Step Three: Habits

We all have habits, both good and bad. But, when it comes to eating, we often don’t give our habits a second thought. If I had asked myself back then how I had gotten so fat and why I could never stick to a diet from the ages of 10 to 20, I would have been stymied by those questions. That might sound strange, but like a lot of overweight people, I had no idea that I ate vastly larger portions than I needed. That extra food turned into stored fat. I didn’t understand anything about nutrition or exercise or how calories really worked. It was all a muddle to me. Honestly, I preferred not to think about it. I was fat. I was miserable. I had tried diet after diet. I had failed to lose weight. In fact, each year, I was fatter and more miserable than ever. It seemed like a hopeless cycle of desperation and defeat.

It was only when I turned 20 and really started asking myself some hard questions that I realized several things about myself. Because I was in a hurry to get to the bus stop to catch the 7:30 AM bus into New York City, I was in the habit of skipping breakfast. I had a 9 AM class and a 1 ½ hour commute each way on a daily basis. I preferred to sleep a little later rather than eat. Of course, by the time I got into Manhattan, I was starving. So, I’d stop at the local eatery near NYU and grab a hot dog and a coffee with extra cream and 3 packs of sugar, then wolf it all down while taking notes in class.

By the time I got home, I had a sick, widower father who needed my care. I had housecleaning, laundry, errands. I also had reading assignments, papers to write, tests and exams. I was on constant overload both physically and emotionally. Each day was so draining that I ate and ate to keep myself going. Each day was about fulfilling the demands and expectations of others.

I had been brought up to be a caretaker and a nurturer. That was all I knew. My life was devoted to meeting the needs of others. I took my pleasure from being helpful and compassionate and kind. I asked nothing in return. I was selfless.

Selfless? Yes, selfless. I had no clue who I was, what I wanted or needed. I was there to serve others, love others, protect others, but what about me? While most children think the world centers around them, I never thought that. The message I got was utterly different. When I was little more than 5 years old, I started to slowly help my dad take care of my sick mother. My Daddy needed me to help while he was at work, and I would not fail him. Although I had an older sister, she was not the helpful sort. My father recognized that, so he placed the burden of our mother’s care on me. No one thanked me. No one praised me. I was expected to be a dutiful child, and so I was. This was normal to me.

When I was 10 years old and my sister was 12, our mother died. Not that long afterward, our father suffered a massive heart attack. My sister and I lived in fear that one day, sooner or later, we’d be orphans. Then what? My sister coped by going into denial and turning herself into the perfect young lady. She was smart, pretty, sociable and above all, thin. I turned myself into the workhorse who ate for comfort, for security, for companionship. I was all alone with my worries, my fears, my insecurities. I could not tell my father. What if I upset him, and he had a heart attack? I did not want to kill my father. I wanted to save him. During the next decade, he wound up in the ICU about every 2-3 years. At that time, the only treatment available to him was prayer. This was before lifesaving surgeries and stents and statins. Our father’s life was in God’s hands.

Food became my only escape from constant anxiety and stress, my one true nurturer, my only comfort in my darkest hours, my only friend in time of need. Food was always there. It was the one constant in my life. Yes, I understand that now, but I didn’t understand it then. If I ate, I felt soothed. If I ate, I felt nurtured. If I ate, I felt less afraid. But, then, inevitably, I’d feel guilty. I’d berate myself and promise to stop eating, but I had to eat to live, didn’t I? It was a vicious cycle.

To add to my confusion, my sister never gained weight. In fact, my parents had always encouraged her to eat because she was a picky eater and didn’t like a lot of foods. As a child, she was skinny, bone-thin. So, if my sister wanted to heat up a frozen pizza at 9 PM, that was a good thing. If she wanted to go to the local place that served super-sized strawberry malteds, off we went. If you were thin, I learned early, you were a good girl, a nice girl, an adored girl. If you were fat, you were undesirable, period. If you were thin, you got positive attention. If you were fat, you got picked on, so better to stay in the shadows and hope no one even noticed you were there.

Like most overweight adults, my bad habits had started in my childhood. What I learned from my mother was that being fat was bad. Denying oneself food was good. Unfortunately, her constant attempts to deny me food only made me crave it all that much more. Despite the risk of punishment, I learned to steal food, hide in a closet in the basement and eat all alone, gobbling bread or slices of cheese or a few crackers I was sure would not be missed. The more my mother deprived me, the more my life focused on getting food. Desperation drove me forward. By the time I entered kindergarten, which was the same year my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was already obsessed with food.

After my mother died, I ate and I ate and I ate. The person who had controlled my eating was not there to say no, to grab my plate, to scream at me and tell me I was fat. While my mother was alive, I really was not fat. But, after she died, I became her worst nightmare. What I wanted was comfort and love. What I wanted, above all else, was someone to protect me. I had no one to protect me. Instead, I became the “little mother” to my family. I had to protect them. So, I turned to food.

My brain became hard-wired to reach for food in any and all situations. My bad eating habits became ingrained. Whenever I felt a powerful emotion, whether it was happy or sad, exhausted or stimulated, anxious or competent, whatever I felt was directly wired to food. It was no longer a conscious decision, a choice, an act of volition. Instead, it was like Pavlov’s dogs. I was trained, over time, to reach for food as the solution to every problem, to every mood, to every hurt. I had no other source of comfort or solace in my life. Did I understand any of this? No. By the time I was only 10 years old, I weighed over 100 pounds. The cycle was fixed. The bad habits were entrenched.

