Stop Me Before I Eat More Cookies

My Struggles with Food Addiction

I came across my food addiction[1] in the classic way, beginning to eat compulsively at the age of seven when my younger brother was born. Apparently I took in food in to replace the affection I was losing. That transaction took place at a deep emotional place where it apparently made sense: it certainly makes no sense when I write it now. I went from being a skinny little six year old to being one of the three fattest kids in my class when I was eight. I can’t imagine what my parents thought while they watched this transformation. Holy shit! What happened to our little boy?

My family jokes that I got fat by drinking Nestle Quik, a powder that transforms milk into chocolate milk, but it wasn’t just Quik that did the job (though it helped create a marvelous breakfast, powdered sugar donuts, which we got in a box at the store, and a glass or two of Quik. Now there’s nutrition for you). You’ve got to work at it to gain weight that fast, and work at it I did. Two or three hamburgers with fries for lunch, half a fried chicken with mashed potatoes and peas for dinner (my favorite meal, which I always requested on my birthday). I sat at the table like a man with a job, ate until I sweated. As I eased into adolescence, I had a football coach who wanted us to be big, big, you couldn’t be too big; two or three massive helpings of lasagna, Sara Lee cakes with ice cream, go on, have seconds. Have thirds. I really wanted to play on the football team.

I’m 5’8”. The most I ever remember weighing is 198 pounds, the summer before my senior year in high school. My football coach was delighted. If he was happy I was happy. But really, at that weight, I was miserable.

I assume the real purpose of eating so much is to make your body so full of food that you can’t feel. My father died when I was sixteen, and I couldn’t deal with that emotionally, didn’t get much help from those around me (the year was 1965). Everyone was just trying to get by. But I could eat. I could eat to the point of pain.

As strange as the way I put on the weight is the way I took it off. I went to Duke University in 1966 and paid for food on an item by item basis, with food coupons that were charged to my mother back home. When I was in a cafeteria with good food, I didn’t go back and get seconds and thirds on the lasagna, didn’t have two or three pieces of cake with ice cream; I’d have been too embarrassed. I also didn’t really want to. I ate what I wanted, including dessert, but was still consuming much less than I’d eaten all through adolescence.

When I got home that summer, after a week-long bout with intestinal flu, I weighed 160 pounds. I hadn’t weighed that little since I was in eighth grade. I loved the way I looked and felt. But I was still a food addict. I just didn’t know it.

In my junior year in college, I made one of the smartest decisions of my life. I had lost weight almost by chance. I never wanted to go back to being that unhappy bloated person from my youth. I knew there was a connection between exercise and weight loss, figured that if I didn’t exercise I’d get big again. So when my PE classes stopped, in my junior year, I determined to keep exercising. The first year I did the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, which were popular at the time; I did them every day in my dorm room (running in place! Pity the poor guy who lived below me). The next year I decided to get out of the dorm. I’d always hated to run, hated when we had to run a mile before football practice, for instance, the linemen huffing around in our pads. But I knew fighters did roadwork to lose weight, and thought—though the jogging craze hadn’t begun—that there was no better exercise than long distance running. I decided to try it.

The hardest part of that was going to the gym. I didn’t know what would happen, thought the gym guys might say, “What do you want gym stuff for? You don’t have gym class.” If I told them that I wanted to run, they’d say, “Why does a fat guy like you want to run?” (I still felt fat. I think your body image forms when you’re an adolescent and never changes.) They said no such thing. They gave me a t-shirt, shorts, and a jock strap, assigned me a basket to put them in with a combination lock. They barely looked at me.

I still remember my first forays onto the track. My shoes were just old tennis shoes, not the fancy running shoes everyone would soon be buying. I didn’t know how to start, so I created my own routine, walking some, running some, trying to get up to a mile, which was the Holy Grail in my mind. But once I could do one I found to my astonishment—I’d never run this far in my life!—that it wasn’t hard to run two miles, three. By the time I graduated I had a three mile a day running habit. I ran at the end of the day, and the tension of the whole day melted away. It’s been the most helpful habit of my life. I’m so glad that—timidly, with great trepidation—I made that decision.[2]

For a long time I coasted, pretty much ate what I wanted at every meal. I still had a policy of not eating between meals, though I might have a piece of fruit. I occasionally fell into compulsive eating—go to a party where there was a dessert buffet and eat ten cookies—but always went back to my old habits and my weight came down. It crept up through the years but never seemed out of control. I felt in decent shape. My pant size hadn’t changed.

