When I was the Fat Girl

I've been reading a lot about obesity and compulsive eating. As I read, i remember the deep pain i experienced as a - i guess i'll just use the word - fat child, teen and young woman. I was lonely, depressed and teased mercilessly. my family and friends constantly urged me to lose weight and scolded me for eating anything but diet food. my mother literally cried in frustration when i couldn't stay on a diet.

I believed i was heinous to look at. it hurt like hell. i felt i carried 100 extra pounds of sheer pain.

having lost those pounds three times, i eventually learned to keep them off through over 20 years of anorexia and bulimia. Yet, as AWFUL as those years were (starving, fainting, binging, binging, binging, puking), i still knew the greatest sadness from those early fat years.

Strange as it sounds, no one commented on my weight when i was anorexic or bulimic.when i weighed my least, i lived in manhattan, among many a super skinny woman. when bulimic, i was a perfectly normal weight that swung to the high end of thin. i didn't "wear" my illness, so no one teased or taunted

Would i take back a minute of any of those years. No. but i still hurt the most for the fat girl

Fear of Food No More

When I started my job a few years ago, I no longer binged, purged or starved BUT i now realize, I was still afraid of food.

I'm not afraid anymore

A little back story, much of my job ironically entails making sure a rather food obsessed office eats. I had no idea when i started that providing meals for everyone would be my job. It takes up (in my opinion, but not my bosses) a silly amount of time each day, but for now, this is my job.

Inevitably, my car is filled with fried chicken, Big Macs, shakes, pancakes and bacon, etc. These are ALL foods i spent as much time as possible avoiding, because i was so TERRIFIED of them. What if i ate french fries, would i be back on my old endless and devastating binge cycles? What if i ate when i wasn't hungry just because the food was there? would i go back to my nearly life long MISERABLE obsession with eating?

None of that happened. Now, blessedly, i don't have those fears. That's because i've learned that FOOD CAN NOT AND WILL NOT SOLVE MY PROBLEMS! i think i did what i had to do to get here out of sheer survival instincts. Perhaps, there was no coincidence that i landed here?

All my life i used food to comfort me, to be my best and sometimes only friend, to replace a lover -- to block out any feelings and particularly to anesthetize pain.

In my case, it was the 12 steps that helped me to see that i was trying to use food for something it could never do. Food won't find me a different job, food won't land me a potential husband, nor will it put money in my bank account or do anything other than...feed me food. Only I can do all those other things for myself.

It's been a journey, and it's cool to see it's possible to move on to live. i was pretty sure that it wasn't possible

Throwing up

I felt a little queasy after dinner Sunday night but didn't make too much of it until I woke up at 2 am desperately needing to throw up violently.

It was awful and sickening and painful and terrible. All I wanted was it for it too end, please, please, please.

It occurred to me that for most of my life, i CHOSE to throw up in and throughout the day. AND i even got some perverse pleasure from it -- i felt i was regurgitating all my problems AND all the calories i'd binged in right before the purge. I'd come out lighter, i thought, emotionally and physically.

It hard to imagine voluntarily doing what i went thru Sunday night.