I’ve always been a compulsive eater. I enjoy food, love buying it, cooking it and eating it, in vast quantities. I was an overweight teenager who reached extreme thinness through starvation. In my twenties, I ate little to nothing Monday through Friday, although I drank a lot of coffee and water. Weekends were a free for all. My weight stayed constant but when I got married and then pregnant all bets were off.
Dieting after pregnancy did nothing. I wasn’t overweight but I am short and the extra pounds made me looks dumpy where I’d once looked slender. And yet, I had lost my sense of control over food. Not that I’d ever had it. But the compulsive eating came out in full force. I’d go to the kitchen for a glass of water and find myself hiding in the pantry stuffing chips into my mouth so fast that I actually couldn’t taste them-and I was out of breath. I wasn’t sure why I was hiding. My husband wouldn’t have cared if he’d seen me eating. Yet I continued to be secretive.
So why?
I grew up in a house where, due to my mother’s fits of SAHM-ishness and my dad’s inability to work somewhere longer than a month without ticking someone off, we swung from moments of flush lavishness to extreme poverty. Sometimes we had tons of food and sometimes we had none. My grandmother always had snacks at her house and we ate out all the time when we were with her.
My mother was obsessed with her body. To this day she barely eats and constantly complains about her weight. She is 5‘7 and 115 lbs. That slender weight I mentioned? 125…at 5‘4.
So…psychoanalyzing myself here…food makes me feel safe. Eating means that we have food so we’re not poor right now, the electricity won’t be cut off. Snacking and eating out mean that I’m safe, nobody’s worrying what everything costs, I can eat whatever I want without us starving next week. But starving…well, that means I’m in control. That means my mom will be proud of me, means I won’t see that disapproving glance down my body when she sees me, won’t hear her talk about diets and ask me why I think I need to eat that, won’t greet my glee in a new outfit with telling me it would look better on someone smaller, won’t always, ALWAYS list my weight as one of my failures. Won’t corner me at 7 months pregnant to call me “chunky” and ask me if I know that I should only be up a few pounds by now and do I have GD?
My brain is not in control. Not when this happens. I am just along for the ride. But I want to get off this thing.
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