Until I hit fifty. At that point my size did change, and I figured it was a part of growing older. I still thought of myself as a person who had a problem with food, even though I could keep it under control. A friend convinced me that weighing myself was part of the problem, just kept me worrying about it, so I went for a couple of years without doing that. Toward the end of that time I had a two-week vacation in San Francisco where even I would have said I ate too much, and when I came home went to the doctor’s office for my annual checkup. To my astonishment, I weighed 180 pounds. I hadn’t weighed that much since my football days.

My face flushed when I saw my weight. I felt a rush of shame. My doctor knew my problem and sat there with me. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“Go to Weight Watchers,” he said. He had recently joined the organization himself.

I walked out of the doctor’s office and drove there directly.

Weight Watchers at that time—it was 1999—taught a simplified system of counting calories, a point system (the system has changed through the years, but I’ve continued with what I learned that first week). You were allowed so many points per day, and per week, and at first when I’d had my number of points I was still hungry. My body had to adjust. But what Weight Watchers did for me was simplify the situation so I could understand it. I could eat what I wanted, but only so much. I remember being struck by the fact that a teaspoon of butter or oil was one point, the same as an apple, or a pear. You could have extra oil on your salad, or you could have an apple. Which would you prefer?

I began using a lot less oil.

I remember thinking that if I couldn’t have a peanut butter and honey sandwich for lunch, and a decent plate of pasta for dinner, I couldn’t do the program. But if you limit the amounts of peanut butter and honey (a tablespoon is plenty, even though the “serving size” on peanut butter is two tablespoons), and don’t put meat in the pasta sauce, you can have both of those things. I found a way to make choices and have the things I wanted.

After I’d been on the program for a while, my weight seemed to plateau at 169. We set it as my goal. I became a lifetime member with the goal of maintaining that weight. But then my weight took another plunge. I got down to 160, the same thing I’d weighed after my freshman year in college. That felt right.

My weight varies—sometimes gets as high as 165—but I gradually bring it back down. It’s also true that one’s metabolism continues to change; the amounts you can eat at 50 aren’t the things you can eat at 65.

In recent years I’d bought some nice dress clothes, and liked the way I looked in them, but they’d been altered to fit me during a thin period and I sometimes had trouble getting into them. I felt frustrated that, nearing 70, I was still fighting this problem. Then one day during sitting meditation—a place where all kinds of insights come to me—I had the sudden realization I was eating too much. What Weight Watchers had allowed me at 50 was too much at 69. Two-thirds, came to me as the right amount. Eat two-thirds of what you’ve been eating. I started doing that and immediately felt better. That was the first time I’d felt, from deep inside me, a feeling of how much I should eat. It seemed to be a breakthrough.

I once said to my friend Levi—an addiction counselor and friend with whom I discussed various problems—“That thing most people have, that tells them they’ve eaten enough food, I don’t have that.”[3] But now I think I do have it. I found it again, somewhere inside me. I just have to remember to consult it, and not fall into old habits that I thought would make me happy, but never did.

[1] I was inspired to write this piece by Jane Brody’s column on the same subject. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/well/jane-brodys-personal-secrets-to-lasting-weight-loss.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fjane-e.-brody&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection

[2] Fifteen years later, I would decide I didn’t want to run anymore because it was hard on my joints and too difficult to do in the North Carolina summers; I went to the Y and started swimming. I had the same difficulties starting, but soon worked up to a mile. I’ve done different things on different days through the years; now I swim a mile three days a week and take long walks the other days, three or four miles. I do a short yoga routine every day.

[3] He said, “I don’t have it for drinking.” He hadn’t taken a drink in over thirty years.