March 2004

The Fatal Nature of this Disease
by Leslie Freeman

The fatal nature of this disease....and how it has diminished my life. That is my assignment tonight, and I am blocked to my ears in what to write. My first thoughts go to the physical aspects and the ultimate price in a life lived with bulimia, which is death. Because people die from this everyday. There were times when I have binged and purged 10 times a day for weeks and months on end. My teeth hurt, my throat was continually raw, I had bloodshot eyes all the time, and I sometimes threw up blood, but nothing stopped me. The truth is, I never really felt like a very good bulimic. How ironic is that, really, because the precise reason I developed bulimia was because I wasn't good enough to just have the willpower not to eat too much. I can remember moments of clarity, in which I would be purging, and it would just come to me how completely crazy it is what I am doing. I am literally killing myself. Why?

And for me, its that question that leads me to the emotional part of the fatal nature of this disease. The havoc this disease has wrecked on my emotional well being far outweighs the harm it has caused me physically. Emotionally, my esteem has gone right down the toilet with whatever it was that I ate. I never felt good enough at anything I have done. I could be a better student, friend, daughter, employee, you name it, I could be better at it. If my life was a mess it was because of my weight, and if I could just be better at controlling that, then the rest would surely follow. Anytime anything didn't work, whether it was a relationship, or job, or simply loneliness, it was because of my weight. And I always felt bad, because I wasn't disciplined enough to just lose the weight, and then I felt bad because I would purge. So I would eat again to forget the guilt from purging, and so the madness continued. I isolated because I didn't feel good enough, and then I didn't feel good enough because I was always alone. Its that black and white thinking. It is also, as I have come to find out, complete and total self-centeredness. That is very difficult for me to grasp on the one hand, because I was forever doing things for other people, and to me that is the opposite of what self centeredness is, but really my entire life revolved around me. What I was doing. What was wrong with me. How what other people did related to me, even when it didn't. It was me, me, me all the time, and I didn't even like me.

When I decided I had had enough, and found recovery, it didn't get much better for me, because while I was able to quit purging cold turkey (at least for a while), I did not look inside to see why I was the way I am, and continued to eat compulsively. For me, the true fatalness of this disease lies in the compulsive eating much more than the bulimia. Bulimia was a means to an end for me. It still can be sometimes. But when I follow my food plan, and I don't eat white flour or sugar, I find that I don't have that urge to be crazy around food. I played around with recovery for a long time, before I decided to work my 12 step around food, and it has only been with doing that, that I have been able to abstain, one day at a time, from this disease.

index
top

---

January/February 2004

My Food History
by Leslie Freeman

My very first memory about food what when I was six years old. My mom told me I couldn’t eat as much junk food as my cousins and still stay as skinny as them. Never mind that no one took the Twinkies away or that I wasn’t fat at all. It was the theory that I couldn’t eat as much as someone else that has stuck with me all these years. Showing itself in overeating, over exercising, starvation, purging and hundreds of pounds lost and gained in my twenty-seven years. This is my story.

I was always bigger than everyone in school, first it was because I was taller, then I was fatter, but to me, it was always just that-BIGGER. I hated being noticed for my size. I developed young, I was nine when I started puberty, and my tallness gave way to curves, which I mistook as being fat. I don’t really remember anyone talking about weight, my mom was overweight—that is when she wasn’t on drugs, because then she was very skinny—but she never really said much to me about it. Looks were important in my family, but more so with my Grandpa, my sister and my cousins (at least some of them).

The first diet I remember was when I was ten. I don’t remember much about it, but I do distinctly remember eating cottage cheese and peaches non-stop. Let me back up though—because my sister is eight years older than I, by the time I was ten, she moved out, and it was as if I were an only child. At that point it was just me and my mom, and we went shopping once a week, and it consisted of this:

