Secret binge eating ruled life for years (03/27/04)

Star Tribune Staff Writer Editor's note: The author lost 75 pounds nearly five years ago, but continued to overeat in large quantities. He started attending meetings of Overeaters Anonymous/HOW in 2002. An employee of the Star Tribune, he is writing this article without a byline because a basic tenet of Overeaters Anonymous is that members maintain their anonymity in the media.

I felt like I was going to explode. My stomach was so full I had trouble turning over in bed. I was not hungry. Just the opposite -- I was absolutely stuffed.

And then it hit me -- I needed more food.

Like a zombie, I rose from the bed and sneaked downstairs -- quietly, so my wife would not hear me. She would be appalled, I thought, if she discovered that I was eating again.

I stared into the refrigerator and tore off a piece of cold meat. I scoured the cupboards and ate some crackers.

With a finger, I scooped a dollop of peanut butter out of the jar. I heated up a can of soup. Taste was secondary. My overly full stomach was of no consequence. I had to eat.

Night after night I was overeating. I couldn't stop.

No one knew. I was thin. I looked normal. I kept this embarrassing secret to myself; to compensate for gorging myself, I ran up to 40 miles a week and sometimes more.

But physically and emotionally, I was a mess. I was gaining 12 or 15 pounds a month by overeating, then losing it by fasting and running.

In my hours away from work, I was preoccupied with food, trapped in a cycle of bingeing and over-exercising.

And then, about 19 months ago, I joined a group called Overeaters Anonymous/HOW. The enormous food cravings that nearly consumed me have dissipated. I have maintained a healthy weight. I have done something that I could not have conceived of: I have not overeaten once. And I have gained some insight into a behavior that, in retrospect, was little short of crazy.

Obesity is rampant in this country. About two-thirds of American adults are now considered overweight or obese.

Many members of Overeaters Anonymous/HOW enter the program in desperate shape, 100 pounds or more overweight. Many of us have been dieting for a lifetime. We're hard-core, powerless over food. Like alcoholics or drug abusers, we have our own form of substance abuse, but it's perfectly legal.

The widespread advice on eating healthfully has done us no good. I subscribe to health and nutrition magazines and devour the latest reports on good eating strategies. But the information was useless. When I had a desire to overeat -- and it happened daily -- logic went out the window.

For years, I was a yo-yo dieter, gaining weight, losing it, gaining it back and then some. I lost 75 pounds through Weight Watchers nearly five years ago, but I had trouble keeping it off.

Such behavior is not unusual. Studies indicate that 70 to 95 percent of people regain the weight they lose. I don't know why people like me eat more than we need. But I know now -- after a lifetime of overeating -- that I don't eat like a normal person does.

Exactly when I became an overeater, I can't say.

I remember the sugar rush I felt as a child, eating frosting off birthday cakes. I recall sneaking pieces of leftover turkey after Thanksgiving, vowing to take no more. But I couldn't stop.

In my 20s, I started getting fat and went on my first diet. The weight came off easily. It came back easily, too. Over the years I dieted four or five times, each time losing large amounts. Each time, it got a little harder. On the Scarsdale Diet, I ate so much zucchini soup that my teeth started to turn green. But once I drifted off the diet, it was back to pizza and fried chicken.

I became something of a gourmet cook, preparing French and Indian cuisine, with lots of oil and butter. The family loved it. I loved it even more.

In the late 1980s, I became aware of my compulsive behavior toward sugar.

I bought a batch of candy bars, ate them, and felt an insane craving for more. So I bought more and ate most of them before I'd driven out of the SuperAmerica lot.

I remembered a friend who had called me years earlier from an eating-disorder clinic to say she had a sugar addiction. I didn't believe it was possible. But now, in the face of my candy bar compulsion, I began to reevaluate.

So I cut candy and sugar out of my diet.

Months later, I decided I'd been too severe with myself. What harm would there be in a little sugar?

I bought some chocolate-chip cookies and ate them. Immediately, I became ravenous for more. I drove to a local shop, bought more cookies and gobbled them down. I realized it was crazy behavior. So I stopped eating sugar, again.

But this didn't stop my problem. It just sent my overeating in new directions. Fried food and potato chips were my favorites. Colonel Sanders might as well have been my uncle.

My weight rose and I felt it. I remember climbing the steps at the newspaper office, and a reporter behind me asked, "Are you going to make it?"

