Getting Real About Food

First of all, why am I sharing this? It’s selfish, really. I have a lot of shame about food. And I have a lot of issues with food. And I need to deal with both the shame and the issues. The best way I know to deal with shame is the disinfectant of sunlight. The best way I know to get a handle on my issues is to write. So here goes. Please be nice!

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I have food issues. Big ones. I’m very worried about my up-to-now inability to deal with my food issues because I have a wife and five children who depend on me financially and emotionally. I’m worried because I want to be around for the long term as a husband and father. Here is the evidence facing me that I need to be very concerned:

• 200 pounds is my healthy weight, but I am morbidly obese at ~300 pounds.
• Since 1996 I have gained 100 pounds above my healthy weight.
• Since 2004 I have gained 70 pounds.
• I have lost half of my lung capacity since 2004 to internal fat.
• I have had issues with fatty liver since 2005.
• I have tried to achieve a more healthy weight, and failed, repeatedly.
• My blood pressure is up by about 20 points in the last year.
• I tire so easily it has become frightening.
• My ankles, knees, hips, and spine are at risk and often in pain from bearing too much weight.

I had put my weight gain down to a changed metabolism and anxious eating. The anxious eating I attributed to a confluence of factors:

• Dealing with abusive and totally dysfunctional parents.
• Years of difficulty with marriage.
• Lingering self-hatred.
• Abusive behavior on the part of religious leaders.
• An awakening to religious dishonesty, the accompanying strain of leaving my childhood faith, and being seen as broken by my family for doing so.
• Increasingly stressful roles and impossible situations at my previous place of employment.

For the past several years, I have felt that something had to give, and have made great strides in dealing with each of those factors. The backstory in dealing with the issues I outlined above are put at the end of this post as kind of a flashback epilogue.

Having reasonably addressed the major stressors in my life at the start of this year, I thought that losing weight would come easily. After all, I spontaneously lost ten pounds in the month after announcing I was leaving my old job. But that is not how it has turned out.

As I have dealt with what I hope are the last vestiges of self-hatred and (I think) fully decoupled my sense of self from my mother’s voice, I have learned that my food issues go very deep indeed. I experienced a lot of trauma around food in my childhood and early adulthood. All of it relates to growing up in my family and my experience in the Mormon Church. 

Early Childhood

My earliest memory with food is that (as was popular at the time) my treatment for hyperactivity was not being allowed to have any sweet foods. My siblings did get treats, but I was not allowed to have them. It could have been a matter-of-fact approach, but it was not. Withholding sweet foods from me became a show of power, and if I did eat something sweet, my mother’s response was hysterical and I was severely punished. This still comes up for me as an important factor in eating as a protection against deprivation.

A common punishment for us was to send us to bed without dinner or to make us skip breakfast and/or lunch. In a home with a lot of children (ultimately 13), this was a big deal. There was never enough to eat to begin with, so going to bed without dinner meant real hunger. As children, we knew this was not right, to the point that one day when I (6) was sent to bed without dinner, my brother (8) rode to the fast-food restaurant and bought me dinner with his newspaper route money.  My dad called my brother in to account for his money a little later, and he was so frightened of my dad’s response that he told a story about being jumped by some teenagers who demanded his money. My dad called the police, and my brother stuck to his story through a considerable interview with the police. After I left home, my younger siblings set up an elaborate system that guaranteed that if you were deprived of a meal, you got the meal without my parents knowing. This method of punishment also comes up strongly as a factor in my eating as a mechanism to avoid deprivation.

Being from a large family without food security, I learned very early on that if I didn’t want to be hungry, I had to eat quickly in case there was anything left over, and if there was anything left over, it needed to be eaten immediately. Eating became a competition for survival. I still almost always finish my food before everyone else and it is exceedingly difficult to leave anything on my plate. Or, something I have been ashamed about, sometimes my kids’ plates. Food very much represents security to me.

Tweenage Years

I went to an elementary school separated by a fence from our backyard. Rather than take lunches to school, we climbed the fence to go home for lunch. Lunch wasn’t usually ready, and if it was, it was not enough. With 13 children, my parents would have qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, but they refused to apply on principle. So, I made a deal with the school principal that I would empty the garbage cans and clean the chalkboards in every classroom after school every day in exchange for hot lunch. I ended up doing that for four years (from third through sixth grade) so that I could get enough to eat. I was made fun of by many classmates for being their janitor, but it was worth it to me. That hot lunch represented a degree of security, and it taught me at an early age that I could not rely on my family for food security.

