Crash-dieters, binge-eaters and those who nibble away their boredom.....

[SantaGotStuckUpTheGreensleeve]

How about having a thread (ie this one) where we can come for support and distraction when our "psychological eating" begins to get out of control? Whether it's compulsive munching, dangerous crash-dieting or yo-yoing between the two, many of us know that our crap relationship with food is rooted in anxieties/depression/feelings of inferiority which some of us have been carrying around since childhood. