Food For Thought - How I Came To Be

In the summer of 1983 I was dancing in the chorus of a show in Canyon, Texas. It was an outdoor musical drama called TEXAS! And it was a very difficult time of my life. I was 18 (would turn 19 that summer), trying to figure out who I was, trying to figure out whether I wanted to date girls or boys (well… I knew who I wanted to date – what I was trying to figure out was if God would still like me, after I started dating them: boys) and trying to find some healthy self esteem. I knew I wasn’t a talented dancer because I couldn’t learn the moves and needed help from my fellow chorus kids. I also knew this because my dance captain, a stocky young woman named Estella Levy, criticized my work in the show, every day. One of the other things she did to me, every day, was tell me I needed to watch my weight.

For your frame of reference, here is a photo of me, suntanning one day, before a show.



Every so often, Estella Levy would remark on my need to lose some weight. It (sufficiently) lowered my already damaged self esteem and gave me copious amounts of stress regarding my eating and workout habits. Once the show was over, I returned to college, where (in the next few years) I began sleeping with men, drinking a lot, binge eating, attempting suicide (it was about a once-every-18-month kind of thing), learning to make friends, learning to be who I am and, finally, where I met the love of my life (who is, as I type, sleeping in the next room, 24 years later). By the time I was 24, I had decided to stop dancing. I didn’t have the talent to take it where I wanted to go and, frankly, I didn’t want to do the work that I would have to do to achieve that level of technicality. I was far more interested in living my life and being with my loved ones. So I quit dancing. Almost overnight, I gained 20pounds. I was in a new relationship (and we both loved to eat – and remember, I was a drinker) and newly retired from dancing. I got doughy. As time passed, I got chubby. By the time I was 34, I was fat.










By the time I was 37, a doctor told me I had arthritis in my spine. He didn’t say that it was because I was carrying too much extra weight. He just said I had arthritis in my spine; and I knew that I had to lose some weight. I was in pain every day. I walked like I had some spinal condition. I knew that I could not (didn’t want to) live the rest of my life like this.

So I took every penny I had in my personal checking account and I gave it to the 19th Street gym and told them “It is April. On July 8th I will turn 38. Here is a photo of my in Jesus Christ Superstar at the age of 18. Make me look like this again by July 8th” and they gave me a trainer named Adam Wilson, who did just that.










For the next year, I trained on my own (Adam quit his job at the gym just before my 38th birthday –but I had reached my goal). For that year, I stayed at 165 lbs. My goal was, on my 40th birthday, to weigh what I did in that photo from Jesus Christ Superstar.—145 lbs. By the time I reached my 40th birthday, I did.

(The above photo shows me at my birthday party – alongside it is one of me in heavier days.)

On the day of my 40th birthday, I stood up and got dizzy; I fell down. My friend (who was with me all day that day) said to me, “You fall down a LOT. Are you eating?” No. I wasn’t. I had become Manorexic. I managed to get my weight down to 145 lbs through starvation. NOT. HEALTHY. Once this was out in the open, Pat decided that it was time to really delve into staying in shape with a greater focus on eating healthily. We had been working with a trainer named Anthony for about a year; during the next few months, he would marry and leave the gym for a more lucrative job in banking. The gym placed us with the man who trained Anthony – the man we still train with, the Rolls Royce of fitness trainers, my teacher, Ray Scalvino. When we began working with Ray, Pat told him that we really needed to focus on the concept of eating healthily. It is through Ray and my other teachers and healers (not to mention a certain amount of reading) that I found the right way for me to eat to remain healthy. I’ve been on this journey, now, for a little over eight years.

