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Lydia's Story

When I was young, my parents always made it clear that “being fat is bad”. One night during spring break in 8th grade, I was laying on my side on the bed reading a book and a little bit of my stomach hung over the side of my pants and my mom said, “Is that fat?!” I said, “I guess so.” I felt like I had just been caught doing something wrong. She wanted me to start eating healthier, so I did. Before that I weighed 114 pounds. I lost about four pounds and then my mom said, “Oh you look great!” What?! I only lost four pounds! So I think that’s why I started thinking that numbers were very important. In 9th grade I started playing field hockey and with all that exercise, I dropped a few more pounds. When field hockey season ended, I started obsessing about gaining weight. Every little pound that went on I thought, “Oh my god! I’m getting fat!” My parents bought an elliptical machine and as spring break approached, I thought, “Okay. I’m not gonna be fat this year. I’m gonna get myself as skinny as I can get and then I’ll look good in a bathing suit.” I put ridiculous limits on my calorie amounts like 200 for breakfast, 200 for lunch, between 70 and 160 calories for snack and then 400 for dinner. By the time spring break came around I weighed 99 pounds and thought I looked great. But on spring break, I was so hungry that I binged like crazy. I ate anything I could. I gained five pounds. So I went right back to my old regimen of diet and exercise.

As soon as I got home from school each day, I would go on my elliptical and burn off exactly 100 calories and then I’d eat my little snack and then do a 45 minute workout or so. I was definitely hungry the whole time and felt weak and tired. In fact, that’s how my bingeing started. I was so hungry all the time. I decided to have a splurge day. I thought, “Okay. I’ll just let myself have whatever I want on Sundays and then I’ll have something to look forward to throughout the week.” Every Sunday, I ate anything and everything. I estimated calorie counts between 4000-5000. Come Monday I thought, “Okay, a new week is beginning and I can go back on my diet.”

By May of that year, I was 95 pounds. I never really had any weight goal in mind. I just kept dropping pounds and it felt good. It was like an obsession. It was a thing to do. Like a way to test my limits. And the bingeing continued as a weekly thing. But by the end of May my parents threatened to send me to a clinic. I finally got to the point where I thought, “This is ridiculous. I can’t do this anymore. It’s exhausting.” I decided to just be good to myself during the summer. So for a few days I ate when I was hungry and stopped when I was full. I didn’t gain a lot of weight at first. Gradually over the summer I went up to 100 but I thought “This is good. I like this. This way I’m not fat. If I stay at 100 like this, life will be great!” I went online to try to figure out how many calories I could eat each day in order to maintain my weight. And I figured it was about 1700-1800 calories. So I usually stuck to 1700. I would have 1600 on days when I didn’t exercise. That seemed to work, but there would be days when I’d get really hungry because I wasn’t spacing out my food well enough. So then I’d binge and beat myself up for it but I didn’t really know any other way. It seemed like I was hungry all the time, so I thought if I actually listened to my body and ate when I was hungry, I’d eat all the time and get fat.

I started my junior year of high school at 5’3” and 110 pounds and I thought that was fat. My mom said I was starting to look better but I didn’t care. For me it was always the number 100. I started restricting again, which left me feeling hungry and more vulnerable to a binge. Halloween of that year, I binged like no other (telling myself that everyone does on Halloween), but I just felt so horrible about it that it convinced me to stop. The guilt was tremendous. Having often turned to food in times of stress (in 10th grade, I’d have a carton of “Cookies and Cream” ice cream out on the desk when I had a difficult essay to write), it suddenly occurred to me that if I wanted to minimize stress, I couldn’t have the guilt of bingeing hovering above me. Then I saw this National Eating Disorders Association ad which said, “Eat what you want when you’re truly hungry. Stop when you’re full. Do this instead of any diet and you’re unlikely to ever have a weight problem or any eating disorder.” I cut that out and put it on my mirror. That helped me walk away, breathe, learn to eat only when I actually felt hungry.

At the same time, I discovered that if I ate a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, I could remain full for really long periods of time. So I’d eat one at 7:30am and then be full until about 5pm. I think that’s how I lost 12 pounds. When I was down to 98 again I thought, “Oh wow. This is really great!” What ultimately scared me out of the restricting calories thing was this book I read late in senior year called Wasted by Marya Hornbacher (1). It’s her story about being both bulimic and anorexic. I think reading it almost prompted more binges because I knew I was really thin. I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted during lunch at school and binged more often. By the end of senior year I weighed 110 again.

When I went to college I thought, “I’m not gonna binge in college because I just won’t keep as much food in my room and I’ll be okay.” But my roommate had a lot of food and she would rarely eat it. I also knew that she ate small amounts in the dining hall. That was definitely a trigger for me. I thought, “Why can’t I eat that little?!” I’d feel bad about anything I ate. One time, she had one of those resealable bags of mini Oreos and I just ate the whole thing and then thought, “Oh my god this is horrible”. The fact that she wasn’t eating anything and I was eating her food made me feel worse about myself.

On my birthday, just a few weeks into my freshman year, my mom and dad bought me this chocolate cake from the dining hall. I invited the whole floor of my dorm and gave away a lot of it but there was still a lot left over and I ate it all in one sitting. My binge days were more frequent than they had been in high school. That’s when I started admitting I had a problem with binge-eating. It’s this complete loss of control…I don’t know how to close the bag of chips, put it out of my sight and not think about it. Even when I’m not eating I keep thinking about it. “If I don’t finish this, it’s gonna stay on my mind. I might as well just finish it and get it off my mind.” I’d open a sleeve of Pop-Tarts and eat one of them and try to put the other in a plastic bag for later, but very rarely did that work. I’d think, “Oh well, I ate two. I might as well just eat the whole box and get it out of my sight.” I had this all or nothing mentality where you eat the one thing and then you’ve gotta eat all of it to get it off your mind.

My bingeing continued to spin out of control freshman year and my weight continued to increase. But for some reason, everything just stopped at 132 pounds. I guess I just reached the point where what I was eating on a day to day basis was what my body needed and could handle. Also, at the end of the first semester, I rearranged my dorm room. The new arrangement was in such a way that my roommate’s food was under her bed, out of sight, and my food was under mine. Mentally, it registered that what was under her bed was hers alone, and after that I never ate one piece of what she had. I kept less food in the plastic tub under my bed—just rice cakes to snack on and some breakfast foods; this decreased my urge to binge late at night. In addition, I started seeing a therapist at school and after each session, I always felt good about myself. She even got me thinking that I could one day help people with eating disorders like she does. Now that I’m home for the summer, there are times when I’ve had to say to my mom, “I can’t have this food in the house. I feel really bad, but you’re gonna have to throw it away or give it to the birds because I can’t have this around.”

Another thing that helped me break out of bingeing is that I don’t weigh myself every day anymore. In January of my senior year of high school, I started keeping track of my weight every day, but the number on the scale dictated my mood for the day and how I perceived myself. So, I stopped weighing myself as often. In the last few months I decided to start focusing on the positives about myself. Like the fact that girls are supposed to have curves and I now have curves!

I also don’t count calories anymore. That was a huge step. Through a very gradual process, I have finally learned to just eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full. I bought a pack of 12oz bottles of (non-diet) soda, but I rarely go through a whole bottle. I just listen to my body and when I’m full, I dump the rest down the drain. So what if I’m wasting a little bit of money? I’d rather do that than feel horrible. I now feel comfortable with what I eat. It feels great to order what I want at a restaurant rather than what I feel I should order.