A.J. asked about our readers’ relationships with food; our readers answered.

Thanks as always for trusting us with your stories. This is part one of two; part two will run next Tuesday. —TSB Editor

It’s Me, I’m the Party

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I have always thought about food, so much so I even equate people’s names with food: Ethel is applesauce. My mother constantly talked about weight, and people who were overweight. I remember her once saying to me, “Gee, you lost your saddlebags.” Guess where my eyes automatically went to for many years. Now I chastise myself for my thick middle. When I’m not on a diet, I think I ought to be. I know that I am fat, but at the age of 65, I wonder when I will be able to let my preoccupation with food and eating go away?

Right now I’m in Europe on vacation and all I can think about is how much I have had to eat and drink, and when my new diet regime will begin again. Sick.

I’m tired. Tired of punishing myself for not being in control, while holding in tension the premise “you only live once” and wanting to enjoy my life. I love to cook and enjoy drinking wine with my husband in the evening, but even that is another reason to berate myself for eating and drinking.

I tell you my story so maybe someone will listen and see what torture I live.

At a work event recently, my boss got a Coke when most of us got beers. When someone teased him about it, he grimaced and said “My beer days are behind me.” I felt a huge rush of tenderness for his vulnerability after being outed like that, but I also felt a shitty kind of jealousy. We all got dinner at this event; I have so many memories of not eating that it still feels like that’s the default, and eating in front of everyone else is still fucking hard, like ice skating for the first time. I felt angry that I have to do this regularly for work: face my addiction, get meals with coworkers, drink a latte and silently deal with the shame and panic it brings, while other people get to say things like “my beer days are behind me,” and that’s that. They reveal themselves, and it’s terrifying and excruciating, but in the revealing, they publicly commit to being, and staying, in recovery.

It made me think about how in recovery from anorexia, you’re giving up the asocial behavior (refusing food), whereas in sobriety from drinking, you have to give up the social standard (drinking in an alcohol-obsessed culture). Recovering from eating disorders means getting to blend in, and recovering from drinking means having to stand out. A lot of the time I feel like I got the easier recovery, the one where I get to pretend to be normal. But I also think there’s something very lonely and scary about this ability that recovery gives anorexics and other EDs to stay hidden, because addiction of course thrives in secrecy. 

After three stints in residential treatment over five years, I finally began recovery when I accepted that I was addicted to starvation, was not strong enough to stop on my own, and would die if left to my own devices. With the help of so, so many people, I have been in solid recovery for almost five years now. Recovery conveniently aligned with me moving to a new city, and there are many people here who have no idea I ever had any issues with eating. That makes me both proud and sad: proud because for so long I thought I would only exist in other people’s eyes as a fuck-up, a revolving door patient, and it seems like a miracle that I am so solidly in recovery that I don’t wear addiction all over me like a bad outfit; and sad, because it is so obvious to me how much my life depends upon my recovery, and how my recovery depends on understanding my anorexia as addiction, and how fundamentally my experience of addiction rearranged me on a cellular level, and it seems like I’m doing a disservice to that rearrangement by not owning it. Maybe I want to be forced to own it. For so long I treated my anorexia like a dirty little secret; now, I treat my recovery like that.

Grocery shopping is a nightmare. It’s always a constant battle of circular inner dialogue while wandering the aisles: “I want that. No, I can’t eat that. Put it back.” Because unlike drugs or alcohol consumption, people do actually have to eat food to survive! But with an eating disorder it’s full on emotional war with your thighs. I cried reading Paulina’s essay cause I’ve been there. For many years.

I am average height and weight but have had bulimia and anorexia since I was a teenager because I think I’m fat. My mother grew up as a fat, bullied kid and passed all of her mental illnesses over to me. My cousins nicknamed me “Baby Fat,” which definitely did not help!

Well, since I’m a vain little motherfucker and going through menopause now, I’ve been having a difficult time with my weight and gained about 30 pounds over the summer. I was going through a breakup and dealing with my heartache by getting a severe case of the “fuck-its” and eating forbidden food, drowning my sorrows in booze, plus swallowing edibles and other drugs. 

Basically, I have been repeating really old dysfunctional behaviour. At least I’m not purging any more. 

I have lots of health issues and should NOT be consuming gluten, sugar, dairy, or alcohol. But my broken heart trumped my diet.

Well, summer’s over and I’m left assessing the damage.  None of my clothes fit. I avoid looking at my naked body in any mirror, and my stomach is fucked up. My skin is sagging, and I’ve aged 10 years in 4 months. :( 

Sadly, I have severe body dysmorphia and a phobia of wearing a bathing suit in public (thanks again, mom). So at the beginning of September when the public pool was empty, I forced myself to go swim on a hot day. Mercifully, there were no mirrors in the change room. Now I’ve created a plan to reduce 1 forbidden food per week and am going on a keto diet to drop some weight and get back on track. Like a true addict, I am avoiding starting the diet full-on! LOL. But I know I’ll feel much better and more in control once I do begin.

I’ve started exercising more because that actually makes me feel way prouder than eating any delicious cake. That sugar high is temporary too, but far more damaging. So, harm reduction, here I come.

The goal is revenge bod and some self-esteem for a change. All it takes is just saying no and not allowing myself to indulge in restaurants or at the damn grocery store. (Hahaha, right?) I try to bargain with myself to buy substitutes: swap fruit for white sugary treats, swap kombucha for beer, Daiya instead of dairy, or go drop a small fortune on pastries from the gluten-free bakery. (It helps that the pastry chef is a hot French guy ;)

I have a charity event to train for in November, so the goal is to be back in shape by then. Less pear-shaped than now, hopefully. 

Think I can do it?

Time will tell.

