I’m super thrilled to feature a three-part interview series with Mara from the powerful blog Medicinal Marzipan, which has become a fast favorite. I’m so thankful to Mara for sharing her struggles, triumphs and wisdom with Weightless readers. She’s truly an inspiration!

Here’s an excerpt from a recent guest post she did about blogging and growing:

Mistakes are endearing. Mistakes are honest. Within my own life, and my blog, I value honesty above all else. When I look at myself and my life, I no longer demand perfection, but I do demand honesty. That is why I work my hardest to blog about all of the off days too – the days where I don’t love myself very much or feel very good about my body, the days when I am depressed, the days when I think mean and hateful thoughts – because those days are all a part of learning to love myself more and grow into a better person. No one person has it all figured out, so don’t forget that we are all human and all doing the best that we can.

Wow. I always find myself nodding throughout Mara’s posts and walking away with lots of insight. Plus, not only is her writing eloquent and raw, but Mara is such a sweet person, too!

Without further ado, here is part one of our interview…

Q: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your great blog, Medicinal Marzipan. Also, what’s the significance of the name?

A: My name is Mara, and I’m the owner/editor of Medicinal Marzipan, a blog about body image, healthy living and learning to love your body a little bit more every day. I blog about anything and everything having to do with compulsive eating, repairing damaged self-esteem, building sex and body positive communities, letting go of the shame that we hold on to about our bodies, finding (and keeping) healthy relationships, and living authentically.  I am twenty-five, and an English major with an over-active imagination and a scary amount of ambition.

Throughout my life I have struggled with my body image. I have been both fat and thin, and everywhere in between, and have tried between a million diets/plans/programs. I have put myself in harms way because at one point I only knew how to gain external validation by risking my sexual health, saying yes when I wanted to say no, and finding myself in dangerous situations as a result. I know first hand what impact having damaged body image has on every aspect of your life. Medicinal Marzipan is a record of my journey to love myself better and treat my body with the respect it deserves, as well as inspire a few others along the way.

The name of my blog is two-fold. Initially, I named it as such because Marzipan is the only nickname that I’ve ever loved, gifted to me by my college roommate freshman year. I loved it because I LOVE marzipan.  My father is German, and I grew up eating marzipan every time we visited his hometown during my childhood. When naming my blog, I wanted to allude to the fact that I was helping people, and thus Medicinal Marzipan was born. It was significant of my personal need and ability to reach out to others.

However, about a year ago, the name took on different meaning for me when I started to blog more about my own personal struggle with compulsive eating. Then the name began to signify my ultimate desire to view food holistically and as something that would sustain and fuel my body, not just something to be used to punish/reward my behavior. I now strive to develop and honor a healthy relationship with food – no foods are off limits or “bad,” not even chocolate and French fries, but that I would listen more carefully to what my body needed and not just what my brain wanted.

Q: How and when did your compulsive overeating start?

A: I am fairly certain that I have always been a compulsive eater. I was born into a family where we ate when we were both sad and happy with equal measure. When I was a child, I ate with relish and without fear, but slowly I began to understand that I was overweight for my age range. I was teased, ignored, bullied and rejected because of the shape of my body. My mother, seeing my distress, helped me to find weight-loss programs that would allow me to lose the weight I so desperately wanted to lose, and as a result – I went to the gym three times a week in sixth grade, saw nutritionists/doctors/physical trainers, took diet pills, recorded my food, and obsessed about my weight.

Unfortunately, when I look back at that time, I think that what I really needed was tenderness and reassurance and a strong message of body acceptance. Though my mother was trying to help me, I saw her attempts as reinforcing the ultimate truth – I was fat and I needed to become thin.

So I would try. I would be “good” for periods of time. I would lose weight, but inevitably I would become frightened when I was thin. I would become really afraid when I was teetering on the verge of becoming what was socially accepted as attractive. Being seen as a sex object was always terrifying for me, something that has always caused me to question a hidden history with sexual abuse during my early life, and the minute that anyone told me I was hot or found me attractive, I retreated, like a hermit crab into a shell, to begin the process of rapidly replacing the pounds. Fat was safe. Fat meant that no one could touch me. Fat meant that I was protected.

