I was four or five when I first decided I was fat. I’ll end the suspense now and assure you that I was not fat. I wasn’t even chubby. I was what mothers everywhere like to cringe-inducingly describe as “curvy.” Like a little J-Lo in terry cloth shorts and cookie monster T-shirts, I rocked a padunkadunk where many of my contemporaries hardly filled out their Osh Kosh B’gosh. My older sister was of the latter category--tall and straight and effortlessly slender, she had her own struggles with always being the tallest in her class (guess who got the part of the mom again in the school play?), but all I could see was my own shame at being shorter and rounder.
In fact, neither my mom or my sister had issues with their weight. There were no diets in our house, no full length mirror scrutiny with disparaging remarks for me to watch and internalize. I never heard, unlike my friend Jessica, that my mother “Would rather have a dead daughter than a fat daughter.” And yet, somehow, before I was even in school, I began to believe that I was a massive balloon child of stay-puft proportions.
It’s pretty unclear where the origin of my body dysmorphia came from. This was 1982 or 83. Obesity had yet to become an epidemic, and fast food was still viewed as a treat. Most kids, like most adults, were still relatively trim by today’s standards. I had very little exposure to media images, as we didn’t own a TV and most computers were still massive 15 x 15 inch, 20-pound hunks of metal with green screens and dot matrix printouts. There was no Internet and MTV was in its infancy. Magazines still featured athletic-looking, feather-haired vixens with tiny waists but still identifiably female shapes, unlike the emaciated little boy bodies on stilt-like legs clomping down the runways today.
This fear and despair over my supposed fatness didn’t really keep me from eating, however, and seemed to often have almost the opposite effect. “If I’m already a pig, why not eat like one?” seemed to be my philosophy, with “Are you gonna eat that?” following closely behind. Like a little human Hoover I followed after my friends and classmates, eating their leftover and unwanted sweets and Lunchables. You would have thought I was starving from the way I swooped in at snack times, bobbing and weaving like a bird of prey on an antelope carcass. The concept of “fullness” was completely foreign to me, much like the even stranger, “stopping when you’re full.” If there was something good to eat, I could eat it any time, even if I’d just eaten, even if I’d had enough. By the time I was 9 or 10, I was the prototype of a binge eater.
People like to joke that they have problems with binge eating. “OMG, I totally pigged out and ate, like, 10 oreos.” Really?! That’s a fucking snack to a binge eater. That’s an appetizer. I was in fourth grade when I ate 32 cupcakes. In one sitting.
I had stayed home “sick” and was indulging in the best of late 80s daytime TV--The Price is Right, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel Williams--when I decide I need a treat. There is very little I love more than eating while watching TV, unless it’s eating while reading. There’s something so exceptionally comforting about zoning out and chewing--the thrill of mental escape and delicious taste mingling for a holistic pleasure sensation. It’s like G-rated masturbation for the ‘tween set.
My family didn’t really keep cookies or snacks in the house so I had to make do with a box of cake mix. I knew enough about baking to tackle this project so I proceeded and within the hour had a batch of toasty fresh yellow cupcakes peeking out of their pastel wrapping. In an act of conservatism I didn’t bother making frosting, and simply placed three on a plate and returned to my show. Almost twitching with anticipation, I unwrapped my golden treasures and bit into their soft little bodies with zeal.
A few bids on the Price is Right later I looked down to see my cakes were gone. Before you can say “Bob Barker” I was back in the kitchen, loading up my plate with round two. By the next commercial break those were gone too and I was back again. And again. 12 down. 15 down. 20. Oh God, 20! Panicking and starting to sweat, it began to sink in. How would I explain this? I had to hide the evidence! I had to get rid of them! Standing at the counter I abandoned all reason and began wildly shoveling them into my mouth as fast as I could unwrap them. I barely chewed, gasping for air as I wolfed down cake after cake, tears streaming down my face as fear and panic took hold. Finally, they were gone. I was half out of my mind by now, my eyes bugging out, my mouth forming a perfect silent scream. What had I done? What would I do?
“I’ll jog it off!” I cried in a fit of inspiration, clearly ignorant of the sheer magnitude of my caloric intake. I had no previous jogging experience. I really had zero inclination toward exercise other than walking and the occasional flailing, 10-year-old white girl attempts to dance. “How hard could it be?” I thought, lacing up my Keds and adjusting the straps on my bra. “It’s just running.” In a flash I was out the door, charging up the street with my head down and my arms wind milling wildly, like Pete Townsend in the throes of an epileptic fit.
About ¾ of the way up the block I developed a side stitch and just about fell on my neighbor’s lawn deer as the surprise and pain stopped me in my tracks. “I’m dying!” I wheezed to the deer as I grasped its concrete antlers for support. “Dyyyyyyinggggggg!”
