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One Woman's Battle

by: Eric

We met in the living room of her home on Topsail Island. I took out my notebook and pen, flipped to a clean page, and we began. It's a difficult topic for her to talk about, but an important one. We began at the beginning...

Her obsession with food began when she was six or seven. Her family had just moved to a new neighborhood and there were no other kids around. Food took the place of friends and relieved some of the boredom for her and her sister. She can remember sitting down with a big Tupperware container of Cheetos and eating until they were all gone. When life was more exciting, food was not important.

She remembers being eight and feeling the need to lose weight. Comments from her family like "you're getting chubby" and "you need to stop snacking" didn't help. "We were playing floor hockey one day at school," she recalls, "and I fell onto one of the boys' legs. He said, Uhhh, ******** fell on me!!'" Seventeen years later, it is still clear in her memory. She wanted to look like the clean, cared for people who got all of the attention. With both parents working, she received little attention at home. Food helped to make her feel better by taking her mind away from her emotions. She would make promises to herself like, "Today I'll eat only vegetables," but the promises would be forgotten within a few hours and she would be eating her usual way again.

In junior high and into high school, food continued to be a comfort. She would come home from school and eat some of everything. She would eat until each food didn't taste good anymore and then move on to something else. If she knew a friend's family ate healthy food, she would try to get the friend to come to her house because junk food was more accessible. She started counting calories in junior high. Being active in athletics kept her from becoming obese. Although she couldn't stop binging, she was afraid people would not love her if she was fat.

As she got older, she became so ashamed of her young behavior that she felt restricting and denying herself pleasure from food would make her a better person. Binging and restricting were both extremes of eating, neither used self-control or moderation. "Binging and restricting are the same behavior," she explains, "but restricting is fashionable. Society applauds you for not eating. It means you are strong. It's just a much quicker death when you don't eat compared to eating too much." Food was controlling her life though she would have denied it then. "Bulimics think about food every minute," she says. In high school, she became more concerned about grades and boys and less focused on food. As she got more attention, food lost some of its importance. She still had restricting and binging episodes, but restricting was becoming more common and episodes were lasting longer. When she got her driver's license, she had a whole new way to get food whenever she wanted it and binges became more frequent. She said, "I remember a friend and I getting a box of Entenman's donuts, the kind with eight huge donuts in it, and the two of us eating the whole box between us." During her junior year of high school, she met the man who would become her husband.

Once she was in a settled relationship, food took on a whole new importance. She remembers, "Some mornings I would wake up and be happy because I knew I would have certain foods that day." When she started at college, the food obsession intensified. Her husband joined her in taking classes at a community college. "I looked forward to the night classes we were taking because we would go to Taco Bell or Burger King on the way home and I'd binge on takeout food. Then I'd have a Snickers," she remembers. One of her fondest memories of the early college years is a trip to Disney World in 1990. Reservations were made over a year in advance and the anticipation was great. "One of the things I was most looking forward to," she told me, "was the food." Her steady relationship allowed her to settle into a way of life that many women without careers know: once they get married and the excitement of dating is off, they get bored and turn to food for comfort. "You have to remember, many women were raised with marriage being the ultimate goal in life," she says, "Once they were married, it was like, Okay, done.'"

She eventually went on a low fat diet, watching her fat and calorie intake, but intended to follow the plan only until she reached her goal weight, then she would be able to return to her old habits. Height and weight charts were something she despised. Doctors would always tell her she was overweight without taking into account the large muscle mass she maintained from athletics. Her need for attention continued to drive her. She dieted to look better, "certainly not for health," she admits.

Her search for affection eventually lead to an affair with a much older man. "I don't regret it," she says. "It changed my life for the best. I started loving myself and my family more when I was getting attention from [the other man]." At the same time, her food addiction changed poles and she started to restrict food completely, she basically stopped eating. Her goal was to secure the love and attention from the older man. She wanted to look like an adolescent and become his "daughter," a relationship she couldn't have with her husband. The lack of affection from her childhood had caught up with her. She kept restricting because she believed being thinner would make her so attractive the man would always love her. Eventually, she learned to play on his addiction to sex to satisfy her need for attention. When people started getting worried about her weight loss, restricting became a way of keeping the world's attention. Looking back, she realizes, "[Restricting] is what I became. I can't imagine myself without an eating disorder."

