As I reflected on the upcoming domestic Thanksgiving holiday, it occurred to me that I have so much more to say about food and eating. Eating disorders are a lonely and seemingly endless tyranny, not uncommon for those with any sort of trauma, but I think even more for those of us with attachment trauma. And while pondering what to write, I ran across an article that had grabbed my attention a while back with the header John Lennon and Yoko Ono were Obsessed with their Weight, according to their old friend Elliott Mintz, who recently wrote a book, (We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me, Dutton 2024) about his long and close friendship with them. Apparently, John journaled daily, and recorded that day’s weight, and the couple kept a rotating rack where they hung their clothes in order of varying waist sizes. I was amazed.
I remembered when I lived alone in a tiny apartment in South America, at the age of about 24. I was desperately lonely but my obsession with being ever thinner was a constant companion, preoccupation and ghostly authoritarian presence. With that I was never truly alone. In those days, I probably subsisted mostly on the cheap, local Gato Negro white wine. I remember I had a picture I had clipped of John and Yoko, the skinny iconic couple I so admired. I thought they were of that coveted species of “naturally,” “effortlessly” or “perfectly thin,” what I later learned some people wildly imagined about me. Little did I know they/we were comrades in this agony.
My eating problems began probably from the beginning. I was always a “bad eater” with my mom chronically annoyed with me. I hated most meat, but had a special and violent aversion to liver, and the second worst was hot dogs. The house rule was, I had to at least eat a piece the size of a quarter, or I would never be released to get up from the table. More than once I was whacked with a serving spoon, or chased around the table. My dad would terrorize us all, bellowing about his traumatic history of going hungry, or subsisting on “bread and worms.” And Aunt Gertrud, my elderly great aunt, called me a “dickkopf” (fathead) for being so unreasonably “difficult.”
I became decidedly anorexic in the middle 1960’s. In 1967 I was just turning 12. In those days it was still a relatively nameless, mysterious, unknown pathology. I remember only much later, finding one book: Hilde Bruch’s, Eating Disorders, that I swiped from the library and hid in my closet. It had pictures of little half undressed, emaciated girls with their faces blocked out, and a brief, unintelligible to me at that time, psychoanalytic analysis that did not help me at all.
Anorexia provided a confusing illusion of control, in a life where I felt profoundly out of control in every imaginable way. My chaotic mood swings, widely pitching me between what I only much later have come to understand as the hyper and hypo-aroused traumatized nervous system. However, anorexia was a strangely contradictory kind of control. Because I had no control over it. When I would have intermittent bouts of terror and guilt, that perhaps I was starving myself to death, I could not stop. And as mysteriously, suddenly I would be bingeing uncontrollably on sugar. For years at a time, I nightly consumed half a gallon (roughly 2 liters) or more, of ice cream, directly out of the carton, standing at the kitchen counter in the silent solitude of the night, until numbed and catatonic, bloated and racked with shame I would stumble off to bed. No one ever spoke about it, but the freezer was always stocked. And I was completely out of control and could not stop.
Although thankfully, I never became bulimic. I discovered endurance exercise as a seeming solution, at least to keep me from gaining weight. So, the other half of the secret was the compulsion to sneak out of the house in the wee hours and run marathon distances, sneaking back in, hiding my sweaty sweats in the far reach of the closet, and creeping back into bed pretending I had never been gone. This unwavering regimen of compulsive control kept me completely and utterly out of control for years, accompanied by the obsession described by gloriously slender John and Yoko. And the obsession was exquisitely effective in keeping my trauma story out of awareness for decades.
Regulation
Now after years and decades of searching, futilely trying every diet and regimen under the sun, to no avail, I have become that elusive “naturally thin” person I never thought could be me. And I have come to understand, why we do all that, why we put ourselves through that protracted agony, and cycle for years and decades on a carousel of despair. Too many people die or make themselves very ill in the process. I am one of the blessed few who came out of it without brain damage (as far as I know!) or medical consequences that I am aware of. Although admittedly I have a huge rage and resentment about a (certainly in the US) profit driven eating disorder treatment industry that is largely useless; and the domestic food production industry which pedals largely processed and unnatural, “junky” foods, that appear to sustain the cycles and keep themselves in business. This is not to disparage or discourage those in our field who have found effective treatment approaches, but grief and bitterness for the many of us who suffered too long, or may not have had the positive outcome that I have had.
Especially from my experience of the eating obsession alternating or operating in tandem with my alcohol addiction, it was a no-brainer that both served a similar function: a flight from pain and consciousness, an effective way to not feel and not remember, and to be preoccupied with something else. The obsessions became the primary relationship in a nervous system unable to sustain a human relationship. So, the healing of course was a long course of relationship and regulation work. I was blessed with a brilliant, tenacious and infinetly patient attachment-oriented therapist who I stayed with for decades, to work the attachment piece, and many and varied modalities of regulation work. For me, neurofeedback and sensorimotor work were the most effective. But the relationship work was the most important, long, hard and unspeakably rewarding and worth it. I don’t work with eating disorders per se, although sometimes it creeps into my practice, and I use what has worked for me. I am always interested to know what others are finding that works. I know in our field, there are clinicians that do. I applaud them, thank them and wish them well.
Gratitude
So, I am immensely grateful for the way my journey has left me healthy, and very much the joyful “foodie.” I live in a town obsessed with delicious food, and in a region blessed with wonderful abundance. I can eat what I want and don’t stress about it. I am a home cheese maker now, which is another kind of regulation, the calming rhythmic movement of stirring, the protracted waiting while cheese ages, and the joy of sharing the wealth are all huge rewards. And for this non-mother, the fact that the medium is milk, seems to have meaning to me. I am also a sourdough baker, another living breathing food, that takes less time to grow and cultivate, but similarly is a source of joy to both produce and share. Perhaps On Thanksgiving I will celebrate stirring a large vat of Cheddar, or some other wonderful bequest of the world’s gastronomy. A day of quiet, peace and immense gratitude. Thankfully my husband does not mind the scrooge in me, and he reminds me almost daily how much he appreciates the cheese and bread, and all the sweet aromas. He is one of those “perfectly” slender folk that I had imagined to be among the illusory, magically effortlessly so. When I first met him in 1991, I asked him, “have you always been thin?” He answered unhesitating, “No! I’ve always been fat!” He suffered as a chubby little kid and a fat adolescent. Somehow lost weight in high school and has worked to maintain his seemingly “perfect” weight ever since. But even many decades later, he still sees that fat kid in the mirror. It is true what I learned from one of my great mentors, “Your self image is the last thing to change.” Best wishes of the season, whatever they are for you. And practice gratitude!
Today’s song:
