naming the problem

If you've read my blog but haven't met me in person, you might be surprised to know that I'd be easily classified as overweight. I think it could naturally be assumed that I'm slim and fit given that I'm professionally trained as a nutritionist and spend a really obscene amount of time on food-related topics, but actually, I've been overweight for all of my adult life.

This is something that goes unspoken as a general rule, but today I'm going to come clean.

80 pounds

I was at an acceptable weight until I had a serious illness at 18 years old. Several times during that year, I took high doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics and corticosteroids. As a result, I put on 80 pounds that year, though I could hardly stand to eat.

After I got better, I found the weight wouldn't budge. The steroids had damaged my thyroid, and there were other chemical issues at play. So my doctor put me on a diet drug (which was recently removed from the market due to serious side effects, including death). The drug didn't do much. I was on so many medications at the time and eventually an unfortunate interaction landed me in the hospital, at which time I stop taking that drug (and everything else, too).

The only time I've lost a significant amount of weight was during the year after I went vegan. I lost 40 pounds, but I gained 20 pounds over the next four years.

Calories and exercise, blah blah blah

Every few months I get super frustrated with being fat and decide that I'm going to do something about it. So I start keeping a food journal. And when I do this I realize that I consistently consume about 1200-1500 calories a day, even with a high fat intake. And I'm not hungry. That's just how I eat. A woman of my height and size can be expected to burn about 2700 calories a day just by breathing. So I can toss the calories in-calories out model.

For a while, I was a gym rat, but eventually I just lost my motivation for it. I didn't want to pay for it anymore and I hated going there. I found it a bit soul-crushing, though that could have been the fact that I was forced to watch CNN, complete with subtitles.

I could certainly be more active, with or without the gym, and this is something that deserves more attention. But the evidence doesn't exist to support the concept that exercising will help you lose weight. At best, what you'll see is favorable weight redistribution. You'll also build muscle and increase metabolism, both of which are positive for weight loss. But exercising more and eating less signals starvation to the body. You'll lose weight, but ultimately biology will win out and you'll just end up hungrier than ever. That's why 95% of dieters ultimately pack on the pounds again -- plus a little more.

I am completely aware of the benefits of exercise, but there's no scientific reason to believe that activity is particularly useful for long-term, sustainable weight loss. So when I lift weights or jog or do yoga, I'm thinking about strength, flexibility, and stamina -- a clear head, more energy, better sleep, and a stable mood -- improved blood panels, efficient digestion, healthy skin -- not the scale.

So if it's not my caloric intake, and it's not my activity level, what is it?

My dirty secret

I grew up on the Standard American Diet -- tons of CAFO meat, tons of non-fat dairy, tons of white flour, tons of sugar, tons of vegetable oil. I felt hungry all the time. I remember stealing food, hoarding food, stashing food from way back in kindergarten. I could never get filled up.
At my daycare center I was the child asking for bagel after bagel after bagel. I have such a distinct memory of one of my caretakers commenting to another that I was getting fat from eating too much. I was eight years old at the time, and when I look back at photos of that little girl, I wasn't fat, but I did have a sort of wasted, flabby look. Small wonder since almost nothing I ate had nutritional value.

So I grew up compulsively overeating, trying like hell to fill up some nameless hole. In college, I'd go days without consuming much of anything except ramen and coffee before stuffing my face with scrambled eggs, toast with margarine, huge bowls of cereal with skim milk and a handful of sugar. I have always been hungry, hungry, hungry.

But I wasn't really overweight until I swallowed all those drugs at 18. It seems like that chemically-induced weight gain changed my set point and now my weight hardly budges from this 10-pound range in which I currently cycle. So I don't necessarily gain weight from bingeing -- I just don't lose it.

Some of the reason why I ultimately left veganism and, more recently, vegetarianism is because most of the foods upon which I based those diets were triggers for me. Whole grains, specifically, are a major trigger for me. Basing my vegan diet on whole grains exacerbated compulsive eating habits and ultimately delivered me into the spiral of blood sugar imbalance that currently requires vigilant management. When I cut back on whole grains, I stopped making enough complete proteins, and developed the fun habit of falling asleep at red lights and on the bike at the gym.

Naming the problem

Food is complicated. I grew up in a home where I was physically and psychologically abused. I didn't get what I needed and I wasn't allowed to express my many deficiencies. Just like your average dieter, I was starving, and eventually biology won out. Just like your average abused kid, I was starving, and eventually psychology won out. So I learned to steal food, and thus did food become an illicit, bottomless, and ultimately unsatisfying thrill.

