Excerpt from The Optimistic Food Addict (Fisanick): I'd Die(t) for You

 

THIS EXCERPT FROM THE OPTIMISTIC FOOD ADDICT SEEMS APPROPRIATE FOR WHAT MANY PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCING FROM THE "QUARANTINE FIFTEEN" COUNTRY-WIDE AVERAGE POUNDS GAINED OVER THE PAST YEAR.

             For a good half an hour before falling asleep, I would try to force my mind to coerce my body to burn itself alive. I hated my fat so much that I would imagine it sizzling like bacon in a skillet, dripping like hot wax off my bones and into the ether. I was determined to will my fat to melt away.
             The next morning I would wake up, disappointed to find my thighs and ass still too big to fit comfortably in my third-hand Jordache jeans. And later that night, I’d lay prone in my bed, visually imagining my flesh liquefying in my skin once again.
             This dour wishful thinking would go on night after night from the time I was 11 until well into my 20s. And yet many people asked me, nearly as often as I asked myself, if being fat bothered me so much, why couldn’t I diet and exercise it all away? Why become fat at all? Why stay fat?
             I was already being bullied in school for being different—a poet, a dreamer, a creative thinker, poor, too talkative, too whatever—but now they had another way to target me: my weight. I was also chided at home by a brother who was underweight, a mother who struggled with her own weight, and a father who had been tortured his whole life for being obese. My body, or rather, my fat, was always up for critique by others, including doctors, counselors, teachers, and anyone who felt like they knew better. They were only, as they often said, “trying to help.”
             I went on a diet for the first time soon after my sixth grade school pictures came home. They revealed a weight gain of more than 70 pounds since the previous school year; a reality I later realized was caused by the onset of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, a metabolic-endocrine disorder characterized in part by weight gain and an inability to lose weight. Since I didn’t have money for a diet program, I chose what would now be called intermittent fasting as my weapon against the war on fat. I would eat breakfast, skip lunch, and eat dinner. I gained weight. I gained a lot of weight.
             In the years that followed, I committed to one diet or another at a time. My mother tried Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal, and I would sneak into her card stash, and make my own daily diet.

