Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (17 page)

That kind of behavior is obviously unhealthy, and I pray that my daughters will not be as consumed by food as I have been. Throughout my school years and the early days of my career, I was aware that other people also had food issues. But frankly, I didn’t talk to them about their issues, or about my own. It took me a long time to see my own eating disorder as part of a larger picture, one experienced by many other successful people. As I became more aware of that, I recognized how important it is for all of us to share stories about our own battles with food demons, so we can help one another replace shame with support.

Maybe because Diane and I decided to go public with our struggles, a lot of well-known people have been willing to talk very candidly to us about theirs. While we were researching this book, we were both amazed to learn how common many of those stories really are. Sometimes, they are linked to coping with a terribly traumatic event. Dr. Nancy Snyderman understands that as well as anyone.

Nancy weighed 135 pounds when she entered college, just as Diane did. It was a reasonable weight for women at their height, which was about five feet eight inches. Not skinny, but healthy. She told us what happened to her near the end of her freshman year at Indiana University. “My roommate was working late on a really hard calculus problem, and she was getting help from the residential advisor. I remember saying, ‘I’m going to bed, but I’ll leave the door unlocked.’

“An itinerant was hanging around the dorm. He slipped in the front door behind a student who wasn’t paying attention when she came in. Then he went down the hall turning doorknobs. And mine was unlocked. He raped me, and the next thing you know, I’m wandering around campus in the wee hours of morning totally disoriented.”

It was 1971, and rape was mostly hidden from view. The campus police took Nancy back to her dorm room, where she took a shower, got dressed, and went to class. “There was no counseling, no talking about it, no nothing, so I turned to food. Food was my savior. I suspect that if you talk to a lot of women who have some kind of traumatic event in their lives, you’ll find they turned to food for comfort. I found great solace in it.”

I suspect that if you talk to a lot of women who have some kind of traumatic event in their lives, you’ll find they turned to food for comfort.

—
Dr. Nancy Snyderman

It didn’t take long for Nancy to put on fifty pounds, her way of trying to disappear from view. It took her a lot longer, almost twenty years, to lose the weight. “Learning to like me was the same path as learning to be healthy; it was the same path as rediscovering my self-esteem,” she says. “Going off to fat camp didn’t help; depriving me of food didn’t help. All it did was make me put food under my bed. I would order salad when I was out in public, and I would sneak the potato chips afterwards.

“Every person who has a food issue figures out how to game the system. I don’t care if you’re anorexic, you’re bulimic, you’re a hoarder—it doesn’t matter if that’s what you want to do. But the only person you hurt when it comes to food is you.”

Frank Bruni, now an op-ed columnist for the
New York Times
, is another person who initially kept his history of eating disorders secret, later making them public in his memoir,
Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater
. Before becoming a columnist, Frank was the newspaper’s chief restaurant critic for five years. Being a “professional eater” was a curious job for a man who acknowledged to Diane and me that he was a “baby bulimic.”

In a telephone interview (ironically, conducted while his refrigerator was being repaired), Frank talked about his earliest
experiences with food. “It was really more about how huge my appetite was. I was about two years old, and my mother wouldn’t give me a third hamburger. I got so upset that I threw up.” Frank told that story for two reasons: to illustrate his belief that some people are hardwired to be big eaters and “because it is a kind of odd, quirky bit of foreshadowing, since when I was in college there was a period when I was an actual bulimic.” Like Diane, Frank tried “pretty much every diet you can imagine, including juice fasts and eating nothing but fruit for days at a time.”

He, too, tried the Atkins Diet time after time, but it rarely helped him lose any weight. “It was a chronic dieter’s behavior, where you ignore evidence and keep engaging in ‘magical thinking.’ It would do nothing for me, because I think for that diet to really work, it’s betting on you becoming so bored with the monochromatic eating regimen that you won’t consume that many calories,” Frank explained. The diet does not require calorie counting, allowing you to eat as much of the acceptable foods as you want. “I love meat and eggs, and ate so much of them that it didn’t work for me.”

Frank turned to bulimia in college in a desperate attempt to be thin without feeling deprived. “One of the things I found so seductive about bulimia was that I didn’t have the same sense of panic or sacrifice at the beginning of every meal,” he recalls. “I thought, if my willpower fails me, I have this safety valve of throwing up what I ate and the calories won’t stick with me.”

Frank’s reliance on bulimia didn’t last long, but his struggle for weight control certainly did. One of his hardest times came when he was covering George W. Bush’s race to the White
House. He was surrounded by food on the campaign trail, and very little of it was nutritious. “Every single meal was some sort of buffet or a bunch of stuff being thrown at us on the campaign plane,” he recalls. “Some days it was just a constant level of fairly abundant eating, and then some days it was stress-induced binge eating after a really, really grueling day. I would feel almost like a drug addict’s desire for a blast of pleasure and a release. I would sit down in front of my hotel minibar and eat the peanuts, then the Oreos and then the Pringles. Before you knew it, I’d eaten every stupid snack in that minibar.”

