Putting the Yo-Yo to Bed: Changing my Approach to Food

I don't know when it started exactly, but I do remember being in third grade. My mother and sister were sitting in front of the TV by the time I got home from school, and they both wanted to watch soap operas. 

Somebody got the bright idea of giving me three large squares of a giant chocolate bar as a snack to keep me quiet, and it worked.

A yo-yo dieter with a wicked sweet tooth was born.

I had always been what my mother described as "skinny." In fact, I had no particular thoughts on food, one way or another.

My mother, on the other hand, was always unhappy about her weight. She went on diets regularly, lost some weight and gained it back. Once we were sitting in her car -- I was in the back seat, she in the the front, facing the road but not driving -- and she said, "Am I a bad person?"

"Not at all," I said.

"Then why did God make me fat?" she asked.

I wish I had said, "You look fine and your family loves you!" But I was four and had no answer. While I am extremely happy to see shows like Shrill changing the way women's bodies are perceived, my mother had no such option. And for most of my life too, the ideal for women has been to look like little boys with breasts - whereas curves everywhere else are frowned upon.

My food issues became internalized pretty early. At eight years old, I began to put on weight, noticeably. Neither my mom or sister exercised, and a year of that with chocolate every day was making my clothes tighter and tighter.

Interestingly, though my mother did not manage to lose weight herself, she was exceptionally sensitive to mine, and cut me off from my chocolate fix as soon as she saw how much weight I was gaining.

That didn't work, though, as I learned to sneak my treats when she wasn't looking. It took at least a year until she figured that out and hid the sweets, but once she did that I lost weight. I didn't lose my taste for sugar, though, and as a tween and teen went up and down the scale like Sisyphus rolling rocks uphill, only to see them fall down again.

Of course you know I have two sets of clothes for those weight cycles. I had to buy a third one in college, when I went through a serious period of anorexia, eating one tiny portion of food a say until I weighed barely anything. I'd wake at night after "nightmares" of eating a million sweets, but continued starving myself daily. I did something similar when going through a divorce.

There were also days I would eat and eat and eat, until I could barely move. A kind friend once said when I told her this, "It must make you feel like you are in control." That's probably because sugar makes your brain light up just as moments of real happiness do. It's also comforting to shut the world off and eat what you love.

One of the things dieting does to the body is skew the dieter's metabolism so that it's harder to lose weight. So up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, up, up all dieters go. As my friend Irene O'Garden says in Fat Girl, my favorite book on disordered eating, "The punishment for eating is the punishment for fat, and dieting's the punishment for that."

In the past two years, I've managed to stop dieting and edged closer to what I feel is a "good" weight for me. That doesn't mean I don't have bad days, (going up, going down). But for the most part, I have given up sugar and other foods that seem to be inflammatory (like diet sodas). I also stopped eating anything with ingredients I can't pronounce easily. I did this not to lose weight, but to calm an aggressive autoimmune illness that feels like psoriasis on steroids.

I think I finally got to a point where I realized reducing inflammation is much more important than reducing calories. Concentrating on that has freed me in a way diets never could. Eating healthy doesn't mean you can't enjoy stuff. I found chocolate with stevia and an avocado chocolate pudding that is truly sweet. I still have raisins and granola as long as the granola is without sugar. At the same time, I try every day to eat as many vegetables and raw fruits as I can.

This has helped the condition I'm fighting (at least, symptom wise) and given me more control over what I'm eating and feeling than I ever had before.

If my mom was here, I would tell her about it. Because I know how hard it is to keep dieting. I also know how hard it is to live up to society's "ideal" of the perfect (low as possible) weight--and that we need to take that idea off our plates, too.

More on that another time.


Ice cream photo: Eric.Ray