If you eat poorly as a result of emotional, mental, or spiritual problems, they may have to be addressed before you can make any real progress with weight loss -- or gain.

If this is a new subject to you, please begin by reading our Diet and Weight Loss Tutorial topic Eating Disorders.

As you will read, eating disorders can have serious health consequences, including death.

In the interest of helping others with eating disorders realize that they are not alone, and that there is hope, I share the story of my own struggle and recovery.

Peter
Founder, thelegacywebsite.com

Preface

My purpose in sharing my story is singular:?é?á?é?áTo help others in their struggle with food by letting them know that they are not alone.

I will never forget the feeling I experienced at my first Overeaters Anonymous (OA) meeting as I discovered that I was not alone. That others like me were getting better and finding peace, happiness and health in their lives. It gave me hope and the desire to want to fight to get well.

How It Started

For the longest time I hadn't given food a second thought. I just ate what I wanted, and while I ate poorly, I didn't put on any weight. That all changed around my 28th year. I was working at a desk job and started slowly putting on weight. Wanting to do something about it, I decided to start jogging at the local high school track.

I decided to start very slowly. I began by jogging a quarter way around the track, then walking the same distance. The first time I went around four times for a total distance of one mile.

Over time I slowly increased both the amount of jogging versus walking, and the distance. The increase was so gradual that I never disliked it. In fact, I always enjoyed it, and six months later I completed my first 26.2 mile marathon!

This all happened at the time when 10k (6.2 mile) running events were becoming very popular in small and large towns across America, and I migrated from running an occasional marathon to running in these much shorter, much more fun races every other weekend. My body was in great shape. It was slim and hard, and the muscle I added by doing push-ups and pull-ups every day showed because there was no fat to cover it up.

All was going fine until the compulsion to keep improving my running times kicked in. It became imperative that I be down to my lowest weight on race day, so for most of the two weeks before each race I would eat very strictly, and very little.

What went wrong? I would feel so deprived by race day that I developed the habit of bingeing after the race for release. They were always on Saturday or Sunday, and I would binge the rest of the weekend and Monday, then I'd be back on my very strict eating plan.

I will always wonder if I would have developed such an eating disorder if I'd never started running. I suspect I would have, because I suspect it's just the nature of my very compulsive personality. Did you notice how I began at the track? I couldn't just go and have fun and do my best. It all had to be very calculated, very compulsive.

What It Led To

Being compulsive is not all bad. You can compulsively do good things, too! That's what led me to create this website, working 14 hours a day, often 7 days a week, year after year. No company, no staff, no advertising budget, only you to spread the word.

But being compulsive is not all good, either. With my running, it led to 9 miles a day in my hilly town, eventually ruining my knees such that I could never run again.

Running had become an addiction, and when I could no longer run, I turned to food. This is what a typical day looked like:

6:00 AM: ?é?áDrove to the nearby Yum Yum donut shop and purchased two huge, over-sized donuts to take back home to eat. I ate them with milk before getting ready for work.

7:00 AM:?é?á Left for work, stopping at Winchell's Donuts to purchase 4 glazed donuts and 3 jelly-filled glazed donuts to eat during my commute.

7:45 AM:?é?á Stopped at a 7-Eleven near work to purchase an ice cream novelty, such as a Drumstick, and a candy bar. I ate the ice cream in my car in the parking lot before driving the?é?áshort distance?é?áto work.

9:00 AM: ?é?áAte the candy bar while working.

10:00 AM: ?é?áWent outside to the break truck to purchase Hostess cupcakes and a small carton of milk to eat at my desk.

12:00 PM: ?é?áLunch at Marie Calendar's, beginning with a glass of wine, a salad drenched in blue cheese dressing, and a huge square of corn bread smothered in honey butter. Lunch itself would be something like seafood fettuccine in a rich alfredo sauce, with cherry pie ala mode for dessert.

1:00 PM: ?é?áStopped at the mall to buy a small bag of See's chocolates to eat at my desk during the afternoon, and a dozen chocolate chip cookies to eat on the drive home.

3:00 PM: ?é?áDespite my snacking on the candy at my desk, I went to the break truck again for something else Hostess and another small carton of milk. I ate this snack at my desk, then continued snacking on the candy the rest of the afternoon.

