May 1, 2024 • 62 mins
2024 1028 Debbie, Nancy, and Sally share their experience dealing with the destructive path of various eating disorders, the many twists and turns in their individual road to recovery, and how finding the Overeaters Anonymous program shaped their hope for the future.
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(00:00):
Hi, I'm Rusty and I'm an alcoholic.
(00:04):
And I'm Tim and I'm an alcoholic and this is Children of Chaos.
Today we're going to talk about eating disorders.
I was fortunate enough in my professional life early on that I got to work with bulimics
and anorexics and compulsive over eaters.
And I have a special affinity for them because we alcoholics have it easy compared to eating
(00:32):
disorders because with eating disorders you've got to have the food one way or the other.
It's going to be there.
And with the alcohol I've got a choice whether I'm going to go drink alcohol or not drink
alcohol or whatever other substance I choose to put in my body.
Today we've got Nancy, we have Sally, and we have Debbie that have graciously said that
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they would be a part of our podcast today.
Each of them is going to give you their personal experience to some degree.
We're going to talk about where we can find help and we're going to also talk about treatment
centers and how effective are they for eating disorders.
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So with that I think I'll turn to Nancy.
Nancy, you want to start out?
I'd be delighted.
I'm Nancy and I am a compulsive over eater and identify myself as a food addict because
that's just the way it is for me.
And I have like dual experiences.
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I'd like to speak about the professional experience first if that's alright.
And I worked at an eating disorders facility here in Tulsa, Oklahoma for part time for
about 10 years as a nurse.
What I know, I think about that particular facility is they have been effective in all
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cases.
No, that's never how it works.
And I also know that at the time I was working for them they required a $25,000 non-refundable
pre-admission deposit.
They only had women in their program and they only dealt with people with anorexia, people
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with bulimia nervosa.
And they did not deal with compulsive over eaters and I think the bottom line is it doesn't
pay.
So on their side of things and it is not, because insurance didn't cover that as an
acute problem, they did not see it as an acute problem.
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They only saw it as a chronic problem.
And whereas if you have a person who weighs 75 pounds and has not eaten more than 300
or 400 calories a day for several years, that's often an acute health risk, a crisis.
Same with bulimia can be the same because people have all kinds of other organ systems
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issues when there's a chronic purging.
So that was an interesting experience.
I learned very early that they had a list of things you don't say to someone who has
an eating disorder and these were all women.
So it's pretty gathered around women's issues and the cultural pressures that women face
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in this country about gotta look good, gotta be a certain beauty standard, hold up to a
certain beauty standard.
Many of the patients we had inpatient, four months by the way, it might be a couple months
in the acute unit and then there were step down units they could go to and eventually
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leading to off campus volunteer work and sometimes actual employment while coming back there
for the evening.
But it was very, very, very structured, very rigid.
They had a healthcare team, nutritionists, they had the big healthcare system right close
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to them where they could go for their GI tract problems, heart problems, muscle wasting issues,
all those things that people who are either over nourishing themselves or under nourishing
themselves would have.
So that was just an interesting, it was an interesting place.
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People tended, patients tended to be on quite a handful of medicines.
They were co-occurring disorders that might be obsessive compulsive disorder, it might
be a personality disorder like for example with bulimia there were a whole lot of women
who had borderline personality disorder.
So there was all of this gamut of things and so there were cross addictions.
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I also worked in an adult unit and there would be someone there who was addicted to pain
medication subsequent to gastric bypass surgery.
They just couldn't get off their pain medication and then I know it goes the other way too
from addiction to substances that are prescription or illicit or whatever to eating problems.
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So it was amazing, it was a challenge.
There are some incredible people who work in that unit and in that area still.
I really value them as professional people and personally I know some of them as well.
So yeah they had a huge range of therapies that you could, that the regular psych patients
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couldn't get.
They had dance and movement therapy, they had yoga, they had art therapy and in those
days it was like a quick turnaround.
Like you have somebody in a crisis who went into a psychiatric hospital.
It is get them in and get them out.
Crisis intervention back home.
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Eating disorders wasn't amenable to that.
Also the other professional thing was I taught that content in a nursing program here in
Tulsa and I asked my partner one time, my teaching partner, I said, you know Lisa I
just keep changing.
Every year I have to tweak this eating disorders thing that I teach and it just seems like
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it's just not quite right.
And she goes well you know it's personal to you.
It's your own and you have similar issues.
She didn't say it in that many words because she was so much more diplomatic.
But she said it's very personal to you.
And I just couldn't leave it alone.
And so I taught that for maybe 15 years in a nursing program.
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We also had students on the units at L'Oreal.
And that was real touchy too because it was easy to get into a regular psych unit there
with nursing students but they were very, very particular about the eating disorders
unit.
I had to pre-conference these students and say you have to commit to eating a full lunch
when you're there for a day.
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And they were going what?
I don't eat lunch.
I just have a snack.
And I'm going you have to commit to a full lunch which includes the following.
A protein, vegetables, fruits and possibly a dessert.
And like the majority of my nursing students could not do that.
So only the ones that could commit to that would go.
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And so that was an interesting, interesting experience.
So in my own personal history experience I was probably four, maybe five years old.
I was a little free-range child in Missouri out in the country.
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My grandparents were Italian immigrants and they owned a grocery store.
Score!
So I found out what donuts were when I was four or five.
And I found out that the colonial bread man would often bring these boxes of donuts or
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not often enough, bring these boxes of donuts to my grandparents for their patronage, for
their business.
And so I got to find out what the days of the week were.
Grandma would say, I'd say, Grandma when's the colonial bread man coming?
Or can I have a donut?
She goes, well the colonial bread man brings the donuts.
And I'd say, when's he going to come?
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Well he comes let's say Wednesday.
And so I would ask Grandma every day, is it Wednesday?
Is it Wednesday?
Is it Wednesday?
So there's the obsession that I share with my alcoholic friends and my friends who have
other drug disorders, drug related disorders.
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And so that was my earliest memory of being obsessed with the food.
The next memory I have is when my grandfather died.
I was about eight or nine.
When they were in the funeral home doing the rosary and my grandmother had never heard
her wail and cry because Italian student.
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So she was wailing the whole time we were there.
She cried when we first arrived in the car.
She came with her hand over her mouth and cried.
I'd never seen her cry.
And so the parents gave us each a quarter and said go down to the drug store and get
an ice cream.
It was intense emotionally.
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So me and my cousins went down the street to the drug store.
At the funeral the church ladies had brought and just covered a picnic table.
I'm looking at a table here that's a little bigger than this.
And covered it with all the good things they had made.
And I remember one particular good thing that was really, I can remember the feel in my
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mouth right now.
The crunch of the sugar in the icing.
It was a cake.
It was white.
Remember all the things and I think I had three pieces of it.
Because when I bit into the cake and swallowed it the hurt went away for a little bit.
So that's how I got hooked guys.
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And then manja.
It's an Italian word that means eat.
And it's the word that says you eat now.
It's that tense that they use manja.
So everybody eat.
Another thing was when we came to visit grandma we'd get there characteristically late on
a Friday night.
Maybe 10 or 11 o'clock.
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We'd driven from Tulsa.
That's after we left.
Grandma would go, she would just light up like a Christmas tree.
She was so happy we were there.
She would go into the store and we'd hear that meat slicer going rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
And so she'd slice up a bunch of meat and cheese and she'd take that butcher paper,
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you know put it on that white butcher paper and then slap it on the table with a loaf
of bread and there we went.
So those are some, and that was a happy emotion around food.
So that's kind of how I got hooked.
I cooked things for my family growing up.
I was always the one who would dig up recipes and cook books and get up at 6.30 on Saturday
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morning and bake something sweet.
And I always had, I was always a round kind of chubby little gal and got into sports and
I grew really tall quickly in middle school and junior high and so I got skinny.
So that was kind of weird.
That was a different kind of feeling.
And then it all came back later.
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But how I got involved, I'm involved in OA, I've been in OA since probably 91 with a kind
of a significant relapse and absence from the program.
But I had moved back to Oklahoma after a divorce.
Oh boy, there's another relationship trigger.
Lots of relationship triggers get me going.
And so I thought I could do it like go to graduate school, work full time and take care
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of two little children that their dad wasn't in the house, they wouldn't miss him that
much.
Well that was traumatic for them.
It was tough on them.
It's tough on me.
I had to find what was I going to do?
Was I going to buy a house or we got a rent?
This place where I'm working, I need child care until 10 o'clock at night and all this
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kind of stuff.
All these things that I wasn't doing when we lived in New Mexico.
Then I skipped the whole thing about the marital relationship, the relationship with that person.
That involved quite a bit of food too.
Also that involved, he was an athlete at OSU and I can't take this whole time you guys
but this is significant too.
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He's an athlete at OSU, he was a distance runner.
I like distance runners, I like the kind of character and perseverance they had.
And so I picked up distance running myself.
So that is what kept me slender through my 20s.
Also we lived in the running capital of the world for a few years, Eugene, Oregon.
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When people ask you what do you do, it's not they don't care about your work.
They don't care about anything except what you do athletically.
So I helped a person, trained for a marathon with a friend, got up to 20 miles running.
If I was going to go out and eat at night to one of my favorite Italian restaurants,
I would run 10 miles in the day.
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So that's how I managed my weight and then just really didn't pay that much attention
to balancing my food out and keeping it where I didn't have to run 10 miles to do that.
I was self-critical if I only ran 3 miles a day.
All that kind of stuff, ran a bunch of 10Ks, a couple of half marathons.
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Anyway, so that was that piece in the 20s.
When I got that utter desperation, a therapist recommended me.
She said, well, let's look at your family system here.
Looks like you have some alcoholics in your family.
Looks like you have some persons who are addicted to drugs.
Sounds like you might be worthy of Al-Anon or maybe this eating.
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We talked about my eating patterns that were not healthy.
Because I would have a bowl of cereal at night after the kids had gone to bed.
Because Dad always had a bowl of cereal.
But his seemed to be a bowl of cereal and mine seemed to be the one where you get there,
oh, there's milk or cereal.
And then you run out of milk and then you put more milk in.
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I would do that until I was aware that I had had 3 or 4 bowls of cereal before bedtime.
That was my icky experiences.
Where I got some help with OA, Overeaters Anonymous, is some ideas for how I can manage
that.
Notice what your emotions are.
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Write them down.
Do some writing.
Do some calling of friends in the program.
