A.J. asked TSB readers to tell us about their relationships with food, and TSB readers answered. This is part two; part one is here.—TSB Editor

I Would Love Not to Think About It

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

Food has ruled my life since my childhood, and I am very old. I robbed my brother’s collection of coins in the 1950s to buy penny candy at the corner store. I made up elaborate lies to hide my obsession and enable myself to eat a whole jar of cookies at a time. I stole dozens of candy bars from an establishment I worked at that had a candy counter. I wasn’t ever more than 20 pounds overweight, but I thought and behaved as if I were 200 pounds overweight. The shame I felt led to my constant dieting—diets that I always broke by the end of a week.

Once in a while I got to my goal weight, but it didn’t lead to happiness. I know now that it was my relationship to food, and not my weight, that made me unhappy.

Over the years I switched obsessions: to buying clothes, to working, and finally to alcohol. If there wasn’t going to be wine served, I wouldn’t go. Ladies’ lunches were only for the wine, and I couldn’t think about going to bed without a wee dram of brandy.

Food, and eating alone, has always been my primary relationship, though. It’s my best friend, and only through decades of 12-step work have I been able, one day at a time, to reach a point of neutrality with food. It’s fuel, and it’s important, but it’s not my best friend, my safe place to go.

My obsession with food took a lot from me: self-esteem, compassion, rational thinking, friends, and more. Alcohol could have been as much of a threat, but it was easier for me to throw off. Now I commit, one day and sometimes one hour at a time, to abstinence from compulsive eating.

I’ve cycled through multiple addictions for several decades, the first being alcohol; my excessive (often blackout) drinking began at age 12 and ended at age 41. Food is the demon that had me by the throat and was the addiction that took the longest to overcome. When you present as a slender, healthy, athletic white female, it’s hard for people—even therapists and psychiatrists—to take seriously what you tell them about your inability to stop bingeing and purging. Binging in my case involved almost nightly consumption of enough food for four robust people. Purging took the form of excessive exercise and, almost still too shameful to admit, enemas.

Even when I had somewhat of a handle on the amount I would consume, I still would eat when not hungry night after night, having already had a full dinner. It took a nutritionist schooled in intuitive eating to really hear me—to see me through eyes of compassion and understanding. I’m still not sure why exactly, but when he asked me whether I tracked calories expended on the treadmill at the gym, something clicked for me about the enormity of my dilemma. This began a years-long healing journey. Who knew I had no idea what the satiation of normal hunger felt like; I needed an instruction sheet. I likewise have to credit my meditation practice and fellow travelers on the path for helping me overcome what I had resigned myself to—the nightly surrender to food cravings, which any addict with enough recovery knows is but a symptom. Being truly present with one’s experience makes all the difference, along with watching, with relative calm, as a craving arises and passes away. All this said, I still feel as though I am being followed by a ghoul ready to consume me at any moment. I often see myself as out of control with food (always eating more than I should or making unhealthy choices), even though I’m really not.  When one’s relationship with a substance—even the stuff of life—has been kinky for so long (35 years in my case) it’s next to impossible to know what normal actually feels like.

Sitting in my red womb chair, sun just risen, laptop on my thighs. In my morning pages I just wrote about no longer waiting for my “real” life to begin. No longer waiting to be happy after losing 20 pounds. It’s disorienting to remember how different I used to feel.

Most of my life: hyper-fixation on food and exercise. A mental spreadsheet always running. Planning the next meal while eating the current one. Walking three hours around European cities to “find the perfect restaurant.” Really believing everything would be better once my body looked a certain way.

When I moved in with a new partner, bingeing and purging got harder to hide. He drank a lot, so I joined him. From barely touching alcohol since treatment in high school to blackout drunk most nights. When I moved to Boston for grad school, I couldn’t afford to lose study time to blackouts, so I picked bingeing and purging back up. I was good at it. When it started clearly hurting my body, I got scared, and with a great therapist, I stopped.

I moved again, started my PhD, and became a locavore obsessed with “clean eating.” Studying nutrition and food policy, orthorexia was socially acceptable. I was doing it for the environment. For the kids who’d never have to feel the way I’d felt since my first diet in 8th grade.

Later, I joined a Health Sciences department full of men in exercise science and elite athletics. Wanting to fit in, I leaned harder into exercise and clean eating. Copier talk was about the noon run; comments floated about what people pulled from the fridge. Our chair never ate dessert. I was the “good faculty member,” including the only one on our Title IX hearing board.

Reading and hearing case after case of sexual misconduct, I couldn’t set the stories aside. I researched legal definitions for hours, replayed testimonies in my mind, until I ended up in the fetal position on my kitchen floor one Sunday, sobbing. Vicarious trauma, the trigger that finally helped me to address my past.

With a great trauma therapist, my world began to repair. I had an awakening about how my own research and teaching fed weight stigma. I found peace and power in my body. It would be a few more years before I stopped drinking, and the layers keep coming—workaholism, codependency.

How do I deal with disordered eating now? By healing the trauma underneath. I didn’t have the capacity to sit with my own discomfort until I did the deep therapeutic work. It was hard. Sometimes it still is.

