I admire the bravery of the fellows who've shared their struggles here.
My name is Travis and I'm a destructive eater and a gamer. In my earliest pictures I was a bright-eyed adventurous tyke, but around the age of 4-5, I became chubby. I hated having to shop for clothes in the "husky" section. By the age of 12, besides owning my first OD&D Red Box, I had also dieted (just eating one packet of snack crackers from the vending machine for lunch), counted calories, and gone to TOPS and Weight Watchers with my mom, who also suffered from overeating. I became thin through dieting and from the onset of puberty. My parents praised me for losing the weight.
In my later teens I underate, especially when my first romantic relationships didn't work out, and I felt depressed. One refuge from my unhappiness was playing D&D (in Mystara, Dragonlance, FR, and Greyhawk) with my brothers and friends. When I went off to college, I put on the "college 15 pounds", and despite trying to control my eating, I kept on going. I tried to stop eating red meat, but I'd hardly last a day before I broke down and ate a hamburger. In my sophomore year, I studied abroad in China, and I swore: "On my grandmothers' graves, I'll stop overeating!" It was only a few days before I was overeating again. I felt guilty about making such an oath. In my junior year, after coming back from study overseas, I developed stretch marks near my armpits, and felt despondent about this.
I was in a poor emotional state, about my weight and other difficulties, and I dropped out of school at the end of my junior year. From the age of 19 to 28, I worked menial jobs, interspersed with periods of dependency on my family. I gave up on life. I thought: "I don't even know how to buy so-called healthy food such as fresh produce, how to store it, or cook it. I don't even like the taste of it, so why bother?" I gave up and ate as much as I wanted any time day or night. Large pizzas, several 1-liters of Mountain Dew per day, big bags of Doritos. I spent much of my free time relaxing reading the newspaper in fast food restaurants, often late at night. It was fun, and I'm glad I did it. One solace during this time was the online D&D forums and mailing lists at WotC, and Eric Noah's nascent 3e news page.
Later though, the pain became greater than the fun. I got heavier and heavier until I reached 290 pounds (at which point I kept overeating, but stopped weighing). My concentration and nerves became shot from the sugary-sweets and caffeine. I'd sometimes try to exercise, but my knees and back ached from the load, and my left thigh became (seemingly permanently) numb. I developed yucky rashes as my body tried to detox from the unwholesome food. I'd gnash my teeth in frustration at the discomfort. I got kidney stones. As I painfully drove myself to the hospital at night, I swore to whatever god there was that I'd eat lots of fruit from now on. After the attack ended, despite my earlier intentions, I went back to eating the same way. I lived in a university town for awhile, and as I walked down the street to Dairy Queen, a pick-up with college guys drove by and one yelled: "Hey, fat ass!"
I sometimes tried to stop, but despite having a strong will in some areas of my life, I found I could not stop overeating and bingeing for any long period of time. I tried fasting, eating only vegetable juice. I was able to sustain this for over a month and shed 50 pounds, but eventually the craving became too great and I fell again. I tried to get myself to vomit the excess food, but wasn't good at it (my lack of skill saved me from becoming a bulemic). I entertained the idea of suicide almost daily.
One thing that did help was that, after several false starts, I was able to take the plunge of becoming a dedicated vegetarian, even though no one else in my family was. I did it only to feel better (less guilty) about myself, not to lose weight (and I didn't lose any). I still ate mass quantities of unhealthy food, just vegetarian versions of it! I'd get the bag of cheese Combos instead of the pepperoni Combos and cheese pizzas instead of meat-lovers pizza. I did feel some satisfaction being a vegetarian, since I was able be successful at doing this one thing. I hated the world and human beings, but I felt neutral toward animals, since though they'd attack and eat me, they wouldn't do it out of malice.
After years of being morbidly obese (by the medical definition), I decided to start a new life. I lived near the East Coast, and I packed up my belongings and drove out to California, with no job or home lined up. I packed my passenger seat with cans of Slim-Fast and V8, and drank only this for weeks, as I drove around Cali (from Santa Barbara to LA to San Diego) looking for someplace to live and work. I settled for San Diego and found a vegetarian intentional community to live in (some would call it a commune!). I also found a job that I could walk to. So I walked to and from work each workday. During this time I was able to stop eating eggs and egg-based dishes, since I heard that conventional egg farms didn't treat the chickens well, and because I'd had some interest in a yogic tradition that refrained from eating eggs. I couldn't make changes that helped me directly...I had to justify it by saying that it'd help the animals. Though I was raised an atheist, I'd started to become interested in spiritual things.