I wasn’t dying. I was out of shape, had run without warming up, and had 32 cupcakes working their way through my digestive system. Defeated, I limped home, clutching my side and moaning. I still hate running. If pressed, I *might* be able to run a mile, but certainly not without a rapist or a very large dog chasing me.
I have a theory that some people are just not physically built for running. Think about it--different dog breeds are or are not runners as a general rule. Your slender, long-limbed dogs like the Greyhound (skinny bitch!) are simply made to take flight over hill and dale (whatever a dale is), but your average little short-legged dogs in the yappy family are not exactly speed demons. If I were a dog I would probably be a basset hound, or maybe a poodle mix (I have no doubt that I would be hypoallergenic). I’m tall and graced with long legs, sure, but I also have wide hips that jar painfully up and down and a sizable rack few sports bras can contain. So, despite many of my friend’s ongoing dedication to lure me into the cult, I am not now, nor ever will be, a runner.
The sensible thing to do after the great cupcake incident would have been to purge, but I had a natural disinclination toward barfing and had yet to explore bulimia at that tender age. Instead, I was stuck with my brick of cake and my shame as I labored to hide all traces of the day’s sins.
Of course, as these things always go, I was found out by my sister, and luckily not by my mom. Ariel, allied with me against the tyranny of parents, kept my secret and confronted me privately. Preternaturally empathic and scarily smart, my sister was the model of discretion. “Let’s have a meeting,” she said as she pulled me into my closet. There, among my summer dresses and forgotten toys, she said, and I am not making this up, “Have you considered that you might be a binge eater?”
“I’m not,” I said, nudging a half-eaten box of cookies out of the way. A wizened middle schooler who had perused our father’s extensive self-help library from a tender age, Ariel wasn’t having it. “I think you are,” she said delicately, “and you may need help.” “I’ll be better,” I promised. “Really, I’m fine.”
In fact, neither my mom or my sister had issues with their weight. There were no diets in our house, no full length mirror scrutiny with disparaging remarks for me to watch and internalize. I never heard, unlike my friend Jessica, that my mother “Would rather have a dead daughter than a fat daughter.” And yet, somehow, before I was even in school, I began to believe that I was a massive balloon child of stay-puft proportions.
It’s pretty unclear where the origin of my body dysmorphia came from. This was 1982 or 83. Obesity had yet to become an epidemic, and fast food was still viewed as a treat. Most kids, like most adults, were still relatively trim by today’s standards. I had very little exposure to media images, as we didn’t own a TV and most computers were still massive 15 x 15 inch, 20-pound hunks of metal with green screens and dot matrix printouts. There was no Internet and MTV was in its infancy. Magazines still featured athletic-looking, feather-haired vixens with tiny waists but still identifiably female shapes, unlike the emaciated little boy bodies on stilt-like legs clomping down the runways today.
This fear and despair over my supposed fatness didn’t really keep me from eating, however, and seemed to often have almost the opposite effect. “If I’m already a pig, why not eat like one?” seemed to be my philosophy, with “Are you gonna eat that?” following closely behind. Like a little human Hoover I followed after my friends and classmates, eating their leftover and unwanted sweets and Lunchables. You would have thought I was starving from the way I swooped in at snack times, bobbing and weaving like a bird of prey on an antelope carcass. The concept of “fullness” was completely foreign to me, much like the even stranger, “stopping when you’re full.” If there was something good to eat, I could eat it any time, even if I’d just eaten, even if I’d had enough. By the time I was 9 or 10, I was the prototype of a binge eater.
People like to joke that they have problems with binge eating. “OMG, I totally pigged out and ate, like, 10 oreos.” Really?! That’s a fucking snack to a binge eater. That’s an appetizer. I was in fourth grade when I ate 32 cupcakes. In one sitting.
I had stayed home “sick” and was indulging in the best of late 80s daytime TV--The Price is Right, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel Williams--when I decide I need a treat. There is very little I love more than eating while watching TV, unless it’s eating while reading. There’s something so exceptionally comforting about zoning out and chewing--the thrill of mental escape and delicious taste mingling for a holistic pleasure sensation. It’s like G-rated masturbation for the ‘tween set.
My family didn’t really keep cookies or snacks in the house so I had to make do with a box of cake mix. I knew enough about baking to tackle this project so I proceeded and within the hour had a batch of toasty fresh yellow cupcakes peeking out of their pastel wrapping. In an act of conservatism I didn’t bother making frosting, and simply placed three on a plate and returned to my show. Almost twitching with anticipation, I unwrapped my golden treasures and bit into their soft little bodies with zeal.
