My Story (First Step Inventory)

My Compulsive Overeating History:

I can remember being self-conscious about my weight from 2nd grade on. We went swimming as a class every Friday and I would cringe whenever my mom packed the two piece bathing suit…and I was not a heavy child, whatsoever!

As I got older and moved from Elementary into Middle School, my feelings toward my weight didn’t change. I was a little on the heavier side, but not big by any means. However, I was anything but comfortable in my own skin! I hated walking in front of the class, would spend hours perfecting my hair before school and wore lose clothes to cover my body. I remember going on vacation and asking my grandmother if she thought i was fat, looking for encouragement more than honesty… I completely expected her to say no, but she surprised me by calling me “chubby” --I started my first diet that day. Looking back at pictures, I can’t believe how small I actually was… it just reminds me how instrumental self-image really is.

Towards the end of Middle School I hit puberty and started to thin out quite a bit. I didn’t really change anything I was doing, it just naturally happened. Those few years were the only years i felt truly beautiful. Even so, when my friends picked out mid-drift baring bikinis, I opted for ones with more coverage as I still thought I needed to lose a few pounds. Again, looking back, I didn’t need to lose a thing- I looked fine.

As High School approached, I became increasingly more aware that I had put on a few pounds, it couldn’t have been more than 5. As small a deal as that sounds now, I became obsessed. I fell back into not being comfortable in my own skin and lived a life of “if I could only lose weight”. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I began going days eating as little as possible and watching the scale obsessively. If I had a date, or some social event that I wanted to look “pretty” for, I would essentially starve myself to see how much weight I could lose. Of course, as soon as the event was over, I would eat anything I could get my hands on and thus gain it all back. Sound familiar? this is definitely when I first fell into the habit of binging. The line was drawn in my mind-

my days were divided into two categories:

1. 1) days when I ate nothing
2. 2) days when I ate everything.

Into my high school years, my home life was less than comfortable. I lived in a very high stress environment and began to cherish my alone time. My house was always full of food and that coupled with my dysfunctional eating habits made for disaster. My mom was(is) an alcoholic and I took it hard. I ate to ease the anxiety and to keep myself from thinking about the problems I was facing, dealing with my mom’s addiction by developing one of my own. That is when I learned to use food as a crutch to take the edge off of my emotions.

This was the turning point for me. From than on, I gained weight very quickly and learned to use diets to try and deal with it. I tried many of them- low carb, low fat, low calorie…. they all worked for a short while but than I would eventually fall back into my old behaviors.

That brings us to where I am now. I found OA about a year ago and had a good 4 months of abstinence and lost 20 pounds. However, my downfall came when I got too focused on the weight loss and turned my recovery into another diet. I stopped attending regular meetings and got lose with my food plan- my thought process turned it to: it’s ok as long as it’s within the perimeters of my diet. Whew- that lasted 3 weeks and soon I was back where I started.

Now, I am taking this seriously. My recovery has to be the most important thing to me. My hope for this blog is two-fold: accountability and a way to carry the message of OA to other suffering compulsive overeaters.

:)