I started tracking my weight on a free online chart at Slim-Fast dot com. After a year or so in Cali, I let go of dairy, since I heard milk cows weren't treated that well either. (In retrospect I know that there are things like free-range eggs and organic milk, where the animals are treated better, but this wasn't in my field of vision yet.) Even though I couldn't control the quantity of food I ate, after a year-and-a-half of eating lacto-vegetarian my weight had gone down to maybe 220. I became interested in organic food, meaning it was grown without synthetic hormones, herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers, and without genetic-modification (so the tomatoes weren't part fish). I had suffered so much in regards to eating, I deserved to eat like a prince. After a year,I even switched jobs from graveyard shift at a convenience store to working as a produce clerk at a health-food store. I gradually learned how to buy and store fresh fruits and vegetables (before then I had no idea how long food stays fresh in a fridge, and which things are not supposed to be refrigerated, such as bananas). Now that my weight was lower, I could jog some on a nearby trail.
During the time I was a vegan, my gallbladder said: "Whew! I'm glad I'm not so stressed out by digesting cheese...I'm going to try to get rid of these stones that've been in here for years." So I had a gallbladder attack. I painfully drove myself to the hospital, and the doctor said he'd have to cut it out, and that it'd cost $3000. I said to myself: "No! My body's just telling me it's time to change. I don't want to mutilate my body." So I did internet research and found two traditional remedies for gallstones: a Western folk remedy and an Oriental remedy. I drank olive oil and lemon juice daily and sent off to Canada for Chinese Gold Coin herbs. I also refrained from eating anything that had any fat whatsoever (by reading the labels). (One helpful thing about being a vegetarian/vegan is that I learned to read labels and did research about what ingredients come from plants and which come from animals.) Anyway, after doing these remedies for a month or two, I gradually tapered back to eating fat again (e.g. eating items that had 1/2 gram of fat, then 1 gram, etc.). I was still a vegan, so I naturally was eating no cholesterol, since I was eating only plant fats (such as avacado and nuts). I hadn't known until then that only animal products have any cholesterol in them. It's been 6 years, I still have my gallbladder, I'm no longer afflicted by it.
Anyway, being a vegan (yet still overeating at will), my weight went down below 200 for the first time in years. But it leveled out at around 190. I still wanted to be trim and handsome. I became interested in raw-food (San Diego's a kind of mecca for the Living Food movement). I enjoyed making raw-food preparations. It was the first time I enjoyed making recipes. For my birthday I made a cake out of two big disc-shaped watermelon slices, and fig and almond paste for frosting. Being a raw-foodist (yet still not able to do anything about my bingeing -- I'd eat a whole organic watermelon in one sitting), my body went down to 170, my hair and skin glowed, and my hands were no longer dry and cracked. I came to delight in the various varieties of organic fruits, and discovered kinds I'd never heard of before: custard-textured cherimoyas and sapotes. My taste changed, and I came to love good-quality organic olives (not the sad rubbery kind I'd grown up with and hated) and avocados. One of my staples was (and is) organic apples or pears slathered with natural nut butters (pb, almond butter, cashew, sunflower butter). Even to this day, my main two dishes I prefer to eat are 1) "Fruit Sundae", where I eat a big bowl of organic natural sweet stuff: fruit, nut butter, yoghurt, cashews, real maple syrup, and 2) "Green Salad" where I fill a big bowl of organic lettuce or arugula, and make a dressing by pouring in almond butter, tamari or soy sauce, and organic olive oil, plus a big handful of cashews or other wholesome crunchy things I like, such as pure rye crackers (Finn Crisp) or brown rice crackers.
Anyway, now that I was physically refreshed, I thought I'd be happy, but I was wasn't. I was still depressed. So I tried to go further...I became a fruitarian, and later started fasting on water for a day at a time. I was still doing manual labor as a produce clerk and walking to and from work (about a 2 mile walk there). Though I enjoyed it for a month, it was going too far. Though I was still bingeing on fruit and soaked nuts, I became thin, down to 145 (half my top known weight). A housemate said I looked like I came from a concentration camp. I resented him saying that, but he was right. I felt loopy, and crashed a pallatte jack into a door which hit a customer and hurt her arm. One day I felt a weird hot rush inside my intestines, and I decided I'd gone far enough. In retrospect, I had become an "orthorexic", and if I kept going to further extremes along that road, it could be as dangerous as anorexia. I tapered back to being a regular raw foodist.