5:00 PM or later: ?é?áAte the cookies I got at the mall during the commute home.

6:30 PM: Typically a huge restaurant meal. I might walk to a Japanese restaurant near my home so I could have four or five glasses of plum wine with dinner, or drive to a Sizzler where I'd have a glass of wine, salad bar, full dinner and dessert.

8:00 PM: ?é?áCookies or cake and milk.

9:00 PM till bedtime: Ice cream till I just couldn't eat any more.

Bedtime meant lying on top of the covers and sweating. My stomach would be so expanded that lying on my back was the only way I could be at all comfortable.

I don't know what caused the sweating. Perhaps it was just too much food for my body to handle, or perhaps it was all the energy generated by so many calories. Eventually I would?é?áfall asleep, only to wake up with the alarm and begin again the next day.

How Fat Did I Get?

Not very. Maybe I'd put on 20 pounds at the most. Then it would be like someone threw a switch and I'd be on a crash diet. I'm not really sure how this worked. Perhaps I'd just become sick of what I was doing, or sick of how I looked.

When I was bingeing, I'd look in the mirror every morning at the huge bags under my eyes and think I couldn't possibly go to work looking that way. But they were just puffy with water from all the salt in the food I'd eaten, and by the time I got to work gravity would have caused the water to flow down from my face.

?é?áTo better understand how salt causes water retention, see the Tutorial topic How Salt Affects Your Weight.

By nighttime this excess water had all run down into my legs, and when I took my socks off I could see a dramatic expansion in leg size just above where the socks had constricted the water flow. Just above where the socks had been my leg bulged out a quarter inch or so.

For whatever reason, I'd eventually turn from extreme bingeing to extreme dieting. It's called yo-yo dieting, back and forth between bingeing and dieting, and it can be very harmful to your health.

When I was dieting, I thought I was eating healthy foods. Though back in those days I thought "healthy" meant a cheeseburger patty (meat and dairy) and green peas (vegetables). But the bigger problem was how much I ate.

Wanting to get a good start, I wouldn't eat anything the first day. I'd have breakfast the second day, breakfast and lunch the third day, then finally I added dinner the fourth day. Never any snacks.

As you can imagine, this played havoc with my bowels. The food would completely stop flowing through them, and this would cause extreme constipation when I started eating again.

When I was looking really good again, I'd inevitably switch back to the bingeing cycle.

A Failed Bulimic

Of course it occurred to me that I could have avoided weight gain by purging after bingeing, and believe me I tried. I used to describe myself as a "failed bulimic" because over the years I tried everything I could think of to make myself vomit. But I was never successful. As compulsive as I was with my eating, I suspect that if I had become a successful bulimic I would not be alive to write this today.

Purging by vomiting can damage your esophagus and throat lining, and cause tooth decay and staining as the stomach acids pass through your mouth. Purging by any means can cause electrolyte and chemical imbalances in your body that affect your heart and other organs, and can lead to serious health problems and even death.

How Was My Health?

Horrible. How else could it be?

While I was compulsive about working out at the gym during the dieting cycle (I'd never go during the bingeing cycle), for the first week or so I'd feel so weak that it was hard to get out of bed. No wonder. My body was not only getting very little food, but it had been used to unlimited quantities.

While I began to feel better in a week or so, it would take months (by which time I was usually bingeing again) before I felt any energy at all, though I knew I still had strength. I knew this because I did well working out with heavy weights.

But one day walking to the gym I felt so weak that I worried that on an upcoming family vacation to San Francisco, I wouldn't feel strong enough to walk up the hills. I decided to see a doctor, something I knew would be very difficult to do because there was no point in wasting my money if I wasn't going to describe my behavior.

I knew I had to see a doctor in a clinic that specialized in both eating disorders and diabetes. I say diabetes because during the first weeks or months of my dieting cycle I would suffer from symptoms of Type 2 diabetes. This included blurred vision, skin prone to easy bruising and infection, tingling in my arms and legs at night to the point where I couldn't sleep, and of course extreme fatigue.

?é?áSee the American Diabetes Association website for information on diabetes and its symptoms.