Talk to your sponsor every day.
Report your food.
What?
Report my food?
That is crazy.
Over the years I've done different kind of permutations of that.
I don't call my sponsor every day.
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I was sending her emails of my food intake for each day, like photographs.
That worked for a while.
Right now I'm just calling my sponsor every week or so.
It could be better than that.
I have a lot of self-criticism about my body right now.
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I remember the place that I worked and their goals for their clientele were eat moderately,
exercise moderately, and make peace with your body shape and size.
And I'm on that making peace place.
Because I might not lose weight.
And that's really hard for me to accept.
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Because I'm not going to kill myself exercising.
I am not going to be on a restrictive diet that is unsustainable.
So I eat a variety of foods.
My ideal is a 301 plan abstinence wise, three meals a day, nothing in between, one day at
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a time.
I tend to eat like a giant salad every day.
And I was complaining about the iceberg lettuce to Sally.
It's a crusty, but a giant salad of all the colors and a big old apple.
And then try to manage myself well at dinner time.
So that might be as good as it gets for me.
But I get experience.
I got my strength and hope from going to meetings, OA meetings every week.
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And going to attending my alternative is the Open AA meetings online.
And they helped me a lot.
There are several of us over-eaters on there.
And I just gather strength from them, connect with them every once in a while and say, hey,
it's so good to hear your voice on the calls and see you in person.
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Because I know we share some of the same issues and problems.
So that's who I am and how I am now.
I prayed.
I took my notebook to lunch today.
I was in the car.
I was going to jot down some notes.
And I didn't.
I just prayed that the right things that would be helpful to the listeners would come out
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and that something I said would be valuable.
But what I've noticed over the years at OA is when I started going in the 90s, we would
fill a chapel up at one of the churches in town.
Huge meetings on Monday evenings and Saturday mornings.
And we have 30 people.
And now we're down to a handful.
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And that just baffles me.
But oh, well, I think there's so many alternatives that get people's attention.
I'm turning my head from side to side.
So I'll let somebody else talk.
I'm Sally, compulsive overeater, gratefully abstaining today.
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And I just wanted to say, Nancy, I don't know if you said the obvious, but OA is overeaters
anonymous.
And it's a program that's based on the AA program, the AA 12 steps, 12 traditions.
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And I came to OA at age 33 after being on a diet, one diet or another, for 20 years,
starting at age 13.
And I had started using food as a child for entertainment in the hot, boring summers in
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Oklahoma to deal with emotions, sensitivity, all of that.
I don't know why.
Because it worked for me, basically.
Food worked.
And I, too, have a string of doughnut stories.
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The only thing I ever stole was doughnuts at the grocery store.
And my feeling was always, well, I have a right to this because I want it, that kind
of thing.
I also grew up in a household in a time and a place where being slim and attractive for
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young women was just absolutely required.
And I started getting chubby when I was a preteen.
And my mother started encouraging me to weigh myself in the morning and maybe go on a diet.
I rebelled against that up until seventh grade when my girlfriends were starting to look
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at boys and get boyfriends.
And I thought I needed a boyfriend, too.
And it wasn't going to happen unless I was thinner.
And so I went on my first diet, secretly kept it from mother, didn't want her to know that
she had prevailed.
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And I immediately found I couldn't do it.
I could not.
It was a calorie thing where you counted calories.
And I had used up all my calories at breakfast and lunch and didn't have any leftover for
the afternoon candy bar after school and dinner and the other things that were absolute requirements
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for me.
And I couldn't do it.
Eventually I managed to, or I tried what was called Metra-Cal at the time.
It was canned lunch, it was a liquid.
It came in butterscotch, which was so wretched I couldn't even swallow it.
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Vanilla, which was moderately better, and chocolate, which was moderately better than
that.
But all three of them were pretty obnoxious.
So I got to the point where I would just, instead of having the Metra-Cal for lunch,
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I'd just skip lunch.
And that was easier.
That was easier.
It's like total abstinence from eating was easier for me to achieve than eating a moderate,
well-balanced meal.
But I was always the one that was in the kitchen looking for snacks between meals.
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And I noticed that food meant a lot more to me than it did to my girlfriends.
They were more interested in boys or other things.
That used to kind of frustrate me, as did the fact that I was battling my weight.
But anyway, I continued to battle my weight all the way through junior high, high school,
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went off to college with prescription for diet pills, which were, well, they were amphetamines,
and pretty high-powered.
I took them as prescribed, but after a while I had to chase them with coffee to get any
effect out of them.
And I sort of sped through college.
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You know, got pregnant at the end of my freshman year in college.
Had a baby and a divorce at the end of my junior year of college, or sophomore year
of college.
And then finished, as a single mother, finished college and got a job.
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And all this time I was on this diet, that plan, this exercise program.
I really left very few stones unturned in my attempts to lose weight.
And here's what happened with every diet.
I would get enthusiastic about it, dedicate myself to it.
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I would maybe, if it worked, I would lose weight, and I'd get down almost to my goal,
maybe within five pounds, and couldn't do it anymore, and would immediately start back
up.
Because I was eating the what, you know, I would start eating the desserts and the carbs
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and the quantities and the snacks.
And I would go right back up, and I would get desperate, and I'd be five, maybe ten
pounds heavier than I'd ever been before in my adult life.
And get on another one.
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Would lose down, not as far down as I had lost the time before.
Lose it, or lose the diet, and gain the weight back up.
And oh my god, I'm five pounds more than I've ever been in my life.
So it was like yo-yo dieting, but the yo-yo was getting higher.
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And you know, if you made a graph of it, it would go straight up.
I had never heard of the 12 steps.
I did hear about OA at one point, and it took me a couple years to get desperate enough.
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And by that time, my diets had turned into fasts, and I had tried behavior modification,
where they shocked me and made me watch myself eating food and spitting it out.
So as soon as I didn't have to do that, I was off bingeing again.
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Anyway, another diet was a protein sparing fast, where I drank a little jigger of protein
glop three times a day, and took a vitamin B shot once a week, and didn't eat anything for 74 days.
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By that time, my hair was starting to fall out.
I was having chest pains, and this doctor that was supervising said, we might ought to start refeeding.
Well, refeeding, as soon as I started eating again, like within 48 hours, I was binging
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on pizza, and you know, the old way of eating.
And of course, the weight came right back on.
And with each diet, I became more desperate.
Food was an obsession about food and weight, an obsession about what am I going to do?
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How am I going to handle this?
How am I going to live?
It was eating more and more of my life, and I couldn't function.
When I was binging, it was really like being on some kind of narcotic, or someone had stuffed
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my head with cotton.
I couldn't think straight, and I couldn't function.
And all I could think about was, what can I eat next that will scratch that itch, or
how am I going to lose weight?
I would wake up in the morning and say, I'm not going to put my foot over the side of
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the bed until I figure out what I'm going to do about my weight today.
And whatever I figured out, it was gone by noon.
So I was just in despair, absolute despair.
And I was on my fourth go-through of Weight Watchers.
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And that's a good program for someone who isn't addicted like me.
But I suddenly realized that the Weight Watchers lecture set, I told her, I've tried to plan
my food and get the right food in the house and eat that way, and I just can't do it.
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And she said, oh, now you can do it if you really want to.
And by this time, I had almost killed myself trying to deal with this problem, including
the chest pains and the hair falling out.
And it just hit me.
I wasn't even angry at her.
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It just hit me that she was incorrect, that she did not know what I knew about me.
And that was that I was powerless, totally powerless.
And I guess my higher power knew at that point I was ready, because I came to OA and I heard
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the 12 steps for the first time, starting with, admitted we were powerless over food
and that our lives are unmanageable.
And I went, I'm there.
Amen.
And I started working the steps with the help of several people in this OA group that I
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came to.
I have been attending Overeaters Anonymous at least once a week from April 21, 1980 until
today.
And it took me three and a half years to get off of sugar, which was my number one.
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If you made a list of foods I'm addicted to, sugars right there at the top, I was able
to stop.
That kind of answers a question that I think you all were interested in.
I was talking on the phone with another member of Overeaters Anonymous one afternoon, a couple
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of weeks before Halloween in 1983.
It goes back a ways.
I had little kids and I had these little Halloween size, individual size candy bars.
Fun size, right?
Fun size, yeah.
Fun size candy bars in a bowl by the front door, ready for Halloween.
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You got to get them early.
And I had been eating them, of course.
I practically wiped out the whole supply.
And I had known I have to get off of sugar.
I just have to.
And I had tried and I had prayed about it.
I was talking on the phone and she was kind of whining to me about, well, you know, the
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alcohol can just put down the alcohol and never have to deal with it.
But we have to eat.
We have to have food.
And that does complicate matters.
Make no mistake about that.
It complicates matters.
But I said, yeah, I do have to eat.
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I'll die if I don't eat something.
But I don't have to eat candy.
I don't have to eat sugar.
And in fact, I will live longer and be healthier if I never eat another sugar sweet again.
And you know, that was suddenly true.
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And suddenly I knew that I could get away with that.
It was like, wow, can I do that?
Can I get away with that?
And I said, I'm going to try it.
And I stopped eating sugar.
And I have not had sugar sweets from that day till this.
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What is that?
Forty years.
And that's a miracle.
That's like the parting of the waters.
That's like the day the earth stood still.
It's an absolute miracle for me.
I have been involved in OA ever since.
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Very active.
Still am.
Sugar is not my only problem.
And it's rarely anybody's only problem by the time they get to OA.
But these grazing, all of these white flour, a lot of people, you know, simple carbs, as
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they say, starches.
Those are things that I could substitute for sugar when I have an itch, you know.
But being able to not eat the sugar, I've been able to maintain a weight loss all these
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years since 83.
You know, within a fairly normal weight range.
Would I like to weigh 10, 15 pounds less?
Yes.
Always.
You know.
And if I did weigh 10 or 15 pounds less, I'd probably think I wanted to lose 10 or 15 more
because I'm crazy that way.
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But my higher power has other ideas.
So my plan of eating is not to eat between meals and to eat one plateful of moderate
nutritious food at a meal.
Not seconds, not thirds, not try this and that at the buffet, you know.
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But to just eat a sane plateful and get up and wash the plate and go on with life.
And sometimes that's hard.
I get crazy thoughts.
But my OA program and the 12 steps and my friends, this fellowship of people who have
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my problem and my solution, which is the 12 steps of OA, they always pull me back to sanity.
A life of sane and happy usefulness.