Right now, junk food—greasy, sugary, fried, ideally all of the above—is my main vice. I realize I’m probably shortening my lifespan—and I DEFINITELY know that I’m not enjoying my current day-to-day as much as I should be—but I’ve gotta get some dopamine somehow. It feels so childish and uncool to be beholden to fucking doughnuts, but that’s where I’m at. I know I’ll have to face the music at my October physical, but even that clear deadline hasn’t inspired a change. I realize my food stuff is tied up with so many other things—how self-conscious I feel about grocery shopping, cooking, exercising, buying clothes, really acknowledging my physical self in any way—but I’m too tired to pull at that knot.

I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem. Every single one of my immediate family members does. 

Not me though. 

Just don’t touch my snacks. 

They’re chips, not a fucking six-pack. 

Don’t raise your eyebrows at me when I go back for seconds. 

Mention my weight gain? Bitch, you’ve just polished off that bottle of bourbon and it’s not even 4pm.

I made a choice that I wouldn’t be another addict in our long lineage of addicts. 

I decided I wouldn’t drink, not worth the risk.

But I sneak ice cream into the bathroom and eat it there so no one can see. 

I hide chocolate bars where no else will find them. 

I have a temper tantrum if someone eats the last piece of cake.

It’s taken me a long time to accept that addiction isn’t about WHAT you’re addicted to.

I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem. 

But I’m still an addict.

The family tradition remains unbroken.

Having a terrible relationship with food is having a terrible relationship. There are these incredible highs when I (briefly) go a few days, sometimes more than a week, without absolutely destroying myself with junk and overeating. There are the lows and recriminations when I feel like shit the next day and literally shit much of the next day. There’s the part of my mind as I start in on the bag of chips that says, “What are you doing? You know how this will go, please stop,” and then whatever else is in my body and mind that can listen to that, believe it, accept it, and then finish the entire bag knowing I will regret every aspect of it the moment I finish. The only “healthy” (?) thing about all of this is that it drives me to run, walk, and bike thousands of miles per year. But even that feels like a bad relationship at times when I can barely move or function after walking for hours and hours in an effort to justify all the garbage. For a couple of years it felt like I had solved this when I thought of my relationship with food as a series of choices rather than something I needed to control, but that mindset slipped away and feels like it will never return. 

While I’ve never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder, I have a long and complex history with disordered eating behaviors and food itself. Like so many women, the consciousness of my body started when I was a girl. I was quite literally built differently than my immediate family: I was small and petite in a family of either short and stocky or big and broad folks. I was traditionally skinny and stayed that way, but now with the constant fear that I wouldn’t. My mother told me I had a cute figure, so I was petrified I’d lose it and therefore lose her love and approval. There were other things going on then, too, but the feeling like I had to be skinny or else has never really left. When I was a senior in college, I was so stressed out I lost so much weight that I almost wasn’t cleared for medically necessary surgery. When I told this to my mom, her response was, “I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing.” Perhaps some of this was vicarious living on her part. 

I’m in my 30s now, and I still have a difficult relationship with food. I would love to not think about it, to not know how many calories are in something, and how much that will take out of my daily allowance. But since the age of 12 I’ve been cursed with that information. I read The Small Bow piece on GLPs and part of me would love the ability to just stop thinking about food, to stop having an appetite. But it wouldn’t be medically necessary for me, and I know that it wouldn’t solve the problem in the end. My underlying relationship with food is adversarial, and I wish it wasn’t. 

Food was my first drug of choice. I was a skinny happy kid until my parents’ divorce when I was 7. I really don’t know how or when the emotional eating started but I wonder if it had to do with the “Eat this, it will make you feel better” ethos from my Italian side of the family. A moment from my childhood is permanently etched into my memory: I am sneaking chocolate ice cream from the freezer, but I can’t stop eating it. I would later feel that same pull and inability to stop when I drank.

As a teenager in the 90s, I was able to rid myself of excess weight after doing exercise tapes religiously and eating fat-free everything. I gained the Freshman Fifteen thanks to beer, pizza, and drunken Taco Bell trips. My weight fluctuated in my 20s and 30s, and I was never at peace with my body.

In 2013, I nearly died after driving head-on into another vehicle during a blackout. I found myself facing serious criminal charges and possibly doing 2-5 years in prison despite zero priors. I was full of shame, terrified, and incredibly lonely. I was sober and without any coping skills, which meant that I leaned heavily on food for comfort.

While I avoided prison, I ended up doing six months at a maximum-security jail where I lost 20 pounds. If you have ever been in jail, you will understand how I lost weight despite regular Snickers bars from the commissary. Watching TV commercials, I would salivate over all the things we didn’t have there: pizza, pancakes, even fresh veggies. I would have done filthy things for a good salad.

Those lost pounds came back easily after my release because I gave myself permission to eat endless quantities of the foods I had missed out on for half a year. I later joined a women’s gym where I started strength training, and after going on a UK hiking trip to celebrate 10 years of sobriety, I hired a coach to help with nutrition. I was so proud of my physical accomplishments but still hated how I looked. I have since lost 55 pounds and am 13 years sober. It has taken a lot of help and therapy to unfuck my brain when it comes to food and addiction. I still eat emotionally, but I no longer beat myself up over it and move on. 

fin

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN