Confessions of a Food Addict

I’m really upset at myself right now. I need to confess. There are a lot of blog posts I should be finishing and posting about, but I need to get this out in the open because I’m afraid that if I don’t own up to it soon, it’ll be too late… that I will be too far gone and can’t reverse what is happening to me.

When someone says “Eating Disorder”, even I immediately think of young women staring at their bodies in the mirror at what they perceive to be imperfections. They are so often starving themselves or purging in hopes of losing more weight – never satisfied with their body image. It’s a terrible and sad reality.

But no one ever talks about those of us struggling with our body image because we have no self control. When you are obese, everyone just assumes you are just lazy. No one considers that you too might have an eating disorder. Too many people think you are happy to be fat and that you choose to live your life this way.

I Have an Addiction to Eating

Lately, I’ve realized that I keep eating and that I can’t seem to stop. I’ve been this way as long as I can recall, but I never noticed it until the last 6 months or so. I tried cutting back on my food intake and it worked briefly. I started substituting meals with smoothies packed with lots of spinach and fruit. And it was good and I felt amazing… so long as I wasn’t hungry.

As soon as I was hungry, I felt like I was starving. I’d ache to the point that I couldn’t sleep. No one really warns you about that. They don’t tell you that eating less and losing weight can be so painful. And worst of all, no one can tell you what feelings you will have or what mental struggle you will go through as you try to keep yourself from opening the fridge yet again today just so you can stare at your food and hopefully not take anything out… this time.

Every time I diet, I get upset. I’m either constantly hungry or it brings back some bad feelings. My Mother put me on a diet when I was 7 years old. Yes. SEVEN. I was always bigger than the other skinny girls in my class. She started feeding me cabbage soup and making me exercise with her. When I was 12, she took me with her to Weight Watchers meetings and even to a special Swedish Spa where you lay down and a machine zaps your muscles to work them for you.

So from an emotional and mental standpoint… it’s no wonder I grew up to be fat. Between being forced to eat everything on my adult portioned dinner plate by both parents, and then being constantly ridiculed by my Mother for my size… it’s no surprise that I have weight and body image problems.

The worst part for me is that as an adult I relate the ability to eat food in whatever portion I want and whenever I desire it to a feeling of success and severe satisfaction. Being able to go to the grocery store and pick anything I want off of the shelf in itself feels like triumph. Taking it home and putting it away in the cupboard and seeing the fullness of a shelf makes me feel accomplished. Being able to eat anything I want, any time that I want… it makes me feel alive.

Just 4 years ago, I was unable to say those things. I hardly had food. I didn’t even really have the money for the food I did have. I was literally starving. Yeah, sure… I was still overweight. But fact is, I was eating a couple of cubes of cheese and maybe 1/10th of a bag of frozen green beans a day. I lost weight at a rapid and extremely unhealthy rate. My muscles began to atrophy and to this day, I still have some mobility issues with my left arm because of the amount of deterioration my muscles experienced.

So yes, when I say that I have access to food and I can eat whenever and whatever I want… it truly feels like a sort of blissful success to me. It’s become an addiction. I feel better every time I put food in my mouth, chew, and swallow.

Until I suddenly don’t.

I eat things I shouldn’t. I didn’t always. It’s only in the last year that it’s gotten out of hand. I tell myself that it’s no big deal as I’m doing it. It’s just a little something this one time. It’s a special occasion, right? There’s no harm in it. But when you can sit down and eat half a container of Chips Ahoy cookies over the course of one day… or you somehow manage to eat 5 donuts in 2 days… it’s a problem. It’s getting really out of hand.

I love Jeremy with all of my heart, but he’s just as much an instigator in this. He has the same feelings toward food that I do. He likes that he can buy whatever he wants at the store, and if he goes without me, he’s much more likely to put things into the cart that have no business coming into our home. And then we sit down and eat these things together.

He’s built like me – he’s a big guy. Even if he loses weight, he’s a big guy. He’s struggling with his weight right now too. We feed off of the same problems and as soon as one of us is hungry, the other is too. And so we both eat. We were doing well for a little while. We both cut back and we were holding one another accountable by saying “No, I’m not going to have that extra helping because I don’t need it.” We kept one another from overindulging.

I know the exact moment we fell off the bandwagon. I forget the reason, but Jeremy brought home 2 bags of pizza bites – something I banned from our home many, many months ago. We ate a bag and agreed that we didn’t feel full or satisfied. We ended up making the second bag and that was it… we were back to square one.