We're not promised nirvana.
We're not promised the secret to the meaning of life, anything like that.
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We're just promised a life of sane and happy usefulness.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Wow, Sally, that's wonderful.
Well, Debbie, why don't you tell us a little bit, will you?
Okay, well, I'm Debbie and I am a, I guess, recovered anorexic.
I don't know.
I mean, I hope.
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I was a compulsive over-eater as well and an alcoholic.
But anyway, so I'll start.
Growing up, I guess, I have a younger sister and my dad, my real dad, was an alcoholic.
He's passed away and he was abusive and my parents divorced when I was in the sixth grade,
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I think.
Weight was never a thing in my household.
My mom, there was no, I didn't have any of that diet culture that you often hear about
or anything.
It just wasn't, you know, I never thought about it.
I played sports.
I was not, I had friends.
My girlfriends were the type, when you're young, you can eat anything and you don't
gain a pound.
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I mean, they could eat large pizzas and they're like, you know, weight nine pounds.
I was not that kid.
I mean, I would put on the weight, but I was always kind of more muscular.
But that never really bothered me.
When my parents divorced, we would go see my dad on visitations and it would come out
very later that he was sexually abusive, but I did not know that.
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I blocked all that out and disassociated.
So at some point, it was in high school, we had gone, I was a part of the dance team that
performed at football games and we went to a camp, a summer camp at SMU in Dallas and
learned routines and all this stuff.
Well, somebody started talking about nutrition and I mean, I was a junk feeder.
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I ate pizza, ice cream and like a great slush was a typical lunch for me.
And then you'd go home and eat dinner and I didn't really think anything about it.
I didn't care.
I wasn't fat.
I wasn't skinny.
I was kind of, I don't know, muscular, I guess.
I don't know.
But I started thinking about it and I think, you know, they were talking about nutrition.
That's kind of a good idea.
I could probably, you know, change the way I eat a little bit and you know, and I did
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the way I played tennis and we had to get a physical and I got on the scale and I was
like, ooh.
So I thought I'd kind of go on a diet.
And for me, I mean, that diet was like, don't have the great slush.
It was not, you know, salad or it was really like, okay.
Whatever baked potato with all my other food will have a rice cake.
I mean, it was not any, I mean, right now I'd be like, God, that's just way too much
(37:47):
food.
But anyway, but I started losing weight just a little bit and I liked it.
So I would try something else.
I'd take something else away.
You know, now I'll change exchange.
I don't know.
I won't have pizza.
I'll have, you know, a chicken sandwich or something.
I would start making healthier choices all the way around and I would keep losing weight
(38:11):
and I loved it.
And it started to, I really take a whole and I would get some compliments at school like,
wow, you look, you know, so good, blah, blah, blah.
But I wasn't doing it for that.
It had nothing to do.
I should say that my mom remarried at some point when I was in the eighth grade and my
now dad came in.
(38:33):
And I was used to being the boss of the family.
My mom kind of, my younger sister, my mom kind of fell apart.
I was kind of in charge and I did, I thought I was, I mean I was, I thought I was.
And I hated him.
I did not want him in there.
I am in control of this ship.
(38:54):
And so we have massive, massive headbuttings.
And my mom was also, I had to be involved, she wanted me to be involved in basically
everything that was to be involved in at school.
I had to be on student council.
I had to be on that dance team.
I had to do all this stuff.
And all I really wanted to do, I was on the tennis team.
(39:15):
That's all I wanted to do was play tennis.
But I, that wasn't gonna fly.
I had to do all these other things.
And I kind of grew up with the idea that when you succeed at things, you get love.
And so that's how it works.
And so I was that kid.
I mean I did, I got excellent grades.
I was great at tennis.
(39:35):
I didn't want to do any of those things.
Those other activities, student council, I didn't care about it.
I didn't want to do it.
I didn't want to do any of that.
But I did it.
But I was resentful.
And when I started losing weight and that diet started working, it was kind of like,
this is mine.
Like, I'm doing this for me.
And nobody could take it away from me.
(39:56):
Nobody could run it.
Because I would do, okay, yeah, I'll do that.
I'll be in that activity.
I'll do this.
I'll do that.
Whatever it is.
But this, what goes in my body and how I exercise is my deal period.
And I loved it.
It's literally all I cared about.
It's all I thought about.
How I was gonna eat.
How I was gonna exercise.
I never threw up.
(40:18):
But I, so I started, you know, continuously losing weight.
And it almost reminds me of drinking.
Like when you take, you know, it takes you, well this diet took me.
I mean it owned me.
I remember getting on the scale and I would take off a ring.
Because I'm like, that might add.
I don't want anything.
And so.
God, insanity.
It was so insane.
(40:40):
And so it got to the point where, and I would play tennis for two hours after school.
I mean, that was part of practice.
I mean, I had to.
But then I would go to aerobics or run.
I mean, so I would spend three to three and a half hours exercising.
And by the end I would get the same thing every single day.
Some grape nuts in the morning for breakfast.
(41:00):
No lunch.
A plain baked potato and steamed broccoli for dinner.
And that is it.
And initially when I started getting kind of a weight where it was like pretty thin,
my friends would call my mom and say, Debbie's not eating.
And I was always real social and I liked to party and all this.
I didn't want to do, drinking wasn't a big deal because it had calories.
So I'm like, nope.
(41:22):
And so my mom, being a mom that doesn't want to believe those things, would ask me about
it.
And I'm like, that's crazy.
I eat.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And so it got to the point where we could go off campus for lunch in high school.
And I would always go with my friends.
But when I started getting bad, I didn't want to go with them because I wasn't going to
eat anyway.
So I didn't want to sit there.
(41:43):
I didn't want to do anything with them.
But I would go through a fast food place, buy food, throw the food out, but take the
sack home to my mom.
I'd be like, oh, so full.
So she would be like, oh, she ate.
So she would be believing that I ate.
And I'm like, yes.
I got one over on her.
So nobody would really, so she couldn't, she wanted to believe me, of course.
(42:06):
And also at the time, my younger sister was a great decoy.
I would say, Lits and I are going to go out to dinner tonight.
And we'd always go to the same place and I would get a baked potato and like pickles.
And she would want to tell so bad.
I was like, don't you dare tell them what I ate.
You tell them that I had, you know, steak or whatever a kid, normal kid would eat.
(42:30):
You know, I don't know, chicken fingers or something.
She's like, okay.
So she'd go home and she'd comply if she would do anything that I said.
Well, but you can't really hide weight loss.
And it kind of kept happening.
And my mom would, she would kind of try to make me eat certain things at some point.
She said, you know, you've got to eat some protein at some point.
(42:51):
I mean, you know, I had her believe in this was athletic and healthy and whatever.
And so one time she, I said, well, I will eat shrimp.
That is it.
It's low fat.
I mean, no fat on it, whatever.
And so I said, I'm going to eat my dinner upstairs tonight.
I don't want to eat with you guys.
And so she caught me flushing shrimp down the toilet.
It's so crazy to think about this right now.
(43:16):
I mean, and it was really, it really did consume my life.
I didn't care about my friends.
I didn't care about anything.
It was just what I was going to eat.
I would think about my body eating itself and I liked it.
For some reason, even back then I felt that it was like cleansing me to eat this way.
And now I can see the relation to what my dad did and I wanted to cleanse.
(43:38):
And that's a theme with my drinks too, the wine.
I wanted to drink wine because I felt it was cleansing, like getting rid of a lot of shame
that I carried around.
But I didn't really know that at the time.
But you know, the one thing about it is it does have nothing to do with, you know, super
models are so skinny or anything like that.
Mine was I wore baggier clothes because I didn't want people to notice.
(43:59):
I didn't want to be attractive.
I didn't care.
That's not why I was doing what I was doing.
It was really about control.
It was my thing.
It's the one thing I can have.
And I did get an intervention this summer.
And I quit having a period.
My hair was coming out.
I mean, but I thought I looked good.
(44:19):
The summer after my senior year of high school, I came home one day and my parents said, you
need to pack a bag.
You're going to treatment.
So it wasn't, it wasn't talked about.
It wasn't anything.
They had planned it.
I got into it.
I was pissed.
And so we went, but wait, what am I going to do?
So we went, they took me to Tulsa.
(44:40):
I'm from Ardmore and they dropped me off.
And of course I hated it.
It was an eating disorder unit and there were bulimics and compulsive overeaters there with
me and my roommate was a compulsive overeater and I thought she was so weak.
I just couldn't stand her because she could not do like the rigidity that I lived for.
I was just like, oh, I hate her.
(45:02):
But then at the end I loved her and I did not want it.
I still love her.
So we're in treatment and initially they do let the patients or they let me choose
our own menu.
They gave you a menu and it had choices, five for breakfast, five for lunch, five for dinner,
whatever.
And they noticed that I was always choosing the safest things like oatmeal and fish.
(45:26):
So they took that privilege away from me and they started picking my meals.
And I kept losing weight in treatment.
Because my idea was I'm going to come here and comply and I'm going to be the best patient
ever.
I'm going to get out and go to OU and continue on my path of whatever path that was.
(45:46):
Self-destruction.
Yeah, yeah.
Let me continue to whittle away.
And so that's what I thought.
I can put on the good face here and be compliant and do what they say and that's what the
anorexics do.
I mean I'm great at boom, boom, boom.
But they noticed that I was losing weight and they accused me of throwing up.
(46:08):
And so they assigned somebody to me every time I went to the bathroom, every time I
did anything.
Well I finally came clean that I had been exercising in my room.
So with that kind of coupled with them two, I'll never forget the first meal they chose
for me was a hamburger and apple pie.
(46:28):
And I literally almost died.
I was like, I can't do this.
I can't do this.
And some other people were like, we want that.
I can't do this.
But I did it.
And it was, I liked that they had, there was a shift.
I liked that they have the control now because I didn't have to do the mental calculations,
(46:48):
just the, it was like I have to do, I don't have a choice.
And it was really kind of freeing.
And that's kind of really when I got into treatment.
Like got into what we were doing there and the programs.
I mean anorexia wasn't a 12 step thing.
It was, you know, I don't know, a long journey for sure.
(47:09):
But I really liked when they took that control.
It kind of freed me up and kind of like, wow.
Like it's so reminiscent of a lot of the things in the 12 step program.
So I ended up loving the place.
I loved my roommate so much.
I cried when she left because I became human and she was human and we were just humans.