1 box of sugar cereal

1 bag of some kind of cookies or snack food

7 frozen dinners or cans of chef Boyardee, or Mac and Cheese

Maybe some bananas or apples—but never grapes, they cost too much

I am sure she bought other things, but these where my meals. She cooked maybe once a week, but other than that, I was left to my own devices. Lunches were always the cafeteria lunches, free of course, because we were low income. Back to the cottage cheese and peaches. I don’t remember who gave me that idea. I do remember I asked my mom to buy that, and when she brought it home, I dumped the cottage cheese and peaches in a big bowl and put it in the refrigerator. Later, when my mom found it, she was mad because of course it was ruined, but how was I to know that you are supposed to mix it when you eat it, not all at once. She made me eat it anyway, and I remember I ate it everyday until it was gone. That year at Thanksgiving, my Grandpa made a comment about how good I was looking. I still remember I was wearing these gray pants, size 4, they were my sister’s pants, and I was very proud to fit into them. I don’t really know how much weight I lost, or what I thought I needed to lose, but I do remember his comments, and feeling very good about it. In retrospect, my Grandpa was a sick ass, who really shouldn’t have noticed how I looked in those jeans anyway. So here’s the thing—at this point, I was never fat. I was tall, I was developed, but I was not fat!

When I was seven, we moved to Northern California, and I was devastated. Up until that point, I spent quite a bit of time with my Aunt Laurie, and my cousins, Kim and Kara. Kara and I were inseparable, and I visited as much as I could. At my aunt’s house, everything was fair game. Late nights, Twinkies for dinner, as much soda as we could drink. My aunt never said no. I would come home, and my mom would swear she wouldn’t send me back again because I was so difficult to deal with. Especially after the summers; three months of unbridled everything. It was a kid’s dream. She always did send me back though. It happened every year, until I was eleven, and my whole family moved up to Northern California. After my grandma died, my grandpa bought a farm, and decided we should all live together, just like he had done as a child. Well, that didn’t work for very long—six months to be exact—before the family was estranged. I didn’t talk to my aunt or cousins for ten years after that. It really wasn’t anything about them, just that our mothers had a falling out, and I was left in the middle of the fire. In the end, it was my mom, my grandpa, my disabled uncle, and me.

For me, and my food and body image issues, this is when it all went down hill. I started gaining quite a bit of weight. I was a size sixteen and I was twelve years old. I was tall, I was fat, I wore glasses, and I didn’t have the right clothes. This farmhouse was in the middle of mansions and we were certainly not rich. It was a very rough period for me. Meanwhile, everyone had left, so there was no one left for my grandpa to be mean to, so it was me. Some background on my grandpa—he is an alcoholic, and has his favorites as far as grandchildren went, and to be in that club you had to be perfect and skinny. Now when everyone else was around, they were all bad enough, that I was able to be his princess, but once they all left, he had to be mean to someone. So my weight went up and I went on the second diet of my life. It consisted of low fat everything, and the home video (purchased by my Grandpa) workout called, “Kathy Smith’s Body Basics”. It actually worked quite well, by the time eighth grade started, I had slimmed down physically, but unfortunately in my mind I was fat as ever. My Grandpa now told me I looked good (we were in the love stage of our love/hate relationship). My mom told me I looked good. My sister told me I looked good. My mind told me I was fat and not good enough.

Life went from bad to worse at home. I was miserable. My grandpa was so mean to me. He would tell me I was fat, and worthless, and that I didn’t love my mom enough. If I did, I would clean the house more often. And that was when the battle really began. I spent the next five years alternating between cleaning the house enough (and therefore proving my love to my mom, and getting love from my grandpa) and not cleaning enough (and ending up in battle with my grandpa about my lack of love for my mom). Of course food coincided with all of this. Too much food, not enough food, it didn’t really matter. My life was out of control, but I could control my food. At least that’s what I thought.

Now, I have never been a size two, but during this time, I was a size seven—which always seemed way too big. It was the reason that I wasn’t good enough. If I didn’t get the guy, it was because I was too fat. If I wasn’t cool enough, it was because I was too fat. If the guy I finally got, cheated on me, it was because I was too fat. I worked out every day. First it was tapes, and then once I was sixteen, I drove myself to the gym six nights a week, from 10pm to midnight. I also ate low fat everything. I remember making all my own food. By this point, I even bought my own food. I didn’t really follow anything specific, I just ate very low calories, and exercised a lot! My grandpa still walked by when no one was around and whispered to me how fat I was.

