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Amy's Story

As a kid I was really picky and I wouldn’t eat anything. I just didn’t like a lot of stuff. Sometimes I’d have to sit at the dinner table until I ate something. I was really small and my parents were always trying to get me to eat more. So I constantly had this idea in my mind: “I am really skinny and I eat like a bird.” And then when I got to be a teenager, I started eating more but I still thought of myself as really skinny. I ate whatever I wanted and didn’t gain weight. When I was in college I thought the same thing and ate whatever I wanted. Then one year I gained twenty pounds and I didn’t understand it because I had always been “the skinniest, littlest kid” and suddenly I thought, “God, this just isn’t me.” At that point I got an image of myself as a “fat person”. Nowadays, I fluctuate. If I’ve lost weight I think, “Oh, I’m skinny. I can eat whatever I want. That was just a fluke.” And then I’ll eat a lot and gain weight and think, “I’m not skinny. I’m doomed to always be fat.” So, how I see myself really changes from day to day.

When I think about it now I can see that my bingeing started in college because you have every possible food there is. People would eat huge trays full of food. You would just get one thing after another because your friends would keep coming in [to the cafeteria] and you’d want to get the most from your meal plan. And you couldn’t control what was there. Everything was there. So, I gained a lot of weight, twenty pounds or so, and I wanted to lose it so I joined Weight Watchers™.

With Weight Watchers there are points; different foods are worth different points and you have a range of points each day. If you eat within the range you’ll lose weight. It does help you eat healthier but it also can get kind of obsessive. I would plan out my points, but it was almost like planning them and knowing what I was going to eat made me want to eat more. It made me constantly think about food. And it was always a battle to not eat. I would think, “Why is this so hard? All I have to do to lose weight is not eat.” Not eating the things I loved just made me want them more. So, every time I would find something that was low in points like a low-calorie food or dessert that wasn’t too bad for me, I would not be able to stop myself. I would have one and then I’d have to have another and another until I ate so much of it that I felt horrible about myself. But I couldn’t stop myself. I’d think, “Well, I’ve already eaten this much I might as well just finish it.” Giving in to the urge initially felt good; I wanted the food and knew that because I couldn’t have it, I would feel anxious about it and obsessed with it. If I just ate it I would feel better.

When I started trying to break out of this cycle, I was reminded of one of the things that they told us at Weight Watchers. They said when you’re first trying to lose weight or eat healthier you have to control your environment and what food is in it because it’s too hard to control yourself. So the idea is if you can’t trust yourself around a particular food then you have to just not buy it. I know I can’t control myself around certain foods so I can’t have them in the house.

For example, the other night I bought ice cream sandwiches. I thought “I haven’t had ice cream sandwiches in so long. I’ll get some for dessert.” They come in a pack of ten and my roommate ate some but then one night I just got in binge mode. I don’t know why it was but I ate dinner and then I thought, “All right. I’ll have an ice cream sandwich.” So I had one. And then immediately after I finished it I thought, “I have to have another.” So I had another. And luckily that was the last one in the box. But then I thought, “I have to have cereal.” So I had a bowl of cereal. And I ended up eating so much more than I needed, but it was like something in me had to do it and I wasn’t going to stop until that urge was satisfied. So there are still lots of things which trigger a binge. I just have to never buy them.

There are a few foods I try to substitute for my binge triggers; for me frozen grapes are really good at helping me when I want to eat ice cream; they have the same consistency. When I eat them, I don’t crave ice cream anymore. For a lot of foods there are no substitutes; I’ll want to eat it anyway. Those are the things that are really off-limits. That really does help me. It’s not a long list of foods, so I don’t think it’s detrimental. Another thing that’s helped me is that I learned to think about food differently. At a place like this [the office] where junk food is constantly available it’s easy to think, “Well, it’s free. Why not eat it?” I had to start thinking about it in terms of, “Well, it’s free money-wise, but it’s not free points-wise or in terms of feeling good about myself.”

It’s hard to know if I’ll ever be free from bingeing altogether. It’s kinda like a self-perpetuating cycle; when I feel really fat I’m more likely to eat more and when I feel skinny I’m likely to not eat as much. This keeps me whatever weight I am. When I was running a lot, I was definitely feeling skinnier and probably was skinnier. I didn’t obsess about my body or my weight as much and I didn’t think about food as much. But whenever I start to feel fat, it’s all I can think about. My bingeing is definitely less frequent in the last couple years, but I always wonder if I’ll go back to how I used to be. I really don’t know.