For the next decade of my life, I used food as my salvation. It was all I had. My father was in and out of the hospital. He suffered heart attacks and angina attacks. I lived in fear. Would I come home from school and find him dead at the kitchen table? Since my father was also a compulsive eater, this was our bond. We ate. We talked. We read books. We shared cultural interests. But, food was our strongest link. It was how we showed our love for each other and for family and friends. If we had company, they had to leave with full bellies, or we were disappointed and feared we had been inhospitable. Food was love. If food were truly love, I should have been the most loved teenager on the planet. Instead, I was growing increasingly fatter, more depressed than ever, more hopeless as my clothing size soared into the stratosphere.

When our dad had his last heart attack, I was a 20-year-old junior in college and my sister was long since married. Within a few months of our father’s recovery, he proposed to his long-time lady friend. That marriage set me free for the first time since I was only 5. I actually had someone to help me care for the household and my dad. My stepmother hired a housekeeper. My stepmother and I shared the shopping, the cooking, the chores. I could finally step back and think about myself for the first time in my life.

What I realized was that I had a long list of bad habits. I ate in response to everything in my life. For example, prior to my dad’s remarriage, I was so nervous about having a new stepmother that I gained 10 pounds in 3 months. I could barely find anything to wear to the wedding ceremony. After the marriage, with a lessening of my responsibilities and with my stepmother’s support, I started to take a hard look at my eating habits. Since I didn’t have to stay up until all hours finishing the laundry or dusting or cleaning the bathroom, I had time to get up and eat breakfast before leaving for my commute. That was the first habit I changed. Yet, when I arrived at Washington Square, my initial impulse, despite having had a full breakfast, was to hit the Chock Full O’Nuts for a hot dog and coffee. Why? I wasn’t hungry, but a powerful message in my brain triggered off the need to eat anyway. For several weeks, I walked into the bustling restaurant and ordered my usual. Since I’d paid for it, I ate it. I did not waste food. I did not want to waste my money. But, one day, after buying my meal, I saw a man who looked hungry. I asked him if he wanted something to eat. He nodded. I handed him the bag. He was hungry; I was not. I raced upstairs to a study hall for commuters on the second floor. I found an isolated desk in the back, put my head down and cried silently. I understood in that moment that I was not in control of my life. I was like an automaton, a robot, who had dark forces propelling her toward a complete lack of control over her impulses. Did I want to keep living like this forever? No, I did not. It was too painful.

That was the first time in my life that I truly recognized and understood that I had a pathway in my brain, long-used, that led to unconscious eating. If it truly was a bad habit, then there was hope that I could change it into a good habit. I decided that each day, I would buy something to eat and give it away to someone in need whether it was a person on the street or a fellow student. I would turn my bad habit into something positive, life-affirming and good.

But, despite my daily good deed, I knew that the urge to eat was still there. That puzzled me. I had had a healthy breakfast with an emphasis on high-protein as my stepmother had recommended. So, I started to keep a journal where I could pour out my thoughts on this subject. “Why do I want to eat even though I’m not hungry?” The bottom line was that I always ate without thinking. I simply kept right on eating until I was in a food coma. Then, I would stop, exhausted and dazed, bloated and miserable. I was not loving myself with food. I was punishing myself with food. I was not soothing myself by eating. I was only increasing both my anxiety and my weight. I had no concept of who I was except a “Fat Girl.” Did I want to remain a fat girl, or did I want to change?

I made a list of all of my bad food habits. Each time I thought I’d finished the list, I had something else to add. I was getting overwhelmed. And, what did I want to do when I felt overwhelmed, I wanted to eat, of course. So, I had to add that to the list. I shoved the list in a drawer. That was not working.

After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to step back and think about how I had gotten so fat. I had gained the weight over a long period of years. If I took 100 pounds as my starting weight at the age of 10, I had added an additional 130 pounds over a decade. That was equal to 13 pounds a year. Well, no, that wasn’t accurate. Over those years, I’d gone on quite a few diets. I’d lost at least 60 pounds give or take a few. So, in essence, I’d really gained a whopping 190 pounds! My heart started to race. 190 pounds.

I decided that if I hoped to lose the weight once and for all, I had to start slowly, make one change at a time. I had to keep eating my healthy breakfast each morning. That was my first good habit, the first positive change. However, when I got to school, I had to resist the well-worn pathway in my brain that still urged me to eat again. That meant stopping my “good deed” of buying a meal, but I could do something else for someone. I had to distract myself from food altogether. Therefore, I went straight to class. Since another student was struggling with our course, which was Chinese Politics, I offered to help tutor her for free. By shifting my focus to a strength, my intellect, instead of my weakness, the constant craving for food, I slowly built a new habit. By the end of the semester, once I arrived at school, I was hungry for knowledge, not food. I was proud of my hard work, and I made sure to celebrate, without food, to note my accomplishment. That was something new in my life. Praising myself had never been my strong suit. I was determined to change that.

I’d like you to think about one and only one bad eating habit you have acquired over the years. Write it down in your journal or a piece of paper. Put it away and allow yourself to think of a strategy that will work for you. How can you challenge that well-worn pathway in your brain that triggers overeating? What can you do to turn a negative behavior into a positive one? Don’t worry if you don’t succeed at first. No one does. Just remind yourself that if you believe in yourself and keep to your plan, you will succeed. Remember, you are carving out a new life for yourself. That means taking it one step at a time. It might take a few months to change that bad habit into a good one, but that will be time and effort well spent.

In my next post, I’m going to continue the discussion of eating habits.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to use the comments link below. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.