Now. Here is the thing that people either don’t know or don’t understand: I am still a food addict. I am an addict. Period. I am an alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in a decade. I am an ex smoker, a former shopaholic and a food addict. I just have an addictive personality. That’s all there is to it. I don’t believe in saying I am a recovering alcoholic. I am an alcoholic. Just because I don’t’ drink anymore doesn’t make me any less of an alcoholic. I am an ex-smoker. I don’t actively smoke cigarettes; but there are times (usually stress induced) when I want a cigarette. I am a former shopalolic who still wants to go buy all the dvds at Best Buy that I don’t own but who has learned to keep walking to the subway station, instead of going in. And I am a food junkie who wants to eat any time I have an emotion. And SOMETIMES I do. When I do, though, I get sick. And, like a dog who gets their nose pushed into their urine every time they pee on the carpet, eventually, this foodie (gradually!) learns his lesson. I no longer binge eat on cakes and pies – now I cheat on my diet with peanuts and raisins; and my friends scoff and say “that’s not cheating on your diet” and maybe they are right. But when you have an intestinal system that is used to processing broccoli and asparagus, eggwhites and chicken breast, when you put that amount of roughage and sugar into that system, you (at least, I) have to lie down and take a nap to escape the pain. This is something I struggle with, almost daily. Happily, I get stronger and the struggle becomes easier to handle.

I’d like to share with you some of my old eating habits.

--I could eat an entire bag of Keebler Pecan Sandies or Chips Ahoy cookies at one sitting WITH a gallon of skim milk for dunking.
--I used to buy Entenman’s variety pack donuts AND an ultimate crumb cake, sit down on the floor, pop in a dvd and eat every morsel (again, with the skim milk for dunking). The crumb cake, I didn’t even cut. I just got a fork and started at the center of the cake and worked my way outward.
--I could make an entire rectangular pan of Katharine Hepburn Brownies and eat all but four (whch I would give to Pat when he got home, using the mentality that, by not giving him more than four, I was not sabotaging his diet).
--I would make an entire huge bowl of popcorn, eat it, then wash the pot and the bowl used in the process and put it away so there was no evidence.
--I could eat an entire bag of Nabisco Oreos (skim milk!) in the middle of the night, hiding out in the bathroom so Pat wouldn’t find me.
--I would buy one of those big bags of Twizzlers and eat the entire thing, shoving three and four twizzlers in my mouth at a time.
--The days after Valentine’s day, I would go to the drug store and buy the marked down boxes of Russell Stover’s chocolates and eat the entire box.
--The days after Easter, I would go to the drug store and buy the marked down bags of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs and eat the entire bag before Pat got home (half of the bag would be deposited in the freezer upon arrival home because frozen PB eggs are the living end).
--I can buy and polish off a box of breakfast cereal in under an hour.
--I used to go to McDonald’s and come home with a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a Filet-O-Fish sandwich and Chicken McNuggets and eat it as one meal, taking the bag and packaging out to the street to put into the trash can so Pat wouldn’t see it.
--I used to order a large pizza from Pizza Plus, eat the entire thing and dispose of the packaging the same way.
--I would order a soft taco, hard taco, quesadilla, guacamole, sour cream and burrito from Fresco Tortilla and could consume it before anything had cooled off. Chased with milk (almost everything was chased with a gallon of milk).

These are some of my big food addiction memories. I was never happy afterward and I was usually sick.

I think having my binge eating be a cup of unsalted peanuts and a cup of organic jumbo flame raisins from Westerly is a lot more healthy.

However. I also think that the food item itself is unimportant; it is the behaviour that matters. What is it that makes me binge eat like this? Mind you, it isn’t an every day kind of thing. It also isn’t something I discuss with everyone. Pat knows when I have been overindulging. So does my best friend, Hunter. They know the symptoms, they can tell by what I am wearing if I have gone off my program, they know by the way I walk or whether or not I am smiling (as opposed to scowling in intestinal pain). I don’t know the answers – but I am working on finding them, with my therapist, who (along with Pat and Hunter) makes sure to tell me, often, that I look good – even though my dismorphia has me convinced I am still fat.

It isn’t easy sharing these private facts with the people who might be reading this blog entry: but to NOT share them would prevent me from letting people know – I am just like you. I am still trying to be healthier, I am still struggling with food issues, I am still battling weight concerns. There are ways in which we are all different and ways in which we are the same. We’re in this together – no matter what our individual perceptions of ourselves and of each other may be.

Now you know my history.

Let’s talk about food….