At one point in my childhood (between ages 10 and 12), our family ate nothing but beans and bread for three meals a day for about three months. Our cows were not giving milk, it was late winter so our garden was not producing, and we had eaten all of the canned garden goods. So, we dipped into our food storage, which consisted of wheat and beans. I remember being hungry even then, but dismayed by what was available. I later learned why this happened. In the Mormon Church, paying 10% of your gross income to support the central church was a given. Mormons are counseled to pay their tithing even if they cannot pay their bills or buy food, and that if they do so, God will bless them with their needs. In addition, other types of contributions were expected: families were expected to contribute to the upkeep of the local building and to congregation activities through a contribution to the congregation budget; and families were expected to contribute a generous “fast offering” to support the poor and needy.

My dad, of course, paid his ten percent tithing on gross income, contributed to the congregation budget, and took literally and liberally the counsel to pay a generous fast offering. At a multi-congregation meeting, a high-ranking church leader told members to double their fast offering. My dad doubled his already generous offering. At a church-wide meeting a few months later, another high-ranking church leader told members to double their fast offering. My dad did so again. Shortly after we had stopped eating beans and bread every day, my dad proudly told a story at church of what church leaders had said, and how he and his family had sacrificed to be obedient. He did not mention eating bread and beans for three months, but I put it together. I was conflicted because I was proud of that but had also strongly felt the sting of deprivation. To this day, this incident plays a role in my intuitive feeling that if someone prioritizes feeding me, it is a sign of how important I am to them.

In addition, most of what came in our Christmas stockings was food, and food we rarely got, like oranges, chocolates, nuts, and candy bars. On Halloween, my siblings and I would race around as many neighborhoods as we could with a large pillowcase to gather as much candy as we could, going through good neighborhoods three or four times until we were caught. We stuffed those pillowcases full. When I take my kids out now for Halloween, I’m shocked that they want to come home after their small bucket is half full. I want them to keep going because food still so clearly means security to me. Leaving before you complete multiple neighborhoods is still foreign to me, let alone just one. It is still very difficult for me to understand why they want to be done.

When I was eleven, my mom would sometimes make cole slaw, and we siblings were in the habit of calling it “cold slop.” That, of course, did not go over well, but no punishments were administered until one day I called it cold slop, and my parents told me that for the next three months I would not be eating with the family, that I would have to make my own food, and that I could use only food that I had bought with money I earned as a farm-hand. I was supposed to be saving my money for my school clothes, but I was so angry about the unfair punishment that I spent it all on nicer and more food than the rest of my family had and did not get new school clothes that year. This incident plays strongly into my sense that food is security and that nice and adequate food is a sign of success.

Teenage Years

As a teenager (around 14), my mom complained that my older brother and I were never full no matter how much she cooked, and declared that she was going to make us full. She cooked 75 tacos. My brother and I each ate 25 tacos and the remaining 13 family members ate 24. We left the last taco “to avoid being pigs.” That is the only time I remember being full as a child other than church potlucks and the very rare occasion when our family would go to a buffet restaurant. I remember eating so much at the buffet restaurants that I was in considerable pain. I remember that in the very few times when there was enough to eat, I felt compelled to eat until I could literally no longer fit anything else.

Although my dad had a very good white collar job, with 15 family members, food security was a real issue for our family. We kept cows to keep us in milk and beef. We kept peach, plum, nectarine, apricot, cherry, pear, and apple trees. We lined our yard with grape vines. We planted at least a half-acre every year in tomatoes, corn, squash, potatoes, strawberries, blackberries, watermelon, cucumbers, cantaloupe, beans, peas, beets, onions, radishes, and carrots. We weeded, watered, harvested, and canned every year, and we still ran out by the end of every winter. I remember my mom being worried and angry every month about how little she had to buy groceries.

