Hi. I'm new here, but can totally relate to all of this. I've never had a full blown eating disorder, but have battled disordered eating most of my life. In my teens, I would restrict my eating severely to be able to maintain a low normal weight for my height, but I never exercised. In college, I just basically said "screw it" and gained the normal freshman fifteen and then some. After college, it was a cycle of dieting and bingeing, with intermittent exercising, never keeping enough deficit to really lose weight because of my binges. In my late 20s, I did weight watchers; reached my goal weight and then spent the next 3 years gaining back all the weight, plus about 5 pounds. Then I got pregnant and used that as an excuse to eat everything in sight. Six weeks after I gave birth to my first child, I weighed 204 lbs (I'm 5'4") I was depressed and mortified; I felt hopeless and frustrated that there was just so much weight that I had to lose that it was going to take forever.
Well, it has taken a long time. That baby is now five and I have another daughter. I have managed to lose weight, but I'm still not where I want to be. (Though yesterday, I wore my skinny jeans in public -hooray!) At first, the dieting was exhausting - like hand to hand combat every waking hour, but slowly I started to realize that I needed to look at the long term of weight managemet and being able to live in a world where there is pizza and ice cream and vodka tonics and french fries and cream sauce and not to fell that I am powerless to these things. I'm a reader, so I read. A lot. And it helped. I used to really be triggered by ice cream. Now, there's ice cream in my house at all times, and I rarely touch it. Same with oreos. After my second child was born, I ate practically an entire bag of oreos by myself in 3 days (ok, 2 days). I couldn't stop myself. Right now, there's a bag of oreos I bought last Tuesday that hasn't even been opened and when it is, I probably won't have one and I won't miss it. I just feel better knowing it's there and I can have a cookie if ever I choose to. My battles are not over. I still have binges, but they're smaller and I'm more aware of my triggers. I know my past struggles will always be there in the background, but hopefully as time goes on and I get farther away from those days, I will get mentally stronger and more able to resist the impulse to binge. So anyway, for those who are interested, here are some books that really helped me to start to feel normal about food. I hope that they can help someone else here too:
1. The 4 Day Win by Martha Beck: I cannot recommend this enough. It's a little touchy feely new age-y and I didn't do all of the things she suggests, but it is a gold mine for those with disordered eating.
2. Anne Lamott's essays about her eating disorder, particularly "Hunger" and "The Aunties" from the book Travelling Mercies and "The Muddling Glory of God" from the book Grace (Eventually)
3. Real Food by Nina Planck and The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan: Made me think about whether there was food in my food, particularly all the "diet food" I've eaten over the years. (Yes, I know there's no food in oreos, but I like them anyway) These books got me over my diet Coke addiction.
4. Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink: It's about experiments he did about what triggers people to eat mindlessly. The bottomless bowl of soup one is pretty freaky. Some of the advice (e.g. "use a smaller plate") isn't anything new, but the book gave me a few new things to think about.
5. The Little House on the Prairie Books, particularly "The Long Winter." I know it seems kind of weird, but these books just really brought home to me the abundance with which we now live and how I should be grateful for it, but at the same time, don't have to partake in all of it. Food was precious to these pioneers. They had to hunt and garden to survive. When the kids got a stick of candy at Christmas it was a big deal. If they were going to have a cake, their mother had to make it from scratch, and she had to have the sugar and eggs available to do that. There was no Entemanns or Sara Lee. Now, when I think about eating something calorically dense like a cake, I try to think about how rarely my ancestors would have been able to eat something like that and how much labor would have gone into the preparation and I try to honor that by eating the best possible cake available (I pretty much won't touch any cake bought at the supermarket - yes I know I'm a snob) and in a moderate portion.
Sorry for the long post. I certainly don't have it all figured out, but I'm better than I used to be and I owe a lot of that to these books. And to Leigh's food measuring video. Seriously, it changed my dieting life.