When she came down with mono, the doctor prescribed steroids. "I saw my body change overnight," she says. "I was so content I let myself eat more." She continued to eat low-fat foods, but now she ate them so she could justify binging on snack foods. When she recovered, she didn't want people to see her eating "naughty" foods. She became more secretive about what she ate. After the hurricanes struck last year, she began eating more junk again. She felt lonely, happy to be home on the island again, but depressed because there was no one around and she wasn't seeing friends very often. She focused on not eating instead of the depression. Severely restricting food changed the need for attention around. She explained, "When I was restricting, I didn't want to be around people instead of feeling lonely because they weren't there for me." Not eating made it her choice to be alone. "Then I didn't feel like such a loser," she says. "I understood restricting would kill me, but I was feeling suicidal by that point." Her salvation came in the form of Park Ridge Hospital in Fletcher, North Carolina.

When she went to the HOPE program at Park Ridge, she was able to turn control over to someone else. "I didn't trust myself to make decisions about food anymore, " she explained. She had people telling her how much to eat but she selected the foods. It was different from what she had heard growing up, "You're going to eat this and like it," or "I give up, make your own food!" The people at the hospital were willing to work with her. She wasn't obsessed with food there. She says, "I thought I was eating good food and was a good person." For the first time, she ate a perfectly balanced diet.

Now that she is back at home, she follows a food plan from the hospital. She doesn't obsess about the plan, but uses it as a guideline to make good decisions about what and when to eat. The eating disorder is still there, it just doesn't have the control it once did. Depression still produces a desire to restrict, but she can fight it now and stick with the plan. She still feels she is expected not to eat, as if people will look at her eating junk food and think, "Ah-ha, she's back to her old eating habits!" She can eat junk food now because she is able to eat in moderation. "I know the desire's there," she says. "Its probable I will relapse. But knowing my husband knows so much about the disorder now will help. I think the relapses will get shorter and less dangerous until they don't happen anymore." She concluded, "I'm not setting myself up to fail, I'm just being realistic."

I asked her if she had anything she wanted to clear up about eating disorders. "One of the most frustrating things, " she replied, "is that people get distorted images from the media. Anorexics are not emaciated 14-year-olds in the fetal position. When people say, I have an eating disorder,' they should not be ignored. People should not look at weight as a determining factor. Just because a person is overweight doesn't mean they aren't anorexic. Anorexia is looked at as being for young, thin people. But older anorexics have had more time to develop and gain weight so they may start out heavier. Many anorexics die before they become emaciated because of upset body functions." This was true in her case, liver and kidney damage would have killed her within weeks if she had not been admitted to the hospital, long before she became emaciated.

"What advice can you give to people who know someone with an eating disorder?" I asked. She replied, "Learn people's triggers. When people stop eating, find out what is wrong in their life. Something has gone wrong somewhere and needs to be fixed. Eating habits can be a good indication of other problems. Try to get people to open up and learn where their true source of pain is. Be supportive and attentive. Try to get through their layers but remember, you can't force people to change. If they trust that you will listen to them and they believe you are willing to help them, it can make all the difference. When my psychologist tried so hard to get me into the hospital, it started my recovery before I even got there." "Don't ever oversimplify it," she advises. "Don't say, Just eat/gain weight/lose weight/etc.' And don't ever think its over and can be packed away. It's not that easy."

"This is my story," she emphasized. It was a need for attention that drove her obsession with food. "There can be so many other reasons for eating disorders," she says, "but if someone has a disorder, something in their life needs to change. I'm 26, food has been one of the biggest parts of my life for almost 20 years. I thought everyone had the same desire for food but could control it. I thought I was naughty and had no self control."

When I asked what she saw happening with eating disorders, she said, "I think the future will see very fat and very thin people, especially in the young. An all or none society without moderation." There's something to look forward to.

Someday, maybe we'll have a daughter. Maybe we'll pull out this interview and let her read what her mom told her dad that April night in 1997. Maybe she'll understand that parents are people too. Maybe we'll understand her a little better as well. The interview concluded, I closed my notebook, put away my pen, and thanked my wife for opening up to me and letting me share her life story with you.

©1998 Eric. [email protected]. Reprinted with permission.

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