It was a good question and I was embarrassed. I was a physical mess. I had a body waiting for a heart attack. I went to a men's store to buy a sports jacket. I required a size 48 -- a size so big that they had to special-order one. I barely fit into airline seats. In late 1997, my wife suggested that if I didn't lose the weight by spring, I ought to go to Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous. Spring came and I was fatter. I chose Weight Watchers.

Early on a Saturday morning, before I went to my first meeting, I had one last binge at an Uptown restaurant.

It was an over-the-top breakfast -- pancakes, syrup, toast, fries, sausage, bacon, eggs, orange juice. It was too much, it was not enjoyable and I had to force it all down. I remember the waitress smiling at me and saying, "You must be celebrating."

I smiled back, humiliated.

After breakfast, I climbed the steps of a Minneapolis church and walked into my first Weight Watchers meeting. I was scared. I had never publicly declared that I had a weight problem, obvious though it was.

I got on the scale -- standard procedure at Weight Watchers -- and weighed in at 253 pounds.

The meeting worked. The Weight Watchers leader was enthusiastic and I became one of the chapter's stars, losing weight virtually every week as I applied the program with a vengeance. I gave up fried food altogether. I joined the nearby "Y," paid a personal trainer for some hourlong lessons, started a vigorous exercise program and began running.

After a year, I'd lost 75 pounds -- my goal.

Ironically, that's when the overeating got worse.

Weight Watchers works on a point program, with each food valued at a certain number. To maintain my weight, I had to eat food totaling no more than 28 points a day. Small quantities of vegetables were zero points and fruits were one point. I started eating larger quantities of vegetables and more and more fruit.

I also started cheating. Two points would get me a cup of oatmeal. My measuring became sloppier. I heaped the oatmeal into the cup so it looked like Mount Vesuvius. It was more like two cups. After a while, I stopped measuring altogether.

Restaurant meals were the worst. Each time I promised myself I'd eat a moderate meal. It rarely turned out that way. I'd have a beer, look at the menu, and all bets were off. Instead of a salad with light dressing, I'd have one drenched in oil. The waitress would bring a basket of bread, and I'd break my promise and have some. As long as I was having one piece, I might as well have the whole basket, and then why not another?

Having gone this far, I might as well have it with butter. Then I'd order a rich meal. So much for moderation.

There's something about overeating that triggers a crazy notion that once you screw up, why stop? As long as I ate badly, I'd think, I might as well do it some more. After eating to excess at the restaurant, I'd go home, overeat and eat badly for a few days. If I was lucky, I'd "come down" by midweek and start eating more reasonably.

I became fixated on the bathroom scale, climbing on and off a dozen times a day. I felt I had to keep going to Weight Watchers, even after I lost the weight, or I'd gain it back. As long as I didn't weigh more than 2 pounds over my goal weight, I didn't have to pay the weekly $10 fee. I vowed that I'd never get to the point of having to pay.

But I was well aware of the recidivism rate on dieting. With some friends in Weight Watchers, we started a support group that met at a coffee shop on Saturday mornings.

On the face of it, I was a terrific success. I was keeping my weight down. What I didn't tell anyone was that I was bingeing every day. I'd become a "volume eater," filling my stomach with vegetables and fruit and on some days, losing total control and eating everything in sight.

Though I was a trim 180 pounds, my stomach bulged nightly from overeating. I felt like a fat person inside a thin body.

It got tougher.

To keep the weight off, I intensified my running in the two weeks before my monthly weigh-in. It was not unusual for me to finish off an eight-hour day at work, fling on my running garb and head off for a 12-mile run -- and then do it again the next evening.

In summer 2002, I ran through a terrific thunderstorm -- straight through the lightning and a heavy downpour. The storm eased up, the sun came out, my shirt dried off, then the storm resumed. Wet or dry, it didn't matter. I ran on.

Several times on these runs, I was so tired that I ran across the street, oblivious to traffic, and nearly got hit. I didn't much care. I'd lost the ability to stop overeating and to stop running. It seemed that the more control I tried to exert over my eating by dieting and exercise, the more out of control I'd become.

In order to come in at my goal weight each month at Weight Watchers, I began fasting before the weigh-in, for one day at first, but then for two days or more. After the weigh-in, I'd go to a restaurant with my wife and the overeating cycle resumed.

Why did I have to volume eat? Why did I have to run so much? My weight fluctuation -- 10 to 15 pounds each month -- could kill me, I thought. What was wrong with me? I seemed to be driven by forces completely beyond my control.

