I'm not having much luck returning to those days of yore when I was losing weight. I talked to my coworker about my late triumph, and he was shocked to hear that I lost 40 pounds. "You have to stick to it," I said, in response to the question he didn't ask: "What happened?" I thought I could go back to eating "normally," occasionally eating cake or ice cream or potato chips, but I couldn't without re-triggering the old addiction.When I thought of that word "normal," though, I realized I had never actually eaten normally, or as a person without an eating addiction eats. When I was young, I was restricted by my family and by the lack of access to fattening foods. We didn't have the money to indulge in junk food, and my mother made sure we ate as healthfully as we could, despite our limited means. Then in college I was restricted by a very tight food budget that didn't allow indulgences.
After college, though, when I had money enough to buy bad food, the struggles began. Normal for me was never an option; there was only restricted and unrestricted--the yin and yang of dieting. Most people with eating addictions see-saw between those two states. Neither is normal in the way a non-food-addicted person eats.
So what to do? Admit that I will never be able to eat normally, or in the way people like my friend Linda eats. Realize I'm stuck with these genes and find a way to deal with it and still remain slim. Shirley Simon was wrong--it really isn't possible to cure addiction. One can only hope to be constantly "recovering," as they say.