A few bids on the Price is Right later I looked down to see my cakes were gone. Before you can say “Bob Barker” I was back in the kitchen, loading up my plate with round two. By the next commercial break those were gone too and I was back again. And again. 12 down. 15 down. 20. Oh God, 20! Panicking and starting to sweat, it began to sink in. How would I explain this? I had to hide the evidence! I had to get rid of them! Standing at the counter I abandoned all reason and began wildly shoveling them into my mouth as fast as I could unwrap them. I barely chewed, gasping for air as I wolfed down cake after cake, tears streaming down my face as fear and panic took hold. Finally, they were gone. I was half out of my mind by now, my eyes bugging out, my mouth forming a perfect silent scream. What had I done? What would I do?
“I’ll jog it off!” I cried in a fit of inspiration, clearly ignorant of the sheer magnitude of my caloric intake. I had no previous jogging experience. I really had zero inclination toward exercise other than walking and the occasional flailing, 10-year-old white girl attempts to dance. “How hard could it be?” I thought, lacing up my Keds and adjusting the straps on my bra. “It’s just running.” In a flash I was out the door, charging up the street with my head down and my arms wind milling wildly, like Pete Townsend in the throes of an epileptic fit.
About ¾ of the way up the block I developed a side stitch and just about fell on my neighbor’s lawn deer as the surprise and pain stopped me in my tracks. “I’m dying!” I wheezed to the deer as I grasped its concrete antlers for support. “Dyyyyyyinggggggg!”
I wasn’t dying. I was out of shape, had run without warming up, and had 32 cupcakes working their way through my digestive system. Defeated, I limped home, clutching my side and moaning. I still hate running. If pressed, I *might* be able to run a mile, but certainly not without a rapist or a very large dog chasing me.
I have a theory that some people are just not physically built for running. Think about it--different dog breeds are or are not runners as a general rule. Your slender, long-limbed dogs like the Greyhound (skinny bitch!) are simply made to take flight over hill and dale (whatever a dale is), but your average little short-legged dogs in the yappy family are not exactly speed demons. If I were a dog I would probably be a basset hound, or maybe a poodle mix (I have no doubt that I would be hypoallergenic). I’m tall and graced with long legs, sure, but I also have wide hips that jar painfully up and down and a sizable rack few sports bras can contain. So, despite many of my friend’s ongoing dedication to lure me into the cult, I am not now, nor ever will be, a runner.
The sensible thing to do after the great cupcake incident would have been to purge, but I had a natural disinclination toward barfing and had yet to explore bulimia at that tender age. Instead, I was stuck with my brick of cake and my shame as I labored to hide all traces of the day’s sins.
Of course, as these things always go, I was found out by my sister, and luckily not by my mom. Ariel, allied with me against the tyranny of parents, kept my secret and confronted me privately. Preternaturally empathic and scarily smart, my sister was the model of discretion. “Let’s have a meeting,” she said as she pulled me into my closet. There, among my summer dresses and forgotten toys, she said, and I am not making this up, “Have you considered that you might be a binge eater?”
“I’m not,” I said, nudging a half-eaten box of cookies out of the way. A wizened middle schooler who had perused our father’s extensive self-help library from a tender age, Ariel wasn’t having it. “I think you are,” she said delicately, “and you may need help.” “I’ll be better,” I promised. “Really, I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. Even before Cupcakeaggedon, I had amply demonstrated my inability to stop once I got my first taste of the white stuff. Unbeknownst to my family but certainly noticed by my babysitting charge’s parents, I consistently cleared their house of cookies with Germanic efficiency. “Leave no cookie behind” was my clarion call. Add to that my agonizingly shameful embezzlement of red vines from my class “store,” which at 5 cents apiece, nearly constituted grand larceny at the rate I lifted them.
I had a problem. An addiction in the truest sense. And I’m sad to report this remains my greatest vice and near impossible habit to ditch even now. At least in my later years, though, I paid for my sugar, having had the fear of God seared into my motherboard by my lowest moment of sugar-driven thievery....
Part II here.
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Deborah Méndez Wilson
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Comments
I see we speak the same language, Linda. Ice cream sandwiches are always a good pick.
Thank you so much, Jenny! Part II coming very soon.
Maryway, hopefully we just won't get chased. Thanks!
Now, to be serious, food addiction is something I'm also familiar with. It's very similar to Alcoholism and even harder to kick. You can completely stop drinking alcohol, but if you stop eating, you will die. You are clearly an emotional eater. You were addicted to that sugar high you got from sweets. Unfortunately, that's usually followed by a sugar low, so you're in the throes of repeated mood swings -- kinda like a manic depressive.
The trick to curing sugar addiction is, I think, cutting out all (or nearly all) sugar and white flour and maintaining a high protein diet. Fresh fruit can somewhat satisfy sugar cravings without putting you on the roller coaster. Bananas are particularly good at satisfying cravings, I understand.
I suggest you look up your local chapter of Overeaters Anonymous. They helped me.
Thanks for an entertaining read.