Day One

I got married yesterday. It should have been one of the best days of my life. Instead, I spent a great deal of the day hating my body and obsessing over how I would look in pictures. Opening Facebook was an exercise in self-loathing as it revealed picture after picture of a body I would prefer to believe I do not have.

Two and a half years ago, at 5' 6" I weighed roughly 130 lbs. Today I weigh 156 lbs. I gained most of this weight in a eight month period, which works out to about a four pound a month rate.

In order to gain at that rate, something really has to be going on. It is hard to eat the extra 14,000 calories a month one needs to consume in order to gain 4 lbs/month (3500 calories = 1 lb). The way that I have accomplished this is binge eating.

I wish I had the first clue why or how this started. I did not just wake up one day and make a conscious decision to eat all the cookies in Denver, though that is how it feels like it happened.

I met the man I married yesterday right before Thanksgiving 2013. Although my divorce from my first husband had only been formalized in October of the same year, he and I had been separated and living apart since late September 2012. During the intensely difficult period between June 2012 and November 2013, when my marriage fell apart, I moved out of our house, and tried not to panic that I had destroyed my two children' lives (they were one and four at the time), I did not turn to food. In fact, I barely even thought about it. More accurately, I thought about it as often as a normal person thinks about food; that is, I ate when I was hungry and the rest of the time thought about and did other things.

Some time right around the start of 2014, my relationship to food took a dramatic turn. By May 2014, I had gained twenty pounds (approximately five pounds a month, or an extra 17,500 calories per month). My older son celebrated his 5th birthday in June 2014. His birthday cake was left at my house after the party, and I ate nearly 2/3 of his cake by myself in a matter of hours. This was the first time I truly registered the scale of my consumption, but even then, I told myself it was an odd, but surely non-repeatable experience. In the months preceding, I was binging, but I really thought of it as controllable: I was just having these unusual moments, but I would get it together and it would go away.

Since May 2014, I have lost and gained the same 5-8 lbs over and over and over again. Each time follows the same predictable pattern: I will binge, experience the usual disgust, self loathing and despair that comes with eating past the point of discomfort; I will promise myself that tomorrow I will get my life back; the next day, I will start logging my food and counting points or calories, and I will exercise nearly every day. This will last from anywhere from a few days to two weeks. Inevitably, I drive to Whole Foods and buy just one or two chocolate chip cookies. And, inevitably, those two cookies cascade into a caloric waterfall, and all of the good work I have done in the preceding days is undone in a single binge.

In the last few months, I have made myself throw up three times. I have tried several other times.

I am tired. I am tired of hating my body. I am tired of hating myself for my lack of discipline, my weakness, and my failure. I am tired of thinking of nothing else but food (or its absence) and my body. I am tired of missing out on so much of my life because my thoughts are consumed by calories and adipose tissue and how much I hate my stomach.

About two weeks ago, I fell apart and called my primary care physician. In tears, I tried to explain to her that I needed  help. She gave me a list of psychiatrists, and I made calls. I am desperate to believe that this will finally be the end of all of this.