I ate my way through my divorce. There is no other way to say it.
I had been the classic yo-yo dieter most of my life. Rarely, if ever, exactly the weight I wanted to be, I usually gained weight when I was bored or depressed, then successfully dieted it off when I was either in love, pumped up about a new job, or motivated to wear the new season’s shorter skirts.
Then my marriage fell apart, and my habit of dulling my feelings with food developed into a full-blown eating disorder.
Plunging into my new full-time job called getting divorced, my days became filled with painful end-of-marriage discussions with my husband, conferences with my lawyer, and mounting legal bills. But my evenings became filled with food. Nightly I tried to escape the fear, anger, and anxiety with comfort-laden foods. Anything that helped me “zone out” for a little while was welcome.
When I hung up after an angry phone conversation with my husband, I would grab a bag of tortilla chips. With an utterly ridiculous “I’ll show him!” attitude, I would feel entitled to eat the whole bag – as though by doing so I was punishing him and not myself (thus, the logic of a true addict.) When my children had their milk and cookies at bedtime, so did I. I deserved it with all that was going on, didn’t I? Nights had their own terrors. Sleeping alone for the first time in decades, the fears would emerge. Some sweet, soft carbohydrate-rich “snack” – a sleeve of Chips Ahoy, the leftover Italian bread – would regularly accompany me to my bedroom at night. In this way, I would temporarily not be alone.
Then came the next morning’s guilt and remorse. “Why on earth did I eat that yesterday?” became my first thought of each day. Of course I was putting on weight, while working overtime to offset the eating with longer stints on the Stairmaster.
None of these behaviors made any sense. They are also, as I later learned, the hallmarks of addiction. I was now truly out of control. The idea of a better future for myself after the divorce was quickly fading. I could never hope to have another relationship, certainly never start dating. I would be fat. Who would want me?
What I had done, in reaching for food as a buffer against the highly uncomfortable feelings brought on by the divorce, was to compound my already problem-laden life with an even bigger problem. Now, along with facing divorce, financial insecurity, and guilt, I had also managed to seriously erode my own self esteem – not only with an unattractive body, but also with my lack of self-control. I knew enough to recognize that I had a serious problem. And this wasn’t a simple little dieting problem any more. Legal though it might be, I was as hooked on eating to escape reality as the most down-and-dirty crack addict. By now, my life was increasingly burdened less by my divorce than by the emotional wreckage caused by my uncontrolled eating.
Eventually it wasn’t even the weight I was putting on that bothered me so much. It was the behavior. There was something so utterly degrading about being so out of control. At my most downcast, I didn’t even care any more how I looked. What I couldn’t abide was witnessing my own inability to stop eating. It became unbearable.
It was this desperation that saved me.
Alone in my house one night, I reached for a telephone directory, and looked up a 12-Step program for food addicts that was modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. There it was, with an 800 number.
Some years before, when searching for the next diet program, I had dropped in on a few meetings, but had not returned. Those people are really bad, I thought. They call themselves addicts. And they talked a lot about a Power Greater Than Ourselves, which seemed completely unrelated to my weight problem. If there was a God, I was fairly certain that the last thing He would care about was whether I had broken another diet. In any case, these people said that they were powerless over food. That isn’t me, I thought. I can always diet, once I get around to it. This isn’t where I belong.
But now it was. My desperation had given me a new willingness to be open to any solution.
The following Saturday I sat at a table in a local church that held one of the largest collections of 12-Step meetings in the county. As a stroke of luck this particular group, while founded on the principles of AA, adhered to a clearly defined food plan. A smiling woman sitting next to me gave me her phone number, and instructed me to call her the next morning to tell her what items on the plan I would eat for the day. I now had a sponsor. “Try it for one day,” she told me. “You can always change your mind.” They did this one day at a time, just as in Alcoholics Anonymous.
It was terribly humbling, and at first painfully embarrassing, to admit that I could not stop my compulsive eating behavior without help. But desperate to put my life in order, I reached out for the support the group offered, continued to attend meetings, and from then on, as far as food was concerned, I did what I was told. “If you want what we have, you do what we do,” they told me.
And so I did. It took just a few months for all the weight I had gained, and more, to fall off me. Years later, I have not gained any of it back. When the time came to start a new career, begin dating, and embark on my new life, I sailed into my new future with full confidence. I had to admit that I looked pretty good.
But to this day, I do not do it alone.
www.happilyeverafterdivorce.com
Excepted from Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey (Health Communications, Inc. April 2009) by Jessica Bram