Missionary Years

When I was called by the Mormon Church to be a missionary in Guatemala, I had my first experience with adequate food. As a missionary, you live on a Missionary Training Center (MTC) campus near Brigham Young University (BYU), and you have access to an all you can eat cafeteria three times a day. As a high-school football player, I had pined to weigh more than 165 pounds. Over the two months I was at the MTC, I went from 165 to 200 pounds, but did not get fat. In fact, I maintained that weight in Guatemala while walking 15-20 miles a day for seven months even though I didn’t much like the food at first.

As a missionary, I was told to eat and drink whatever we were handed to avoid offending potential converts or current church members. We were told that we were the Lord’s servants and that if we obeyed we would be protected. I was fine for the first seven months, when I was sent to a village just outside the capital, and became ill as did most missionaries. I was taken to a leader’s apartment. Over a period of 24 hours, I lost 25 pounds to diarrhea and vomiting from whatever had made me ill. I questioned my accuracy on that figure for a long time, even though I remember that the apartment had a scale (rare in the areas I was in) and out of curiosity I had weighed myself when I arrived and when I left. I have since heard other missionaries from the same mission say that they lost 25 pounds in a single day from explosive illness. Though my leaders notified the mission president of my illness, he sent me to a remote outlying area seven hours from the capital and four hours from the nearest hospital. I made a four hour walk up a mountain the next day to visit some remote church members, and nearly collapsed from the effort.

Over the next six months, I lost another 50 pounds, eventually becoming a stick figure of 125 pounds. Before hitting that low weight, I contracted severe night-time asthma, and was hospitalized, but only after I faked a daytime asthma attack to be admitted to the hospital and avoid the mission president’s wrath for having come to the capital without permission. I asked the doctor about my constant diarrhea and he gave me an enema to test for parasites and to clean out any parasites. He told me that I had contracted a type of amoeba that eats and permanently damages the intestinal lining.

The diarrhea went away for a while even after I returned to my outlying area, but came back again. I became so weak that I spent two weeks in a hammock sleeping, only able to get up to use the bathroom and to walk two blocks to the house of the person who cooked for us once or twice a day. I was sent back to the capital not because I was sick (plenty of us were sick, and sometimes severely so), but because I couldn’t work. I was not sent to the hospital, but to the apartment of the mission nurse in the capital. Other than Gatorade, I did not receive any “medical” treatment. What I did receive was six or more meals a day from the American restaurants and stores that were common in that part of the city. I got Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, and lots of hot dogs, candy, Gatorade, soda pop, and potato chips from 7-11. After two weeks, I had regained 25 pounds and was sent back to my outlying area. I was literally saved from dying of malnutrition by desperately gorging on junk food for two full weeks. Because of this I have a very unhealthy relationship with junk food. This experience strengthened my emotional tie between lots of food and security. I sometimes have flashbacks about this experience.

After I returned, I learned that I still had amoebas and roundworms. My family doctor gave me a regimen of medicines that killed my parasites, but my stomach and intestines had been irreparably damaged.

BYU Years

Although I had a full-tuition scholarship to BYU, I had to pay for books, fees, and room and board. I got a part-time job on campus and worked full-time over summer break and Christmas break to pay my way. I was still just making it. When Cindi met me, I owned two pairs of pants and two shirts, and did laundry twice a week. I ate a lot of ramen and mac and cheese. I shopped with my roommate, who I really liked, at the least expensive big-box grocery store in Provo, Utah. One day, he entered us into a drawing for a $250 shopping spree. I won, and he let me know. We went shopping, and I was so desperate for food that I totally ignored my roommate for about twenty minutes before it dawned on me that I should share the $250 with him. I was completely bewildered and ashamed by my behavior. I felt that I had become a terrible person without even being aware of the transformation.

On our third or fourth date, I did what I thought you did for someone you really liked: I cooked Cindi a nice dinner. A really big one. And really spicy. She disguised her mouth burning and kindly ate enough to be polite, and then handed it to one of my roommates. I remember feeling jealous of my roommate who got to eat what I wanted, but I was aware enough of the social mores not to say anything, though I wanted to badly.

During our engagement and after we were married, I attended several family dinners with Cindi’s family, either at their home or at buffet restaurants. They nicknamed me Hoover. I feel ashamed just writing that. I could eat six or seven heaping plates at the buffet. I would finish off whatever they did not want to put away. At first, it just felt like that was the natural thing because food is so loaded for me, but then I became aware of what an outlier I was and the shame hit me pretty hard every time they offered me what was left over.

