What’s Your Excuse?

I cannot even count the times I have eaten an entire box of cookies, or a bag of potato chips, or a gallon of ice cream because I was anxious, sad, depressed, fatigued, stressed, annoyed, frustrated or simply bored (of course I didn’t know that at the time). Many times I have looked around at my messy house and the piles of bills that need to be filed and the hundreds of lego pieces strewn across the floor or the dozens of fingerprints on the wall or the mud my dogs have tracked into the house and just become numb. It is mind-blowing to think that when I was young and single, I could not get my day started until I cleaned every single thing in my apartment, dusted, tidied every pillow and comforter and vacuumed up every piece of loose fuzz.

For the last 6 or 7 years, when I have been confronted with mess, I just glaze over and head straight to the fridge. So calming. The chewing, the crunching. The sugar rush making me feel happy again, and if I stuffed myself just so, my belly would swell up and I would be sleepy. And then I could sleep and not think about anything and wake up in a better mood. Aaaah, serotonin. If it was late afternoon and there was a full gallon of ice cream or a full box of cookies and I ate the whole thing, I would run to the grocery store and buy a new one to replace it so my husband wouldn’t know. If the original ice cream was partially eaten, I’d eat some out of the new gallon as well so he wouldn’t know I’d bought a new gallon, then I’d hide the empty ice cream container way down in the bottom of the trash. If busted or asked, “What happened to all the cookies?” I blamed it on the kids – and when I have a setback, I still do. I’d say, “Oh, I had a few and they had a few.” “But the package is almost empty,” my husband might say, and I’d change the subject. Sick, sad, addictive — I know. Now I know. The lies I have told myself and others is shocking.

Until recently I made many, many excuses for myself and lied to cover my actions – much like an alcoholic or other junkie. And I was (and always will be) a food junkie–an addict if you will. I have heard that being an overeater/binger is one of the hardest addictions to overcome, because there is no going cold turkey. One HAS to eat to survive. You cannot give up food.

One therapist asked me if I could recall a scene in particular when I had binged. I had a very dear boyfriend, Tim, when I lived in Boston whom I cared for very much. I was about 21. He invited me to Thanksgiving with his family in the Fingerlakes area of upstate New York. I had platinum blonde hair and really didn’t care about how much I ate, because I was super thin. That Thanksgiving, I recall eating about 3 or more heaping full plates of food and falling asleep at the gathering. EXCUSE ALERT: “Oh, it’s Thanksgiving, everyone does that.” No, not everyone does that. Sure, most people like to sample all of the foods at Thanksgiving, but not everyone stuffs themself, gorges themself, out of some type of self-punishment until they can feel the bile coming up hot in their throat and cannot eat one more bite. I have actually tried eating past my most full point on many occasions. Why, I do not know. We were poor at times when I was a child. For a while we lived in a motel in Galveston, and for a while we were on foodstamps. I recall once not having enough in the house to eat for a meaningful school lunch and I had a peanut butter and jelly on rye bread for lunch, packed in a full-size grocery bag all by itself. To this day, I eat peanut butter and jelly every single day, often more than once. Sure, I eat the healthy peanut butter and the fruit juice sweetened jelly on whole wheat bread, but it’s still the comfort food of choice for me.

I have used the “Thanksgiving excuse” on thousands and thousands of occasions: get-togethers, donuts at work, lunch out (Oh, this is a special occasion, I rarely get to eat out”), dinner at my in-laws’ (“She’s such a good cook I better eat all I can”), fast-food at Taco Bell (“Well, I’m eating junk food anyway, I may as well go for it”). There is always this sense that “I better eat it now and eat as much as possible because I don’t know if I’ll get to eat again.” I mean, we didn’t have money but we weren’t living in a shelter. But maybe the instability, the chaos of the situation left me with that insecurity. I have used excuses on every occasion you can imagine — and believed them oftentimes.

What’s your excuse?