It's not always about being skinny

©Trudi Evans 2007

There was no mirror, no staring at my body and seeing what wasn’t there. I’d abandoned fashion magazines long ago. I’d never forced myself to vomit, snacked on laxatives, or seen my bones force my skin taught. I’d never needed encouragement to eat a meal. My friends and family knew me for my quick wit, easy laugh, plump body, and rosy cheeks.

All my adult life I had been gainfully employed. I was a competent employee and had dreams of one day owning my own business. My life was full of great people – spouse, child, family, and friends. I was completely average, down to being part of the statistic that over 40 percent of North Americans are obese or morbidly obese.

Of course, I didn’t want to be obese. If dieting were a profession, I could have been at the top of my game. I had cut carbohydrates, fat, and calories, exchanged calories for points, exchanged groceries for liquid meal replacements, and exchanged good sense for unsafe medications with big promises. I joined gyms, bought gadgets, videos, and pedometers, and vowed to be fit. And every year, my weight went up. Surely, I thought, there must be something medically wrong with me.

I sought medical help and was diagnosed with a low-functioning thyroid. That was it, I presumed. That was the reason why I gained weight. All I had to do was take medication and the fat would melt before my eyes.

I still gained.

I joined weight-loss support groups, became an armchair nutritionist, and continued to try to outsmart my fat. Nothing worked long-term. Over the years I’ve lost and gained hundreds of pounds. I’ve worn every size from 10 to 22. I’ve lifted weights, bounced up and down steps, kick-boxed, jogged, walked, and read every book and surfed every website on how to lose weight. If ever there was a diet expert, it would be me.

Each failure ate away at me. I blamed myself for a long time. I hated my body for rebelling against what my heart and mind wanted. My anger and self-hatred grew. I began to blame dieting for my downfall. If I had never started, I wouldn’t be in the shape that I am, nor would I feel so badly about myself. If the diet industry would stop selling snake-oil and making me believe that something was wrong with me, I’d be fine.

The magic potions and the empty headlines that screamed “Lose 10 Pounds This Weekend!” were lies. I understood that they were lies, but I was addicted to the lies. What if I uncovered the one that was true? What if I found the way to be thin? I searched high and low because in thinness, I knew I would find happiness.

And one day, I gave up. One day I sat quietly and the voice inside of me shrieked, “It is not your body making you unhappy! It is in here!” and I listened. I did a little research and learned some new terms. These terms the diet industry doesn’t sell.

Anorexia Athletica (Compulsive Exercising)
Compulsive Over Eating (COE)
Binge Eating Disorder (BED)
Orthorexia (“Correct” Eating Disorder)
Nocturnal Sleep-Related Eating Disorder
Habitual Dieting
Disordered Eating

The broad spectrum of eating disorders and disordered eating surprised me. I, like most people, thought of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as the only eating disorders. As I read and learned what these meant, I saw myself in some of the definitions.

Compulsive Over Eating (COE): the use of food to temper one’s feelings and emotions. Using food to fill a void. Often, people who suffer from COE are caught in the cycle of shame from being overweight and feeling out of control and eating to cope with those feelings, which causes those feelings to surface again, and so on. Though not a clinical eating disorder, COE falls into the spectrum of disordered eating.

Binge Eating Disorder (BED): overeating to compensate for hunger caused by food restriction or deprivation, or overeating to compensate for negative feelings. The difference between BED and bulimia is that people with BED do not purge after binging. The binges tend to be a regular pattern for dealing with stress, anxiety, sadness, or loneliness, and are tempered with a balanced diet outside of binging sessions. It is estimated that one in five people suffer from BED.

Habitual Dieting: the pattern of going from one diet to another. The person who habitually diets is always waiting to start that next diet. When a person thinks, “I’ll have this today and just start my diet tomorrow,” she is likely a habitual dieter. It is classified as disordered eating because the person is obsessed about eating food in a way that stimulates weight loss, not for sustenance or enjoyment.

Although at times, you could probably say I suffered from orthorexia (the obsession with eating properly over enjoyment of food or honoring hunger and cravings) and with anorexia athletica (obsessive need to exercise and fear of gaining weight if any part of an exercise regimen is missed), these were really only small parts of my disordered eating. Since I was a child, I used food to soothe myself. A cheese sandwich cured loneliness for half an hour. A danish could bring a sense of calm in a nerve-wracking situation. Food was my panacea.

When I realized that eating was a problem, I also understood it was a symptom. The only way to change my actions was to understand what caused them and fix it. I sought professional help at an eating disorders centre and went for one-on-one counseling and attended support groups. I wrote in my journal daily. I vowed to give up dieting forever.

And I still struggle. I still want to lose weight. When I am under stress, I am torn between eating to combat it and starting a diet to control it. That is how I have operated my entire life. Eating quieted the feelings, and dieting gave me control when I felt I had none. As a teenager, I loved to diet and to control my weight because I had no voice and no control over my home life or how people treated me. I still want to grab onto those restrictions.

It has been 18 months since I sought counseling, and I still struggle. I work each day to find balance in how I eat – for nutrition, for joy, and sometimes, I still eat for stress. I am ahead of the game because I understand that is what I am doing.