Clara B.
I had never considered bariatric surgery. People around me made nasty comments about the obese, forgetting that there were several obese people in the room. (Oh, they don't count, they're "friends"). They made nasty comments about bariatric surgery as the "easy" way out for lazy people. For my part, I thought my eating disorder and weight gain were 100% psychological. The moment I admitted to myself ten years ago that I had an eating disorder, I dutifully marched myself off to an eating disorder support group, got individual therapy for my eating disorder, saw a nutritionist. I learned to accept myself just as I was, I learned that there aren't "bad" and "good" foods, it's just food, without moral qualities. I learned it's okay to be larger. I decided that no one should judge me for my size. I realized that every time I had lost weight in the past, it was through no effort on my part (falling in love, having an ulcer my freshman year of college, etc. - all effective means that can't be duplicated). The times I tried to lose weight, I would head right for the fridge at the first whiff of restriction.
When I was in my early 20s, I thought I just had a big appetite. But I was in control. I could eat a fair amount and not gain weight, so obviously I was lucky. Wrong. When I was 25 and living in Belize, I wrote a friend who had had an eating disorder and told her of my distress - not being able to stop eating the delicious homemade tortillas filled with lovely things. I just wanted to eat and eat. And she was the only one I could talk to, because she had been open with me about her eating disorder. I still didn't think I really had a problem. Not until I met my boyfriend. Boy, was that a fun ride. As I started to fall for him, I shed pounds like crazy, soaring on a dopamine cloud. I could easily lose ten pounds in a week, maybe even a weekend. Food? Who needs food when you're in love? I thought it would last forever. Hah! I was 27, 140 pounds, and the world was my oyster. I also have intractable chronic pain - fibromyalgia and migraines - in severe pain every day since I was about 12, maybe younger. When I fell in love, my pain vanished. Completely. I have a dopamine definciency. They're finding this in patients with fibromyalgia. Dopamine surge = no pain. Understand, this was huge. Being in pain every day and suddenly, for the FISRT TIME EVER IN MY MEMORY, it was all gone. Not just a little gone, not mostly gone, but ALL gone. I felt like a "normal" person for the first time in my life. Bliss. I thought, I'm cured, no more pain, no more weight issues, no more overeating.
Guess what? I didn't last. The dopamine surge of falling in love started to wear off after three blissful months. I started to feel pain again. And I started looking for a dopamine high again. A momentary distraction from my pain in a delicious pint of Ben 'n Jerry's from the corner 7-11. Sometimes two, when my boyfriend was out of town.
And slowly, it all crept back. The 30 pounds I had shed without effort came back as 50. My unsupportive boyfriend told me I was ballooning up. The MOMENT I admitted I had an eating disorder (gaining 50 pounds sealed that for me), I was off to find a compulsive overeaters' support group, a therapist for my eating disorder, a nutritionist, a compassionate doctor who didn't judge. I thought eating disorders were completely psychological. If I did enough "work" on myself, if I accepted myself just as I was, I could beat it. I was smart, I got a good score on the SAT and went to a prestigious college. I could beat this through total acceptance.
My boyfriend told me several times during the course of our 7 year relationship that I looked like a beached whale. Why I didn't up and leave right then and there is anyone's guess, but I loved the security of a relationship, and he was very loyal. Just not supportive. He never tried to understand my position, he just wanted to see results. The more he badgered and criticized me, the more I snuck food. Duh, you idiot boyfriend, like I'm going to lose weight by eating pretzels in front of you after you say such mean things. He was of the negative motivation school. Say mean things so she can strive to be better. Doesn't work well on animals. Works even less on people. I was recalcitrant. I knew he was an idiot and I wouldn't let him get me down. But words do hurt, and the disrespect burned.
The first time I remember feeling funny about my eating habits I was about 12. I was at my brother's piano recital, and there were little chocolate turtles at the food table. We were health nuts, raised on hippie carob bars, so I'm not sure I'd ever had a turtle before. It was delicious. I wanted more. No one else was taking more. SO when no one was looking, I took more for myself.
Warning to hippie parents who raise your kids on organic tofu and homegrown peas - that doesn't make your child immune from eating disorders or obesity! Not if you give them subtle bad messages about food when you think you're being helpful.
I couldn't do much to feed my eating disorder as a kid with no car and no grocery store anywhere nearby. I couldn't do that much to feed it in college even, with no money, and living off cafeteria food. But it was slowly growing inside me. My mother was desperate to find a cure to my pain. She took my to hippie dippy quack naturopathic doctors, most of whome were very nice AND all of them THOROUGHLY convinced that they could cure me. Back then, no one knew what fibromyalgia was. The old naturopath trick - do some bogus muscle testing for food allergies and then restrict the adolescent female from eating the staples of the American adolescent female diet: milk, wheat and corn. Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. My mother just wanted to help, but little comments, like when I picked up a bottle of aspirin: "Did you eat wheat today?" or "when I was your age, I would come home and make myself one piece of toast even though I wanted two" didn't really help all that much.
We had three weeks of sit-down dinners during my entire adolescence. It was the summer of 1986, I was 14, and we had 2 Japanese exchange students staying with us. Depsite the fact that our house was unfinished and had exposed walls, my mother wanted to show them that we were a typical American family, so we cleaned off the table (that took a lot of effort, it usually was covered in years of junk), and sat down to dinner every night. Otherwise, it was everyone for themselves, and we'd eat in the living room on the couch. To this day, I'm really uncomfortable eating at a table for more than a few minutes.