Food’s a tricky subject for me. I started emotionally eating in elementary school. Snacks after school. Snacks when I was bored. Snacks when good things and bad things happened. I played sports most of the year (not well, but they all involved running) so I didn’t notice any effects. 

When I turned 14 things tipped. Eating disorders were a form of social currency in the early 2000s. My friends and I starved, binged, and purged together, sometimes competitively. By the end of my freshman year, I was enrolled in an outpatient eating disorder program weighing in weekly and listening as a nutritionist arranged plastic food on a plate to demonstrate “normal” portion sizes. The following year I passed out on the back steps of my high school. My parents transferred me to another district where thinness wasn’t as exalted. I leveled out temporarily.

In my late teens and twenties, hangovers were a mask for my disordered eating. I went through phases of living off coffee and cigarettes and eating entire boxes of cheap Pad Thai. I continued to purge under the guise of heavy drinking. My weight dropped and ballooned. A few years into sobriety, consequences arrived. I fractured my hip running a normal amount and was diagnosed with osteoporosis at 31. I’ve had other health challenges arise, and food’s part of my overall recovery; nutrients, vitamins, how my somewhat fragile body continues to function and move.  

I eat breakfast now and occasionally attend a dual recovery meeting for alcoholism and disordered eating. When life feels out of control, I can slip back into bingeing and restricting. I don’t purge anymore but eating five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in succession to feel or not feel something hasn’t just magically disappeared. It helps to share about it, not hide anything in secrecy, and to practice mindfulness at mealtimes. To rip off a 12-step saying, progress not perfection. We have to eat to live — it’s a lifelong thing.

I’ve often imagined there are steps to my addictions. Up there on the top step are the illegal drugs, thankfully a short and shallow step from long ago. Then alcohol, a longer and deeper step, but one I’m no longer standing on. Finally chocolate, a step so long it’s just a floor I can’t seem to step off of. Who doesn’t love sugar? Oh wait, not everyone is aware of how much chocolate is in the house, can’t travel without it, and will eat a dessert with other people and then go home and have chocolate because that’s what you need to feel full.

My teeth are falling out. It’s partly genetic, but the sugar didn’t help. The tubs of cold frosting eaten with a spoon, the ice cream for breakfast, the bag of chocolate chips from the baking aisle never bought for baking. The easy reward, the most reliable friend, even when the candy shell of M&Ms scrapes against the exposed dentin sending a sharp shatter of nerve pain. 

I’ve been off chocolate since May. Not the first time, but hopefully the last. Some people can have a drink and not become a typhoon. Some people can eat that tiny candy bar sold in the grocery store aisle, and it will be enough. It will never be enough for me. Some people can stop their addictions with willpower. Mine have to wear me down until I walk into another room. Such a silly addiction, so embarrassing to tell people I can’t have a slice of chocolate cake because it will lead to the party size bag of candy (it’s me, I’m the party). But here I am on the bottom floor, walking alone with no addiction companion tucking a warm hand into my pocket.

Man, my disordered relationship with food has been with me for as long as I can remember. It’s never been healthy, all binge, no purge. Except for a brief window over the pandemic where I was able to channel that energy into movement, I end every night eating till I can’t, stuffing the day’s anxieties deep into my body. Is it totally fucked that I’m almost envious of people with the opposite problem? I think it is. I struggle to be comfortable with my body, to look the other way, go to bed, leave the cabinet door closed. Even as I do therapy and try to get a better handle on my life though, food is always there, comfortingly beckoning me to dig in.

The raw pain I remember curdles when I try to make meaning, grieve, or counsel, and I can only laugh in disgust at myself. I am desperate to share, but I catch myself. As if sharing were some noble act and not another form of vanity . . . God knows I would never be able to tell a loved one or therapist the gory details. But is it really shame that prevents me, or the pleasure of keeping secrets?

I started out of vanity. The desire for Paul Simonon’s cheekbones . . . a way of keeping thin, with the added benefit of self-harm, and soon a way to kill lonely hours.

You can eat several hundred dollars of groceries in a weekend, buying and eating and purging in a cycle. If you eat fast enough, you can put away 3-5 times the amount of grub that causes satiety. Before it starts to hurt. Over time things stretch, and you can cram in 4 or 5 pounds before you leak. The pain is well deserved and so is tolerable. Eventually your finger isn’t enough to make you gag. Spatulas, computer cables, hangers . . . your throat becomes an open wound. But the relief of being absolutely empty is better than pain killers, better than sex. You chain smoke cigarettes so you won’t get triggered by simple hunger.

I started with beer as the lubrication but soon found milk superior for getting it all back out again. I was absurdly proud, as though I’d solved a scientific puzzle. Also, using beer was a waste of getting drunk; I could just get drunk after — such economy!

After purging, I smashed the chewed food down the shower drain with my fingers and toes. Sliced them open. The drain clogged, and more than once I hired a plumber who wouldn’t look me in the eye. His judgment changed nothing.

I don’t know anymore how the situation turns out. Sometimes I give myself some credit for a few years sober and 16+ in remission from bulimia, but sometimes I feel like all I did was get old. No epiphany; just wore myself out. The feeling of loss is cavernous, and facing the grief of lost time amid the melodrama of middle age is terrible. Suffering is now so commonplace, ha!

My nightmares are all about throwing up, hunger, and heart attacks. I feel the acidity of bile and the metallic tang of blood as I run my tongue over my rounded teeth. I wake up in a cold sweat, and my heartbeat is off. I know I will always wallow; nothing makes the past disappear. I will never have a normal relationship with food or myself.

I’m afraid that when I’m old and dementia begins to set in, I’ll relapse and spend my final days puking and binging and forgetting where I am in the cycle, mean and despondent, smelling of barf, unlovable, and finally despised as I should be.

fin

*****

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