(47:30):
But when I got out I had to do outpatient therapy for a very long time with a therapist
that specialized in eating disorders and he was a man.
And he is where I, the memories of being sexually abused came up because he kept saying it.
I would go, I would weigh in and I really, at first I didn't like him because I didn't
(47:55):
trust really anybody at all.
But he wore me down and I really liked him.
And he was an anorexic so I knew he knew when I was talking he wasn't just book smart.
He knew it.
And he, you know, after a while after we developed a relationship he, a therapeutic relationship,
he would say, you know, you talk like somebody that's been sexually abused.
(48:19):
Is that part of your, I was like no.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Literally like I thought that's the craziest question.
I don't know why you're asking me that.
So then you go, okay.
And then we'd talk about something else and that would be that.
But he kept bringing it up every time and I was like no.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Why are you saying this?
(48:39):
I don't even know what I'm saying that sounds like that, you know.
And finally after several of those experiences like little flashbacks because I really didn't
have much of a memory of my childhood.
At a certain point I don't remember very much but I remember very vividly pieces that happened
(49:03):
and they kind of like it's like broken glass kind of putting it together.
It's like you can't really fit it together.
It's like it's not some sequence where oh on this day this happened and then this, this,
this, this.
But it happened.
And that's where I discovered that part of my story and I read that you know 30 to 65
(49:26):
percent of people with anorexia have been sexually abused because it's a wonderful,
nobody can get in.
I mean it's a penetration.
It's like a wall that I built around myself like nothing could bother me as long as I
could stick with my routine of eating and exercising not one thing mattered.
(49:46):
It reminds me of the drink.
Not one thing mattered if I could have the drink, you know.
So I stayed in therapy with him all through college most of law school and I really liked
it and he helped me a lot.
But with that you know with anorexia I firmly believe that I would have had to have gone
(50:07):
to inpatient.
There's absolutely no way that I could have done anything on my own.
I mean them taking over my menu choices was one and I mean when I got out it was scary.
One of my assignments was eat a chicken taco salad with cheese on it and I was like oh
you know.
I was like oh these things are so scary.
(50:29):
I was excited because I would eat it but it would not have, I had this, this, this, this,
this.
He was like just order as it comes.
I was like oh.
Then he made a rule one time where I had to order whatever the person next to me ordered.
So I could be out if I was out with you guys because I mean I would always venture to these.
He was like so you just get what she gets and so oh my god please get something.
(50:49):
But it was kind of fun for me because finally the chains were off a little bit you know
and I had to let go of control and then now at some point that flipped to compulsive overeating.
I was gonna ask you.
It did.
That was awful.
And what about the alcoholism?
That came after the compulsive over eating.
(51:12):
You know I mean I drank throughout all this but that was not, it was I would think normalish
and then I mean it wasn't even a thing.
I didn't think of it the way that it later became in my life and so the compulsive overeating
it happened like, it just a switch happened.
(51:34):
I can't even explain.
And I was unbelievable how the amount of willpower I exhibited in anorexia.
I mean I was 30 pounds less than I am now.
I couldn't muster one day.
I mean I was like what is happening?
I don't understand.
I mean I was the queen of virginity and control and I could not, I could never get that back
(51:59):
ever.
I would hide food, I did the drug seeking behavior of one restaurant.
I never threw up.
I would just eat it.
When I would get my comfort food, the second I had it when I was a compulsive over eater,
it was like everything was okay.
You know and then I just wanted more and you would almost pass out from like a sugar type
(52:22):
coma.
You know it was very.
Does anybody want to comment on that pain that you felt that you were going through
some of those things?
In your own personal life?
You know I was bad because I was so focused on eating.
And my mother was worried about me and my socialization.
(52:46):
I was getting ready to go through puberty or going through puberty.
And it came across to me like I suddenly had turned into this bad person because of my
body, my body size.
You know I still have a lot of shame issues connected with having a belly.
(53:09):
And you know I'm 77 years old.
A lot of people my age have a belly.
And I've had two children and still I look in the mirror and feel bad about my belly.
And I have to laugh at myself but it's a real thing still.
(53:32):
And that is something I've carried through my whole life.
But I do feel like the 12 step way of life because it calls for me to really look at
myself and to grow along spiritual lines.
Absolutely.
I can let go of I guess you'd say character defects or thought patterns and behaviors
(53:56):
that get in the way of me coming face to face with just truth, the facts about myself.
And I think the beauty of the 12 steps is that they don't have an end point really.
It's a lifelong process and the last three steps are present tense in the sense.
(54:23):
They're continued to do this, sought to improve our conscious contact with the power greater
and ourselves and carry the message and practice these principles in all our affairs.
There's no the end to that, no graduation day.
Yeah, it's interesting reflecting on my mom.
(54:47):
She's about my size and she was always on a diet and with her third child she was on
amphetamines because back then professional standard words, this person, this woman's
going to gain more than 25 pounds, put her on some drugs.
And so she was like always concerned about how she looked and she was a tennis, very
(55:10):
active tennis player and right about a month before she died I had been staying with her
some because she had been sick some and she said you know what, I think I have an eating
disorder and you know her whole life she was you know this organization called TOPS, Weight
Watchers Weight.
I was in TOPS.
(55:30):
Were you in TOPS?
Yes.
I was there as a six-year-old at a meeting and was traumatized by these women like fighting
over the weigh-in thing.
And one woman actually took her dress off and was down to her slip and I was like.
But the pressure on especially women in that time was horrible.
(55:51):
Yeah.
It was horrid.
In TOPS if you gained weight they put you in a special section in the room.
Oh my gosh.
In the shame room.
It was the pig pen and they'd oink at you.
They'd oink it?
Oh my gosh.
No way.
It was a big deal.
Yeah.
Effective on doubt.
(56:11):
I remember one time I gave up butter for Lent and lost I was ten years old I lost four pounds.
How in the heck does any normal person remember that unless they've got an issue.
And so I was right with my mom on the cabbage dolly part whatever that diet was where people
ate cabbage every meal.
And you know I was watching she'd have the grapefruit diet.
(56:34):
That thing taped to the inside of the cabinet door.
And I was like reading it.
So she wasn't pressuring me I was pressuring myself.
And I obsessed I remember lying in bed at night thinking okay if I could just lose ten
pounds I'd be just perfect.
And I was maybe thirteen or fourteen you know when I was having those thoughts.
(56:56):
So my mom didn't put a lot of pressure on myself.
And I did Sally what's yours five?
Me ten.
Ten times a weight watchers.
I only did four until I found out.
Every city I lived in I was in weight watchers.
And one hospital based program that was behavior mod.
(57:20):
And oh I got pregnant on the Nutrisystem so that had to go.
It wasn't the Nutrisystem I think it was something else.
Probably something else.
They got you pregnant?
Yeah.
I had to abandon that immediately.
And then so those were the things I said I ran and I ran and I ran and I found that exercise
(57:43):
that I lost weight when I exercised heavily.
So all that some crazy stuff.
And yeah my mom and outside of that I did have a lot of conflict with my mom.
But outside of that she was not the one who put pressure on me.
I put the pressure on myself.
And then of course when I got to be a teenager and shot up four inches in one summer.
(58:09):
And then I was like this and I went like that.
And I was so happy about that.
So excited.
So anyway yeah that's kind of what I wanted to add about.
And childhood trauma being yelled at a lot.
And then for other reasons not meeting her expectations.
(58:31):
Dad was just he was a push up.
He loved us no matter what.
But mom was like Nancy you're spinning your wheels.
Why don't you take responsibility.
Those kinds of messages of course being the oldest daughter of Nutris.
Also as another kind of source of okay what is this cause in a person's life.
(58:54):
But another thing one other thing I wanted to mention.
But you know my mom didn't put pressure.
But our damn culture.
Our damn culture is awful.
And it was even worse back then.
And it was made fun of people who didn't look young and thin.
And then there was Twiggy.
It was fucking Twiggy.
Delete that if you want to.
You know like when I was in high school she stuck her head out of the Heidsen tree in
(59:23):
England.
God bless you Twiggy.
I think she's still alive and hopefully she's recovered too.
But that cultural pressure is just terrible.
Yeah anyway.
Thank you.
Yeah anything?
Just a little bit.
Yeah.
But I think about growing up and the anorexia to me was it was about control.
Like can I have something for myself?
(59:46):
Like can I do something just that I wanted.
I mean that's not really what I wanted to do.
But it makes me think about growing up and how we were never asked who are you?
What do you want to do?
You know you're going to do da da da da da da da.
We weren't nurtured.
And I know that she's a child of an alcoholic and so all those things.
But then the compulsive overeating and the drinking are absolutely the same to me.
(01:00:11):
Different substances.
But it was all just like I just want the world to stop.
And I just want to feel good.
Or deal with whatever it is going on with me.
But I never knew what was going on with me.
And that would make it feel good for a little bit.
You know until it obviously doesn't.
Success.
Don't talk.
Don't feel.
(01:00:31):
Don't trust.
Was part of my family system.
And all the like the food and the alcohol you could kind of just drown it out for a little
bit until you always had the consequences you know.
So here we are.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I would like more information about Overeaters Anonymous.
The international website is OA.org.
(01:00:56):
If you're in the Tulsa area it's TulsaOA.org.
And they also have a lot of information about anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive overeating.
Questionnaires and other literature too are available on that site.
Yes.
Great.
Thank you guys.
(01:01:16):
Thank you.
And I want to thank everyone for being here and sharing your life with us.
This has been a production of ChildrenOfChaos.net and we invite you to share your thoughts with
us via email to comments at ChildrenOfChaos.net.
Children of Chaos is a forum to discuss topics related to and in concert with addiction and
(01:01:40):
recovery in America, is not affiliated with, endorsed, or financed by any recovery or treatment
program, organization, or institution.
Any views, thoughts, or opinions expressed by an individual in this venue are solely
that of the individual and do not reflect the views, policies, or position of any specific
(01:02:03):
recovery-based entity or organization.
Hi, I'm Rusty and I'm an alcoholic.
(00:04):
And I'm Tim and I'm an alcoholic and this is Children of Chaos.
Today we're going to talk about eating disorders.
I was fortunate enough in my professional life early on that I got to work with bulimics
and anorexics and compulsive over eaters.
And I have a special affinity for them because we alcoholics have it easy compared to eating
(00:32):
disorders because with eating disorders you've got to have the food one way or the other.
It's going to be there.
