Posted on September 4th, 2008 by admin

There is almost no such thing as a bingeless human being, and it’s okay to get off the wagon and get back on. Expecting never to eat anything bad again or not to eat too much of the good stuff is like expecting never to be unhappy again . . . unrealistic. Once “upon you,” the binge is almost impossible to stop, wouldn’t you say? A slipping dieter or binge-er will get dressed in the middle of the night to go to the deli, will kill the loved one who tries to keep her from opening the refrigerator door. On the pretense of “helping the hostess,” a “slipper” will take guests’ plates from the table, rush them to the sink and gobble what’s left on each one before anybody else makes it to the kitchen. A binge has to be gone through, like a fit! Heavy and frequent bingeing usually comes before you have decided to “go straight” (get to your wanted weight and stay there forever).

That was the case with me (the case history I know most about). I have never been fat because I always made myself pay for binges (thirty-six hours without any food . . . ghastly!) immediately, but just because you put yourself on the rack the next day doesn’t mean you aren’t one of the world’s “best” compulsive eaters. Dear little good-person me has binged until I looked like the snake in the Frank Buck (late, great wild-animal collector) movie who crawled through the slats of a cage to reach a young pig, swallowed the pig whole (as is the wont of snakes) and, with the pig in his tummy, couldn’t get out of the cage again . . . disgusting! On my birthday binge a few years ago a friend sent a Candygram—one pound of fairly good chocolate delivered by Western Union. As soon as the Western Union boy departed, I sat down by the front door and ate the whole thing. Incredible what the human tummy will hold . . . it just stretches and stretches! Why do we do that to ourselves—eat until we’re ill? A thousand books and magazine articles have been written about motives: low tolerance for frustration, anger and depression (opposite sides of the coin) compensated for with food, needing to be fat so you can “hide out” from job and/or sex success . . . if you’re frightened of either of these Big Two, fatness will pretty much guarantee you won’t get them. A load of self-hate may cause us to try to destroy ourselves with food . . . all these hang-ups are reasons to gobble, but I think we may also do it just because the food is there . . . all of those fabulous (worthless) yummies mother and other authority figures never trained us not to eat. Only recently have people become anything but derelict about nutrition . . . and now, all grown up, we simply don’t believe the bad stuff should be out of our lives forever. Well, one Hershey kiss leads to another Hershey kiss and one Toll House cookie calls for fifteen, and you’re off and gaining. I think my bingeing days are over. Not slippage—I still have too much of my “staples”: tuna salad, cottage cheese, mozzie cheese, things like that, but heavy sinning is in the past.

Two Christmases ago somebody sent my husband (poor darling never even saw his present) some Greek pastry and I ruthlessly (attack dogs chewing on my calves couldn’t have stopped me) went through the whole thing—two pounds—from midnight to six o’clock the next morning . . . I just kept tripping to the frig for another fix. When it was all gone, even the crumbs, something clicked off—or on—in my head and I said, You know you can’t do this anymore—this insane gobbling and then the equally insane compensatory starving. Dr. Atkins had for several years been coaxing me to give up sugar, and the day of the pastry fit—December 11, 1998—I went cold turkey off sugar.

Since then—four years ago—I’ve had just one encounter—preplanned. I promised myself that on my first anniversary of abstinence I would have something wicked, and, since the same Greek pastry had arrived for Christmas from the same innocent friends, I sat down and ate about half a pound. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted and I could feel myself slipping down down down back into the old morass . . . bingeing having to be followed by remorse and starvation. It was like falling once more into the hands of a cruel but devastating lover you thought you’d got free of. I closed the tin, gave the rest to the housekeeper (I can’t seem to put anything in the garbage or flush it down the john), and now my fourth anniversary has passed. You don’t have to give up sugar totally, my love, as I seem to have had to, but I’m just describing how one binge-er sort of broke the habit. Even with sugar out of my life—to finish this interminable saga—I still weighed, at five feet four, one hundred ten or twelve pounds, still had a poochy stomach . . . I’ve always had it and, yes, I do exercise like a maniac (exercise in next chapter). So I went to see one of those gifted doctors that maybe you can only find in New York, who confirmed that one hundred five would indeed be a much better weight in my case and gave me a product called Optifast to get off the five pounds. To get from one hundred ten to one hundred five, where I now stay, I had three Optifasts a day plus one small meal for six days. Even with a meal a day—not giving up food totally—the routine was terribly unpleasant. I would tell myself, “You are Juliet, taking the poison now so you will be able to see your lover (solid food!) a little later . . . swallow!” Eating less than you’d like to is always unpleasant but I find doing it in one swoop—Optifast actually tastes okay—better than months of semistarvation to get to the low mark.

Okay, that’s one person’s “How I got the weight off—with crashing—and kept it off” story. Could we talk about crashes and fasts for a moment?