The Recent Past

Because of the amoebas I had as a missionary, I have experience chronic abdominal pain since 1990. I have gastro-esophogeal reflux disease (GERD) that is generally well-controlled with medication, but flares up periodically as severe stomach pain. I have constant low-grade to moderate-grade intestinal pain, which appears to be untreatable. My first reaction to a GERD flare-up is to eat because it sometimes eases the pain. My first reaction to a spike in intestinal pain is to eat because it sometimes eases the pain. The only time I am without intestinal pain is when I am overfull, but not too overfull. Unfortunately, this does not always work. I sometimes keep eating when the pain continues in the hope that the pain will go away, but it does not. This very real physical issue complicates the emotional issues wrapped up in food for me. My use of food to ease physical pain has spilled over into soothing and numbing emotional pain and distress as well. Part of that is because my abdominal pain spikes when I experience emotional distress. 

I have always also wondered why I eat more when I am ill. I now recognize the tie to my mission experience in which gorging on junk food saved my life, to food as a sign of security, and as a mechanism I use to soothe physical pain and discomfort.

As I became aware of how anomalous my relationship is with food, I became ashamed of myself. I would eat a whole bag of chips or a whole package of cookies, and lie about it. I would pick up two fast food meals in the course of one hour and pay for one in cash so Cindi wouldn’t see the receipt. I would throw out all but one fast food bag from my car before I got home so that it would look like I had only stopped at one place. This didn’t happen all the time, but often enough.

As part of my recent recovery, in the last few years, I rarely hide my food behaviors, though the urge is still strong to do so. The severity of my food-related behavior has decreased appreciably, but not to the point where I am losing weight. 

The Present

Obviously there is a lot of shame around food for me. Recent work with my therapist has shown me my expectation that having dealt with the major stressors in my life would automatically lead to success in becoming more physically healthy is naïve. My food issues go very deep. They are fundamental to the coping mechanisms I developed in response to deprivation, health crises, and physical and emotional pain.

So, I have four reasons I eat unreasonably. First and foremost is the association of abundance of food with security and success. I have a very hard time not getting seconds and sometimes thirds or more, let alone leaving something on my plate. Second, I eat to soothe and to numb my physical stomach and intestinal pain. Third, I eat unreasonably to soothe and numb emotional pain and distress. Finally, I use eating a mechanism for soothing other types of physical distress such as being ill or having a headache.

I feel fortunate that I have natively low blood pressure and a high metabolism. Were that not the case, I would probably not still be around. I also feel more hopeful having written this down. No less than three weeks ago, I was unaware of the depth of my issues with food and baffled by my inability to make progress with food six months after having removed the biggest remaining stressor from my life. Now it’s making more sense, and I believe that understanding where the maladaptive coping mechanisms are coming from will allow me to move forward. I’m certainly not thinking that it will be easy, but I at least have hope that it will be possible.

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Backstory: Dealing with Major Stressors
(Flashback Epilogue)

Dealing with Abusive Parents

Twenty-two years after exposing the physical, emotional, verbal, and spiritual abuse my mom and dad heaped on their children, I made a change that was long due. Those twenty-two years consisted of my parents’ repeated acknowledgment of past abuse followed by inevitable retraction, continuous angry denials of ongoing abuse toward me and my siblings, fostering divisions between siblings, demonizing scapegoat children to others when they did not fit their mold, explicit rejection of attempts to develop authentic relationships with them, and manipulation of the existence of civil but superficial relationship to support their continued denial of the issues. Late last year I resigned my position as a child of my parents with considerable support from Cindi, my therapist, and the community at www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists. I have fully cut off contact with my parents.

Dealing with Marital Difficulties

Having grown up in a totally dysfunctional family, I married someone who also grew up a in a family that is, if possible, equally dysfunctional. We have been married twenty-two years. We have had to work through many, many conflicting and sometimes multiplicative layers of dysfunction we came by honestly as children of our parents. It has required an enormous effort on both parts, including years of therapy, and years of working with support groups and support partners. We have struggled to learn to love and care for the other without losing ourselves, to allow each other to be their own person without fear of being swallowed up and reacting abusively to each other, and to slowly identify and rid ourselves of (most of) the sick and counterproductive coping skills we learned from our families and each other. We certainly still have our difficulties, but we are in a good and happy place. That is especially so given the entirely warped sense of negotiating a marriage our parents conveyed to us.

