The last 24 hours demonstrates perfectly an eating problem I’ve had for years. A friend of mine just moved into a new place, and to celebrate, since he’s too far away to visit in person, I thought I’d send him some of my very delicious whole-wheat and barley flour chocolate chip cookies. I started them last night, figuring I’d make enough to pack a good-sized care package, and then send them off this morning.

Unfortunately they’ve turned out horribly, most of them getting burned because I either couldn’t hear the timer going off over the background music of Spore (my god that’s an addicting game), or because I was so distracted I walked off and forgot to set the timer entirely. There was also some strange cookie-flattening phenomena happening that I couldn’t explain (too much oil?), but that isn’t the point here. The point is how I’ve been eating these cookies.

I started them last night and intended to eat a few. Maybe three, maybe four. Those are what I like to call Good Intentions. If I were an lolcat, I’d look like this:

Last night I started nibbling on cookie dough. Eventually I was nibbling on cookies (they weren’t too burned to eat, just too burned to send to someone you want to impress with your l33t baking skillz*). I wasn’t overeating. I wasn’t binging. I’ve read about eating disorders before, and they seem to fall under three behaviors: starving oneself, making oneself throw-up food, or binging (eating a great deal – think Michael Phelps’s diet but without the exercise – at one sitting).

I’ve never done any of these behaviors, and yet I often feel disordered about my eating, like something is not right, or feels out of my control.

It hit me the other night that I have my own kind of eating disorder: compulsive grazing. If there is a certain type of food in the house, almost always something incredibly sugar-laden, then it feels almost physically impossible for me to stop nibbling at it, taking a few small bites every half hour or hour, frequently not eating anything else.

Last night I got so busy with the game that Greg put the cookie dough away and turned off the oven. This morning I came out to finish the baking project, got out the dough, had a taste of it, and then probably had a small spoonful of dough once every 30-40 minutes as I was making the cookies. At noon, I realized I’d eaten nothing but cookies or dough since I’d gotten up.

Over the short term, this isn’t a big deal. So what if you live on junk for a couple days? Most people get a stomachache, regret it, and move on. When it happens repeatedly over the long term, however, problems develop, just like with any other disordered eating. I have panic disorder that is very sensitive to my diet, and eating nothing but cookie dough for a day puts me in danger of having severe attacks, which can take several days to recover from. Thanks to my sugar addiction I’m also about thirty pounds overweight, and a day of eating cookie crack doesn’t help things. It’s not uncommon for me to gain a pound after eating this way for a couple days, which isn’t a big deal until you consider my over-grazing periods happen once every 2-3 weeks, at least.

So, what’s a girl to do? In the past, I’ve just beaten myself up about it (ahhh, that old standby). I tell myself that a “normal” person would just eat a few bites, and that next time I’ll be normal. I’m big on being normal. Having panic disorder for the last six years has left me feeling like a needy, unpredictable, inconveniencing freak on countless occasions, and the idea of Normalcy is something I alternately seek comfort in and beat myself with. Most people want to be exceptional or amazing. I’d settle for normal.

Beating myself up doesn’t work though. I just end up doing it again. A second thing to try might be to put some boundaries around it, like to say that I won’t make cookies at home anymore. But I resist that mightily,  because, again, it doesn’t line up with my ideas of How Things Should Be. This is another big one for my brain, it goes along with Normalcy. It’s called, “I Should.” I Should be able to have a jar of cookies at home and not eat them all over the course of a couple days. Yeah, well, but I do. What should happen and what actually happens aren’t always the same, are they? What do we do then, if we want to change our behavior?

I’m going to stop making cookies or other sweets, and stop bringing junk food into the house that I know I’ll have trouble eating at a reasonable pace. I want to do this for a few months, and see what happens.

There. There’s my decision.

Resistance, I’ve found, is interesting. It’s wily. It will do anything to maintain the status quo. I can already feel a big swell of resistance, telling me that if I accept myself, if I love myself, then it’s not okay to put boundaries on anything I do (especially things related to food and eating) because that’s self-oppression, it’s bowing to the man, it’s self-hate, blah blah blah. Clearly, not wanting to overeat sugar, and putting boundaries into effect around that, really signifies that I’ve given up thinking for myself and am now going to become a tool of the patriarchy, void of self-esteem, only happy when I look good in a bikini.

Uh huh.

But we all know people who think that way, right? And for a lot of women, especially those of us who have spent a lot of time conditioning ourselves to be feminists, especially those of us who have issues around fat acceptance, it’s hard not to escape a little bit of that conditioning too, the stuff that tells us what the right way to think about food is. Even if it’s not the way that makes us feel good about ourselves.

I strongly suspect that making this decision will contribute to me feeling better about myself, and being happier overall. So I’m going to try it, and see what happens.

That’s the best philosophy for a lot of things, I think.

*Impressing people with my vocabulary clearly isn’t high on my list either.