Both my grandmothers had a problem. It's called "50s housewife perfectionism". In my maternal grandmother, the beautiful socialite, the colonel's wife, the artist, the diplomatic hostess who fed canapes to European dignataries in Moscow the day of Stalin's funeral, it manifested as a highly observant and critical view of the world. Russian women, she observed, were 20 pounds heavier than the average American women and dressed like men, doing men's jobs. She drank and smoked and died of throat cancer at the age of 64. My fatehr's mother was a tragic figure. She was athletic, a tennis star, had the perfect developmental trajectory all planned out for my father's upbringing, from the blazer he would wear to first day of kindergarten to what he would study at Northwestern (Biochemistry). Then she went swimming one day, and came home paralyzed, or soon to be paralyzed, anyway. She ruled the Bard clan with a bitter mouth, rolling around in her wheelchair, an independent widow in the later years, control-tripping people in to doing what she wanted them to do. When I visited her in Colorado for an excruciating 3 weeks when I was 11, she told me she had never become "fat" like all those other people in wheelchairs. That seemed to be her proudest accomplishment - controlling herself and the people around her. My grandmother died of malnutrition at the age of 84. She weighed 69 pounds. She told my cousin, a tall, big boned girl, that she would be perfect at 110 pounds. Back then I had no idea what 110 pounds would look like, but now looking back, there's no way you'd fit a girl like that in a 110 pound frame. This cousin, Erin, my favorite, became anorexic and addicted to drugs (but is better now). She was my favorite, because she always told me what was up in the alien world that was Colorado and a family full of strangers. My parents got as far away from my grandmother as they could after they got married. That ment almost falling off the west coast. My father is the most athletic 67 year-old you will meet. His sister is tall and lean. But their other sister was short, and, for lack of a better term, squat. Later, after our grandmother died and was rolling in her grave as we ate Chinese food out of boxes in her living room, Erin told me that Aunt Cindy was a "snacker". Erin said, "you probably don't even know what you weigh," putting me up on a pedestal. I nodded my head. I had no idea. But I daren't tell her I still cared, and still felt fat. I let Erin think I was strong. I let everyone think I was strong, except my mother and my friend Paula, the aforementioned friend with the eating disorder - in remision. I never told my dad. As my brother got in some bad scrapes in his early 30s, I was the good child, the one who had it together. I had an image to withold. The funny thing is, I don't think my dad would react badly. It's just that, until my grandmother died, I never knew he loved me because he never once told me (or at least I don't remember him doing so). But when we picked up the her ashes and were driving to some sort of middle-America Applebees-type restaurant (a place I certainly would look down my nose at) to meet all the cousins for dinner, he told me my aunts were proud of me. I told this to my mother after I got home, and she said, "it's his way, maybe his only way, of telling you he loves you." That was news. I'd never really been sure. I talked to him after that, about how much it hurt that he neglected us, and we cried, in my office at school, and it was the best talk we ever had. But I never told him about muy eating disorder. Because I was the good kid, who had it together. Cousin Erin commented on how cool and nice my dad was, and he must have been a really good father, comparing him to my aunts. I replied "you didn't have to grow up with him." (or without him, as it mostly was). The grass is always greener.
My brother binged on sugar in high school. He's a man of extremes, and intense as all get out and a mathematical genius. So he had to be right. He spent several years on an anti-sugar kick. Then one day I poked around his room and found all the candy wrappers. Hard candy, those lemony things in a stiff plastic bag. Empty bags of candy all over the floor and under the bed. We had a secret stash of ice-cream - always Breyers mint chocolate chip. We never had any other flavor. Maybe it was my mother's secret stash, but of course we knew where it was. I'm not sure how we replenished it, or maybe we ate less of it than I thought. My brother told me how awful sugar was for you when he was on the anti-sugar kick. He had lots of authority in his voice, and a smart-alec, and with super smarts, so I believed him, but I also thought he was weird.
Someone told my mother she was fat when she was a kid. Maybe my grandmother, I don't know. I look at her pictures, and she's a very cute girl, not too tall. In high school, slender and pretty. But she never thought so. When I was a teeanger, I thought my mother was horribly fat. Turns out, she was smaller than I am now. In 4-H, we'd go to the county fair, and she'd tell me the super obese people there - well, it somehow affects them, it affects their judgment, they're not like regular people. Being so fat is bad, was the message. But she was a nice person, and struggled with weight herself. She and my dad separated under not pleasant terms when I was 5, and I think the rejection reflected on her body image.
My mother died of ovarian cancer on March 31, 2007. She was the closest person to me, ever. Once, in the 4 years she was sick and in remission, she said to me how great it was that cancer had made her lose so much weight. I was horrified, but I couldn't begrudge her that. My best friend's mother had basically said the same thing when she had diverticulitis and couldn't go to the bathroom without a colostomy bag. Hey, but at least we're skinny. My mother lost about 80 pounds. I think she was around 180 or 190 when she got cancer, and around 100 when she died and as she was dying, her body stopped needing food. When she made that comment, I was in my "accept myself means not thinking I need to lose weight." Because if I thought I needed to lose weight, it meant I didn't fully accept myself just as I was. I think I needed to go through that phase, or I never would have loved myself fully. But there came a time when I realized that it's also okay to want to be your natural size instead of your binge-eating size. I could give myself that desire and not let go of my pride.
I was kind of a skinny kid. Until I got breasts. Then I was kind of a skinny kid with big breasts and glasses.