I’m to the point where sometimes I put food in my mouth just because I want to. Sometimes, I just want to keep tasting it. I like to make joke of it and say “I’m letting my fat girl out… I’m not even hungry any more. I just want to keep tasting it.” Sometimes we refer to it as feeling snacky… just wanting to munch on something.

Jeremy has this wild notion that his weight isn’t all that bad and that if he gets motivated enough, he could just lose the weight. That’s probably true. I think he could. But I’m scared… Because if a doctor told me that I would die if I didn’t lose the weight, I’m scared that it wouldn’t be motivation enough… that I would just keep eating to ease the pain. I have a really terrible habit of eating my feelings. And that’s basically ANY feeling.

If I’m happy, I eat in celebration.
If I’m upset, I eat because I feel like I deserve cheering up.
If I’m lonely, I eat for comfort.
If I’m depressed, I eat in hopes of making myself happy.

I used to tell myself that I didn’t eat all that poorly. I think at some point, that was the truth. I don’t believe that my obesity is entirely related to how often my hand finds its way to my mouth. I have a cycle of underlying medical issues that keep me from losing weight – PCOS, chronic pain, plantar fasciitis so severe that it requires surgery. But those are just reasons I don’t lose weight – they aren’t any excuses for the reasons I keep piling on the pounds.

Remember when I went to the doctor last year for my PCOS? I told him I had gained 100 pounds in a year. He didn’t seem to believe me. I showed him pictures and it became quite clear to him that I had a weight issue. That’s one of the reasons he put me on Metformin. It was supposed to curb my appetite and help me lose weight in addition to alleviating my menstrual cycle issues.

I have no idea if that medication ever worked for me. It made me super sick for quite some time… up until the point that I lost my health insurance in December because my plan was no longer going to exist and I fell through the cracks of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Once I ran out of the medication, that was just sort of it. I’ve had some very light menstrual cycles on my own… so I assume it did me some good. But I’m no closer to any goals of losing weight. In fact, I’ve done nothing but gain.

I looked at a picture of Jeremy and I back in August just after we signed the papers to buy the house. Sure, I was overweight. I have been my entire life after all. But my face. Oh My God. My face. It was so much thinner than it is right now. I went from only having an extra chin when I look down to having an extra chin all of the time. I can grab the fat below my jaw line. Where did this come from!?

I’m physically beginning to struggle. When you are carrying this much weight on your bones, you don’t always realize how much it’s affecting your mobility. And then one day, you realize you are having a really hard time climbing the two flights of stairs to your apartment. You can’t carry anything up the stairs with you because your knees can’t tolerate the extra weight – it’s already carrying 350+ pounds of you.

That’s right. I said it. I am only 5’2″ in height and I weigh over 350 pounds.

I hide a lot of the weight fairly well. I’m getting to the point that I don’t any more, but most people would look at me and not believe that I weigh that much. I remember when I was a teenager and I thought I was so fat because I was 175 pounds at the age of 18. I knew back then that I needed to lose weight. But I told myself that so long as I didn’t reach 200, I would be okay.

I got pregnant with my daughter just a few years later and that was it. I slid right over that line with ease. Before I knew it, I was 250 pounds and climbing. And the more depressed I got after she was born, the more weight I packed on.

I don’t even know what to do any more. Exercising is so hard. Not even just because exercise isn’t all that fun for anyone, but because I seem to lack the discipline for it. We spent hundreds of dollars last year on a gym membership thinking it would hold us accountable and we’d go. I think we went maybe all of 5 times and that’s probably generous. I always had an excuse as to why I couldn’t go – lack of transportation, I was tired, I had to be up early, I was hurting, etc.

I told myself I’d go swimming last year too. To be fair, I would have if our apartment complex pool had been open more than a month of the year. Seriously, it was always either disgustingly filthy or closed. I know that in my current condition, swimming is my best option. I’m hoping that this year, I can do more swimming since the community we’re moving into has an Olympic size swimming pool.

I’m afraid drastic measures will need to be taken. I often wonder if I just knew what it felt like to be smaller, that maybe I could take better care of myself. Perhaps if I could just wake up with a more manageable size, I could work out and be more healthy.

But alas… I am currently without health insurance for the time being. I’m hoping that moving to a better neighborhood where I can go outside and walk around safely is going to make a difference. Or that having access to a clean pool will be a life changer. That having a kitchen I have space to cook in will give me the opportunity to prepare more healthy meals in advance so I’m not buying crap I can easily grab and eat. But only time will tell.

I suffer from Compulsive Overeating Disorder and I need to get help.