I want to eat, but I just can't

I've read so many things about recovery: how it won't be anything like you expect; how it will be hard; how you'll fail at points - but my lord, I didn't really anticipate this.

It's lunchtime at work. I walked in to the supermarket and wandered through the aisles. I looked at the salads, I looked at the sandwiches, I looked at the smoothies, and yet, I couldn't find anything. There were plenty of foods that fit my normal criteria: vegan; low cal; cheap, but nothing I could eat.


There were too many numbers. All of the numbers were too high. Too much salt, too many calories, too much sugar. Even as I was looking at it and actively thinking, "I'm hungry. I should eat," those thoughts were drowned out by the demon that was screaming at me that it was weigh-day at the clinic tomorrow, and how I better have lost or things would get very bad.

I walked back to work and made myself a very hot coffee. I sat, and I wrote in my notebook in the snack area, surrounded by colleagues eating, the smell of their food pungent and almost offensive. I looked at them and just wanted to know how they did it. How didn't they think about what they were eating? How did they not count the calories? How did they not care? It's so normal to me, it's so second nature, that anything different seems, simply, weird.

The biggest fear that I have from this lunch-skipping is that I will binge when I get home. I've not purged in five days. Six if I can make it through today. I don't want to binge. And the best way (that I've found) to avoid binging, and consequently, purging, is to eat at set intervals throughout the day. It doesn't have to be a lot, it just has to be something. And even though I've missed hundreds of meals in my life, skipping this one feels more ominous. More dangerous.

I'm sad, right now. I'm very sad. Conflicted, too, like I'm doing the right thing and the wrong thing all at the same time. The right thing for my eating disorder. The wrong thing for recovery.
Is it always going to be this hard to fight? Will I ever have the luxury of eating the way my colleagues did? But, more importantly, what will my weight be tomorrow?