Binge & Purge
It’s time for me to come out of the closet.
Before everyone starts pitying Howard, I do not mean to announce a switch in my sexual orientation. I am a practical heterosexual, and so my marriage and my morals remain intact. No, this is about my years-long struggle against eating like a waif in public and a walrus behind closed doors.
I’ve danced around this topic for a while, but I think I’m ready to stop being polite and tell the raw truth about the history of my food addiction. I do this in hopes that sharing my secret will somehow help me to rid myself of its hooks in me. So here goes.
My need to fill my stomach has long focused on two things-eating as little of what was put in front of me, and sneaking around to supplement my diet with junk food. I grew up one of three children in a single-parent household. When I was 17, my mother was grossing $8,000 a year. We lived with my retired grandparents, the 3 children in the house’s unheated upstairs bedroom, and my mother slept on the uninsulated screened porch out back. I went to work as the school receptionist, just so we could have a phone in the house. All 3 of us children qualified for free lunch, and at one juncture, I qualified for free breakfast as well. If I hadn’t been utterly humiliated at being given that “privilege” I would have 2 of my 3 daily meals handed to me by the state.
I was always hungry. Not Ethiopia, starving-to-death hungry, but hungry all the same. There was never any extra food in the house. I got into trouble once because I put 2 packets of instant oatmeal into my breakfast bowl. My mother had budgeted for us each to have only 1, and there was no wiggle room. I probably knew this at some level, but I was hungry at school long before lunch, so I had attempted to stave off my stomach rumblings by eating more at breakfast. As that was not an option, I went looking for other ways to fill up between meals.
I got pretty creative. For example, I stayed in Girl Scouts for years, because there were snacks served at every meeting. Bad snacks, to be sure: potato chips or cookies and milk, but food is food, and the Girl Scouts met twice a month. Eating those after-school snacks helped me get through the afternoon and, sometimes, through dinner.
I loaned myself out as a babysitter at age 10, and routinely raided the household refrigerator after the kids went to bed. I say this without pride: I’ve since had those kinds of babysitters, and while I sympathize with them, it still irks me to go into my fridge for something that should be there, only to find that it’s gone, or that there’s that last sip left—you know, the one that’s useless, but keeps the bottle/can/container out of the trash.
The only vegetables we could afford came in cans. They were cooked in a rolling boil until the last remnants of taste disappeared into the range hood. Hot dogs, hamburgers and baloney sandwiches (our standard dinner meals) were served on white bread with mayonnaise as the only condiment. I hated most of it, and, unless forced, would not eat it. To this day, I cannot stomach even the smell of real mayo.
I probably wasted a year of my life sitting at the dinner table after everyone else had gone, desperately trying to choke down inedible (to me), and now cold food. I wasted another year in my room or in punishment for throwing out the food when I thought no one was looking.
I earned a decent allowance and was a regular babysitter at several homes in my neighborhood, but I never had any extra cash. The whole of my weekly allowance went to dime-store candy, the best value for my quarters at the time. I wasn’t allowed to have non-parent-bought food in the house, and so whatever I purchased had to be consumed in secret, before I got home.
In college, where every meal was a buffet, I ate as little as I could manage (dining commons food is also inedible), and then spent evenings in my room, unwrapping candy bars or aluminum tins of cheap breakfast rolls--whatever I could find that was cheap and filling. I wolfed them down, eating as fast as I could manage, so I could wipe my mouth off and stash the evidence if someone came to the door.
I worked off-campus for 3 years during college. I would eat a sparing lunch in the campus commons, take the bus downtown, find something in my company’s building drug store and eat it (alone) in the elevator going up to the office. If there was someone in the elevator with me, I would take it to the ladies room and hide in a stall, taking care to flush the wrapper down the toilet. Always destroy the evidence. Never let them see chocolate on your fingers or foil in your hands. On the way home, I’d do the same thing.