At first I told my mom, but she really didn’t do much. She would just tell me to ignore him, or worse, to tell him I was sorry, anytime he got mad at me. That was what she would do, and it seemed to work for them. She was always one to keep the peace, but that just wasn’t my style. From an early age, I was outspoken. Well, let me clarify, I was outspoken for our family, which in the real world doesn’t equal a whole heck of a lot of outspokenness. Eventually I quit telling my mom about my grandpa. She didn’t want to hear about it, because that might make her have to do something. So I suffered, and she ignored. And I ate. I ate when I was mad. I ate when I was scared. I ate when my mom drank too much and there was a big fight. I ate for everything. The more I ate, the more my grandpa hated me—because what he hated more than an outspoken girl, was a fat girl. My self-esteem went down the tube, and it just didn’t matter anymore whether I was fat or skinny, because I always felt fat. I remember saying I would be bulimic if only I could make myself throw up, but I could never be anorexic, because I just loved food too much. Little did I know what my future would hold? It wasn’t just the food that was out of control. School was a mess. I went from a straight A student to barely graduating. Of course I did graduate, because I love a crisis, and figuring out how to swing graduation was certainly a crisis.

My sister moved to Santa Barbara when I was 10, and I would visit her during the summers (on my way to the cousin’s house). She was always very skinny, blonde, small—everything I wasn’t. I loved her so much though, and idolized her to no end. I have two very distinct memories of my visits. One was a day we were at a café having lunch, and I don’t really remember what I tried to order, but I remember my sister made a comment about wouldn’t I like something else better, and I ended up in the bathroom crying. When I was gone for a bit too long, she came in to look after me, and asked me what was wrong. I remember telling her that I just wanted to eat what I wanted, and she said she was just trying to help me lose weight, because I was such a pretty girl. As if that wasn’t bad enough, get ready for memory number two—My sister left me home alone while she and her then boyfriend when to work. When she came back, she asked me if I ate all the cheese and I said I didn’t. Truth be told, of course I ate the cheese, I was hungry, and cheese has always been my favorite food. But the way she asked me was so embarrassing. Here is her reply, “Leslie, we know you ate the cheese while we were gone, because before we left I counted the cheese, and when I got home I counted it again and there are nine pieces missing.” I didn’t know what to say, I was mortified. I don’t think I copped to it even then, but it is a memory that has scarred me just as much as my grandpa’s fat comments. I lived with my sister for a couple of months when I was eighteen, and this memory came back to haunt me. Someone drank the last of the Orange Juice, and again, it was only me, my sister and her now husband in the house, so of course I was blamed. But this time, I didn’t do it. I don’t know who drank it, and I don’t even know why she really cared, but she brought up the cheese incident, and was convinced I was lying. I mean come on, that happened when I was thirteen, and I was now eighteen, and she thought I had done the same thing again. It hurt so much that she didn’t believe me, but I think it hurt more to know she was paying that close of attention.

I moved out at seventeen, but my eating didn’t get any better. To that I added drinking. I partied every night. I had always been very careful not to drink too much, given my family’s history. I never even tried any drug, except pot, which I quickly decided I didn’t like. At the end of that summer, I quit drinking, but I kept gaining. I never really dieted at that point. I mean, I would start the diet each day, but I never felt like I was disciplined enough to actually stick with a diet. But I was always dieting. I, like many woman, talked constantly about my weight, my food, what I could and couldn’t eat.

The next diet I can remember is when I was twenty. I joined 24 hour Nautilus, and began their eating program. It consisted of weighing my food, writing everything down, and exercising more. Eat less, exercise more, there’s a thought. I don’t really remember what the actual food plan was, but just that it was pretty evenly split between carbs and protein. This worked. I lost 15% fat and 60 lbs. I stayed there for a while, but always returned to eating. I gained back that sixty and tacked on another forty pounds over the next few years, and then I entered what I call the Treiman era.

This time in my life was as detrimental as the years with my grandpa, if not more. I was twenty-two, and took a job as a nanny for a family that were pretty young. The parents were only five years my senior, the wife being a stripper and the husband working for Pacific Bell, however that is another story for another time. I will just say the next three years took me to places I never thought I would go, and my food, and body image suffered more than I can express.

One day, about a month after I started I stepped on the scale and it read 299. I panicked. I knew at that moment I had to make a serious change. I was talking to Marci (my boss) about a week earlier and she had told me that she was anorexic and I relayed my comment about not being able to be anorexic, but I would have been bulimic if I could’ve made myself throw up. She said those fateful words that would change my life, “It’s easy, I will show you.” And she did. So that day, when the scale said 299, I decided I would make myself throw up. It was the enchiladas we ate for dinner, and I figured if it worked, that would be great. I didn’t really think I would be able to though. Sadly I was, and that began the newest chapter of my insanity around food.

