Someone has re-wired my brain.

My usual stress/depression reaction has always involved binge eating and serious cravings for all manner of unhealthy things. When my man told me he was leaving, I figured I'd gain another good chunk of weight.

The first week, I was so upset I couldn't eat. I cried until I threw up a few times, and couldn't choke food down. I was never hungry anyway. I started drinking a lot of protein shakes and milk, and sometimes making myself eat ice cream or something, but mostly I just slept a lot, cried a lot, forced myself through work, and repeated the cycle.

Eventually I started to feel hungry occasionally, but food was largely repulsive. I started taking a fistful of vitamins every morning, which meant I had to eat something so the fat soluble ones would absorb, so I'd take those with my protein shake. But then I was having bowel issues, so I added peanut butter bread. My legs were starting to get weak and trembling at work, so I'd choke down a chicken breast or a small steak at night. Sometimes I could only manage half of it, and I always felt like I was having a blood sugar rush afterward. I started having a drink after work with people a lot more often - just one, not in a destructive way, just seemed like I liked the taste more. This worries my mother, because the night HE told me he was leaving I got drunk for the first time in life and repeated that again mid-October (alcoholism runs in the family). I'd actually avoided getting drunk for the first 33 years of my life because I was afraid to turn in to a drunk, but so far so good.

I knew I'd lost weight, and I tried to hide it. I hate the weight loss conversations. How are you doing it, congratulations, you look so good, etc. etc. I especially tried to hide it from my father, who's been on my ass for years about my weight (I'll have to come back to that in a later post). I kept wearing the same clothes for as long as I could, hoping the extra fabric would make me look more fat. I wore minimizing bras so my belly would look bigger in comparison. I just tried to keep anyone from noticing, because I'm not a good liar and I didn't want to deal with the horrified response if I told people why I was actually losing weight. Plus, I figured eventually I'd be hungry again and I'd gain it all back. So I tried to hide it, and when I got invited places I'd eat even if I didn't want anything at all - just so nobody would notice anything different.

Two periods came and went, and after the second one I realized something. I hadn't craved chocolate. I'd always had the stereotypical woman's cravings for chocolate, and this time it hadn't even crossed my mind. In fact, a friend had given me two bags of Lindor truffles and it took me more than a month to eat them. I didn't even touch them the first week they were sitting in plain sight on my desk.

That was when I realized that somewhere in there, I'd stopped drinking soda. It didn't taste good, even the Diet Sunkist I used to love. I hadn't had ice cream in two months. I hadn't had a burger in that long either. French fries were too salty. My default food at work when I couldn't decide what I wanted had always been our boneless hot wings, but I never ordered them any more. Extra food that employees got to eat, I didn't even touch. At first, I just chalked it up to depression, figured I was so brokenhearted that I couldn't even enjoy food. Then the real weirdness started.

I baked a cake for my friend, the most chocolately cake you could ever imagine - it's got two pounds of goddamn chocolate in it. I didn't even have a piece. Oh, I tasted a piece I'd trimmed off while leveling it, to make sure it didn't taste like ass, but that was it. My friends and I have gone to Perkins for pie once a week for the last year or so, and I almost always got the peanut butter silk pie. I got it in August and couldn't even eat half of it, it was way too sweet (I used to buy whole pies and have a piece of that shit for fucking breakfast, when I was aggressively anti-dieting). 

One day I was dehydrated, so nice crunchy fresh lettuce sounded kind of quenching. I took a salad home from work, and didn't like the ranch dressing. That's always been practically the only dressing I like, and I couldn't stand it. I had some vinaigrette from when I was going to make HIM dinner, and that was good. I started eating salads regularly. I have never eaten salads regularly, except when I was trying to low carb, and it was a chore and unpleasant and several times I actually threw them up. Apparently I like them now.

Another day, someone was eating sweet potato fries and for god knows what reason I snagged one. And I liked it. I eat them regularly. The other day, I asked my mom "How do I feel about sweet potatoes?" Right away she said, "You don't like them, you never have." Apparently I do now.

While doing my grocery shopping, I walked by the yogurt case and thought, what the fuck. I've never liked that shit either, but who knows. I have 14 cups of yogurt in my fridge now and have eaten it every day, sometimes more than once, the last two weeks. I've only ever liked coffee with a fuckton of cream and sugar, and would only have it every couple of months .... now I have simple coffee with almond milk every morning. My dad gave me a shrimp and while it didn't thrill me, it didn't make me gag anymore either.

I ordered nachos at work once and forgot to say no pico de gallo. I was even more depressed than usual that day, so much so that I couldn't be bothered to scrape the pico off any of the chips even though I have always, always, fucking always hated onions and jalapenos. I just ate it, because everything tasted like sawdust anyway. But that made me wonder, so I did a test, and ... fuck. I fucking eat onions now. I mean, they're still not my most favorite thing. But four months ago if I bit in to a piece of onion (or pepper or jalapeno) in my food, I would literally twitch and gag from the texture. Now I can eat all of them.

I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind. I've finally started talking to people about this stuff, and they always have almost exactly the same reaction when I say I like x and don't like y anymore: "Well, that's no necessarily a bad thing!"

And you know what? FUCK THAT. Nobody seems to fucking understand how absolutely distressing this is to me. I am so profoundly heartbroken and depressed that my likes and dislikes, patterns of my entire life, have been affected. This shit is not normal. So yeah, from a physical health standpoint, it's great that I'd rather eat this Chobani Greek Yogurt With Oats (my mother is going to have an aneurysm if I start liking oatmeal) than a chocolate cake. But I repeat, this shit is not normal. It's freaking me out, and I feel even more broken every time I look at something gooey and cheesy and think .... nah.