OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS: THIN IS NOT HEALTHY
The medical diagnosis was anorexia nervosa ?whatever that meant. All I knew was that the doctor told me I had to snap out of my depression and gain weight immediately or I’d have to be hospitalized.
I didn’t feel anything was wrong with me. Yes, I was tired and not interested in much, and I had lost a lot of weight. But I had been trying to lose weight. What I refused to see was that I was five feet, seven inches and weighed less than 90 pounds! Thin was beautiful; it was the way to be accepted and admired.
How I got that way I can’t really say. I had grown up the oldest of two children in a typical middle class family. My father worked long hours as a produce shipper and I rarely saw him. When I did, he was usually drinking. My mother stayed home, rather unhappily, until my brother and I were in school. Then she returned to teaching.
With both my parents working, I began feeling fairly responsible, at least in some areas. I made an effort to be a good student and model daughter. I avoided getting into any of the usual kid or teenage trouble, and I remained fairly naive about the world in general.
In my senior year in high school, I came to the conclusion that I was getting too fat. I weighed about 135 pounds at the time, and at my height, I looked a little chunky. I didn’t like my appearance, but I couldn’t change my facial features or my height or build. If I lost weight, perhaps I would be popular; perhaps people would like me; perhaps someone might even love me.
I started dieting and, being a perfectionist, I didn’t know how or when to stop. I became a walking computer who knew the calorie count of everything eatable ? how much to allow myself and exactly what I’d eaten every single day.
I watched the scale go down gradually. The more I lost, the happier I was and the less I ate. I can still remember the last day of my final exams. As I walked home that day, all I could think of was, “The last three days I have eaten only diet jello and a total of less than five hundred calories.”
My parents were beginning to get worried. I had lost about 25 pounds and still seemed as active as ever, but there was no indication that I planned to stop. I wasn’t eating with them anymore. I prepared separate meals and refused to go out to eat. As often as possible, I also avoided going out with friends.
By the end of the summer, I weighed about 100 pounds. I was more active than ever, and dieting even more intensely. My mother finally convinced me to see a doctor because my menstrual cycle had stopped completely. The doctor could find no physical reason for either the weight loss or the menstrual problem.
The next stop was a psychiatrist. He talked about Freud, hating my mother and philosophical theories for about three months at $50 per half hour. I was getting a little upset over the whole thing, when he finally gave me his medical diagnosis and ultimatum. Anorexia nervosa sounded pretty formidable, but at least he didn’t say I had to gain weight; he just told me to get over my depression.
Shock therapy was the latest “cure” for depression, and I was scheduled for six to nine treatments. After the first one, I was receptive to almost anything ? including food. I was fed goodies every few hours and I didn’t care. Two more sessions and 8 pounds later, I was sent home with a good prognosis. It lasted all of two months. I dropped back down to my 90 pounds and continued my lifestyle.
By this time I knew I was causing a lot of worry to a number of people. My skeletonlike figure and yellow coloring were hard for anyone to look at. So I decided to go away to finish my schooling. I applied and was accepted at a university about 150 miles from home. I threw myself into my studies so I wouldn’t have to face social situations that required me to eat. I had always been a good student, but now studying became an obsession and an avoidance for facing anything else.
Somehow I maintained my 90-pound weight and top grades until I graduated two years later. There was a demand at the time for my area of study, and I obtained a good position. I threw myself into my work just as I had my studies, and tried to avoid looking at myself.
Being thin hadn’t enabled me to fulfill my need for popularity, acceptance or love. I now thought that perhaps marriage would. There was a man who, surprisingly enough, wanted to marry me and who actually thought I was attractive.
During the first year and a half of our marriage, I was left to my own resources. He was in the service and stationed in Hawaii with orders for Vietnam. I stayed in California working and going to school. I felt some concern because I didn’t want my husband to discover what I was really like. So I began eating a bit, and to my horror I found I liked it. I liked it so much I had trouble stopping.
It wasn’t bad at first. It was a meal or two here and there, but I began putting on weight. Since I had always been so thin, I received a lot of encouragement. I began to feel as though things were going to be all right after all.
When my husband finally got out of the service, we settled down to a “normal” life. But I wasn’t satisfied. Something was missing. I loved my work, liked my house (as long as I didn’t have to clean it), felt OK about my marriage, but something was wrong.
For one thing, I had a very poor self concept. I hated the looks of my body. It didn’t matter whether it was thin or fat, I still hated it. I could not accept myself as a woman or in any type of “womanly” role. I didn’t like sex, refused to use cosmetics or dress well unless absolutely necessary, and I avoided housework. To top it off, I felt bored and restless.
I turned to the things that had usually calmed me before: food, work and school. I buried myself in work and classes and occasionally came up for air long enough to have a food binge. It was on those days that I enjoyed my husband’s company because he would generally join in my eating activities, at least for part of the day. What he didn’t see was what I ate while he was gone, and what he couldn’t understand was my depression afterward. Once introduced to binge eating, I loved it. I began starving myself for two to three weeks to build up a big enough weight loss to “afford” the binge.
It worked for awhile, but it became progressively harder to control. The weight was going up slowly and my self-esteem was rapidly plunging. I decided to go back to school in Arizona to finish my doctorate degree and to escape ? from me. Only one part was accomplished. I got the degree.
Meanwhile, I divorced my husband. My excuse was that we were going in opposite directions. I wanted a career and he wanted a family. That was true as far as it went, but it wasn’t far enough. I felt unworthy and worthless as a wife or a woman and I couldn’t face myself, much less a husband.
Back in California, on my own, I tried to straighten out my life. I spent another year and a half binging and starving. But my previous control was slipping. I hardly remembered my too-thin days. I began resorting to fad diets between binges, then shots, hypnosis, diuretics and anything that sounded promising. I returned to a psychiatrist, but he didn’t listen to my weight problem. He wanted to straighten out my thinking. Imagine that!
I was getting desperate because the binges were lasting longer than one day. They had stretched to two or three days and they were affecting my work. I found myself making excuses to leave meetings in order to sneak food. I felt in a constant state of turmoil.
After one extremely bad three-day binge during which I ate nonstop every waking moment, I was totally devastated. I picked up the phone and called a psychiatric hotline. They asked if I was suicidal. When I said no, they said they’d call back later. I was frantic. Then I remembered something a friend had said: “If you’re really in a bad way, try praying about it.”
I had rejected God a long time before, but that day I was ready to try anything. Without much hope I said, “Help me, please. It’s the worst problem I’ve got. I can’t control the food anymore. Please, help.”
Somehow I made it through the day and the next with relative calm. On Friday of that week I was to go shopping with my prayer-suggesting friend. We got halfway down the block and turned around. He wanted to catch something on the news before we went. He never saw whatever it was he wanted to see, and we never made it shopping. That night on the news there was an interview with an OA member.
I felt as if I’d just had my last “shock treatment” from a most gentle Source. I knew that I was supposed to see that program, and by Monday I was at my first meeting. Tuesday I began abstinence and a whole new outlook on life.
It was almost as if I had released a valve on a pressure cooker. These people accepted me skinny or fat, good or bad, idiosyncracies and all. They also helped me get in closer contact with that Higher Power that got me to OA in the first place. Between the group with its support and love and the contact with my Higher Power, my world and my life are coming back into focus, and I’m reaching out for new opportunities.
Anorexia nervosa is often fatal. I thank God that He has seen fit to allow me an opportunity to share and grow in OA and, even more important perhaps, to be of help to my fellows who still suffer. Believe me, thin is not healthy!
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