I learned to throw up during my first year of college. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I could eat two brownies at dinner instead of one and not have to worry about gaining weight. Those brownies were delicious! I even lost weight by the end of my freshman year. So much weight that my sisters told me I was too skinny. I loved that and believed they were just jealous.

The high of being skinny (and starved) was short lived, however. I went to work for a donut shop that summer, $1.25 an hour and all the donuts I could eat. I could eat a lot of donuts! My weight ballooned by 30 or 40 lbs. that summer. That was the beginning of 18 long years of dieting and bingeing. Fortunately, I gave up the vomiting after only a few years. It was just too humiliating.

My interest in nutrition came after developing malnutrition from having lived, literally, on donuts that one summer. I had a real appreciation for the importance of healthy food and entered my fanatical phase of eating only "natural" foods. My good food/bad food thinking only deepened. My self-esteem took a double beating whenever I pigged out on junk food. Not only was I eating "bad" food, I was now a "bad" dietitian, too.

My first real understanding that dieting does not fix compulsive overeating came from several years of running an obesity treatment program. It was one of the "very low calorie" liquid diets popular in the 80’s. Seeing the emotional swings my clients went through convinced me there was something wrong with, or at least missing from, the dieting picture. Their euphoria with being "thinner than ever before" became despair with the almost inevitable weight gain during the refeeding and maintenance phases of the program. Even though the staff tried everything we could think of to help clients understand the underlying emotional causes of their overeating, the "fantasy world" nature of fasting and losing gobs of weight made it cognitively and emotionally impossible for clients to really address these issues. By the time they were back on real food, they were gaining weight and giving up.

I quit dieting, personally and professionally, after leaving that job. It was then that I was able to really face my own food/body issues and to truly know in my heart that dieting is not only a poor way to lose weight, it is a negative process that was keeping my eating disorder alive. I have not dieted in over 8 years. It is something I will never do again. The freedom attained from giving up dieting and recovering from compulsive overeating is too precious. I would be lying if I didn’t say it is sometimes tempting to focus on weight and dieting in my life. Though my weight is stable and healthy; I am not thin by society’s standards. But now I know when I start feeling that way, I am really feeling something else - a sense of not being good enough in some way, usually. Fantasies about dieting and being thin are now just signals that I am not feeling good about myself. I do not dwell there. Instead, I look inside and see what is out of place. Any pain I feel is correctly labeled and now I know where to look for help. That is freedom.

Becky has a private nutrition practice and is a HUGS facilitator in the Glenwood Springs area of Colorado. She can be contacted at 2800 Midland Ave, Suite 101, Glenwood Springs, CO 81601, ph/ 970 945 4110, fx/ 970 963 0302, e-mail/ bchase@rof.net.

Taken from HUGS Club News #14