My relationship with food has always been complicated. I am not convinced that is the right word but I choose it because I want to share my experience and find it difficult to put into words. Sharing this part of the story makes me feel the most vulnerable. How do you explain to someone who’s never had this kind of toxic relationship with food how making myself feel physically terrible somehow made me feel better?
For many years food was the central part of my day. I woke up thinking about food. While eating breakfast I would be planning lunch. Eating out was a regular occurrence. I preferred to eat at sit-down restaurants because I could order “normal” meals and know the huge portions we’re so accustomed to now would be enough to fill me up. Not my stomach. My pain. I made my emotional self feel better by making my physical self feel worse. Complicated, right?
I made my pain stop by causing more pain. It was like any other addiction, over time I required more and more food to get the numbness I wanted. Meals in a restaurant started to include several courses. And if I was not in a restaurant, drive-thrus were my friend. Yes, that is plural.
My highest weight was near 270 lbs. I don’t know exactly because I never got on a scale except at the doctor’s office, and even then I would look away. When I ate, my mind was consumed with the next bite. It was also filled with judgment, sadness, fear, and desire. Desire to stop. Desire to figure out how to stop killing myself. I have page after page of journals that say the same thing, “I’m killing myself with food. I feel dead inside. I don’t want to die. I want to live.”
I remember a conversation I had with a dear friend about how she did not like the feeling of fullness. She hated it and I craved it. She asked me why I liked feeling bad? I told her it brought me comfort and made me feel better. I remember sitting in that conversation and not even understanding my own explanations or reasoning anymore. That moment made me realize I had been doing things all wrong. I was going to have to unpack and analyze all my actions and reasoning. It was definitely an early step towards my healing.
I learned that control was my trigger. I didn’t want to feel the bad things that happen in life—relationships ending, loss, grief. I didn’t want to feel those (very normal, very human) emotions, so I made myself feel full instead. I wanted to control how I was feeling so stuffing food in my mouth allowed me to control that I would hurt physically instead of emotionally.
Eventually, I accepted those actions were making me feel worse in the end, only delaying emotions instead of facing them. My eating was the reason my life was not what I wanted. I was the one making everything much harder than any of the life challenges being thrown my way.
Do you see why I chose the word complicated? Learning to feel and navigate through life without using food and physical pain as a crutch has been key to my journey of going from fat to free.
Today, my life is full of love, joy, curiosity, and certainly still some pain, grief, and loss. My life is full of emotions, and I feel them all. Now I feel a different kind of full, and it is wonderful. Knowing what hungry feels like can lead to a life of feeling full.