Unfortunately, I was not safe, and as I went through my middle school, high school, and early college years I was the victim of several terrifying sexual experiences. I would get myself into situations because my self-esteem was at a rock bottom, and I sought external validation sexually. I said yes, because I honestly believed that I wasn’t good enough to say no. That I wasn’t good enough to choose.  That I was lucky if anyone even wanted to touch me. I became the girl that people would hold hands with in closets, behind closed doors, the girl that boys would lie about to their friends after they promised they loved me. I ate those experiences. Burying them down deep, where they would be safe from prying eyes, I ate those experiences, because I was positive that if I ever spoke them out loud, I would be labeled FAT for all the world to see.

Q: What do you think contributed to it?

A: My relationship with food has always been a complicated one. I was raised eating organic, healthy food. Food that I continue to prefer to this day. But, I always ate too much, consuming vast quantities because the holes in my heart and in my self-image were deep, cavernous, and always demanding more. I ate because I was scared. I ate when I was happy, but always worried that the rug was going to be pulled out from under me. I ate and ate and ate.

I ate, because eating feels good. The food feels good going down your throat. It feels good when your body is warm and satisfied. However, this good feeling always had a nasty and dark underside for me, because the food would feel good until I looked in the mirror or stepped on the scale or someone told me, “Sure she’s beautiful, in the face. She would be hot if she lost a hundred pounds.” (Note, that last bit was said to me when I weighed 190. So – I would be “hot” at 90 pounds? I’m so sure.) After that dark side set in, I would eat because I was heartbroken, because food never abandoned me. Because if I was going to be fat, and no one was going to love me – I might as well eat the foods that I like.

Compulsive eating was also a large part of my yo-yo dieting, because before I would get ready to start a diet “tomorrow” or “on Monday” I would always eat as much as I possibly could, as if it was the last supper. Or if I messed up on a diet, I would scratch the rest of the day, consuming anything and everything I wanted, because “I was going to start fresh tomorrow.” I have been starting fresh tomorrow since I was nine. I’ll tell you – this approach does not work.

Q: How did you overcome compulsive overeating?

A: I can’t say that I have entirely overcome my compulsive eating, but I can say that I have finally, in the last year, openly applied that label to my eating habits and that has been a HUGE step for me. I finally stopped and took a really good look at my life, to find out that the type of eating I have been doing my whole life is, without a doubt, disordered eating. Since then I have taken some hugely sobering steps in the right direction:

• Eat for your body and not for your mind/heart. Think about why you’re hungry, and what you are truly hungry for. Honor your body’s needs, both healthful and not, and do not restrict. Now, no foods are off limits. I remind myself (sometimes tri-daily) that I am an adult, with a car and money, and that if I absolutely must have something, at any time of day or night, I can obtain it for myself – thus, there is no reason to consume everything in front of you just because it’s there or you feel like you’ll never have a chance to eat it again.

• Get enough sleep and drink enough water. These are major traps for me as I have a tendency to be a little lax on both, and they have an enormous impact on my ability to clearly discern what I’m craving and why.

• Start again: NOW. Seriously, do not allow yourself to be sucked into the “I’ll start again tomorrow” game. I am working hard to teach myself that each and every bite is an opportunity to turn it all around and treat my body kindly. Every bite is an opportunity to choose to eat for the right reasons. Every bite is an opportunity to choose to be healthy.

—

Thanks so much, Mara! Stay tuned for part two tomorrow, when Mara talks about the toughest parts of her recovery, the insights she’s gained, being perfect and so much more!

Today’s favorite post. “Learning to Love Yourself: How to Start Loving Yourself More and Be Happier Right Now” by Sui at Cynosure, which I discovered from one of Mara’s post. It’s a must-read!

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (June 29, 2010)

Compulsive Overeating: Q&A with Mara of Medicinal Marzipan … | feelgr8.net (June 29, 2010)

From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (June 29, 2010)

From Psych Central's website:
Body Image & Healthy Living: Q&A with Medicinal Marzipan, Part 3 | Weightless (July 1, 2010)

Body Loving Blogosphere 07.04.10 | medicinal marzipan (July 4, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 28 Aug 2010