I found 5 or 6 different places where I could indulge my habit, and I rotated where I went to buy things, so the clerks wouldn’t take too much notice of how much I took out with me. I ate what I could at the bus stop, or if there were others around me, I’d sneak it in bites on the bus, or cram it all into my mouth on the walk back to the dorm. Once back on campus, I’d go to dinner, again eating very little, but sneaking out with a napkin full of cookies to eat in my dorm room before Howard came over for the evening. If I went back to the dorm alone, sometimes the cookies (6 or 8, on average) wouldn't even make it to my room.
It became easier as an adult, and as I’ve always had a job that paid me enough to have food in the refrigerator. But by then it didn’t matter-the habit had formed. I dusted my stove more than I scrubbed it, and I once lived in an apartment for 2 years and never once turned on the oven. I ate at the couch, hunched down below the windows, or in the bathroom with the door closed. I lived alone, but I would not eat anywhere I could be spotted. I stuffed the wrappers inside milk cartons or their carry-home plastic bags so the trash men wouldn’t see what was in my garbage.
Last year, before Howard came back, I was involved with someone who fancied himself a cook. He was wrong, but compared to me, he at least made food that was hot and unpackaged. We were both trying to lose weight, so he modified recipes to suit our lower-calorie desires, and tried to serve some sort of steamed vegetable every night. In truth, even though we barely did anything worthy of weight loss, he started losing. I did not. Not only was I still eating too much, but I was eating all day long. As soon as he left for the day, I would dash from my office in the basement and raid the pantry. I would barely get back downstairs before I’d consumed whatever I’d grabbed, and so back up the stairs I went, this time taking a larger portion so I could do a little work between “meals”.
By the time my boyfriend arrived to cook dinner, I was reeling from the sugar high and really, too full to eat anything. Yet I sat down to dinner every night, unwilling to admit I was stuffed from binging all day. I ate bits of what he’d cooked, and then made up an excuse to go out on an errand at night so I could feed the habit before bedtime.
Writing it now, it's obvious how crazy my behavior was. Eating on the sly became a habit so ingrained in me, and so steeped in guilt and shame that I couldn’t share it with anyone, and so I couldn’t break it. If you substituted "heroin" or "alcohol" for food here, it's easy to see what level of addict I had become.
Weight Watchers talks about how their program works because they endeavor to change people’s habits. Rather than flood members with pre-packaged meals that won’t teach you anything other than how to spend money for processed food, Weight Watchers sets you loose in your own neighborhood with psychological counseling, group therapy and weekly “confessions” at the scales. Sixteen months of this and my habits have changed. I eat salads for lunch instead of ArbyQs. I have jello for dessert instead of half of a pecan pie (the other half was for dinner). I walk more, I drink more water, and I know how to choose the right foods. My habits have changed.
But I have not. The Sneaky Snacker still lives in me. I am still that person, and Halloween is a testament to that.
There’s a leader who substitutes on occasion at my regular meeting. She talks about how she always gets a Mrs. Field’s cookie when she goes to the mall. She takes great pains to make sure the cookie isn’t eaten at the mall, or in the car on the way home, but in her home, out in plain site. “I eat my cookie in the daylight, and with dignity,” she stated. “I only do it once in a while, and I enjoy it, every time. I have earned it, and I deserve it.”
I fear that if I “allow” myself an occasional indulgence that eventually it’ll be an everyday thing, and then an all the time thing, and then all my size 3 clothes will go to the women’s shelter while my closet fills up with bigger sizes…and stashed treats. I have no ability to monitor or to moderate myself. For me, it's all or nothing. I am a nerve cell when it comes to food. I eat it all, or I have none. There is no middle place.
I persevere and I have hope. I’ve come all this way, and really, this is the first mishap in months. I can’t plan for these things; I’d self-destruct. But maybe I can just know this about myself and do what needs done to fix it after it’s happened. And maybe, some day years from now, I won’t have to worry about it at all.
Wish me luck.
A the P(romise to be Funny in the Next Post)
Before everyone starts pitying Howard, I do not mean to announce a switch in my sexual orientation. I am a practical heterosexual, and so my marriage and my morals remain intact. No, this is about my years-long struggle against eating like a waif in public and a walrus behind closed doors.
