My therapist asked me a question today.

What does overeating mean to me?

Food is my best friend and my worst enemy, an evil entity that stalks me in unsuspecting moments. Food is a drug, not unlike heroin. Food is life. Food is death. It is why anorexics deny it and why I try to fill myself up with it. I panic and think I will die if denied food. When I eat I’m in my own little world where no-one can hurt me. I am a child in my mother’s womb. It’s safe and protective and for the duration I can block out the terrifying world where I just don’t fit in. Not unlike my therapist’s room.

If anorexics suffer guilt, repulsion and feel a sense of non-entitlement to eat even the barest amount of food, then I as an overweight person with a compulsive eating disorder feel a gigantuan sense of all-encompassing authority and empowerment to eat whatever I want, whenever I want and in whatever quantities I desire and f**k you if you get in my way.

We are working together to see if I can gain control of my eating. To eat the right food, in the right quantity and at the right time, three times a day and with a moderate amount of exercise thrown in is something I can only fantasise about. My doctor tells me it is part biological and part psychological.

Body-wise I was of normal weight till I was ten. Psychologically and emotionally I am still ten years old. I am now learning perspective taking, discovering internal strategies to manage intense emotions, recognizing an improved ability to reflect on thoughts and feelings and finding my sense of empathy and connection – all socially approved ways of managing intense emotions. Over-eating is not an acceptable pastime or hobby. In a world that equates thinness with success, then I am a failure – and yet I am the worst when it comes to being most scathingly judgmental of fat people.

My mother said to me, when I was a decade old, that I was putting on weight and needed to go on a diet. I reflected upon this as I made my way to the shops for yet another bag of lollies. Looking back at photos of that era they reveal a smiling, happy child of normal weight with a bit of a pot belly.

My mother is a good woman. She fed and clothed me, educated me and gave me shelter. For that I am truly grateful. But as mother and daughter we were emotionally incompatible. I wanted a clingy, affectionate, adoring mother who would carry me on her hip forever. She wanted a quiet, independent, undemanding, studious child who would obligingly and silently fly under her emotional radar. My sister, who does not have an eating disorder or any other disorder for that matter, filled the role of compliant child more than adequately.

My mother would berate me for eating food I was not entitled to. The more she berated the more I ate. I overeat to compensate for the longings and losses in my life. For the fantasy mother who did not exist. To fill that empty void that not even therapy can fill sometimes. I was so overwhelmed by negative thoughts and emotions that I lost sight of who I was. I had no identity, just an aggressive, fragmented sense of no sense. I only felt good when I was eating. It numbed the ever present internal pain that I could not identify or describe.

Sometimes especially during my 14th summer I would experience a sense of longing and loss I could not explain, only feel, of something so intangible, so near yet so unobtainable, and so far out of my puny reach it was warming my heart and breaking it at the same time. I wanted a relationship with a special person. I wanted to fly to the moon and reach the stars. I wanted to swim in the deepest waters and climb the highest mountains. I wanted connection. I wanted love. I wanted to experience the sheer intimacy of raw sensuality and sex which combined with the Australian summer heat was an utterly irresistible sensation of being nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

What I ended up with was an eating disorder. Because I could not identify this curious, mystifying poignancy I overate so I wouldn’t have to feel it. It was so private, it didn’t occur to me others felt it as well. Psychologists have a name for this strange sensitivity – it’s called puberty.

Food became my best friend, but no matter how much I ate I never felt full. I was hurt, angry, bewildered, sad, lonely and feeling strange bodily sensations that I could only identify as sexual longings. But for those glorious heady moments when I ate everything and anything in sight, I didn’t have to feel fat, inadequate, lumpy, stupid and friendless. I might have felt enormous guilt after I ate, when I was full and stretched out on the couch, unable to breathe, let alone move. But it was all worth it. Then came the descent into the depth of darkness, the self-loathing and the vows of nutritional chastity to only eat a lettuce leaf every other day. My internal critical voice was screaming in my head that I was taking up too much space on the planet, breathing precious oxygen destined for special more deserving others. My one fear was that I would not get enough to eat and then I would have to feel all those painful feelings.

I am much older now and I have filled that existential unidentifiable sense of loss and longing and disconnection with my beloved husband, my gorgeous but somewhat annoying teenage children, my work, my studies, my writing and yes, with my mother. But I still overeat. I’m not sure what I am trying to fill now. I don’t ever feel hungry in my adored therapist’s room. Carrying that warm, loving, connected, entitled to live life to the fullest feeling into the real world is the biggest challenge for me.

The best days I have now are ones where I have a structured routine. I get up, make the bed, have a shower, get dressed and face the day. I learned this in a psychiatric clinic where they teach people with mental health issues living skills. Days when I eat three correct meals a day without alcohol are the ones when I feel mentally and physically clean.

Then there is the biological side of overeating. There is only a very tiny amount of brain neurotransmitter chemicals between anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating and normality. I recognise this now. Living cleanly and knowing when I am too hungry, engulfed in anger, overwhelmingly lonely and simply too tired to cope that I need to retreat to my psychic cave, lick my wounds and spent much time concentrating on what my body is feeling. Hunger will not kill me, over-eating will.

When I get hurt, thwarted or slighted I regress in primitive fashion to a child. I eat to make that internal child feel good about herself. But when I am in adult mode, I use other soothing techniques – reading, listening to music, studying or simply sitting, reflecting and looking out the window till the feelings pass.

I spend more and more time in adult mode now.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (November 4, 2009)

    Last reviewed: 4 Nov 2009