When I wake up in the morning, it is the first thing on my mind. I won't brush my teeth or go to the bathroom, I'll go to the kitchen to see what everyone ate last night. When I'm done eating the leftovers, I'll make myself some eggs, or cereal, or both. When I'm done eating breakfast, I'll go into the snack closet to find some Oreos or wasabi peas or what I have been thinking about since I first woke up: pretzels.

At this point, I'm already thinking about lunch, which, if I time it, will be two hours from my last pretzel, but I'll find something else to occupy my thoughts in the meantime. I'll pace my room, Google places that have the best pizza, or my favorite – go back to sleep. I'll set an alarm for myself that reads "LUNCH!!" approximately one hour and 58 minutes from then. Most of the time I don't dream during this period, but if I do it's about being thin.

Sometimes nobody will be home, or they'll have better things to do during lunchtime. My mom always used to tell me that as a kid "there was no lunch time" and that they would go outside and play until they were called in. When she told me that story this time, I was making a sandwich of all the meat and cheese we had in the refrigerator. But that couldn't be all, so I added gushers, popcorn, and more pretzels as a snack on the side.

The gap between lunch and dinner can range between three and six hours. As noted I've been studying this for a while now. I'll go back into my room, clean myself up, notice that my room is a mess, and have my OCD kick in. A rampage of vacuuming and folding and dusting and writing and proper placement sweeps over my room until just about dinner time. "Good job, Sam," I tell myself. "You haven't thought about food in almost five hours."

Dinner was always my favorite meal because I'd get to sit with my family and talk about our day. What I didn't like so much is that my dad used to tell me, "This isn't a race, slow down," when I scarfed down all of my food. When I was younger I was too embarrassed to go for seconds, but as time went on it didn't bother me as much. The third piece of garlic bread after three meatballs and two cups of pasta didn't phase me at all. In fact, part of me still wasn't full.

That's what compulsive eating is for me. It's not being full when everyone else that I know would have thrown up three times after eating what I had. Compulsive eating is, more often than not, followed by guilt and shame, but mine doesn't come until I step outside of my house. Hanging out with my friends is what really gets to me, because they'll get the salad when I get the burger. It makes me think about how I can get this to stop, and what I can do to get better. As an after effect of compulsive eating, I also crash diet which, like compulsive eating, often leads to binging. It's a mind game that is hard to control but can be controlled, so long as I wake up tomorrow morning and think of something other than pretzels.