I’ve danced around this topic for a while, but I think I’m ready to stop being polite and tell the raw truth about the history of my food addiction. I do this in hopes that sharing my secret will somehow help me to rid myself of its hooks in me. So here goes.
My need to fill my stomach has long focused on two things-eating as little of what was put in front of me, and sneaking around to supplement my diet with junk food. I grew up one of three children in a single-parent household. When I was 17, my mother was grossing $8,000 a year. We lived with my retired grandparents, the 3 children in the house’s unheated upstairs bedroom, and my mother slept on the uninsulated screened porch out back. I went to work as the school receptionist, just so we could have a phone in the house. All 3 of us children qualified for free lunch, and at one juncture, I qualified for free breakfast as well. If I hadn’t been utterly humiliated at being given that “privilege” I would have 2 of my 3 daily meals handed to me by the state.
I was always hungry. Not Ethiopia, starving-to-death hungry, but hungry all the same. There was never any extra food in the house. I got into trouble once because I put 2 packets of instant oatmeal into my breakfast bowl. My mother had budgeted for us each to have only 1, and there was no wiggle room. I probably knew this at some level, but I was hungry at school long before lunch, so I had attempted to stave off my stomach rumblings by eating more at breakfast. As that was not an option, I went looking for other ways to fill up between meals.
I got pretty creative. For example, I stayed in Girl Scouts for years, because there were snacks served at every meeting. Bad snacks, to be sure: potato chips or cookies and milk, but food is food, and the Girl Scouts met twice a month. Eating those after-school snacks helped me get through the afternoon and, sometimes, through dinner.
I loaned myself out as a babysitter at age 10, and routinely raided the household refrigerator after the kids went to bed. I say this without pride: I’ve since had those kinds of babysitters, and while I sympathize with them, it still irks me to go into my fridge for something that should be there, only to find that it’s gone, or that there’s that last sip left—you know, the one that’s useless, but keeps the bottle/can/container out of the trash.
The only vegetables we could afford came in cans. They were cooked in a rolling boil until the last remnants of taste disappeared into the range hood. Hot dogs, hamburgers and baloney sandwiches (our standard dinner meals) were served on white bread with mayonnaise as the only condiment. I hated most of it, and, unless forced, would not eat it. To this day, I cannot stomach even the smell of real mayo.
I probably wasted a year of my life sitting at the dinner table after everyone else had gone, desperately trying to choke down inedible (to me), and now cold food. I wasted another year in my room or in punishment for throwing out the food when I thought no one was looking.
I earned a decent allowance and was a regular babysitter at several homes in my neighborhood, but I never had any extra cash. The whole of my weekly allowance went to dime-store candy, the best value for my quarters at the time. I wasn’t allowed to have non-parent-bought food in the house, and so whatever I purchased had to be consumed in secret, before I got home.
In college, where every meal was a buffet, I ate as little as I could manage (dining commons food is also inedible), and then spent evenings in my room, unwrapping candy bars or aluminum tins of cheap breakfast rolls--whatever I could find that was cheap and filling. I wolfed them down, eating as fast as I could manage, so I could wipe my mouth off and stash the evidence if someone came to the door.
I worked off-campus for 3 years during college. I would eat a sparing lunch in the campus commons, take the bus downtown, find something in my company’s building drug store and eat it (alone) in the elevator going up to the office. If there was someone in the elevator with me, I would take it to the ladies room and hide in a stall, taking care to flush the wrapper down the toilet. Always destroy the evidence. Never let them see chocolate on your fingers or foil in your hands. On the way home, I’d do the same thing.
I found 5 or 6 different places where I could indulge my habit, and I rotated where I went to buy things, so the clerks wouldn’t take too much notice of how much I took out with me. I ate what I could at the bus stop, or if there were others around me, I’d sneak it in bites on the bus, or cram it all into my mouth on the walk back to the dorm. Once back on campus, I’d go to dinner, again eating very little, but sneaking out with a napkin full of cookies to eat in my dorm room before Howard came over for the evening. If I went back to the dorm alone, sometimes the cookies (6 or 8, on average) wouldn't even make it to my room.