And with the alcohol I've got a choice whether I'm going to go drink alcohol or not drink
alcohol or whatever other substance I choose to put in my body.
Today we've got Nancy, we have Sally, and we have Debbie that have graciously said that
(01:01):
they would be a part of our podcast today.
Each of them is going to give you their personal experience to some degree.
We're going to talk about where we can find help and we're going to also talk about treatment
centers and how effective are they for eating disorders.
(01:23):
So with that I think I'll turn to Nancy.
Nancy, you want to start out?
I'd be delighted.
I'm Nancy and I am a compulsive over eater and identify myself as a food addict because
that's just the way it is for me.
And I have like dual experiences.
(01:45):
I'd like to speak about the professional experience first if that's alright.
And I worked at an eating disorders facility here in Tulsa, Oklahoma for part time for
about 10 years as a nurse.
What I know, I think about that particular facility is they have been effective in all
(02:08):
cases.
No, that's never how it works.
And I also know that at the time I was working for them they required a $25,000 non-refundable
pre-admission deposit.
They only had women in their program and they only dealt with people with anorexia, people
(02:30):
with bulimia nervosa.
And they did not deal with compulsive over eaters and I think the bottom line is it doesn't
pay.
So on their side of things and it is not, because insurance didn't cover that as an
acute problem, they did not see it as an acute problem.
(02:52):
They only saw it as a chronic problem.
And whereas if you have a person who weighs 75 pounds and has not eaten more than 300
or 400 calories a day for several years, that's often an acute health risk, a crisis.
Same with bulimia can be the same because people have all kinds of other organ systems
(03:17):
issues when there's a chronic purging.
So that was an interesting experience.
I learned very early that they had a list of things you don't say to someone who has
an eating disorder and these were all women.
So it's pretty gathered around women's issues and the cultural pressures that women face
(03:45):
in this country about gotta look good, gotta be a certain beauty standard, hold up to a
certain beauty standard.
Many of the patients we had inpatient, four months by the way, it might be a couple months
in the acute unit and then there were step down units they could go to and eventually
(04:07):
leading to off campus volunteer work and sometimes actual employment while coming back there
for the evening.
But it was very, very, very structured, very rigid.
They had a healthcare team, nutritionists, they had the big healthcare system right close
(04:28):
to them where they could go for their GI tract problems, heart problems, muscle wasting issues,
all those things that people who are either over nourishing themselves or under nourishing
themselves would have.
So that was just an interesting, it was an interesting place.
(04:51):
People tended, patients tended to be on quite a handful of medicines.
They were co-occurring disorders that might be obsessive compulsive disorder, it might
be a personality disorder like for example with bulimia there were a whole lot of women
who had borderline personality disorder.
So there was all of this gamut of things and so there were cross addictions.
(05:17):
I also worked in an adult unit and there would be someone there who was addicted to pain
medication subsequent to gastric bypass surgery.
They just couldn't get off their pain medication and then I know it goes the other way too
from addiction to substances that are prescription or illicit or whatever to eating problems.
(05:43):
So it was amazing, it was a challenge.
There are some incredible people who work in that unit and in that area still.
I really value them as professional people and personally I know some of them as well.
So yeah they had a huge range of therapies that you could, that the regular psych patients
(06:06):
couldn't get.
They had dance and movement therapy, they had yoga, they had art therapy and in those
days it was like a quick turnaround.
Like you have somebody in a crisis who went into a psychiatric hospital.
It is get them in and get them out.
Crisis intervention back home.
(06:27):
Eating disorders wasn't amenable to that.
Also the other professional thing was I taught that content in a nursing program here in
Tulsa and I asked my partner one time, my teaching partner, I said, you know Lisa I
just keep changing.
Every year I have to tweak this eating disorders thing that I teach and it just seems like
(06:49):
it's just not quite right.
And she goes well you know it's personal to you.
It's your own and you have similar issues.
She didn't say it in that many words because she was so much more diplomatic.
But she said it's very personal to you.
And I just couldn't leave it alone.
And so I taught that for maybe 15 years in a nursing program.
(07:10):
We also had students on the units at L'Oreal.
And that was real touchy too because it was easy to get into a regular psych unit there
with nursing students but they were very, very particular about the eating disorders
unit.
I had to pre-conference these students and say you have to commit to eating a full lunch
when you're there for a day.
(07:32):
And they were going what?
I don't eat lunch.
I just have a snack.
And I'm going you have to commit to a full lunch which includes the following.
A protein, vegetables, fruits and possibly a dessert.
And like the majority of my nursing students could not do that.
So only the ones that could commit to that would go.
(07:52):
And so that was an interesting, interesting experience.
So in my own personal history experience I was probably four, maybe five years old.
I was a little free-range child in Missouri out in the country.
(08:13):
My grandparents were Italian immigrants and they owned a grocery store.
Score!
So I found out what donuts were when I was four or five.
And I found out that the colonial bread man would often bring these boxes of donuts or
(08:35):
not often enough, bring these boxes of donuts to my grandparents for their patronage, for
their business.
And so I got to find out what the days of the week were.
Grandma would say, I'd say, Grandma when's the colonial bread man coming?
Or can I have a donut?
She goes, well the colonial bread man brings the donuts.
And I'd say, when's he going to come?
(08:57):
Well he comes let's say Wednesday.
And so I would ask Grandma every day, is it Wednesday?
Is it Wednesday?
Is it Wednesday?
So there's the obsession that I share with my alcoholic friends and my friends who have
other drug disorders, drug related disorders.
(09:18):
And so that was my earliest memory of being obsessed with the food.
The next memory I have is when my grandfather died.
I was about eight or nine.
When they were in the funeral home doing the rosary and my grandmother had never heard
her wail and cry because Italian student.
(09:40):
So she was wailing the whole time we were there.
She cried when we first arrived in the car.
She came with her hand over her mouth and cried.
I'd never seen her cry.
And so the parents gave us each a quarter and said go down to the drug store and get
an ice cream.
It was intense emotionally.
(10:01):
So me and my cousins went down the street to the drug store.
At the funeral the church ladies had brought and just covered a picnic table.
I'm looking at a table here that's a little bigger than this.
And covered it with all the good things they had made.
And I remember one particular good thing that was really, I can remember the feel in my
(10:21):
mouth right now.
The crunch of the sugar in the icing.
It was a cake.
It was white.
Remember all the things and I think I had three pieces of it.
Because when I bit into the cake and swallowed it the hurt went away for a little bit.
So that's how I got hooked guys.
(10:42):
And then manja.
It's an Italian word that means eat.
And it's the word that says you eat now.
It's that tense that they use manja.
So everybody eat.
Another thing was when we came to visit grandma we'd get there characteristically late on
a Friday night.
Maybe 10 or 11 o'clock.
(11:03):
We'd driven from Tulsa.
That's after we left.
Grandma would go, she would just light up like a Christmas tree.
She was so happy we were there.
She would go into the store and we'd hear that meat slicer going rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
And so she'd slice up a bunch of meat and cheese and she'd take that butcher paper,
(11:23):
you know put it on that white butcher paper and then slap it on the table with a loaf
of bread and there we went.
So those are some, and that was a happy emotion around food.
So that's kind of how I got hooked.
I cooked things for my family growing up.
I was always the one who would dig up recipes and cook books and get up at 6.30 on Saturday
(11:44):
morning and bake something sweet.
And I always had, I was always a round kind of chubby little gal and got into sports and
I grew really tall quickly in middle school and junior high and so I got skinny.
So that was kind of weird.
That was a different kind of feeling.
And then it all came back later.
(12:07):
But how I got involved, I'm involved in OA, I've been in OA since probably 91 with a kind
of a significant relapse and absence from the program.
But I had moved back to Oklahoma after a divorce.
Oh boy, there's another relationship trigger.
Lots of relationship triggers get me going.
And so I thought I could do it like go to graduate school, work full time and take care
(12:32):
of two little children that their dad wasn't in the house, they wouldn't miss him that
much.
Well that was traumatic for them.
It was tough on them.
It's tough on me.
I had to find what was I going to do?
Was I going to buy a house or we got a rent?
This place where I'm working, I need child care until 10 o'clock at night and all this
(12:54):
kind of stuff.
All these things that I wasn't doing when we lived in New Mexico.
Then I skipped the whole thing about the marital relationship, the relationship with that person.
That involved quite a bit of food too.
Also that involved, he was an athlete at OSU and I can't take this whole time you guys
but this is significant too.
(13:15):
He's an athlete at OSU, he was a distance runner.
I like distance runners, I like the kind of character and perseverance they had.
And so I picked up distance running myself.
So that is what kept me slender through my 20s.
Also we lived in the running capital of the world for a few years, Eugene, Oregon.
(13:37):
When people ask you what do you do, it's not they don't care about your work.
They don't care about anything except what you do athletically.
So I helped a person, trained for a marathon with a friend, got up to 20 miles running.
If I was going to go out and eat at night to one of my favorite Italian restaurants,
I would run 10 miles in the day.
(13:58):
So that's how I managed my weight and then just really didn't pay that much attention
to balancing my food out and keeping it where I didn't have to run 10 miles to do that.
I was self-critical if I only ran 3 miles a day.
All that kind of stuff, ran a bunch of 10Ks, a couple of half marathons.
(14:22):
Anyway, so that was that piece in the 20s.
When I got that utter desperation, a therapist recommended me.
She said, well, let's look at your family system here.
Looks like you have some alcoholics in your family.
Looks like you have some persons who are addicted to drugs.
Sounds like you might be worthy of Al-Anon or maybe this eating.
(14:47):
We talked about my eating patterns that were not healthy.
Because I would have a bowl of cereal at night after the kids had gone to bed.
Because Dad always had a bowl of cereal.
But his seemed to be a bowl of cereal and mine seemed to be the one where you get there,
oh, there's milk or cereal.
And then you run out of milk and then you put more milk in.
(15:09):
I would do that until I was aware that I had had 3 or 4 bowls of cereal before bedtime.
That was my icky experiences.
Where I got some help with OA, Overeaters Anonymous, is some ideas for how I can manage
that.
Notice what your emotions are.
(15:31):
Write them down.
Do some writing.
Do some calling of friends in the program.
Talk to your sponsor every day.
Report your food.
What?
Report my food?
That is crazy.
Over the years I've done different kind of permutations of that.
I don't call my sponsor every day.
(15:51):
I was sending her emails of my food intake for each day, like photographs.