On the other hand, I'm healthier now than I was as that child raised on sugar and corn chips. I might be overweight, but most of my calories are good calories. I know what to eat; I know how to nourish myself. I know how to not be hungry. During the day, I have a model diet. Enviable. I do "everything right." Plenty of good protein, plenty of good fat, plenty of whole, fresh vegetables and fruits with every meal, nuts and seeds for snacks. This is the stuff you see on this-here blog.

Eventually, though, psychology beats out biology. I get overwhelmed, stressed out, self-hating; I make a mistake or someone treats me poorly and... I binge. I eat lots and lots of sugar. Whatever weight I might have lost to that point will reappear on the scale, and it will take days to recover. For some reason, I'm still trying to fill up that hole.

Passing

There you have it. I know everything, right? I'm brilliantly informed. Hooray for me. So why is this still a problem?

Rationally, I know that I'll never be skinny, no matter what I do. I come from French-German stock on my father's side and my mother's family is Cherokee. I have wide hips, wide shoulders, a wide ribcage -- a body built for manual labor. And I'd like to be a good feminist and say that skinniness isn't my ideal. But there is something I admire about thinness, and only recently have I been able to put it into words. What I like about thin bodies is their compactness. I'd like to be able to fold in on myself. I'd like to roll up in a ball and be invisible if I wish. I'd like to be a small person. I'm 5'11, wide and heavy. Nothing about me is small. I spill out everywhere. I envy the ability of a thin woman to disappear.

That's a sad thing to admire. But just like anyone else, all I've really wanted in life is to pass. I'd like to pass as part of the solution, not part of the problem. I'd like to pass as a completely average person, neither prettier or uglier than most, neither fatter nor skinnier than most. It's all about passing, in the end. Being unremarkable.

One cannot pass as an overweight nutritionist. Nutrition is complex, but habits are more complicated. And this is only a public issue if I'm publicly claiming some special authority or wisdom about nutrition. So when I decided to go into nursing instead, I had an unspoken but deep sense of relief that nobody would expect me to look a certain way anymore. Nobody will assume anything about me anymore, one way or the other.

But really, this problem is so much bigger than me, and this is one reason why I've decided not to practice professionally. Our collective food culture is pervasively, insurmountably toxic. Most of us are raising children who will be incapable of making good decisions about what they eat. Most of us are inescapably trapped in the patterns we learned as children.

If an overweight person came to me for help, I'd be more inclined to refer that person to a therapist. I wish it were as simple as making good choices, promoting good nutrition. This information -- fats and proteins, good carbs vs. bad carbs, antioxidants and sustainability and food lobbies -- this is important stuff. But all of it bounces off a person walled in by compulsion, surrounded by easily accessible, inexpensive, addictive, destructive, fake food, living in a culture where eating well makes you appear freakish, a bad citizen, a self-righteous asshole, while family and friends wait for your failure.

Where I'm at

All that being said, things are better now, better than they've ever been. I know the rules -- the rules for someone who compulsively binges, the rules for someone with blood sugar imbalance. Such as: I can't skip meals. I need to eat lots of good fat. I may not have a rigidly idealistic dogma about what I eat. I must express gratitude and eat consciously. I can't have too many grains. I need to be extremely careful about sugar. I can't have gluten. Dessert is fruit. And so forth.

When I stay within the guidelines, I am kind to myself. I don't binge very often. But it still happens. Maybe Halloween comes along and suddenly candy is everywhere. Candy, which I wouldn't consider eating the other 50 weeks of the year. But for two weeks, I do. And the weight I lost by following the rules for the past six weeks is right back on the scale.

With tremendous gratitude I can say that things are better. I've stopped gaining weight, and when I follow the rules, I lose weight. My mantra is Strong, Not Skinny. Sometimes it even works. I'm a more open and loving person, less that pinch-faced little girl. I know about the pit and that I need to fill it with things like solitary time in nature, Quaker Meetings, yoga, gardening, photography, obsessively relabeling my music files, learning Spanish words with my son -- anything but food.

Little by little, I'm recovering. And part of that recovery is sharing it with you. So thanks for listening.

If you'd like further information about compulsive binge-eating, I strongly recommend the works of Julia Ross (on nutritional insufficiency) and Geneen Roth (on psychology). For information about destructive patterns learned from childhood, Alice Miller is essential reading.