It became easier as an adult, and as I’ve always had a job that paid me enough to have food in the refrigerator. But by then it didn’t matter-the habit had formed. I dusted my stove more than I scrubbed it, and I once lived in an apartment for 2 years and never once turned on the oven. I ate at the couch, hunched down below the windows, or in the bathroom with the door closed. I lived alone, but I would not eat anywhere I could be spotted. I stuffed the wrappers inside milk cartons or their carry-home plastic bags so the trash men wouldn’t see what was in my garbage.
Last year, before Howard came back, I was involved with someone who fancied himself a cook. He was wrong, but compared to me, he at least made food that was hot and unpackaged. We were both trying to lose weight, so he modified recipes to suit our lower-calorie desires, and tried to serve some sort of steamed vegetable every night. In truth, even though we barely did anything worthy of weight loss, he started losing. I did not. Not only was I still eating too much, but I was eating all day long. As soon as he left for the day, I would dash from my office in the basement and raid the pantry. I would barely get back downstairs before I’d consumed whatever I’d grabbed, and so back up the stairs I went, this time taking a larger portion so I could do a little work between “meals”.
By the time my boyfriend arrived to cook dinner, I was reeling from the sugar high and really, too full to eat anything. Yet I sat down to dinner every night, unwilling to admit I was stuffed from binging all day. I ate bits of what he’d cooked, and then made up an excuse to go out on an errand at night so I could feed the habit before bedtime.
Writing it now, it's obvious how crazy my behavior was. Eating on the sly became a habit so ingrained in me, and so steeped in guilt and shame that I couldn’t share it with anyone, and so I couldn’t break it. If you substituted "heroin" or "alcohol" for food here, it's easy to see what level of addict I had become.
Weight Watchers talks about how their program works because they endeavor to change people’s habits. Rather than flood members with pre-packaged meals that won’t teach you anything other than how to spend money for processed food, Weight Watchers sets you loose in your own neighborhood with psychological counseling, group therapy and weekly “confessions” at the scales. Sixteen months of this and my habits have changed. I eat salads for lunch instead of ArbyQs. I have jello for dessert instead of half of a pecan pie (the other half was for dinner). I walk more, I drink more water, and I know how to choose the right foods. My habits have changed.
But I have not. The Sneaky Snacker still lives in me. I am still that person, and Halloween is a testament to that.
There’s a leader who substitutes on occasion at my regular meeting. She talks about how she always gets a Mrs. Field’s cookie when she goes to the mall. She takes great pains to make sure the cookie isn’t eaten at the mall, or in the car on the way home, but in her home, out in plain site. “I eat my cookie in the daylight, and with dignity,” she stated. “I only do it once in a while, and I enjoy it, every time. I have earned it, and I deserve it.”
I fear that if I “allow” myself an occasional indulgence that eventually it’ll be an everyday thing, and then an all the time thing, and then all my size 3 clothes will go to the women’s shelter while my closet fills up with bigger sizes…and stashed treats. I have no ability to monitor or to moderate myself. For me, it's all or nothing. I am a nerve cell when it comes to food. I eat it all, or I have none. There is no middle place.
I persevere and I have hope. I’ve come all this way, and really, this is the first mishap in months. I can’t plan for these things; I’d self-destruct. But maybe I can just know this about myself and do what needs done to fix it after it’s happened. And maybe, some day years from now, I won’t have to worry about it at all.
Wish me luck.
A the P(romise to be Funny in the Next Post)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 10:45 AM
1 Comments:
Heh - your story sounds a lot like mine, except my mom wasn't poor, we were solidly middle class - but she had weird control issues and food was a big one. Secret eating, going hungry at school (where we had no lunch program and I wouldn't have qualified if we did) - going to places where there was food just so I could eat - all this sounds familiar. I eat far too fast, and have a lot of trouble eating in moderation - I feel driven to finish what's in front of me regardless of hunger. Waiters who refill my water glass drive me crazy - because I can never finish the water.
Anyway, I'm slowing learning...
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