I was still unhappy though, and I'd gone as far as I could go with food-related practices, so I was in despair. I had a spiritual crisis: I feverishly went to Barnes & Noble's religion/spirituality sections and picked out any book that caught my eye and brought them home: Gandhi, Tolstoy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ken Wilbur (a neo-Buddhist), a Bible, the Muslim Gospels. I read them, but realized I had to have a community for me to practice these things with, otherwise nothing would come of it (any more than the several other times I'd tried to meditate on my own). I looked on the internet for a community related to these authors, and I found a monastery associated with one of the authors nearby. I started going to the public practice days there. In the discussion circles there, was the first time I felt safe enough to admit to others that I had a binge-eating problem. I went on a walk with a monk and I admitted that I couldn't stop craving food. At the monastery, I learned concrete mindful eating practices that have helped me to this day: setting my fork/spoon down while I chew, counting my chews up to 20, 30, or more (now I no longer count, but simply don't like the feeling o chunks of unchewed food going down my esophagus), and refraining from speaking of negative things during a meal.
Well, having learned all this, and being physically refreshed, I moved back East with the intention of finishing my bachelors degree. I lived with my folks a few months before I'd move off to school. During that time, I was still a rawfoodist, but one day I got angry at my parents, and frustrated that there wasn't a better selection of organic food in the store (we lived in rural West Virginia) and I went into their pantry and ate a bunch of their junk food. From there, I was back to the races, and edged up toward 200 pounds again. I was demoralized. Here I'd spent two years in California, working day-in-and-day-out to lose this weight, and here I am fat again!
Not long after that, a friend mentioned to me that one of their friends is in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I wondered if there's something like that for me. I looked on the internet and did find a similar recovery group. This is where I recovered from bingeing. I started going to meetings and asked someone to sponsor me, and I began refraining from bingeing one day at a time. It was rough. I felt emotionally tense. I was abstinent for a month, but I went out of town for a visit, and I didn't stay in touch with my recovery fellows when I came back, and within a short time, I'd had an extra dessert, and was off to the races again. I was gone for a year.
I binged pretty much every day like I'd done in the old days: cheese pizza delivered daily, and picking up a bag of snacks (I liked alternating sweet, salty, and sour) to eat myself to sleep. Most of my life for that year was work + eating alone in my apartment. Then strange things started to happen: my hair falling out, disconcerting feelings in my intestines, waking up with ringing in my ears and itchy eyes, my skin turned pink and pasty again (where it had become golden and fresh after the raw food remediation), and my emotional and mental state slid down a black spiral. My mind was in a food-fog, and I was reaching the point where I was no longer effective at my work in the engineering firm. I'd eat a bunch of pop-tarts behind my closed office door before work. My concentration was shot. There was a week where I marked my timesheet for only a few hours of work because I'd goofed off on the internet instead of work-projects, since I couldn't concentrate. My manager was a mellow fellow and let it slide, but I felt I couldn't keep this up much longer.
I soon remembered how I used to go to that recovery group. I went back, having been beaten by the affliction of destructive eating. I felt literally beaten: my eyes, face, and body were all puffy and sore. This time I found a male sponsor to work with (the last time I'd been there, there were only women). I went to a meeting nearly every day for a year. If I couldn't find a eating disorder meeting, I'd go to AA or NA or Al-Anon or other meetings.
I started working through the threefold recovery program: physical, emotional, and spiritual. I admitted that I was beaten, I conceived that some Power beyond myself could cure me of this affliction, I turned my will and life over to that Power of my own conception, I made a thorough emotional and moral inventory (writing down everything I'd ever felt 1) angry/irritated/annoyed/hatred about or 2) fearful/worried/anxious about, along with 3) an inventory of my sexual history), I wrote down at least some way (however small) I was partly at fault for all the things I was resentful about, I asked my personal Power to relieve me of my faults, I made a list of every person or institution I'd ever harmed in my life (from the boy I'd hit in the nuts in school, to my parents whom I'd unconsciously used the threat of suicide as a weapon against them), I went to the many people and institutions I'd harmed (even if they'd harmed me even worse) and apologized and made concrete or symbolic redress to them (I still have some to go), and I continue to do these things daily and pass on this way of life as I'm able. Within six months I was down to my target weight (175) and I have not binged any more, my thigh is no longer numb, and I've been maintaining a normal weight for three years.
Thanks,
Travis
. This has been a great thread. I appreciate reading about everyone else's similar struggles. Thanks for letting me rant.