My wife had heard about Overeaters Anonymous/HOW, a group within OA that has more structure. HOW stands for Honesty, Open-mindedness and Willingness. I didn't have much hope, but I was ready to try anything. I'd run out of options.

I was pretty nervous when I walked into the basement meeting room of the St. Louis Park church on a Sunday night in August 2002. I was greeted warmly at the door, which made me suspicious. There were about 50 people, and not many men, but that wasn't unusual. There aren't many men in Weight Watchers, either.

I was stunned. They talked about overeating, and laughed about some of their most bizarre eating moments. It was a roomful of people just like me, many of them with stories similar to mine. I realized I might have come to the right place.

The most dramatic moment in the meeting came when some of the longer-term members stood up, held hands, introduced themselves and mentioned how much weight they'd lost. Some had lost more than 100 pounds and many had not overeaten for months, even years.

I started attending regularly, and something happened almost immediately. The fog began to clear from my brain.

I had surrendered -- admitting to myself and to others in the program that I was powerless over the food, that I could not control it. I was now relying on a higher power -- for me, in the early stages, it was the group. For many, it was God. But the act of surrender was an important first step.

OA/HOW has a structured program, and I needed it. I got myself a sponsor, standard procedure, and found a nutritionist -- also standard -- who worked out a food plan for me.

The theory is that as compulsive overeaters, we shouldn't create our own food plans, but choose one given to us by a nutritionist, dietitian or doctor. Abstinence meant sticking to the program, not eating more or less than what is in the plan.

Each morning, I called in my day's food to my sponsor. My breakfast, for example, is usually two portions of starches (a cup of oatmeal), one serving of a dairy product (usually a cup of skim milk), one fat (a teaspoon of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter), two fruits (half a grapefruit and a banana) and two protein servings (often 2 ounces of beef, fish or chicken).

If I had to change what I was eating during the day, I called a sponsor. The theory is that as compulsive overeaters, we have been dishonest with ourselves throughout our lives, and this was a part of getting straight about it.

I learned I had to weigh and measure my food, and it had to be precise. No more Mount Vesuvius cups of oatmeal; it was exactly a cup. Two ounces of protein were not estimates, but measured on a food scale. The teaspoon of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter was exactly a teaspoon, with a knife run across the top to remove any excess.

In my daily call to my sponsor, I got an assignment to read a selection from the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book or the AA Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. My sponsor also gave me a question to answer in writing. One of my first assignments was to write my history of compulsive overeating.

It gave me a chance to explore my food obsession and solidify me in the program. The next day, I read what I wrote to my sponsor. In the beginning, it did not come easily. But whenever I thought of dropping out, I recalled the hell I'd been through. I did not want to go back.

Members are encouraged to attend at least one meeting a week. There are now five offered weekly throughout the Twin Cities area that collectively draw nearly 300 people. There is no admission fee, but a hat is passed to cover expenses. Folks normally chip in $2 if they have it.

Over time, I've learned that much of my overeating was the result of emotional reactions to life experiences. If I was happy or satisfied with the job I did, I celebrated by eating. If I was unhappy or worried, I buried my anxiety in food. No longer able to eat my troubles away, I began experiencing real emotions and clarity. It was a revelation.

The self-examination has gone in other directions, as well. I discovered that anger and resentment fueled my compulsive behavior. As part of the program, I made a list of people and institutions I resented, then looked hard to see what my part was in the problem. Almost always, I had a role. I then confided this information to my sponsor and later made a list of people to whom I owed an apology.

I am part of the way through that list. I have come to understand that my bizarre eating behavior and defects of character are part of being human. I used to pretend I knew everything. It was an ego running rampant. Going through this process is a load off my shoulders. And it's my effort to get straight with the world.

Last Sept. 4, I celebrated my one-year anniversary. I have not overeaten once in 19 months. I still measure my food and call my sponsor every day. I'm a sponsor myself for two people. Giving something back and telling my story is a way to stay abstinent. Maintaining my weight is much easier. I still run, but I no longer run half-marathons to keep my weight off.

I used to be frequently angry with people and institutions. I still have strong opinions, but the personal animosities have subsided. My love for my family has deepened. I've achieved a level of serenity that I've never known. A lot of that has to do with ego reduction.

Others who have been in the program longer say it gets even better. But it all begins with abstinence, for which I am very grateful.

The author is anonymous@startribune.com.

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