That worked for a while.
Right now I'm just calling my sponsor every week or so.
It could be better than that.
I have a lot of self-criticism about my body right now.
(16:12):
I remember the place that I worked and their goals for their clientele were eat moderately,
exercise moderately, and make peace with your body shape and size.
And I'm on that making peace place.
Because I might not lose weight.
And that's really hard for me to accept.
(16:34):
Because I'm not going to kill myself exercising.
I am not going to be on a restrictive diet that is unsustainable.
So I eat a variety of foods.
My ideal is a 301 plan abstinence wise, three meals a day, nothing in between, one day at
(16:55):
a time.
I tend to eat like a giant salad every day.
And I was complaining about the iceberg lettuce to Sally.
It's a crusty, but a giant salad of all the colors and a big old apple.
And then try to manage myself well at dinner time.
So that might be as good as it gets for me.
But I get experience.
I got my strength and hope from going to meetings, OA meetings every week.
(17:18):
And going to attending my alternative is the Open AA meetings online.
And they helped me a lot.
There are several of us over-eaters on there.
And I just gather strength from them, connect with them every once in a while and say, hey,
it's so good to hear your voice on the calls and see you in person.
(17:39):
Because I know we share some of the same issues and problems.
So that's who I am and how I am now.
I prayed.
I took my notebook to lunch today.
I was in the car.
I was going to jot down some notes.
And I didn't.
I just prayed that the right things that would be helpful to the listeners would come out
(18:02):
and that something I said would be valuable.
But what I've noticed over the years at OA is when I started going in the 90s, we would
fill a chapel up at one of the churches in town.
Huge meetings on Monday evenings and Saturday mornings.
And we have 30 people.
And now we're down to a handful.
(18:22):
And that just baffles me.
But oh, well, I think there's so many alternatives that get people's attention.
I'm turning my head from side to side.
So I'll let somebody else talk.
I'm Sally, compulsive overeater, gratefully abstaining today.
(18:43):
And I just wanted to say, Nancy, I don't know if you said the obvious, but OA is overeaters
anonymous.
And it's a program that's based on the AA program, the AA 12 steps, 12 traditions.
(19:05):
And I came to OA at age 33 after being on a diet, one diet or another, for 20 years,
starting at age 13.
And I had started using food as a child for entertainment in the hot, boring summers in
(19:29):
Oklahoma to deal with emotions, sensitivity, all of that.
I don't know why.
Because it worked for me, basically.
Food worked.
And I, too, have a string of doughnut stories.
(19:50):
The only thing I ever stole was doughnuts at the grocery store.
And my feeling was always, well, I have a right to this because I want it, that kind
of thing.
I also grew up in a household in a time and a place where being slim and attractive for
(20:14):
young women was just absolutely required.
And I started getting chubby when I was a preteen.
And my mother started encouraging me to weigh myself in the morning and maybe go on a diet.
I rebelled against that up until seventh grade when my girlfriends were starting to look
(20:41):
at boys and get boyfriends.
And I thought I needed a boyfriend, too.
And it wasn't going to happen unless I was thinner.
And so I went on my first diet, secretly kept it from mother, didn't want her to know that
she had prevailed.
(21:04):
And I immediately found I couldn't do it.
I could not.
It was a calorie thing where you counted calories.
And I had used up all my calories at breakfast and lunch and didn't have any leftover for
the afternoon candy bar after school and dinner and the other things that were absolute requirements
(21:26):
for me.
And I couldn't do it.
Eventually I managed to, or I tried what was called Metra-Cal at the time.
It was canned lunch, it was a liquid.
It came in butterscotch, which was so wretched I couldn't even swallow it.
(21:48):
Vanilla, which was moderately better, and chocolate, which was moderately better than
that.
But all three of them were pretty obnoxious.
So I got to the point where I would just, instead of having the Metra-Cal for lunch,
(22:10):
I'd just skip lunch.
And that was easier.
That was easier.
It's like total abstinence from eating was easier for me to achieve than eating a moderate,
well-balanced meal.
But I was always the one that was in the kitchen looking for snacks between meals.
(22:35):
And I noticed that food meant a lot more to me than it did to my girlfriends.
They were more interested in boys or other things.
That used to kind of frustrate me, as did the fact that I was battling my weight.
But anyway, I continued to battle my weight all the way through junior high, high school,
(23:00):
went off to college with prescription for diet pills, which were, well, they were amphetamines,
and pretty high-powered.
I took them as prescribed, but after a while I had to chase them with coffee to get any
effect out of them.
And I sort of sped through college.
(23:26):
You know, got pregnant at the end of my freshman year in college.
Had a baby and a divorce at the end of my junior year of college, or sophomore year
of college.
And then finished, as a single mother, finished college and got a job.
(23:51):
And all this time I was on this diet, that plan, this exercise program.
I really left very few stones unturned in my attempts to lose weight.
And here's what happened with every diet.
I would get enthusiastic about it, dedicate myself to it.
(24:15):
I would maybe, if it worked, I would lose weight, and I'd get down almost to my goal,
maybe within five pounds, and couldn't do it anymore, and would immediately start back
up.
Because I was eating the what, you know, I would start eating the desserts and the carbs
(24:40):
and the quantities and the snacks.
And I would go right back up, and I would get desperate, and I'd be five, maybe ten
pounds heavier than I'd ever been before in my adult life.
And get on another one.
(25:02):
Would lose down, not as far down as I had lost the time before.
Lose it, or lose the diet, and gain the weight back up.
And oh my god, I'm five pounds more than I've ever been in my life.
So it was like yo-yo dieting, but the yo-yo was getting higher.
(25:24):
And you know, if you made a graph of it, it would go straight up.
I had never heard of the 12 steps.
I did hear about OA at one point, and it took me a couple years to get desperate enough.
(25:45):
And by that time, my diets had turned into fasts, and I had tried behavior modification,
where they shocked me and made me watch myself eating food and spitting it out.
So as soon as I didn't have to do that, I was off bingeing again.
(26:08):
Anyway, another diet was a protein sparing fast, where I drank a little jigger of protein
glop three times a day, and took a vitamin B shot once a week, and didn't eat anything for 74 days.
(26:32):
By that time, my hair was starting to fall out.
I was having chest pains, and this doctor that was supervising said, we might ought to start refeeding.
Well, refeeding, as soon as I started eating again, like within 48 hours, I was binging
(26:53):
on pizza, and you know, the old way of eating.
And of course, the weight came right back on.
And with each diet, I became more desperate.
Food was an obsession about food and weight, an obsession about what am I going to do?
(27:16):
How am I going to handle this?
How am I going to live?
It was eating more and more of my life, and I couldn't function.
When I was binging, it was really like being on some kind of narcotic, or someone had stuffed
(27:39):
my head with cotton.
I couldn't think straight, and I couldn't function.
And all I could think about was, what can I eat next that will scratch that itch, or
how am I going to lose weight?
I would wake up in the morning and say, I'm not going to put my foot over the side of
(28:02):
the bed until I figure out what I'm going to do about my weight today.
And whatever I figured out, it was gone by noon.
So I was just in despair, absolute despair.
And I was on my fourth go-through of Weight Watchers.
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And that's a good program for someone who isn't addicted like me.
But I suddenly realized that the Weight Watchers lecture set, I told her, I've tried to plan
my food and get the right food in the house and eat that way, and I just can't do it.
(28:48):
And she said, oh, now you can do it if you really want to.
And by this time, I had almost killed myself trying to deal with this problem, including
the chest pains and the hair falling out.
And it just hit me.
I wasn't even angry at her.
(29:08):
It just hit me that she was incorrect, that she did not know what I knew about me.
And that was that I was powerless, totally powerless.
And I guess my higher power knew at that point I was ready, because I came to OA and I heard
(29:35):
the 12 steps for the first time, starting with, admitted we were powerless over food
and that our lives are unmanageable.
And I went, I'm there.
Amen.
And I started working the steps with the help of several people in this OA group that I
(29:56):
came to.
I have been attending Overeaters Anonymous at least once a week from April 21, 1980 until
today.
And it took me three and a half years to get off of sugar, which was my number one.
(30:16):
If you made a list of foods I'm addicted to, sugars right there at the top, I was able
to stop.
That kind of answers a question that I think you all were interested in.
I was talking on the phone with another member of Overeaters Anonymous one afternoon, a couple
(30:41):
of weeks before Halloween in 1983.
It goes back a ways.
I had little kids and I had these little Halloween size, individual size candy bars.
Fun size, right?
Fun size, yeah.
Fun size candy bars in a bowl by the front door, ready for Halloween.
(31:08):
You got to get them early.
And I had been eating them, of course.
I practically wiped out the whole supply.
And I had known I have to get off of sugar.
I just have to.
And I had tried and I had prayed about it.
I was talking on the phone and she was kind of whining to me about, well, you know, the
(31:31):
alcohol can just put down the alcohol and never have to deal with it.
But we have to eat.
We have to have food.
And that does complicate matters.
Make no mistake about that.
It complicates matters.
But I said, yeah, I do have to eat.
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I'll die if I don't eat something.
But I don't have to eat candy.
I don't have to eat sugar.
And in fact, I will live longer and be healthier if I never eat another sugar sweet again.
And you know, that was suddenly true.
(32:16):
And suddenly I knew that I could get away with that.
It was like, wow, can I do that?
Can I get away with that?
And I said, I'm going to try it.
And I stopped eating sugar.
And I have not had sugar sweets from that day till this.
(32:39):
What is that?
Forty years.
And that's a miracle.
That's like the parting of the waters.
That's like the day the earth stood still.
It's an absolute miracle for me.
I have been involved in OA ever since.
(33:00):
Very active.
Still am.
Sugar is not my only problem.
And it's rarely anybody's only problem by the time they get to OA.
But these grazing, all of these white flour, a lot of people, you know, simple carbs, as
(33:21):
they say, starches.
Those are things that I could substitute for sugar when I have an itch, you know.
But being able to not eat the sugar, I've been able to maintain a weight loss all these
(33:42):
years since 83.
You know, within a fairly normal weight range.
Would I like to weigh 10, 15 pounds less?
Yes.
Always.
You know.
And if I did weigh 10 or 15 pounds less, I'd probably think I wanted to lose 10 or 15 more
because I'm crazy that way.
(34:04):
But my higher power has other ideas.
So my plan of eating is not to eat between meals and to eat one plateful of moderate
nutritious food at a meal.
