On May 30, 2006, I weighed almost 250 lbs. I don’t know what my exact weight was that day because for the first time in my life, I had stopped weighing myself. I could no longer bear to see the number on the scale. That was the day I gave birth to my last child. Today, I weigh 140 lbs. and have been this size for the past six years in recovery from food addiction. Here is my story.
I grew up in a family of food addicts. My parents showed us love by feeding us. There were huge pink boxes of baked things on Sunday mornings. I don’t ever remember being told “No” when requesting second or third helping of anything. I grew up in a house with no boundaries around food. I regularly looked in my parents’ medicine cabinet for edible medicines. I loved the taste of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin, Di-Gel and Pearl Drops tooth polish.
By the time I was 10 years old, I weighed 100 lbs. All my friends weighed 80 lbs. I had immense shame over being bigger than the other girls. I had to shop in the “husky” section of the Sears catalog. My blood froze at the thought of having to borrow clothes from a friend. My father threatened to send me to a fat farm. He had an obese daughter from a previous marriage and her weight caused him a lot of shame. In the 1970s, there were not as many people who weighed 300 lbs. as there are in America today. I should also point out that my father looked perpetually pregnant. He had one of those hard fat bellies. He died a few weeks later of a massive heart attack, leaving my mother with four small children. I was the oldest at age 10.
I ate to deal with the stress of the situation that I was faced with. I became the surrogate parent, helping get my siblings off to school, helping to cook meals and helping to pack lunches. I did what I could to help my mother out as she not only worked full-time, but also worked nights. She usually slept during the day, so we were left to fend for ourselves.
At puberty, I thinned out and began to get attention from boys. It felt powerful, and it was at this point that I made a decision to control my weight and appearance. We had a Detecto doctor’s scale in my mom’s bathroom. I knew how to use that scale by the age of 10. I tried any trick I could in order to eat what I wanted and not have the food show up on my body.
My mom was a chronic dieter, and I learned many tricks from her. She made it clear that I could never have a normal relationship with food and dieting was the only way to maintain my shape. She regularly told me things like, “You are big boned. You have fat on both sides of your family, so you will always have to watch it.” I grew up with no boundaries around food and I accepted that dieting was an important and normal part of life.
I tried every trick to keep my weight in check. I used Dexatrim diet pills, put myself on the Scarsdale diet at age 12, used bulimia to control my binges, starved myself and discovered excessive exercise as a great way to tone my body. In high school, it was not uncommon for a friend of mine to join me in the bathroom to purge after our favorite lunch. Then we would go running after school. I was a cheerleader, and my appearance was very important to me.
My family continued to eat unhealthily, and I never missed an opportunity to preach to them about the benefits of healthful eating and exercise. My food addiction/obsession led me to the opposite side of the spectrum from obesity. I became the “food police” in my home.
In college, I joined a health food co-op in order to control my eating. To me, the best answer to my food addiction was just not to allow myself to make poor choices. I could never control myself around unlimited or unhealthy food, especially in the college cafeteria setting. I made sure I always belonged to an aerobics class.
At age 17, I weighed 120 lbs. At age 20, I weighed 130 lbs. At age 25, I weighed 150 lbs. At age 30, when I joined Weight Watchers for the first time, I tipped the scales at 188 lbs. At age 34, when I gave birth to my first child, I was 239 lbs. At age 35, I got back down to 180 lbs. But by the time I gave birth to my second child at age 36, I was somewhere close to 250 lbs.
My food obsession and addiction were progressive. My dieting tricks seemed to work for a time, but eventually, I became less and less able to control my eating. My husband and I had double income with no kids for a long time and could afford to eat out. It became a bad habit. I used to save my calories for dessert items. On Weight Watchers, I ate what I wanted for five days and starved myself for the last two days to make weigh-in. Although I prided myself on being an honest and hardworking person, I could not keep promises to myself.
I continued my exercise regimen through both pregnancies, ignoring my doctor’s advice about not engaging in heavy exercise while pregnant. But it didn’t matter because I gained 60 and 70 lbs. during both pregnancies. I had my license to eat and, as friends told me how wonderful it was that I was eating for two, my food addiction was in full effect. I finally allowed myself to eat the way I had always dreamed of eating.
When my second daughter was seven months old, all my excessive exercise finally caught up with me. I had been entering running races in order to get the weight off, but it wasn’t working. I could not lose the weight after the second baby. One day, in a step aerobics class, I felt the sensation of a rubber band popping inside the back of my knee. It was my ACL tearing in half. By the time I got home, my knee had swollen up like the Elephant Man. I was in serious trouble.
My running partner brought me the crutches she had used a few months earlier when she had fallen and split open her knee. I knew the universe was trying to tell me something and I lamented to her that I did not know how to lose weight without exercising. She said the two words that changed my life. She said, “I do.” She invited me to a meeting and we went the very next day. Although I had a lot of reservations in the beginning, I thankfully have never looked back.
It took me only eight months to go from 205 lbs. to 132 lbs. I surrendered the food and regained my life. I am so thankful to my food addiction recovery program. I no longer obsess about food. I no longer weigh myself four times a day. I no longer look in the mirror and hate myself. I no longer hide in the closet to eat junk food so my children will not see me. I no longer eat differently in front of others than when I am alone. My recovery program has saved my life. My daughter tells me how beautiful I am every day, and I believe her.