Despair at 4am

I’m losing the plot :( I get up at four o clock every morning to eat. I crave sugar so badly and demolish everything in sight. In the morning I realise what I’ve done and feel awful.

A few years back when I was doing better health-wise, I had a personal trainer for a few months. She advised on healthy eating as well as exercise. She advocated drinking a lot of water, and if I did want something unhealthy, to eat something good for me before I ate it.

I kind of have this inprinted into my brain, so tonight when i binged, I had a handful of grapes first. But thats not going to take away the huge slice of dark chocolate cake I demolished at 4am.

I have a feeling this is something to do with my medication. I take a tricylic antidepressant to help me sleep, but I take it around 7pm, and believe it has probably worn off by the time I wake up and binge.

Whilst I feel quite desperate and guilty right now, I’m also searching for a solution. I think maybe I could save some syns, and prepare something to eat before I go to bed, so that when I do binge, it doesn;t do as much damage as it is currently doing.

Another thing I need to take care of is obviously finding out if it is my medication, as if it is I may need to find an alternative. The problem I’ve found over the years (and I’ve been ill for some time) is that every medication has side effects to one degree or another. And whilst this one has relativly few, eating in the middle of the night cannot be healthy, purely from the point of view that I’m eating and then (most of the time) returning to sleep for another 4-6 hours.

I found something my slimming comnsultamt said in group very interesting. she said the food diaries are important because some people think they eat well, and then realise from the food diary that it may not be so good. I'm definetly one of those! When I feel well enough I love to cook. Apparently I'm a good cook, but I do add extra vegetables to everything. However I have rubbish willpower, so if I'm extremly hungry, I will order take away without even thinking. 

I also realise I have a lot to work on regarding "getting my head around this" as well as controlling the food I put into my mouth. Tonight I found a photograph from 4 years ago, this would have been after my first child, but before my second. I look amazing. I must have been a size 10, but I look really good compared to now. It stirred a lot of emotions. With it being taken after I’d had my first child, I realised I had lost the weight one time, so why can’t I this time? (My little girl is 3 now!) I know its not that simple. I am older now, and on a lot of medication. But this is definetly soemthing I need to try and “work out” myself, as I feel the binges could be in part, to do with how unhappy I feel, and maybe a vicious circle is at work here?