Self Hatred

From the age of about six to about thirteen I was told by my mother on an exceedingly frequent basis (I remember it being daily, but I don’t know how accurate that is) that unless you change everything about yourself, no one will ever love you, you will never have any friends, you will spend the rest of your life in jail, and you will end up killing someone. This because I have a combination of ADHD and OCD that caused impulsive actions followed by compulsive self-loathing manifested as further acting out. As we have children with the same issues, I have been able to see that I was a perfectly normal child with some challenges. My mother was simply unable to cope with a mildly challenging child. Regardless, I completely internalized my mom’s message, thinking that I was a monster who, no matter how hard he worked to overcome his inherent rotten nature, was ultimately going to destroy his own family in some horrendous manner. I fulfilled her prophecy throughout my youth by indeed having no friends from age 13-19 because I was afraid they would learn how broken I was.

As a young father, I spent at least a decade devoting at least twelve hours a week to individual therapy, group therapy, and support groups with the happy result of concluding in approximately 2007 that I like myself and that I am not a monster. I did not recognize that considerable self-hatred remained until earlier this year, when in a therapy session I was shocked at the realization that one reason I allowed myself to like myself was that I believed I had changed everything about myself. Even after cutting contact with my parents, I was still hearing their contempt, and it nearly destroyed me. I was unable to sleep for over a month, and I developed back spasms so painful that I had to skip multiple professional meetings to deal with the medical issues. Thankfully, without my parents in my life, I was able to work through this quickly with my therapist. I have realized that I have not changed everything about me, and that my mother’s approach to me was quite literally insane. Or bat-shit stupid. It doesn’t really matter which.

Dealing with Religion

As a couple and family, we were devoted to the Mormon faith of our childhood, so much so that we stayed through some incredibly painful abuse by church leaders perpetrated against three of our family members. We held on for at least a decade longer than we should have because we really did believe. We did everything we could to protect each other and our children against any further abuse, but we stayed, albeit with limited participation and careful protective mechanisms.

Then we learned that the church in which we grew up has misrepresented its history in just about every way possible since its beginning in 1830. Because the internet makes 1984’s figurative “memory hole” obsolete, many first-hand, corroborated sources previously only available to church scholars with access to the memory hole are now available to the average person. They show unequivocally that the founding fathers were not the sanitized saints we were taught to revere. Reliable historical and corroborated sources from church documents show that instead, they were coercive and tyrannical in their wielding of power to gather harems including other men’s wives and girls as young as fourteen, slandering women who refused their advances, destruction of a newspaper that exposed their sexual exploits, swindling, lying in the name of God, racism, quite possibly murder, and highly charismatic sociopathy. The final nail in the coffin was that the founding narratives of the church upon which our convictions rested were objectively false as demonstrated by first-hand corroborated sources from church documents.

Our devastation was profound, but there was a sense of relief in that we could without any guilt leave behind the authoritarian culture of the church that facilitates abusive leaders and parents. We resigned our membership in the Mormon Church in June of 2011. Immediate reactions by both our families (for the most part) was that we were in Satan’s clutches, that we were deluded, that we were broken people, and that we had become dangerous (in the tradition of the “suppressive person” of Scientology). The anger we expressed at the deliberate deception of church members for over a century certainly fortified our family members’ perceptions.

Stressful Employment

Finally, I rose through the ranks at my former place of employment over ten years, taking more responsible and highly stressful positions. The last two years were extremely stressful, with untenable situations. The work was meaningful and fulfilling to me, but I felt that the work I was putting in was not going to result in anything good. I had become the face of an organization that was despised by powerful actors, and that connection severely reduced my ability to be effective in my role. Given all the other challenges I was facing, I knew I had to make a dramatic change or risk severe health consequences. In January 2015 I changed employers. I am now in a job in which I have much less stress, but the work remains meaningful and fulfilling and I am able to be effective in my role.