I threw up everything I ate for seven days, and lost 8 pounds. By then I was hooked. I remember telling Marci that I was throwing up. I had the mistaken notion that I wasn’t really bulimic if I didn’t keep it a secret, so I decided I would tell her. She proceeds to tell me how bad for me that throwing up was. Hello? Wasn’t this the same person who had just a week before shown me how to throw up? Again, another story for another time. So she convinced me that starving myself was much better. So my next diet was this. 500 calories per day, anything else I threw up. Marci decided she would help me on my diet, so we dieted together. Never mind that she started at 110 pounds, she just liked the challenge of it all. So if she had 4 carrots at dinner, I had 3. This went on for about three months, during which time I lost 75 pounds. I was thinner, although had not lost all the weight. Eventually, I couldn’t eat only 500 calories, so I resorted to my old friend bulimia. Oh yeah, and kick in some diet pills for good measure. I lost another 30 pounds, and still that wasn’t enough. I never did make it to my goal weight, but even skinnier, I was crazy and not happy. I did many things I am not proud of during that time, and losing weight certainly didn’t solve any of my problems.

I was throwing up 4-10 times a day. It didn’t matter whether it was carrots or cake, if I ate it, I threw it up. I still thought I wasn’t actually bulimic, because I didn’t eat boxes of donuts at a time, and I wasn’t really keeping it a secret. If anyone questioned me about it, I told the truth. I knew throwing up wasn’t a great plan, but my answer was always that it was pretty unhealthy to be so fat.

I had so many delusions about bulimia. I thought if I didn’t try to keep it a secret, then it wouldn’t get its hooks in me. I thought if I didn’t eat loaves of bread and boxes of cookies, then I wasn’t really bulimic. How wrong I was. I found out the first time I lied about throwing up, and that first time I ate the box of cookies, as well as everything else in sight, just how wrong I was. I had moved out of the Treiman house, and was devastated by it all—again, another story, another time—and just didn’t know how to cope. I still threw up everything I ate, but I just ate more and more. From the moment I got home until the moment I went to bed, I binged and purged. I still didn’t see the craziness of it all though—it was only when I decided that maybe I should quit throwing up that I realized I couldn’t. I remember 4 very long days of white-knuckling it and then giving in. That was the first time I tried OA. I didn’t go to a great group though, and I certainly didn’t keep going back, so it didn’t work. But I did find Payson Road at that same time, and that really helped me through so many dark days. I got stronger, and I had a lot of really great friends, the ones I made at PR but also in my everyday life I was learning what I wanted in my friendships. PR worked for me in a way nothing else had. I tapped into my creative self, that part of me that had been squashed as a child and really developed those qualities that I have always loved. I started writing poems for the site, and I think those early poems saved my life. When I looked back at them now, I think how corny some of them were, but I got it out, and found myself not having to purge them instead. The problem was, I quit throwing up, but didn’t quit eating compulsively. So I gained all the weight I had lost, and purged to keep off, back.

Then I found the ACA group I went to and spent the next 2 years trying to work a 12-step group without working the 12 steps. I did Atkins, “changed the way I ate, just a little, but not a diet”, a modified Atkins (because I wasn’t going to be extreme), binged and purged, and ate my way through problems. Along the way, I found success though in other areas of my life. I did apply some of the principles of the 12 steps to my life, it just didn’t occur to me that I would have to actually work them, and more specifically, that I should work them in the way that they are meant to be worked, which is step 1 then 2, and so on. I would jump around and do a little of step 4, then some step 8, and throw in an amend or two. I managed to get my finances in order, and train for a triathlon. I worked out most of my issues with my mom, and some of the ones with my sister. But still I ate and gained. It was so frustrating, because I could see how the principles of the program worked in other areas of my life, but I just couldn’t apply it to food.

I went back to OA again, and this time, I heard someone speak about how she had not eaten sugar for 30 days and she felt so different. And somewhere, something inside me just clicked, and I thought, “I might as well try it, because what I am doing isn’t working” and that was the first step in my recovery. It has now been nearly 7 months since I ate any sugar and I do feel differently. I haven’t done everything at once, but I began to look at my life, and I have realized that I am sick and tired of living my life the way I have been. I don’t care if I lose another pound. It’s finally not about the weight for me, its about not being obsessive about food. The ironic part about this is that I know if I just let it go, and fix the inside, the outside will follow. That’s the faith that Sarah always talks about it. My own leap of faith.

index
top