Over the years I went to clinics to be tested twice. It was expensive, but I was worried. I went the second time, two years after the first, because I just couldn't believe that the first doctor got it right.

Both times I was tested for diabetes, and both times I was told I was fine. Fine? One doctor actually patted me on the back and said that I didn't have anything to worry about. Neither said anything to explain my physical symptoms, nor did they suggest that I seek psychological help because of my eating habits.

Finding Help

This left me feeling very defeated, but it took something more to get me to finally seek the help I needed.

Have you ever eaten so much that you felt like you could burst something inside? Well, I did! Not directly from being so stuffed, but by messing up my bowels so severely that I eventually caused a tear. It became infected and required antibiotics.

The third time this happened my doctor looked me in the eyes and said that if I kept it up I could build up a resistance to the antibiotics and the infection could spread through my body and kill me. That got my attention, and I began seeing a therapist that specialized in eating disorders.

I enjoyed working with the therapist and she helped me to understand what was causing me to turn to food to escape the harsh realities of life. This was in the '80s and a lot was being written about shame. I remember when after I'd only talked with her for 20 minutes or so she asked me if my parents had ever shamed me. I said no, but over the months we worked together I came to understand how wrong my answer was.

I could never do anything right in my parents' eyes. As I write this,?é?áI am now into my '60s and they are in their mid-'80s, and nothing has changed. And now I know that it never will.

I am not blaming my parents for what I have done to myself. After all, they haven't put food in my mouth since I was an infant. I am responsible for my own actions. But I think it has been very helpful to understand why I have always had very little confidence and self-esteem. And why I felt so bad about myself that I turned to food for escape and comfort.

Escaping to Food

I won't argue that turning to food is physically the same as turning to alcohol or other mind-altering substances. I can tell you with certainty, however, that for me it had the same effect of causing me to forget about all my problems and stop feeling bad about them.

Simply abstaining from poor eating behaviors doesn't do anything to solve your problems or heal your mind. And before I found help, my most difficult times emotionally were not when I was eating poorly and not facing my problems, but when I was eating well and facing them.

When I was bingeing, I did nothing outside?é?ámy career. Everything just piled up, and I had to face it all when I returned to eating well and addressing my responsibilities. But without food to sedate me, or support from others before I found it, I would reach a point where I would simply give up.

I might be in the middle of a workout at the gym, and suddenly I was out the door and on my way to the supermarket and days or weeks or months of bingeing. Or perhaps I would be in a business meeting where it would be hours before I could get to food.

?é?áThe tremendous feeling of relief did not come when I started to binge, it came at the moment I decided I was going to binge.

This made it clear to me that the change in my mind was as significant as the change in my eating habits, and that I had to address my mental and emotional problems as well as my diet in order to become well.

Finding Support in Numbers

As helpful as my therapist was, the single best thing she did for me was to ask me to attend Overeaters Anonymous (OA) meetings while I was seeing her. I did, and continued to attend OA meetings for many years.

We didn't have the internet yet, so of course we didn't have anything like these forums. At OA meetings I discovered the power of sharing with others who are facing similar problems. OA is patterned after the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), only it's designed for people struggling with compulsive eating rather than alcohol.

I enjoyed the structure of the program, and it brought a sense of order to my life in relation to my struggles with food. I found a great feeling of release and support in being able to share my story and daily challenges with others. And I greatly benefited from all that others had to share.

Hearing someone share who was doing better than I was gave me hope, and hearing someone share who wasn't doing as well as I was made me feel good about my progress. As for the many who were struggling much the same as I was, they made me feel that I was not alone. And we were all there to help each other.

As Time Goes By

I began this website as a retirement hobby in 2000, and it has filled my mind with thoughts of eating well and caring for myself for these many years now. With my daily communications with my website users, they have become my support group, and I a part of theirs.

There was no particular moment when I felt that I was free of my compulsions regarding food. In fact, I don't suppose I will ever be completely free of them. But I am now able to live my life without food occupying my every thought, and without food molding my every action.

I am content with my progress and happy with my life.

Join Us

As I said at the beginning, my purpose in sharing my story was to help others in their struggle with food by letting them know that they are not alone. Please join in on the discussions in these forums, and consider sharing your story to help others. You will receive an abundance of help in return.

Peter