Usually, I don’t dwell about it here, because it is not the purpose of this blog, but I also happen to suffer from a mild form of Tourette’s. Which has seemingly nothing to do with weight loss. Or had. Because while biking home yesterday night after having gone to the movies, I was struck by an odd thought.
Tourette’s tics are a compulsive behaviour, in a way. You can control them for a while, but the longer you try to white-knuckle them, the harder they come back with a vengeance at the end of the day. It’s not possible to “make an effort and control yourself!” (parents, please never say that to your child with Tourette’s, it’s destructive). It’s not something you can easily battle. And even once you reach adult age, when symptoms tend to be less noticeable in a good deal of people, it’s still there.
I then noticed a sort of parallel between my tics and my (fortunately not weekly now) binge episodes.
Of course, I am not saying that the two are to be put on the same level of ‘disorder’, so to say. The triggers and the causes are different. Tourette’s in a neural affection. Bingeing disorder is not, as far as I know. You can try to understand why you medicate with food and binge by psychological inquiry, while going to a shrink is seriously of no use when it comes to Tourette’s, because there is nothing to understand. Nevertheless, I still think there are odd parallels between them.
It may be because of the compulsive aspect–that need to have the tic now, the need to have that food now. It may be because of the false feeling that if you can have that tic just one more time, or have that food just one more time, then everything will be okay and you will be at peace, not feeling the urge to make that gesture, not having that craving anymore now that you’re ‘done with it’. This is totally wrong, of course: the craving will come back the day after, and the need to express the tic will come back just as well (usually before one night has passed, to be honest; “within minutes” would be a more appropriate term). And the way I see it, a bout of bingeing, finding oneself unable to stop eating, is strangely akin to having restrained my tics for too long and falling down into a spiral of repeated tics for a few minutes or sometimes more, until I’ve ‘let all that stress out’.
I know I cannot get rid of my binges the same way I try to minimize the tics occurrences. In the latter case, cutting on caffeine, or exercising often, as well as avoiding processed foods, help a lot–the crappier my diet is, the worse my tics become. It’s not so easy with bingeing, because avoiding junk food most of the time doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t get the urge to wolf down a whole pizza all by myself in ten minutes tomorrow morning. And exercising is good to relieve the stress in both cases, but it’s still just a temporary fix to this condition.
I guess that’s the essential difference. With Tourette’s, I don’t need to understand anything about it. It just is, and the only medical solution is out of the question because of the side-effects (being lethargic is not something I want nor can afford), so I have to live with it. Now, self-medicating with food is another matter; there is likely a reason behind it, especially since it has started so suddenly, and I wonder if all the changes in my life–being alone again, without much money, unable to have a rich social life due to work/school, etc–weren’t potential, believable triggers. For the time being, I have to try and fix that all by myself, unfortunately.
Anyway… Thinking about it this way, through such a weird comparison, is somehow helping me. At least, it’s the feeling I get the more I think about it. I don’t mean that I’m going to consider bingeing as fate, something unavoidable like Tourettes; it’s just that it sort of falls down logically into my way of being, my compulsive self. And the same way I can try to keep my neural disorder under socially acceptable check, I can also do my best to find other ways to keep the silly desire for food at bay.
I know, weird ideas tend to cross my mind too often for my own good. But I found that train of thought interesting.
