To Binge, Or Not To Binge, That is the Question…

PART I

I am hungry! I’m doing the 5:2 fast diet right now. In case you don’t know what that is, it is when you eat normally 5 days per week and then on the other 2 days you try to average around 500 calories. I can’t stop thinking about my one remaining hard-boiled egg for the day that is in the fridge. I wonder what it’s doing… gabbing with the jar of pickle juice? Flirting with the baby carrots? Or just enjoying some alone time while playing Sudoku? I’ve done this diet before. It helped me drop 10-ish pounds before my brother’s wedding. I have to do this again because I’m getting fat. After Christmas, my weight was tipping the scale at 175. I’m 5’2…on a good day. This is the heaviest that I’ve ever been. However, I feel like my body carries the weight seemingly well. I definitely look chubby, but I think people would guess that I’m in the 150's. Even though I am short, I will never be seen as slim or slight. To paint a picture, I look like a hardy Jewish Ukrainian peasant carrying a pair of unidentified fowl (or are they her own large and pendulous breasts?) over each shoulder. I look like I could trudge through snowy terrain with ease, but at the same time, would look like an uncoordinated beaver on ice skates.

I feel miserable. I want to eat and eat a lot, but I won’t let myself. I’ll do this for 2–3 weeks and drop several pounds. I used to be able to stay on this restrictive side of the street for longer periods of time, but now these long arduous battles are becoming more like brief interludes. It’s just so exhausting and I ‘ve been doing it for so long. Lately, I’ve needed the help of “supplements” to help stave off the urges. In the past, I’ve tried diet pills, Adderall, cocaine, and other stimuli. While those drugs decreased my appetite, they increased my racing thoughts about food. The mental torture was not relieved. Nowadays, I’ll take a few extra Klonopin, drink some wine, or take some sleeping pills to stop thinking. That’s the goal. I want to not eat and not think about not eating. If only I were a little mentally stronger, had more self-control, then I could truly lose the weight and keep it off. I am not, though, and Phase Two always arrives with a vengeance.

While dieting, I’ll feel slightly better about myself and then I’ll unleash the beast. Here comes the binge monster. The binge monster is just like those cult leaders I love reading about. At first, they make you feel a sense of calm and safety that you’ve never experienced before, that’s how they lure you in. Next thing you know, all of your money is gone and you have a mean case of TMJ from the age-old exchange of blow jobs for bathroom privileges. When my limited willpower expires, I must give in. An itch I need to scratch seems too basic of a metaphor, it’s like the air I need to breathe, an alarm I need to sleep through, a puppy I need to pet; it’s a compulsion. It’s a dirty compulsion that I feel insurmountable shame about. Why can’t I control myself? It’s this never-ending battle. I wake up in the morning and release either a sigh of defeat or a deep breath of preparation. Which way am I going to go today? Am I going to do what I am supposed to do and limit my eating? Or am I going to do what I want and what feels good? EAT! This is the only way I can tell if I’m good or bad. Good or bad… Good or bad.

PART II

Good or bad…Good or bad. This is how a child thinks about life, or a Scorpio. This makes sense because I have hated my body ever since I was a child. I have been told something was wrong with my body since I was 6 or 7 years old. In those days, I was very tall. This is normally not alarming, but I come from a vertically challenged family. My mother is 4’10 and my dad is probably 5’4 or 5’5 without his Dansko’s. My height was constantly talked about, in fact, it was concerning. My mother has severe Scoliosis and had a tough time as a kid. She had to frequent physical therapy often and wore a back brace for much of her childhood. My mother and pediatrician were worried the same thing would happen to me. I had a slight curve in my spine, but with my rapid growth, doctors were worried it would get much worse. This meant that I visited my goofy Armenian orthopedist with a gorgeous mustache several months per year for X-rays. Instead of playing tag with my friends, I was in a sterile and cold X-ray room with a heavy vest standing perfectly still so that they could photograph my spine. Not only did my family comment about my height, but I had to see a doctor for it!

Just as my growth plates came in and my friend’s heights started to finally meet mine, I got my first period. I was ten-years-old. I was changing out of my stuffy dress and tights from being at Rosh Hashanah services all morning when I saw a big brown stain in my underwear. “Mooooommmmmm!!” She came rushing in and told me about my period. I got my period before I was even old enough to watch that ubiquitous health class video! I did vaguely know what menstruation was from reading “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret” several times with my best friend, Brie. For some reason, our moms didn’t find it necessary to monitor our Judy Blume habit. It was of no concern when our obsession with fellow 8-year-old, Ramona Quimby, turned into reading about periods and masturbation. I was the only kid in my class that had gotten my period. I felt it to be a shameful secret.

After my period, followed the rest of puberty and my tall and lanky shape turned into the Ukranian woman that I mentioned earlier. With physical puberty comes the emotional development stage of struggling with my own identity and desperately wanting to fit in. I wanted to be seen as normal, but I didn’t feel normal. My psychological and emotional struggles felt out of my reach to cope with, but I could control my weight. Maybe if I looked like my peers, then I’d feel like them too.

This is a very normal way for a 12-year-old to think. What’s abnormal, and what makes me sad for my 12-year-old self, is that my parents bought into my way of thinking. This was around the time when my mother suggested my first diet. She’d just read this book called The South Beach Diet. All you had to do was not eat any carbs or sugars for 2 weeks. No more sandwiches, no cereal, no fruit, no nothing! I did it for a week and lost 5 lbs. I was thrilled! Then the inevitable crash came and I ate an entire loaf of Pepperidge Farm Cinnamon bread. This began the bingeing and restricting pattern that I’ve come so accustomed to. I have tried all of the diets in the book, South Beach, Atkins, Keto, Paleo, Weight Watchers, Mediterranean Diet, Low Glycemic Index, HCG Diet, juice cleanses, The Master Cleanse, strict calorie counting, and The Cabbage Diet. I’ve tried eating only vegetables, only fruit, only protein, and intermittent fasting. I’ve also self-induced vomiting after meals, misused laxatives, used legal and illegal appetite suppressants, and I’ve spent multiple hours at the gym trying to burn off the calories from my single Luna Bar dinner.

Again, this brings up feelings of sadness and compassion for little Kaya. It sucks that I didn’t have a healthy adult to teach me about food. It sucks that I’ve created this microcosm where how I relate to food imitates how I think and feel about other aspects of my life. I binge because I know that I won’t be able to eat tomorrow when my restriction begins again. I’ll soon be out of food…or love, or acceptance, or approval. I have to inhale as much as I can and as fast as I can to store it away for the long winter ahead. It feels like this supply of positive feelings that we as humans crave and need is not endless. I have to remind myself that this is not true. There is no limit on love, care, and support. It took years of therapy and school to learn that the world isn’t black and white. There is no good and bad. There is something important and truly beautiful about these “bad” feelings that I’m trying to avoid. Feelings of sadness, loneliness, fear, and emptiness are tough to sit through. I’m still practicing this. I now know though, that these feelings allow me the ability to connect with other people and allow me to expand my perspective. I have struggled with my body for over 25 years and am a warrior. I thought and behaved how that little girl needed in order to survive. I don’t need to think this way anymore. I can release myself of this burden. There will be missteps and successes, but overall there will be progress. I continue learning and distancing myself from that lonely and scared little girl who needed to lose weight to be seen as enough. I am enough.