My name is Michele and I have eating issues

This week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, which is why I’m doing a post on my own eating issues. While the only recognized disorders are anorexia nervosa, bulimia and binge/compulsive overeating, food and eating issues don’t end there. Many of us have a difficult relations with food and body image, no doubt complicated by how very physically-oriented our society is.

My own experience with food started out healthily enough. My mom may have made me a member of the clean plate club, but she also gave me a liking for vegetables and cereals, an adventurous palet and good over all nutrition habits.

But she died when I was nine and things changed dramatically. My siblings and I moved in with my dad who taught us the joys of a bachelor life. I went from eating out maybe once a week, if we were very lucky, to eating out for almost every meal. I went from living in a neighborhood where everyone had swing sets and backyards and moms traded time off with others in the neighborhood to living in an apartment complex with no other kids my own age, much less play ground equipment. Plus, my dad used cable as a baby sitter.

If the sudden lifestyle change and depression from the death of my mother was enough things began to get worse. I could say that my father didn’t know how to be a good parent, but the truth is he didn’t seem to care enough to learn either.

I developed issues with being a female. Those Tampon and pad commercials? Imagine being the only female in the room and feeling as if all the males are looking at you like you’re disgusting because that’s what your body did once a month. My mother was bad mouthed by my father, and all other women were quantified by what they could give him. He often tried to pass off responsibility for us to his girlfriends. And they, well apparently all of them had exs who abused them and about two thirds of them broke up with him to go back to their ex who beat them. They also looked nothing like me, and comments on my appearance weren’t commonly positive. Luckily, they weren’t common at all.

When I hit my teen years things got worse. First, suddenly I was being quantified by what I could give my father. Given past experience with his views of women, his expectations of women and my drive to get attention from my daddy this was a very bad development.

We got older, parental involvement lessened, as did the number of trips we made to the grocery store. I became a latchkey kid over a year before my siblings, which led to them picking food up on the way home as per normal, and assuming I ate something at home. There was some pretty extreme favoritism going on benefiting my brother so even when we did go grocery shopping more than once he’d invite friends over and they’d stay up, literally, all night eating most of the food we had bought. There was no such thing as eating a portion and leaving the rest for everyone else. You ate the whole box of 20 corn dogs while you had the chance or else you might not have anything to eat two days later. You never knew who was coming home, whether they’d be eating, or bringing their own food, or what.

So I developed competitive eating problems.

You’d think since I moved out ten years ago and haven’t done without food for most of that time it would be something you could just get over, but it’s not.

Every time we eat, especially eating out, I feel like I have to stuff myself because I might not have access to food later, when I get hungry.

I feel like I must eat, even if I’m not hungry because I might not get another chance when I am hungry.

When I see other people eat, especially the people in my family, hungry or not I feel like I need to eat because they will eat it all and there will be no food for me.

Which means even though I like healthier food when I see other people eating junk food I feel the urge to eat that too.

I like salads, but they don’t fill me up the way burgers and fries or big greasy meals do, so I skip them, because I still fear there won’t be food if I get hungry later.

So I constantly make bad food choices because I’m scared we’ll run out of food.

Which leads to me being overweight (okay, so I’d probably always be big. It leads to me being more overweight than I should be.) Which leads to complications with my body image (especially when combined with the lessons learned as a child about women as a gender–and what they were good for–and about what was attractive and not attractive–five foot two Playboy models with augmentations, attractive; over five four or 120 pounds, not attractive.)

After I had my son I gained weight, then lost a lot of it. I got down to just over my ideal weight of 200 pounds (by 4 pounds). I got so excited I started exercising more. I started seeing how long I could go without eating. I wondered if I could get down to 150, or even 120. I cut myself off pretty quick, but I have to admit I’d scared myself. i never thought I was the disorder type (as if there is a type, but that’s how I put it in my head).

So I stopped exercising and dieting because I was scared of myself and I saw now that there were things going on that had nothing to do with my actual size. i knew I had to address those things first, and get a healthy image of myself in place or else I would find myself right back in the same situation.

By that point I knew I was pregnant with my daughter and i knew that I had to change something because I was not willing to pass my body image issues on to my little girl.

So I let it go and I tried very hard to change myself esteem and my body image without trying to manipulate myself. I needed to know that I was a good, valid person, without being size anything or the right BMI number.

I have to say writing helped a lot. It gave me something that I accomplished that I could be proud of that wasn’t physical. It wasn’t about me. Divorcing myself and my self worth from my work helped me build that line and now I can apply that line to other things.

Like I am not defined by my weight. I do not have to eat how others eat to be a whole person. I can eat a salad, if that’s what looks good, and I am capable of dealing with hunger if it arises later.

I’m not a fourteen year old girl looking into an empty fridge while my family eats McDonald’s in the other room anymore.

It’s still a fight. I’m wired wrong and there are days when it’s easy to remember that and easy to eat in a way that leaves me feeling good, satisfied and not gorged. And there are days when I can’t say no and I eat too much of foods I know leave me bloated, gassy and feeling horrible.

I think I’m beautiful now. I think I’m a worthy person. And yeah, there are days when I go to Walmart or open a clothing catalog and notice that size 14 is considered plus size now. When I see that they don’t even make some of the cute panties and bras or nightie in my size.

Or yes, when I see the media praising so-and-so for be gorgeous and size 2 and then I see people calling so-and-so a fat ass for being a size 2. When I see people tell us overweight folks to just stop eating as much, or go vegan. When Doctor fucking Phil tells some beautiful, not overweight woman that she’d never be overweight unless she was eating wrong on purpose. When the nurse tells me losing weight is just a matter of math, all I have to do is not eat as many calories as I burn.

It’s just not that easy.

Not when your body is telling you you should terrified that the food is going to run out.

Or in the case of the recognized disorders, your body is telling you that you’re hideously overweight, or wildly out of control. That you have to punish yourself because you had a fight with your mom today, or that you have to weigh your food in and food out to make sure the math is balancing.

For some of us, many of us, it just isn’t that easy.

Whether you have disorder or merely issues, it’s time to stop beating yourself up, or deluding yourself, whether you do it through BBW labels or punishing your body. It’s time to be beautiful and healthy and whole people, instead of trying to cut out the parts of ourselves that other people don’t like.