Hello teenage girl who binge eats!
Ehrm. Okay. You don’t have to be a teenager to read or identify with this.
Or a girl for that matter.
It’s just- when I needed this message, I was as a teenage girl. I would have given my mahogany semi-hollow bodied guitar, meant to charm my guitar obsessed crush, to hear this message.
So whatever gender you are, whatever age group your in, if you binge eat:
I know. I know. I know.
When I was in high school, I began binge eating. At the time, I’d never heard of binge eating. I didn’t know I was “binge eating”. I knew only that on a daily basis I was eating vast quantities of junk food, quantities that made me sick, quantities that other people didn’t consume in a week. And I had no idea why. I knew I didn’t want to eat like that. But it seemed that I had no control over how much I ate. Every morning , I would try to compensate for last night’s binge, by starving myself until lunch, eating a salad, and breaking when I got home. Each afternoon my newfound motivation to avoid food, suddenly disappeared. Slice after slice of toast was buttered. Craisins, peanuts and chocolate chips mixed together into a trail mix. And within a half hour I was sprawled on my bed, uncomfortable, dismayed, and alone.
Whatever I did, wherever I went, I was never really there. I was always thinking of my body, how fat I was, how fat I looked, how much I ate, how much I would eat, how I could avoid eating, how I could hide eating, how I could hide my body. I wonder how much of my life was lost due to disordered eating. All the times my mom invested her time and savings so we could do something special together, like go hiking in the Appalacian mountains. I couldn’t enjoy the experience. While I hiking, I thought only of burning calories, transforming my body into the one I longed for. Returning to the hotel, my thoughts turned immediately to binge-food acquisition. Go to the pool? But then I’d have to deal with my body. That shameful fat covered receptacle I had to carry around with me.
She wanted to bond over reading one of my favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird. I also wanted to, but every time we sat down together, my mind wandered from our living room, full of potential for savored mother-daughter time, into our freezer. Ice cream. Just a few more minutes and then I can have the ice cream. Who cares what Atticus was trying to impart to Scout? Chips. Ice cream. Sandwiches. I couldn’t participate in improving our relationship. I was consumed with food thoughts. Would today be a day to indulge all of my food desires? Or a day to practice monk-like asceticism?
Parties were nightmarish. Starve, stare longlingly at others’ plates, return home and binge. Or begin eating and not stop until I left the door.
I couldn’t progress in any of my hobbies, in any of my dreams, because food was always beckoning me.
When I discovered Overeatings Anonymous, I thought I’d found the answer. Here were others, who had once been fat and obsessed with food, and were now, miraculously thin, happy, productive individuals. OA required me to avoid all of my “triggers” i.e. delicious foods. I was left with vegetables, dairy, eggs, and tuna (essentially the same diet which originally propelled me into binge eating). I couldn’t do it. I put my all into following their instructions, going to their meetings, doing “step work”-self reflection aimed at enabling emotional well being, meeting my aversion to phone calls by calling other OAers. But I was hopelessly always off the abstinence wagon. I felt a failure. OA did not seem to help me. And yet, I had no other option. I decided the answer must lay in OA, and that I was the problem, I must be doing something wrong.
I continued my diet and binge cycle until I was 21 when I was pregnant with our older daughter, and I stopped dieting. I thought that if pregnant ladies are allowed to gain weight, then why be on a diet? I started to allow myself food, I started to feed my mistreated, loyal body. And subsequently I stopped bingeing. I had never before connected bingeing with dieting. I thought diets were about will power. I didn’t know that the long term success rate of diets is less than 1 percent. I didn’t know that when you go on a diet, your body increases your hunger and food thoughts, slows your metabolism and does its very best to get you to eat. I didn’t know that most people who go on diets gain all the weight back, and end up with a higher body fat percentage than before they began their diet. I didn’t know that if left to its own devices, a healthy body will maintain its set point weight, and that a diet interferes with this mechanism.
I also didn’t know that I didn’t need a diet. I didn’t know that my body (and my mind and spirit) deserved love and acceptance at whatever BMI it was.
I believe my highest weight was 165 pounds. Before dieting I was 128 pounds. Now that I’ve recovered from disordered eating, I maintain a healthy weight. There have been some ups and downs with pregnancies, with being unwell and without appetite, but this is the weight range my healthy body returns to when well fed.
As fulfilling as a healthy weight, is a healthy mind. My life is no longer wasted with food and body thoughts. I enjoy being a wife, mother, student, teacher, friend, sister, and daughter. I can devote myself to my roles, I can grow, because, as they say in OA, I’m not in the food.
Gratefully Thriving 