Frank tipped the scales at 275 pounds. In those days, he recalls, he would allow himself to overeat “because I would tell myself the lie that tomorrow I was going to go on a diet, or the next day I was going to fast. I would end up giving myself permission in the moment to overeat.”

I would tell myself the lie that tomorrow I was going to go on a diet, or the next day I was going to fast. I would end up giving myself permission in the moment to overeat.—
Frank Bruni

Eventually, Frank learned the secrets to good eating that helped him break the constant cycle of dieting and weight gain. He lost eighty pounds, in part by redefining appropriate portion sizes, and he has kept that weight off. Gaining control over his schedule was key for him, because it gave him time to cook healthier foods and to exercise rigorously.

When the
Times
offered him the job as restaurant critic, Frank thought long and hard before accepting it, concerned about the potential impact on his weight. Ultimately, he
decided he would be able to eat with enough restraint when he was not working that he could stay “on the straight and narrow.” Ironically, he actually gained some weight after his stint as critic ended.

Like me, Frank has not entirely conquered his food demons. “I still have a somewhat compulsive relationship with eating. I mean, the desire to overeat comes along with some frequency. I’m not a slave to it, as I once was, but I still have to struggle with it, and sometimes I lose the struggle.”

The link between eating disorders and obesity is getting more attention from scientists. For a long time they were considered distinct. Conditions like bulimia and anorexia were viewed primarily as psychological issues, while overweight and obesity were viewed as either genetic or metabolic problems, or as failure to take personal responsibility. But now we are starting to understand that there is a lot of overlap, characterized by an all-consuming focus on weight and food.

This is where my story of food obsession and Diane’s tale of fighting fat converge. Both of us spend an incredible amount of time focused on food. In Diane’s case, she has lost weight, gained it back, and started all over again, virtually her entire life. In my case, I have been so terrified of that loss of control that I have resisted even weight gain that would be good for me. I would be healthier and more at peace if I weighed 135 pounds instead of 125, but I’m afraid that I won’t stop there and the weight will keep on climbing. So I sacrifice and I suffer and I’m hungry a lot. What a waste of mental and physical energy for
both of us. “At least your obsession with food helps you keep the weight off—mine doesn’t,” Diane told me with frustration. She may be right, but it is still not healthy. One problem is that being so thin really gets rewarded. When I’m at my thinnest, I have everyone in the world telling me how great I look. Companies send me clothes to wear, and I can’t believe how attractive they are. I feel like a model. Women say to me, “You’re amazing, look how good you look!”

That kind of praise drives me to keep my weight way down. It’s hard not to enjoy so much reinforcement from the outside world. Culture is a very powerful force. Ever since I was a kid, I studied the landscape and I saw how things went for women—
prettier and thinner equals success
. Diane gets really annoyed when I say this. She thinks I am too willing to accept a culture where women are valued most for their looks. I agree with her that it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and that’s a fact.

But I am finally realizing that trying to be extremely thin is like trying to collect water in a sieve. It just doesn’t work. I have to come to terms with that. And when I hit the scales at 118, or even 125, that is just not healthy for me. I have more work to do if I am going to reach 135 pounds and still feel good about myself.

O
UR STORY, WITH
D
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. M
ARGO
M
AINE
,

L
ISA
P
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, S
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G
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, D’M
ARIO
S
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,

A
NDY
D
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V
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, D
R
. T
HOMAS
L
ANE

B
y the time we reached the halfway point in writing this book, Diane had lost forty pounds. Meanwhile, I was still driving myself crazy with thoughts of food and desperate to find enough piece of mind to achieve, and stop at, a ten-pound weight gain. I was still living hungry most of the time.

As I began confiding more about my eating habits and obsessions to Diane, she began pushing me harder to deal with my attitudes toward food and weight. She thought I was masking some of my emotional issues, instead of dealing with them directly. Finally, I agreed to talk with clinical psychologist Dr. Margo Maine, a nationally known specialist in eating disorders. Margo is also co-founder of the Maine & Weinstein Specialty Group in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Margo presented me with a completely different way of thinking about my eating patterns when she surprised me with
a diagnosis of
orthorexia nervosa
. The doctor who originated the term, Steve Bratman, explained that “orthorexia nervosa indicates an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food.” The term derives from the Greek word
orthos
, which means “right,” or “correct,” and
orexia
, meaning “appetite,” and is intended to sound like a relative of anorexia nervosa.

I was pissed off at first. Now I’m in trouble for eating too well??? As you can imagine, my first session with Margo was a little rocky. I have almost entirely quit the junk food that used to captivate me. And that’s bad?

“We get so much information about food, and if you’re health conscious it can kind of morph into an obsession,” Margo explained patiently. “Lots of people get into that today.”

Food, it seemed, was still owning me.

Orthorexia nervosa is part of a larger category referred to as “eating disorders not otherwise specified.” Margo said, “In that diagnosis, people can have some anorexic diagnostic indicators, some bulimic indicators, sometimes they have a combination of the two, but they don’t meet the full criteria for either one. Their concerns about their body and their eating are a driving force, so that’s the unifying factor.”