If I eat a cookie in the woods and no one is around, do I still get fat?

In hiding. In secret. Secret stashes. Waiting to be alone. Preoccupied with the thoughts of wanting it. Throwing away the evidence. Nobody will know. It doesn’t count if nobody sees. Waiting for the next hit. The next high. I need it. Needing a shot of it. More. Never enough. Never satisfied. And then the regret. Never again.

Until the next time.

And the cycle continues.

I am not an alcoholic. I am not into heroine or meth, crack or pills.

But I love food.

I think love is the wrong word. When I say I love my family, my son, my boyfriend, I mean that I appreciate that, that I have a respect for them, a deep emotion to take care of them.

To love food is to appreciate it, real food, the stuff that nourishes and sustains your body. The stuff that you eat and it makes you feel good, strong, healthy.

I have an obsession with eating. That’s what it is.

For my entire life I hoarded food, hid food, ate it in secret and then threw away the evidence.

As a little kid I use to wait for the chance to run to the kitchen and snarf something really quickly. We didn’t often have many sweets in the house that I can remember, so when she would go downstairs to the laundry room I would run to the kitchen and eat spoonfuls of straight sugar. If we did happen to have something I’d unwrap it, eat it, and bury the wrapping in the bottom of the trashcan so nobody would see it, and hope that nobody would remember there were 3 cakes left instead of 2.

At parties and food gatherings it was taking extra pieces and bigger scoops of things and hoping nobody saw. Then hoping nobody noticed I went back for seconds, and thirds, and then snuck one more bread roll (or 2) as I was walking out the door.

Late night eating, and then embarrassment over wanting to eat again so I’d wait for my roommate to go to bed so that I could eat more without anybody seeing how much I was eating. If nobody sees it, it doesn’t count, right?

I would stop at a fast food place or gas station on my way home and eat something bad, and then fix dinner once I was home.

I think about eating a lot. It monopolizes my thoughts on a constant basis. There are times I’m sitting with my boyfriend watching television and he asks me if I heard something, or what I thought about what was just said. And I am too embarrassed to tell him I didn’t hear it because I was thinking about something I wanted to eat.

Tuesday for some strange reason I decided to buy 700 calories worth of coffee on my way home from work. Despite not having caffeine in like 6 weeks I thought it was a good idea to get caffeine. I hurried to finish it before I got off the train, threw the cup away, and was just glad that my boyfriend wouldn’t know I had just done that.

Then I got home and immediately after walking in the door I threw up. Then I had the shakes from the caffeine. Then I had a headache hit me like a ton of bricks. Needless to say, he found out, because I told him. He asked me why I did it.

Good question. That’s when the guilt creeps in and my response simply was “Because I’m stupid”.

It’s easy to beat myself up after a binge or a bad food choice. I’m hopeless, stupid, worthless. Instead of just acknowledging the slip up and moving past it, I decide beating myself up over it is the better choice. How does guilt work for you? Not well for me. Because it causes the problem to magnify itself. Well I’m already screwed, so why not make it TEN TIMES WORSE?!

People will sometimes say that losing weight is just about eating less and moving more. Well, yes that’s true, it mostly is about that. But for some of us, it’s figuring out how to kill an addiction to something that our body still needs. Alcoholics can just avoid alcohol and bars. Drug addicts can avoid the places they buy drugs.

But what of us that have a bad relationship with food and eating? What do we do? We have to buy groceries. We have to walk by and drive by food places everywhere we go. We have to learn to live with the fact that our body needs nourishment and therefore we have to correct our relationship with food.

It’s not easy.

I don’t want a pill or a surgery or any kind of quick fix. That won’t stick. I just need to learn to have an appreciation and respect for food, and moreso an appreciation and respect for my body and what it needs.

It’s a process.

Other people who understand the struggle:

Twelve in Twelve “My Cycle”

Ben Does Life “A Constant Struggle and a Breakthrough”

 

Feed Me I’m Cranky “Rob Kardashian’s Struggle with Binge Eating”