Skinny

I picked the name of this post for two reasons. One - I just finished a book called Skinny (by Diana Spechler) and I'm going to talk about it. Especially because I am a reviewer for a blog called The Readers Cafe, and I will be reviewing the book in further detail there. And two - I listened to a podcast this morning called "Live. Love. Eat." And the woman who was a guest on the show talked about Overeaters Anonymous. A subject I am currently researching. This post, I have a theme.

The book, Skinny, was fantastic. It's about a woman named Gray who, after her father's death, goes to a fat camp to serve as a counselor in search of the truth about her father's past. Throughout the book, all I could think about was the temptation this woman was facing, temptations to settle for less than the best in her life, to do something illicit, to bury her father's secrets, and of course, the temptation to eat.

Obsessive-calorie-counter-turned-compulsive-eater, Gray is a character with real-life flaws that I'm sure many women can relate to. She rationalizes her flaws until she is forced to confront them, on a symbolic rainy day in the midst of chaos at camp. Soon after, the story takes an about face that even I, cynical reader and astute "guesser of plots" that I may be, didn't see coming.

Why do I tell you all this? Because, readers, I am having my rainy debut. That's what the apologizing to ex-friends was all about, and an idea of solidarity behind writing in this blog. I needed something authentic and consistent to push me through the next year. And you're a part of that.

Of course, I am also telling you about this book because I too, like many women I know, actually, am an emotional eater. I tried for a long time to deny it, because when I'm sad or angry I am no where near food, especially now. Now you'll find me writing in my burn journal (which should be burned if I should die an untimely death - mom) or going for a walk. The last time I was in hysterics, the only thing on my mind was to get out of the house and blow off steam before my razor sharp angry tongue unleashed itself on some poor soul. But food? Not even a whisp of a thought in my head in the moment.

And then I caught myself eating when I was honestly just bored. I looked down at the Bugle bag, and thought, "Why am I eating these? They aren't good enough to be munching on right now, when I'm not even hungry." So I stopped, and I owned my disordered eating. Gray and I have that in common, because I've caught myself in fight or flight mode, where I felt like I ate enough for it to be my last supper and I was worried about whether I would eat again. Like, ever. It's this panic that you can't even begin to control, and you feel like you just need to store food for winter or something crazy.

A lot of people don't understand that feeling at all. The can just eat when they're hungry, or not eat when they're not hungry. They don't see food and start thinking they are hungry after they just had dinner a few moments prior. But I deal with that all the time.

Which brings me to Live. Love. Eat.

A podcast about loving yourself, the first guest speaker (and only session I've listened to thus far) was a woman who is a member of Overeaters Anonymous (OA). There is a chapter near my house, and I've considered it, given my recent awareness of disordered eating. The coolest thing about OA is that the people in it don't all look the same. It's not AA where people are all recovering from the same addiction with different symptoms, or NA where the source is different and the withdrawal is the same. No. OA has people of all different sizes, because disordered eating comes in different forms with different symptoms and different signs and different outcomes. Two bulimic women could be complete opposites, one thin and one fat, but yet they are both bulimic.

In high school, I struggled with even more aggressive disordered eating. Diet pills, purging, binging, and starving were all part of my cycle, and I never lost weight for the long haul. Instead, I kept the weight on, and added more. Add in some lovely mental health drugs, and you've got weight gain that could make a sane person lose it. Her sanity, not the weight.

So OA is sort of a welcoming environment to me. It is regimented, with the twelve steps and all, but the part that scares me isn't the commitment or the program. It's the "believe in a higher power" bit. Yes, all the twelve step programs, OA, NA, AA, etc, have a higher power. But listening to the podcast, I found out that OA doesn't define the higher power as God, or Buddha, or whomever else you might want to call out to in your prayers. It doesn't even have to be a higher power in a spiritual sense, but rather it can be the fact that you are loved, as something bigger, and thus more powerful, than your disordered eating.

So maybe next Monday, ironically around lunchtime, you will hear about my venture into my first OA meeting. I know it's anonymous, but I'm not ashamed of my emotional eating anymore. I'd rather be honest with you, reader. Because in the end there is only one higher power who'll be judging me, and it's not you, or you, or you.