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Karen's Story

I was quite depressed as a child. I remember when I was about fourteen or fifteen and I would come home after school and eat and eat and eat. I’d go through bags and bags of chips and jars of cookies. My dad always bought groceries for the house, for everyone to share. So there would be this huge jar of cookies and I’d go in and eat the entire thing. Then I’d go and buy more cookies and put the jar back so that no one would notice. Soon it became a habit to stop by a provisions store every day after school and buy a whole lot of snack food. I’d go home and eat it all and then make sure it was cleared up before dinner.

I would always eat dinner even if I was completely stuffed. I would eat a huge full meal just so no one would get on my case. My dad knew that I was eating a lot. I put on a lot of weight. He would always give me a hard time about putting on weight. My sister was anorexic, so I think he was worried that I was going to have similar problems with my eating. I also think he was worried about aesthetics. When I was fifteen, he told me I’d be pretty if I lost fifteen kilos [about 30 pounds]. That stuck in my head for the last ten years.

So I kept bingeing in secret. We had those cheese slices, Kraft singles, and I would go down and get a couple slices, leave and eat them. Then I’d go back down for more. I’m sure no one would have said anything if they saw me eating a slice of cheese, but I didn’t want to get caught. I knew it was part of a bigger issue. I became afraid of getting caught, so I tried to avoid people. We had a housekeeper and I was always trying to make sure she was somewhere else when I was eating. At some point, though, I just got tired of always hiding and always being in secret.

In twelfth grade, after a horrific breakup with my boyfriend, I said to myself, “I’m starting over. I’m clearing out. I’m a new person”. Looking back, this was probably a big part of breaking the binge cycle. I had a lot of negative energy, so I started windsurfing as a way to vent that. I started getting fitter and losing weight and that started me on a positive cycle.

Then I went to college. Coming to college, I knew that the first year is always rough, eating-wise. You hear stories of people gaining “the freshman fifteen” [pounds]. So I didn’t let myself eat snack food or soda the entire year. Almost zero. ‘Cause there’s so much snack food around and I thought if I started eating even a little of it, I would just spiral out of control again. So, I didn’t touch it. And it really helped. But it took me a while to relax away from that. In fact I spent the next three years of college learning to eat a little bit of the foods I loved without being excessive. I remember freshman year how good it felt to not eat snacks at all. Being that in control was a big accomplishment. But now the times in my life when I’ve been able to have a little and stop myself are even more rewarding to me.

Sometimes I’ll still wind up bingeing and I know I shouldn’t but I’m able to forgive myself and that helps me not do it again. If I allow myself to feel bad [guilty] then I want to eat more to erase those negative feelings. The other day I caught myself going through a box of Wheat Thins like there was no tomorrow. Whenever I’m at my laptop working really hard on something, I get lost in thought. I eat without thinking about it. I try to avoid this by setting limits for myself ahead of time. I say, “go, take something, and leave. That’s it.” Portioning things out ahead of time and not letting myself feel bad when I do binge have helped keep me out of that cycle.

I also try to exercise. That seems to help. And I still try to keep snack foods out of the house ‘cause I know if there are bags of chips around I’ll eat them. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m pretty confident that I won’t always binge on that stuff, but I know it’s a temptation. It’s a holdover from freshman year when I just banned myself from snack foods altogether. I know that the easiest way to keep myself from bingeing is to not have it around at all. However, I try to mitigate that a little because, of course, the occasional snack isn’t a bad thing. If I do slip up and binge, I try to tell myself, “I may binge once in a while but that doesn’t make me a bad person” and “I’m not gonna balloon from one binge on ten cookies.”

I think overcoming binge-eating is a lifelong process. For me, it’s mostly under control and I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t think of it as something to control, which is really where I want to be. But I know my history. I know in the back of my head that certain things are likely to trigger a binge. I’ve tried to build new habits, ‘cause habits are hard to break. If you build good ones, you’ll be stuck in a positive cycle.