one time. We are in denial that we have already relapsed.

I think you know how the rest goes. Two hours later we are driving somewhere and want MORE. We want a burger or an ice cream sundae. Our flesh says to us “We might as well grab that burger. We went off plan today anyway when we popped that cookie in our mouth. Let’s just have the sundae now and restart tomorrow.” So we eat the burger and the sundae. And feel like garbage. We go home defeated. We have dinner with the family. The “what the heck response” is in full effect. We rummage through the house, looking for whatever we can find since we intend to be “back on plan” tomorrow: a granola bar, something in the fridge, anything carby. We eat with secretive, but reckless abandon, hoping that tomorrow will be different.

Depression

After enough cycles of getting on, falling off, and getting on again, we start to totally lose hope. This is truly a dangerous stage. At least during the crazy cycle we may have keep our weight within a certain reasonable range. However, “depression” in this food context is a permanent “what the heck response”. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. This is a time when our weight tends to increase rapidly. When we are in this place, we are fully in Satan’s grasp. We are the husband who has decided to see a prostitute every week and doesn’t care anymore. We are the cocaine addict who has channeled all resources toward feeding her habit. We are in free fall and it’s ugly. James 1:15 says that “sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death”. This is the Devil’s end game. The flirting is over; he is going in for the kill. The utter detestability of our sin is exposed. For us who begin gaining scores of weight, this really does mean our death.

Listen to me. This is a dire and horrific situation. I speak from personal experience. On at least five separate situations I have gained back at least 80 pounds. There are few things worse in life than losing control of yourself in this way, watching the consequences stack up, and yet feeling utterly powerless to stop it. I know that this is where some of you are at right now.

Cycling between desperate action, dining in the dark, and depression is no picnic (unless that picnic includes doughnuts!). Next week, I will show you the careful path I have attempted to walk to get us off the crazy train and bring us to a place of integrity with food.