My love-hate relationship with food

I've decided that my relationship with food and eating has soured once again. I go through phases where I am completely comfortable with what and how much I eat, and then I swing down into phases where I feel like a complete fat-ass and struggle to limit what I eat and how much of it I eat, and then I always feel like I'm losing the battle. And, on top of that, while struggling to limit what I eat, I of course feel deprived and spend a vast amount of mental time and energy thinking about what I want to eat and when I can eat it and conversely what I can't eat and how much I wish I was eating it. Sometimes I exert so much effort thinking about one particular food, I eventually get too tired of resisting and just eat it, and then eat too much of it and too quickly, as if the sooner I get the eating over with, the sooner I can start to feel guilty and fat and irresponsible. And, most likely, uncomfortable and overly full.

I feel as though food has way too much influence on my life. I spend so much of my day thinking about food in various ways. I feel like I'm hopelessly caught up in thoughts of food and eating, to the point where it feels like half my day is spent on these thoughts. Either I'm thinking about how hungry I am or how desperately I want to eat one particular thing (or many particular things), or if I've just eaten, I then spend a large amount of time thinking about how I probably shouldn't have eaten what I did, or how much I did, or when I did. Almost every time I eat I feel physically lousy after. I feel like I ate too much, I feel bloated and gassy, and in turn fat and disgusting. One of the worst things though is when I've just eaten and can barely control my desire to eat even more. This is often where I lose control and just keep eating a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. Then I stand up and suddenly I ate way too much, or at least I feel like it. This happens so frequently with my "bowl" of cereal in the morning that I might as well resign myself to the fact that I'll eat too much.

Things are getting to the point where I'm starting to once again despise food and how good it is and what a wide variety of things there are that I like to eat, because eating just causes me so much distress that I wish I didn't have to do it at all. I feel like I'm facing a lifetime of feeling both deprived of and overwhelmed by food. I anticipate meals, snacks, and especially social gatherings that involve food with mingled dread and glutinous joy. I can't wait to eat but at the same time I dread how eating will make me feel.

I don't know what happened to me. I was so in control of how I felt about myself and how I look and how much I weigh and that in turn allowed me to be pretty comfortable in my relationship with food. But once again I've turned down this road of self-loathing, anxiety, disgust, irritation, and sadness that accompanies food, eating, and so on. I am once again off-track with my gym attendance, but a week or two ago when I was going more regularly again, I was forcing myself to stay on the arc trainer for as long as it took to burn a minimum of first 700 calories, then 800, then a couple times I made myself go until I had burned 1000 calories. And that on top of whatever I burned doing strength training. And generally I feel like I can eat what I want within reason on those days that I go to the gym and burn huge numbers of calories, but then conversely I almost don't enjoy my days off from the gym because I feel such a strong need to limit what I eat so that I don't get fat. When I was going to the gym and dieting before, I feel like I had things better under control. I usually kept myself on the elliptical either until I had burned 500 calories or just for a set amount of time (usually 45 minutes or an hour), and did strength training besides. That seemed fairly reasonable and healthy, but now this compulsion to keep going and keep going on the arc trainer seems like it may be a little unreasonable. My fear is that if I get off of the trainer before I've burned my "minimum" amount of calories, I will feel like shit about myself and feel like the whole workout was a waste. This seems like it might not be the world's healthiest mindset about such things, but I struggle to know how to change it.

What this all comes down to is a recurring struggle with my own body image and self-appreciation. For whatever real stupid reason, despite being thin and fairly fit, I still see a very flawed individual in the mirror. I hate my love handles and the way they pooch out over the waist band of my pants. I hate that I feel lousy about myself based on how I look. I hate that I feel like food controls my life. I hate that my thoughts seem almost obsessively preoccupied with food, eating, satiation, and over-indulgence. I feel trapped by these thoughts and really struggle to enjoy myself and my wonderful life on too many occasions due to preoccupation with my relationship to food.

This is ridiculous.