Is your eating out of control?

A hopeless anorexic, bulimic, and compulsive overeater, this woman experienced a remarkable release from the vice-grip of food obsession and fear, and is now living a life of freedom that she never imagined possible!

Are you in a panic because your clothes don’t fit like they did last year? Are you forced to shop for a larger size yet again? Are you sick and tired of the terrible cycle of dieting, losing the weight, gaining it back, promising never to do it again, and doing it again anyway? Are you past the point of believing that if you just lost the extra weight you’d be happy? Are you trying to muster up the strength for a new diet, but feel defeated before you even start? You are not alone. In fact, there are millions of people just like you who suffer from compulsive overeating, and I was one of them.

The battle for me began in my early teenage years, and grew progressively worse as I got older. I spent an enormous amount of time and thousands of dollars in pursuit of thinness and trying to achieve the “perfect body.” I tried to manage my weight by restrictive dieting, going to diet centers, eating “moderate meals,” starving myself, abusing diet pills and laxatives, self-induced vomiting, obsessive exercise, taking antidepressants, and going to therapy. My garage is full of exercise equipment I hardly used, and I have a shelf full of diet, exercise, and self-help books that never worked. I regularly attended Overeaters Anonymous meetings for nine years, but my binges only became more secretive as I tried to maintain a façade of being healthy and normal. I even went so far as to get a Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, believing that by gaining this intellectual insight and knowledge I could help myself and save others. I also thought that throwing myself into religion would help me. None of these things worked. I was so obsessed with my weight that it was all I thought and talked about. Even when I was not on a diet, I obsessed about what size clothes I wore, what was going to fit this week, and how I could look thinner without having to give up eating certain foods. I had a closet full of clothes that ranged in sizes from the “skinny clothes” to the “fat clothes.” I was caught in a vicious cycle with no permanent solution, and I was miserable.

Overeating was a very painful problem for me for several reasons. Physically, carrying excess weight caused me joint pain, “chub rub” (chafing of the skin under my arms and between my legs), shortness of breath, and high blood pressure. The toll that repeatedly gaining and losing weight took on my body made it increasingly difficult to lose weight the next time. The mental and emotional torture I suffered was almost worse than the physical discomfort. Depression, anxiety, self-hatred, phobias, irritability, codependency, forgetfulness, irrational decision-making, disorganization, and a suppressed sexual drive tormented me relentlessly. Sometimes overeating caused these symptoms, and at other times I used food to try to cope with the emotional pain caused by them. My body size caused me immense shame and untold grief, and as a result, it was extremely difficult for me to create and maintain anything but superficial relationships with people.

Compulsive overeating is a silent, but fatal epidemic that is growing steadily and silently. It is one of the major contributing factors to other well-known diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, anorexia and bulimia, and some forms of cancer, among others. And it is one of the most insidious, deadly, and misunderstood diseases that exist today. The percentage of the population that is overweight is rapidly increasing each year, but the percentage of the population that is obsessed with weight and body size is even larger. Compulsive overeating does not only plague those who struggle with obesity. There are hundreds of thousands of normal to underweight people who are also obsessed with their weight, what they eat, and their body image. They actually may be equally or even more obsessed than an overweight person, but you’d never know it just by looking at them.

The reason people rarely recover from eating disorders is because the problem is so misunderstood. Most people, professionals included, tend to treat the symptom of excess weight (or, with anorexia, underweight, and with bulimia, purging) as the problem. Once the weight is under control or the purging is stopped, the problem is considered cured. In all the support groups and therapy I attended, the focus was mostly on discussing problems specific to food, or feelings related to being fat, but the underlying reasons why I felt the need to overeat—literally compelled to binge, were never addressed or resolved. Truthfully, I rarely ate for physical hunger. Once I had lost weight, I was still obsessed with food, body size, exercise, and fear of putting the weight back on (which drove me into the other serious disorders of anorexia and bulimia).

The disease of compulsive overeating centers in the mind, but manifests its symptoms in the body. So, the crux of my problems really started with my thinking. Underlying my fat and never-ending struggle with food was a very poor self-image and deep-rooted feelings of utter worthlessness. Feeling bad about myself caused me a lot of shame, guilt, and humiliation, which in turn led to isolation, loneliness, depression, and despair. Even when I appeared to be self-confident and happy, deep down inside I felt awful because I lived with constant self-loathing, and a bombardment of self-deprecating thoughts. The adage: “it’s not what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you” certainly applied to me. Since my thinking and attitudes about myself and others did not change whenever I stopped overeating, the fundamental need to overeat did not go away, and it was only a matter of time before the compulsion to binge would arise and I would be gaining weight and fighting food again. This key piece of information that I didn’t know kept me locked in the vicious cycle of running from my feelings and looking to external things to solve my problems and make me feel better.

I personally suffered with this struggle for twenty years. I felt hopeless of ever being free from the obsessions with my weight, my body, food, and exercise. After trying every imaginable method of weight control and self-help, and despairing because none of them had worked for me, I discovered a permanent solution that saved me from destroying myself with vicious compulsive overeating. With the help of a unique recovery process called Metasteps, I finally have been able to face and overcome the underlying demons that drove me to overeat and self-destruct. I have lost the weight effortlessly, and have experienced a freedom from compulsion, obsession, fear, and desperation that I never knew was possible. I am grateful to have been blessed with the chance to heal from this illness, and hope that my story has offered some hope to others who are still suffering in silence.