             My adult neighborhood friend lost a ton of weight taking street amphetamines (speed), and I tried those for a while too. Ironically, they caused me so much anxiety that I ate to calm down and ultimately gained more weight.
             My friend’s Mom lost weight using a silver exercise suit that she bought off an infomercial. I borrowed that for a week or so, but I found that the only thing it made me was sweaty and claustrophobic.
             Throughout my teen years, my friends and I would go on diets together, ranging from cottage cheese, to white rice, to rice cakes. We were fad diet queens. We did low fat diets and low calorie diets. I remember the T-factor diet, and the Weigh to Win, faith-based diet, with charts and numbers and blocks. We would exercise at the gym and then eat at McDonald’s. We would cry about our ballooning pants sizes, and then eat at a buffet until bursting.
             Throughout those years, I lost 15 pounds here and ten pounds there, but mostly, I gained. I gained, and I gained, and I lost. In order to starve myself, I had to hate my body. In order to look at my body in the mirror at 5’5 and 135 pounds and think I was worthless because I was so fat, I had to hate my body. By the time I was a senior in high school, my mind and body were ruled by two powerful emotions: shame and disgust. While my eating disorder likely formed as a means of feeling control over my life, the twin daggers of shame and disgust took it to the next level, a place that, even now at 42, I find myself slipping into from time to time. They are deeply cut grooves in my brain.
              Several recent studies have proven that shaming people for being overweight is not an effective means for helping them lose weight. Those of us who have struggled with our weights know this to be true, but it seems like the rest of the world still has not caught on. In reality, though, I believe that fat hatred and body policing are far more complex than they appear. There is no doubt that some people in my life have encouraged me to lose weight because they thought it was best for my health. After all, ‘fat equals death’ has been pounded into our heads for decades by doctors, magazines, television shows, movies, and everywhere else we look. But other people have certainly not had my health in mind when they thought they had the right to talk to me about what they believed to be a very serious problem: MY weight.
             As those of us forever-fat people will tell you, we are quite aware of our size, and it has occurred to us more than a few times that maybe we should lose weight. Therefore, mooing, puffing chipmunk-cheek faces, making beeping sounds, or otherwise attempting to humiliate us will not make us thinner. What it will do is certainly the point: make us feel further shame and disgust, and sink our self-esteem ever lower than before we walked by.
             Meanwhile, food manufacturers and marketers continue to make foods that promote cravings, and they openly admit to it. Books, like Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, have exposed the intentional ways in which Big Food keeps us in its clutches by lacing their products with chemicals that raise our endorphin levels, which makes us want more and more, no matter how physically full we may be. You see, in America, we are supposed to be good consumers. We are supposed to buy the junk food, but we are not supposed to look like we ate it.
             And so for me, it went on. Eventually, I would lose 100 pounds four times. First, in my senior year of college on the Rainbow Weigh to Win Plan, a diet tool that required that I keep track of every bite I put in my mouth by marking it on a chart. It worked for weight loss. I lost 109 pounds in about a year, but I became even more food obsessed. I was so hungry that I was the first one in line for breakfast every morning. My roommate once ate my 100 calorie snack that I had been thinking about all day, and I snapped at her. I was outraged! I used to go out to dinner with friends and eat just a plain baked potato while they enjoyed their roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. But I stuck with it. People were complimenting my body in a way that no one had before, in a way that I imagined they complimented pretty women. In fact, for the first time ever, I was attractive to men my own age.
             I ended up going off the plan two years later while in graduate school. The stress of my studies and teaching college for the first time wore down the walls I had constructed. My boyfriend moved in with me, and he had a love for McDonald’s and other fast food. My lifetime of bad habits crept back in. Plus, he had a car, so I stopped walking everywhere. The weight came back to the tune of 137 pounds. I was no longer restricting. I was in full binge mode. I ate and cried and ate and cried. I could no longer stop at one bagel. I had to eat two. I could no longer put my plate in the sink after one slice of lasagna. I had to have three. I kept trying to fill up a bucket, without knowing that it had a big hole in the bottom.
             Two years later, after being diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), my doctor urged me to try the Atkins diet, which meant very, very limited carbohydrates and lots of meat and fat. (I have heard that it has since been re-configured.) The weight poured off of me to the tune of ten pounds per month. Chasing the numbers on the scale was exhilarating! I was obsessed with counting carbs and with going into ketosis, a state in which the body burns its own fat for fuel. And I binged. Boy, did I binge. There were no portion recommendations on fat and meat, so I would eat 12-oz. steaks and bags upon bags of pork rinds. I would eat blocks of cheese and gorge on plates of bacon and eggs.
             I was also constipated and angry and prone to wild mood swings. I found myself screaming and crying at my boyfriend-now-husband over nothing. As my pant size plummeted, my life had never been more miserable. I felt more out of control than ever, and I finally fell to pieces when a friend came to visit for a few days to celebrate her birthday and my graduation from a Master’s program. For the first time in nine months, I ate sugar—birthday cake and ice cream. I couldn’t stop. I ate at the party, and then in the dead of night, when everyone was asleep, I went downstairs and ate again. I got up early and ate again. I couldn’t wait for my friend to go home so that I could gorge on the rest of it. In all, I ate three quarters of a sheet cake and an entire half gallon of chocolate ice cream. From there, it was an uphill climb. The nearly 100 pounds I had lost came back, plus 70 more.
             This pattern went on and on well into my 30s. I lost 123 pounds on the South Beach Diet. I gained it back. I lost 111 pounds through calorie reduction and counting. I gained it back. I couldn’t stick to any eating plan longer than a year. It was as though after a year, I couldn’t take the restriction. I couldn’t take being told what to do by some unseen force. I had never felt worse about my body or myself, despite being highly successful in my academic career.  

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