Constantly pulling the shades up and down in the house to shelter my eating habits from the outside. I could do this literally 30 times in a day - usually I just kept the shades drawn.
Finding food I had dropped in random places: a cheese curl under the couch, a candy bar wrapper stuffed in-between sofa cushions, a bottle cap the kitty had batted underneath the computer desk.
Getting into my car in the morning and smelling day-old, musty fast food scent, like putrid grease from the french fries.
Almost having a heart attack every time someone knocked on the door, any time, day or night. It normally amounted to the UPS delivery person dropping off a package, asking for a signature. But I always felt like I was getting caught. I just realized now my punishment was my disorder.
Cleaning up! I would allot about two hours every Friday to "clean" the house before your return. This would largely include going to the grocery store to replenish your foods I had binged on during the week. If there was a large amount of food in the fridge on Monday, I would write a list so I could purchase what I needed. I cannot tell you how many boxes of cereal I've had to buy. By the way, you buy really expensive cereal. :)
Fear of lending people my books, uncertain whether they were smudged with food grease or if crumbs were trapped in-between the pages.
Always needing to know where you are at all times, just in case you happen to come home unexpectedly and see me bingeing.
Finding trash I've hidden absentmindedly. For instance, I used to stuff empty potato chip bags (along with many other things) in plastic bags and scatter them throughout the house: in my sweater baskets, in my purses, behind the kitty litter in the bottom of the closet. I found a plastic bag filled with trash, including beer bottles, about a month ago. I opened my Rubbermaid storage container to retrieve some old tennis shoes, and there it was. That was about 5 weeks ago.
Going to the grocery store. I will always love grocery stores, as most eating disorder sufferers do, but I hated the feeling of returning to the same store so frequently. I consciously had to scatter what stores I went to because I was going so often and buying so much food. And I was buying the SAME foods, too. If I recognized the checkout person as the person who last rung me up, I would switch lines.
Stuffing my face in the car. If I was returning from the grocery store, I had to purchase something to snack on for the ride home, either chips or popcorn. And if I drove home next to the same car the entire way, I recognized what a pig I was, and started to wonder if the driver thought the same. If I've gone through the drive-through and purchased my grotesquely large order of burgers and fries, I made sure that the cars around me only witnessed me eating one burger. If I came to a red light, I made sure to stop out of alignment with the other drivers, so they could not look out of their car windows into mine.
And so much more.
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