I have talked in this blog about a long, dark time in my life when I was 300 – 350 pounds. You don’t get to that kind of weight without having some serious binge eating disorder. I have struggled for years with compulsive overeating – and it truly is compulsive. It is something I do knowing I’ll regret it, and I do it without joy. If addiction is repeated use despite adverse consequences, I have been soundly addicted to abusing food. 

Emotional eating has been my go-to since I was a little kid. For a lot of us, that’s our first substance abuse problem, right? It certainly was for me. I’ve had a lot of success in behavioral health in the past 5 years, and my mental health has improved massively with medication, meditation, kicking addiction, and countering negativity bias. But food was my first addiction, and apparently it will be my last. I was a well-behaved kid, but I did get in trouble over food. I would steal whole blocks of cheese, or eat packets of Jello powder like Lick-a-Sticks Fun Dip – whatever I could find. Even at age 7, my well-intentioned family tried to encourage me to eat healthfully and exercise, but it only got worse and worse. 

Like a lot of morbidly obese people, I ate carefully in public, and kept my binges in secret and alone. My outward image was confusing to people – “You don’t seem to overeat; how are you so heavy?” I would shrug and scratch my head, then retire to my basement to eat Zingers and hand pies in front of the TV. I would hide food containers like alcoholics hide liquor bottles, sneaking bags of to-go boxes into unprotected Dumpsters. When I first lived with a partner, I was mortified when he found my hidden graveyard of empty pizza boxes and KFC containers. But I wore my humiliation on the outside, for everyone to see, every day, and I couldn’t hide that. 

My binges used to be daily. Is it even a binge if you do it every day, or is it just how you eat? I would eat thousands of calories at a sitting, eat until I couldn’t eat any more, then eat again as soon as I felt physically capable of it. With the help of keto, I’ve gotten binges down to maybe once every month or two, but it still happens. These days, a binge is more like a couple thousand calories, and is almost always fairly low-carb. That’s improvement, right?

Ironically, the most likely trigger for a binge is seeing a number on the scale that shocks or frustrates me. When I gain more weight than I “should,” I bitterly throw in the towel, saying to myself, “If I’m going to gain weight off eating practically nothing, I might as well eat effing everything.” I binge with a grim determination like I’m punishing someone – and I guess I am, it’s just that it’s me. Leave it to me to make a bad situation worse. 

I’ve always been plagued by all-or-nothing thinking. I can’t do anything halfway. If I’m dieting, I’m strict and rule-driven. Once I’ve broken the rules, I say, “Eff it,” and break them all. There’s not a lot of room for harm reduction models in my black and white world. When it’s on, it’s on. I eat alcoholically – I eat in a way that no “normie” (those of you without a twisted relationship to food) would recognize. I gain a lot of weight – and thanks to the magic of keto, I also lose a lot of weight. 

And this twisted relationship with food also pulls me out of mindfulness of the present moment. I stick to a strict plan of eating on weekdays, when I have work filling the hours so I don’t obsess about food. On Saturdays, which I spend with Dan, I allow myself more latitude, and on vacations, I throw out all the rules. But on Saturdays and on vacations, I’m often plotting when our next meal is going to be, instead of enjoying being with loved ones, and instead of admiring the fact that I’m in Vermont, or on a beach, or in a forest. The more I allow myself to eat what I want, the more my food obsession is the only thing in my awareness, to the exclusion of other excellent things.

Since food is the one addiction you can’t quit cold-turkey, it’s hard to know what to do. Quitting alcohol and cigarettes is easy by comparison – particularly for an all-or-nothing thinker like myself. In Overeaters Anonymous, they refer to a “plan of eating” – what you intend to eat based on clear-eyed thinking and planning, not driven by addictive, compulsive, emotional thinking in the moment. When I stick to my plan of eating, as I heard in a group one time, food is quiet, and takes up an appropriate amount of space in my mental landscape. When I sneak a peek in Pandora’s box, food comes roaring out, demanding all of my attention, pulling me out of the present moment and keeping me squarely focused on the next thing to eat, and the next thing, and the next thing. I will plot out opportunities to eat like vacationers map out their visits to museums and monuments, in an effort to guarantee maximum coverage.  

Mindfulness has a lot to teach about emotional eating. Often I’m putting something in my mouth before even realizing that I’m feeling a feeling (and that feeling is not actual hunger). Sometimes I catch myself eating over a feeling, and I stubbornly tell myself, “I do not care that I am eating my feelings, it’s what I know how to do.” I do this, despite knowing I will feel more bad feelings afterward. 

I do this, despite my actual curiosity about what might happen if I were inquisitive about the feeling instead. Judson Brewer says an important step is to investigate the feeling. What does frustration, or boredom, or stress feel like? And here’s an experiment – what would happen if I didn’t eat over the feeling? Would the feeling get stronger? Would it maybe go away after a while, all on its own, with this thing and that thing popping up in my awareness until the feeling recedes into something that happened a while ago? I’ve felt a lot of feelings in my day. Some of them have been very dangerous. Occasionally I have acted on feelings in dangerous ways. One thing, though: A feeling needs action to be truly dangerous. A feeling all by itself won’t kill me.

I admit, I often feel powerless over food – this despite losing hundreds of pounds, and succeeding 13 days out of 14. Although I’ve exorcised a lot of demons from my life, food is one that still bedevils me. Will I ever have sustained success in eliminating binge eating? I wish I had a bow to put on this one, Readers. I suppose one hopeful nugget is this: It took me a year of consistent effort to quit drinking, after 10-15 years of addiction. Quitting smoking has taken 3 years, after 25 years of addiction (and is still a work in progress – cigarettes keep coming back). After 5 years of increasing success, maybe kicking 40 years of wrong thinking about food just takes longer, and maybe I’ll still get there. Writing this, it makes me think maybe I really am getting there.