Is the video online yet? I missed it. Linky please? My thoughts, which I hope relate to the video..
It’s simple. Amber has handled all her emotions by eating. All her life, that’s what she learned. She’s afraid? She eats. She’s sad? She eats. She’s happy, she celebrates with food. Excitement, worry, annoyance, any emotion you name, for her, food supresses it. Parties are not about getting together with friends, they are about what to eat. Vacations-food. Boredom, take the edge off with food. (She has a lot of boredom, by the way.) Her conversations are about food. It’s the biggest most important thing in her life.
Without food, and a lot of it, Amber doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s now on her bi-yearly period which makes her irritable and depressed and she doesn’t feel well-the only way she understands how to handle it is to eat. And if she’s not eating yet, she will because this is the first abnormal discomfort she’s had in three weeks and she has no other way off managing. This is the type of thing that always throws off death fats.
We’d take Tylenol, sleep it off, snap at our husbands and maybe satisfy our sugar craving with a truffle. But Amber, she can’t put a tampon in, cleaning is very hard, she can’t sleep properly, and for her chocolate doesn’t mean a truffle, it’s pounds of candy followed by salty chips followed by pints of ice cream then start over with her sweet salt cycle. She’ll feel a lot better until she realizes what she’s done, then she’ll feel guilty and say fuck it. She doesn’t have but one method to deal.
A life that would be miserable to you and I (not walking, breathing, being flesh imprisoned) is tolerable to Amber Because she’s distilled life down to eating. Walking for three minutes is ok if she can eat. She won’t admit that, but it’s all she knows. Somewhere, deep down, she knows this is wrong and sick. Maybe even, not so deep down. But she doesn’t have the skills to manage it. And, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. If not eating means she has no idea how to live with discomfort, if it feels overwhelming and she can’t handle it, than she’ll skip surgery and keep the ability to eat on the table.
That is why she absolutely must get psychological help. She has no tools to do this on her own. Some people have been normal weight all their lives and for whatever reason, gain 20-30 or even 50 pounds. They can put their mind to it and lose it without psychological help because it’s not a lifestyle, it’s a momentary screw up. For Amber, every waking moment of the past 25 years has been about food: what she’s going to eat, when, how much, who to tell, where is it, what should be first and what’s next. Now, she has to be taught how to manage life, and especially discomfort without it.
Since she won’t see professionals, she’s destined to fail. She will always fail on her own, there is zero doubt.