Not seconds, not thirds, not try this and that at the buffet, you know.
(34:27):
But to just eat a sane plateful and get up and wash the plate and go on with life.
And sometimes that's hard.
I get crazy thoughts.
But my OA program and the 12 steps and my friends, this fellowship of people who have
(34:50):
my problem and my solution, which is the 12 steps of OA, they always pull me back to sanity.
A life of sane and happy usefulness.
We're not promised nirvana.
We're not promised the secret to the meaning of life, anything like that.
(35:14):
We're just promised a life of sane and happy usefulness.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Wow, Sally, that's wonderful.
Well, Debbie, why don't you tell us a little bit, will you?
Okay, well, I'm Debbie and I am a, I guess, recovered anorexic.
I don't know.
I mean, I hope.
(35:35):
I was a compulsive over-eater as well and an alcoholic.
But anyway, so I'll start.
Growing up, I guess, I have a younger sister and my dad, my real dad, was an alcoholic.
He's passed away and he was abusive and my parents divorced when I was in the sixth grade,
(35:58):
I think.
Weight was never a thing in my household.
My mom, there was no, I didn't have any of that diet culture that you often hear about
or anything.
It just wasn't, you know, I never thought about it.
I played sports.
I was not, I had friends.
My girlfriends were the type, when you're young, you can eat anything and you don't
gain a pound.
(36:18):
I mean, they could eat large pizzas and they're like, you know, weight nine pounds.
I was not that kid.
I mean, I would put on the weight, but I was always kind of more muscular.
But that never really bothered me.
When my parents divorced, we would go see my dad on visitations and it would come out
very later that he was sexually abusive, but I did not know that.
(36:39):
I blocked all that out and disassociated.
So at some point, it was in high school, we had gone, I was a part of the dance team that
performed at football games and we went to a camp, a summer camp at SMU in Dallas and
learned routines and all this stuff.
Well, somebody started talking about nutrition and I mean, I was a junk feeder.
(36:59):
I ate pizza, ice cream and like a great slush was a typical lunch for me.
And then you'd go home and eat dinner and I didn't really think anything about it.
I didn't care.
I wasn't fat.
I wasn't skinny.
I was kind of, I don't know, muscular, I guess.
I don't know.
But I started thinking about it and I think, you know, they were talking about nutrition.
That's kind of a good idea.
I could probably, you know, change the way I eat a little bit and you know, and I did
(37:23):
the way I played tennis and we had to get a physical and I got on the scale and I was
like, ooh.
So I thought I'd kind of go on a diet.
And for me, I mean, that diet was like, don't have the great slush.
It was not, you know, salad or it was really like, okay.
Whatever baked potato with all my other food will have a rice cake.
I mean, it was not any, I mean, right now I'd be like, God, that's just way too much
(37:47):
food.
But anyway, but I started losing weight just a little bit and I liked it.
So I would try something else.
I'd take something else away.
You know, now I'll change exchange.
I don't know.
I won't have pizza.
I'll have, you know, a chicken sandwich or something.
I would start making healthier choices all the way around and I would keep losing weight
(38:11):
and I loved it.
And it started to, I really take a whole and I would get some compliments at school like,
wow, you look, you know, so good, blah, blah, blah.
But I wasn't doing it for that.
It had nothing to do.
I should say that my mom remarried at some point when I was in the eighth grade and my
now dad came in.
(38:33):
And I was used to being the boss of the family.
My mom kind of, my younger sister, my mom kind of fell apart.
I was kind of in charge and I did, I thought I was, I mean I was, I thought I was.
And I hated him.
I did not want him in there.
I am in control of this ship.
(38:54):
And so we have massive, massive headbuttings.
And my mom was also, I had to be involved, she wanted me to be involved in basically
everything that was to be involved in at school.
I had to be on student council.
I had to be on that dance team.
I had to do all this stuff.
And all I really wanted to do, I was on the tennis team.
(39:15):
That's all I wanted to do was play tennis.
But I, that wasn't gonna fly.
I had to do all these other things.
And I kind of grew up with the idea that when you succeed at things, you get love.
And so that's how it works.
And so I was that kid.
I mean I did, I got excellent grades.
I was great at tennis.
(39:35):
I didn't want to do any of those things.
Those other activities, student council, I didn't care about it.
I didn't want to do it.
I didn't want to do any of that.
But I did it.
But I was resentful.
And when I started losing weight and that diet started working, it was kind of like,
this is mine.
Like, I'm doing this for me.
And nobody could take it away from me.
(39:56):
Nobody could run it.
Because I would do, okay, yeah, I'll do that.
I'll be in that activity.
I'll do this.
I'll do that.
Whatever it is.
But this, what goes in my body and how I exercise is my deal period.
And I loved it.
It's literally all I cared about.
It's all I thought about.
How I was gonna eat.
How I was gonna exercise.
I never threw up.
(40:18):
But I, so I started, you know, continuously losing weight.
And it almost reminds me of drinking.
Like when you take, you know, it takes you, well this diet took me.
I mean it owned me.
I remember getting on the scale and I would take off a ring.
Because I'm like, that might add.
I don't want anything.
And so.
God, insanity.
It was so insane.
(40:40):
And so it got to the point where, and I would play tennis for two hours after school.
I mean, that was part of practice.
I mean, I had to.
But then I would go to aerobics or run.
I mean, so I would spend three to three and a half hours exercising.
And by the end I would get the same thing every single day.
Some grape nuts in the morning for breakfast.
(41:00):
No lunch.
A plain baked potato and steamed broccoli for dinner.
And that is it.
And initially when I started getting kind of a weight where it was like pretty thin,
my friends would call my mom and say, Debbie's not eating.
And I was always real social and I liked to party and all this.
I didn't want to do, drinking wasn't a big deal because it had calories.
So I'm like, nope.
(41:22):
And so my mom, being a mom that doesn't want to believe those things, would ask me about
it.
And I'm like, that's crazy.
I eat.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And so it got to the point where we could go off campus for lunch in high school.
And I would always go with my friends.
But when I started getting bad, I didn't want to go with them because I wasn't going to
eat anyway.
So I didn't want to sit there.
(41:43):
I didn't want to do anything with them.
But I would go through a fast food place, buy food, throw the food out, but take the
sack home to my mom.
I'd be like, oh, so full.
So she would be like, oh, she ate.
So she would be believing that I ate.
And I'm like, yes.
I got one over on her.
So nobody would really, so she couldn't, she wanted to believe me, of course.
(42:06):
And also at the time, my younger sister was a great decoy.
I would say, Lits and I are going to go out to dinner tonight.
And we'd always go to the same place and I would get a baked potato and like pickles.
And she would want to tell so bad.
I was like, don't you dare tell them what I ate.
You tell them that I had, you know, steak or whatever a kid, normal kid would eat.
(42:30):
You know, I don't know, chicken fingers or something.
She's like, okay.
So she'd go home and she'd comply if she would do anything that I said.
Well, but you can't really hide weight loss.
And it kind of kept happening.
And my mom would, she would kind of try to make me eat certain things at some point.
She said, you know, you've got to eat some protein at some point.
(42:51):
I mean, you know, I had her believe in this was athletic and healthy and whatever.
And so one time she, I said, well, I will eat shrimp.
That is it.
It's low fat.
I mean, no fat on it, whatever.
And so I said, I'm going to eat my dinner upstairs tonight.
I don't want to eat with you guys.
And so she caught me flushing shrimp down the toilet.
It's so crazy to think about this right now.
(43:16):
I mean, and it was really, it really did consume my life.
I didn't care about my friends.
I didn't care about anything.
It was just what I was going to eat.
I would think about my body eating itself and I liked it.
For some reason, even back then I felt that it was like cleansing me to eat this way.
And now I can see the relation to what my dad did and I wanted to cleanse.
(43:38):
And that's a theme with my drinks too, the wine.
I wanted to drink wine because I felt it was cleansing, like getting rid of a lot of shame
that I carried around.
But I didn't really know that at the time.
But you know, the one thing about it is it does have nothing to do with, you know, super
models are so skinny or anything like that.
Mine was I wore baggier clothes because I didn't want people to notice.
(43:59):
I didn't want to be attractive.
I didn't care.
That's not why I was doing what I was doing.
It was really about control.
It was my thing.
It's the one thing I can have.
And I did get an intervention this summer.
And I quit having a period.
My hair was coming out.
I mean, but I thought I looked good.
(44:19):
The summer after my senior year of high school, I came home one day and my parents said, you
need to pack a bag.
You're going to treatment.
So it wasn't, it wasn't talked about.
It wasn't anything.
They had planned it.
I got into it.
I was pissed.
And so we went, but wait, what am I going to do?
So we went, they took me to Tulsa.
(44:40):
I'm from Ardmore and they dropped me off.
And of course I hated it.
It was an eating disorder unit and there were bulimics and compulsive overeaters there with
me and my roommate was a compulsive overeater and I thought she was so weak.
I just couldn't stand her because she could not do like the rigidity that I lived for.
I was just like, oh, I hate her.
(45:02):
But then at the end I loved her and I did not want it.
I still love her.
So we're in treatment and initially they do let the patients or they let me choose
our own menu.
They gave you a menu and it had choices, five for breakfast, five for lunch, five for dinner,
whatever.
And they noticed that I was always choosing the safest things like oatmeal and fish.
(45:26):
So they took that privilege away from me and they started picking my meals.
And I kept losing weight in treatment.
Because my idea was I'm going to come here and comply and I'm going to be the best patient
ever.
I'm going to get out and go to OU and continue on my path of whatever path that was.
(45:46):
Self-destruction.
Yeah, yeah.
Let me continue to whittle away.
And so that's what I thought.
I can put on the good face here and be compliant and do what they say and that's what the
anorexics do.
I mean I'm great at boom, boom, boom.
But they noticed that I was losing weight and they accused me of throwing up.
(46:08):
And so they assigned somebody to me every time I went to the bathroom, every time I
did anything.
Well I finally came clean that I had been exercising in my room.
So with that kind of coupled with them two, I'll never forget the first meal they chose
for me was a hamburger and apple pie.
(46:28):
And I literally almost died.
I was like, I can't do this.
I can't do this.
And some other people were like, we want that.
I can't do this.
But I did it.
And it was, I liked that they had, there was a shift.
I liked that they have the control now because I didn't have to do the mental calculations,
(46:48):
just the, it was like I have to do, I don't have a choice.
And it was really kind of freeing.
