FAMISHED: Confessions From A Decades-Long Binge-Eater

You grow soft in the body but hard in the face. You and I know it should be the other way — hard in the body, soft in the face. — from my second book, Coupling.

Photo by Nutritionist Mom

My first conscious binge-eating episode occurred in 1989 while on a school trip to Washington, D.C. during the end of eighth grade. My class slept in side-by-side motel rooms at a mid-budget accommodation off the Washington Beltway that eerily resembled The Lorraine Motel, the Memphis location where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The motel had the same retro-looking rows of outdoor balconies that you’d see off the Vegas Strip, or located in some seedy section of Atlantic City, blocks away from the brownish-green ocean and bygone era boardwalk.

The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, U.S. National Park Service

While my horny, hormonal classmates with facial acne that resembled various constellations had snuck away in pairs to fool around behind our commercially rented bus parked conspicuously in the adjacent parking lot, I would walk alone to the first floor vending machines, where I would indulge in my own secret sin — gluttony. My heart raced like a soon-to-be heroin addict about to get their first score.

After digging deep inside my jean pocket for the rows of quarters that I’d guide into the metallic slit of the vending machine, my candy and chip selections would soon begin in rapid succession: Starbursts, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Kit Kat, Twix, Twizzlers, two bags of Lays’ salty potato chips to compliment the sweetness of the candy. I’d go on to stash my pirate loot inside the concave space of my pulled-out shirt like some farm woman carrying golden eggs from the chicken coop, and then went looking for a private place to binge alone.

Photo by Alamy

About mid-way through my secret shame, a classmate would find me sitting on the floor, hiding behind the overstuffed arm of the lounge chair in his empty, half-lit motel room. I will never forget the look on his face. It was a look between concern and disgust. He said something to me at that moment but I blocked it out. Whatever he said had snapped me out of my numbed, junk food-like trance.

I’d apologize profusely before I began to frantically pick up the empty candy wrappers and chip bags strewn on the floor, then bolted back to my motel room where a handful of my classmates had gathered round a boxy-looking TV set to watch The Goonies. I wanted to be anywhere but there.

I went from 95 pounds at thirteen up to 140 pounds by sixteen. My relatives soon took notice of my new curvy size with a Captain Obvious cousin pointing it out while we stood in a sea of family when he’d stop me to say “Whoa, you put on a lot of weight” after having seen me for the first time in months. I’d remember the abject shame that I had felt in that exact moment, standing in our grandmother’s dining room with no place to run or hide.

When I’d later ask my father if he thought I was fat, he’d reply by calling me “pleasantly plumped.” According to Quora:

“Pleasantly plump” is a nice way of saying that a person is overweight, but not horribly so. There used to be a time when some extra weight was actually considered to add to beauty. You can note how women in particular were painted in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I thought I could live with pleasantly plump, but not fat.

However, after catching a glimpse of myself wearing baggy, gray sweatpants in a random mirror at the local mall, I’d decide right then and there to make a sudden and needed change. Almost immediately, I began to fast intermittently from 5pm to 12pm, well into the following day. I had accomplished this fasting-feat by binging from the moment I got off the school bus at 4 until 5pm, then stopped eating altogether until I had lunch at school the following day — a total of nineteen hours of straight fasting. In addition, I would jump rope in the evenings and do 100 sit-ups before bed.

Within three months, I would drop in weight from 140 down to 115 pounds, and four months later, I’d finally reach my goal of 105 pounds. I wanted so badly for my cousin and an aunt to eat their own words, and never to feel that sublte brand of fat-shaming again.

By nineteen, I would develop a chronic heart condition called Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT), which I suspect was due from three straight years of extreme dieting, including, for a brief time, over-the-counter diet pills. Here’s a link to my essay highlighting my 25 year history with SVT: https://medium.com/p/15f5f6d1017d

But I’d find that history would repeat itself in 2004, when my great uncle, on my father’s side, would say loud enough for all to hear that I had “put on a lot weight” after greeting one another at my grandmother’s funeral. By then, I’d lost that fire to prove others wrong, and kind of accepted my learned helplessness as a form of cruel fate.

Binge-eating had become a persistent, invisible saboteur in my life — perhaps my shadow-self, some quasi ghost hellbent on haunting me throughout the decades. I understood all too well that euphoric numbness that drug addicts would feel and continually seek out because that was the same exact high that I would feel in the middle of an emotional food binge.

The high was akin to a warm hug but instead of the hug coming from outside of myself, say by a loving mother or father, the hug would come from within. And in that internal embrace, I’d feel absolutely nothing as if my feelings were suspended in time, but later dispising myself over my gluttonous indulgence and apparent lack of self-willpower.

Here’s a link to my micro fiction story entitled “Famished,” about binge-eating on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GPGuAv6_9uY?si=X9lqM_dfBWpW_-3Y

When Sia’s music video for her song “Chandelier” came out in 2014, everyone was enthralled by little Maddie Ziegler’s powerful choreography, the young dancer from the Lifetime show Dance Moms. For me, this song would encapsulate my lifelong struggle with emotional binge-eating. Here are some apt lyrics:

Party girls don’t get hurt
Can’t feel anything, when will I learn
I push it down, push it down

Throw em back, till I lose count

I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier
I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist
Like it doesn’t exist
I’m gonna fly like a bird through the night, feel my tears as they dry
I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier

Today, I’m in intense therapy — 90 minutes per week, and finally addressing those feelings that have led to this secret and shameful condition. I’ve thought about taking Ozempic for the cravings alone, but am a little hesitant due to some of the noted aesthetic side effects like a sagging face and ass, not including stomach paralysis, which actually sounds quite painful.

My new therapist is fantastic. A session with her is like sitting on a park bench with a random stranger, who just happens to be a cloaked angel in disguise, who’d divulge answers to life’s biggest mysteries through covered coughs and left behind briefcases as seen in foreign espionage films.

She told me in our last session that I’m a powerful manifestor, that I’d somehow manifested all those feelings from childhood into the here and now, and that my weight is just a symptom of something else entirely.

“You like being invisible,” she’d say.

A poem from my second book, Coupling:

Pleasantries

When I ask you
how you’re doing,
tell me to F-OFF!

Tell me you can’t see
past tomorrow.

Tell me you sleep
in the nude.

Tell me you’re afraid
of what hides
in the shadows.

Tell me you eat
until you feel
all numb inside.

Tell me about
the numbness.

Tell me anything
but I’m fine;
anything but Fine.