And that's kind of really when I got into treatment.
Like got into what we were doing there and the programs.
I mean anorexia wasn't a 12 step thing.
It was, you know, I don't know, a long journey for sure.
(47:09):
But I really liked when they took that control.
It kind of freed me up and kind of like, wow.
Like it's so reminiscent of a lot of the things in the 12 step program.
So I ended up loving the place.
I loved my roommate so much.
I cried when she left because I became human and she was human and we were just humans.
(47:30):
But when I got out I had to do outpatient therapy for a very long time with a therapist
that specialized in eating disorders and he was a man.
And he is where I, the memories of being sexually abused came up because he kept saying it.
I would go, I would weigh in and I really, at first I didn't like him because I didn't
(47:55):
trust really anybody at all.
But he wore me down and I really liked him.
And he was an anorexic so I knew he knew when I was talking he wasn't just book smart.
He knew it.
And he, you know, after a while after we developed a relationship he, a therapeutic relationship,
he would say, you know, you talk like somebody that's been sexually abused.
(48:19):
Is that part of your, I was like no.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Literally like I thought that's the craziest question.
I don't know why you're asking me that.
So then you go, okay.
And then we'd talk about something else and that would be that.
But he kept bringing it up every time and I was like no.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Why are you saying this?
(48:39):
I don't even know what I'm saying that sounds like that, you know.
And finally after several of those experiences like little flashbacks because I really didn't
have much of a memory of my childhood.
At a certain point I don't remember very much but I remember very vividly pieces that happened
(49:03):
and they kind of like it's like broken glass kind of putting it together.
It's like you can't really fit it together.
It's like it's not some sequence where oh on this day this happened and then this, this,
this, this.
But it happened.
And that's where I discovered that part of my story and I read that you know 30 to 65
(49:26):
percent of people with anorexia have been sexually abused because it's a wonderful,
nobody can get in.
I mean it's a penetration.
It's like a wall that I built around myself like nothing could bother me as long as I
could stick with my routine of eating and exercising not one thing mattered.
(49:46):
It reminds me of the drink.
Not one thing mattered if I could have the drink, you know.
So I stayed in therapy with him all through college most of law school and I really liked
it and he helped me a lot.
But with that you know with anorexia I firmly believe that I would have had to have gone
(50:07):
to inpatient.
There's absolutely no way that I could have done anything on my own.
I mean them taking over my menu choices was one and I mean when I got out it was scary.
One of my assignments was eat a chicken taco salad with cheese on it and I was like oh
you know.
I was like oh these things are so scary.
(50:29):
I was excited because I would eat it but it would not have, I had this, this, this, this,
this.
He was like just order as it comes.
I was like oh.
Then he made a rule one time where I had to order whatever the person next to me ordered.
So I could be out if I was out with you guys because I mean I would always venture to these.
He was like so you just get what she gets and so oh my god please get something.
(50:49):
But it was kind of fun for me because finally the chains were off a little bit you know
and I had to let go of control and then now at some point that flipped to compulsive overeating.
I was gonna ask you.
It did.
That was awful.
And what about the alcoholism?
That came after the compulsive over eating.
(51:12):
You know I mean I drank throughout all this but that was not, it was I would think normalish
and then I mean it wasn't even a thing.
I didn't think of it the way that it later became in my life and so the compulsive overeating
it happened like, it just a switch happened.
(51:34):
I can't even explain.
And I was unbelievable how the amount of willpower I exhibited in anorexia.
I mean I was 30 pounds less than I am now.
I couldn't muster one day.
I mean I was like what is happening?
I don't understand.
I mean I was the queen of virginity and control and I could not, I could never get that back
(51:59):
ever.
I would hide food, I did the drug seeking behavior of one restaurant.
I never threw up.
I would just eat it.
When I would get my comfort food, the second I had it when I was a compulsive over eater,
it was like everything was okay.
You know and then I just wanted more and you would almost pass out from like a sugar type
(52:22):
coma.
You know it was very.
Does anybody want to comment on that pain that you felt that you were going through
some of those things?
In your own personal life?
You know I was bad because I was so focused on eating.
And my mother was worried about me and my socialization.
(52:46):
I was getting ready to go through puberty or going through puberty.
And it came across to me like I suddenly had turned into this bad person because of my
body, my body size.
You know I still have a lot of shame issues connected with having a belly.
(53:09):
And you know I'm 77 years old.
A lot of people my age have a belly.
And I've had two children and still I look in the mirror and feel bad about my belly.
And I have to laugh at myself but it's a real thing still.
(53:32):
And that is something I've carried through my whole life.
But I do feel like the 12 step way of life because it calls for me to really look at
myself and to grow along spiritual lines.
Absolutely.
I can let go of I guess you'd say character defects or thought patterns and behaviors
(53:56):
that get in the way of me coming face to face with just truth, the facts about myself.
And I think the beauty of the 12 steps is that they don't have an end point really.
It's a lifelong process and the last three steps are present tense in the sense.
(54:23):
They're continued to do this, sought to improve our conscious contact with the power greater
and ourselves and carry the message and practice these principles in all our affairs.
There's no the end to that, no graduation day.
Yeah, it's interesting reflecting on my mom.
(54:47):
She's about my size and she was always on a diet and with her third child she was on
amphetamines because back then professional standard words, this person, this woman's
going to gain more than 25 pounds, put her on some drugs.
And so she was like always concerned about how she looked and she was a tennis, very
(55:10):
active tennis player and right about a month before she died I had been staying with her
some because she had been sick some and she said you know what, I think I have an eating
disorder and you know her whole life she was you know this organization called TOPS, Weight
Watchers Weight.
I was in TOPS.
(55:30):
Were you in TOPS?
Yes.
I was there as a six-year-old at a meeting and was traumatized by these women like fighting
over the weigh-in thing.
And one woman actually took her dress off and was down to her slip and I was like.
But the pressure on especially women in that time was horrible.
(55:51):
Yeah.
It was horrid.
In TOPS if you gained weight they put you in a special section in the room.
Oh my gosh.
In the shame room.
It was the pig pen and they'd oink at you.
They'd oink it?
Oh my gosh.
No way.
It was a big deal.
Yeah.
Effective on doubt.
(56:11):
I remember one time I gave up butter for Lent and lost I was ten years old I lost four pounds.
How in the heck does any normal person remember that unless they've got an issue.
And so I was right with my mom on the cabbage dolly part whatever that diet was where people
ate cabbage every meal.
And you know I was watching she'd have the grapefruit diet.
(56:34):
That thing taped to the inside of the cabinet door.
And I was like reading it.
So she wasn't pressuring me I was pressuring myself.
And I obsessed I remember lying in bed at night thinking okay if I could just lose ten
pounds I'd be just perfect.
And I was maybe thirteen or fourteen you know when I was having those thoughts.
(56:56):
So my mom didn't put a lot of pressure on myself.
And I did Sally what's yours five?
Me ten.
Ten times a weight watchers.
I only did four until I found out.
Every city I lived in I was in weight watchers.
And one hospital based program that was behavior mod.
(57:20):
And oh I got pregnant on the Nutrisystem so that had to go.
It wasn't the Nutrisystem I think it was something else.
Probably something else.
They got you pregnant?
Yeah.
I had to abandon that immediately.
And then so those were the things I said I ran and I ran and I ran and I found that exercise
(57:43):
that I lost weight when I exercised heavily.
So all that some crazy stuff.
And yeah my mom and outside of that I did have a lot of conflict with my mom.
But outside of that she was not the one who put pressure on me.
I put the pressure on myself.
And then of course when I got to be a teenager and shot up four inches in one summer.
(58:09):
And then I was like this and I went like that.
And I was so happy about that.
So excited.
So anyway yeah that's kind of what I wanted to add about.
And childhood trauma being yelled at a lot.
And then for other reasons not meeting her expectations.
(58:31):
Dad was just he was a push up.
He loved us no matter what.
But mom was like Nancy you're spinning your wheels.
Why don't you take responsibility.
Those kinds of messages of course being the oldest daughter of Nutris.
Also as another kind of source of okay what is this cause in a person's life.
(58:54):
But another thing one other thing I wanted to mention.
But you know my mom didn't put pressure.
But our damn culture.
Our damn culture is awful.
And it was even worse back then.
And it was made fun of people who didn't look young and thin.
And then there was Twiggy.
It was fucking Twiggy.
Delete that if you want to.
You know like when I was in high school she stuck her head out of the Heidsen tree in
(59:23):
England.
God bless you Twiggy.
I think she's still alive and hopefully she's recovered too.
But that cultural pressure is just terrible.
Yeah anyway.
Thank you.
Yeah anything?
Just a little bit.
Yeah.
But I think about growing up and the anorexia to me was it was about control.
Like can I have something for myself?
(59:46):
Like can I do something just that I wanted.
I mean that's not really what I wanted to do.
But it makes me think about growing up and how we were never asked who are you?
What do you want to do?
You know you're going to do da da da da da da da.
We weren't nurtured.
And I know that she's a child of an alcoholic and so all those things.
But then the compulsive overeating and the drinking are absolutely the same to me.
(01:00:11):
Different substances.
But it was all just like I just want the world to stop.
And I just want to feel good.
Or deal with whatever it is going on with me.
But I never knew what was going on with me.
And that would make it feel good for a little bit.
You know until it obviously doesn't.
Success.
Don't talk.
Don't feel.
(01:00:31):
Don't trust.
Was part of my family system.
And all the like the food and the alcohol you could kind of just drown it out for a little
bit until you always had the consequences you know.
So here we are.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I would like more information about Overeaters Anonymous.
The international website is OA.org.
(01:00:56):
If you're in the Tulsa area it's TulsaOA.org.
And they also have a lot of information about anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive overeating.
Questionnaires and other literature too are available on that site.
Yes.
Great.
Thank you guys.
(01:01:16):
Thank you.
And I want to thank everyone for being here and sharing your life with us.
This has been a production of ChildrenOfChaos.net and we invite you to share your thoughts with
us via email to comments at ChildrenOfChaos.net.
Children of Chaos is a forum to discuss topics related to and in concert with addiction and
(01:01:40):
recovery in America, is not affiliated with, endorsed, or financed by any recovery or treatment
program, organization, or institution.
Any views, thoughts, or opinions expressed by an individual in this venue are solely
that of the individual and do not reflect the views, policies, or position of any specific
(01:02:03):
recovery-based entity or organization.
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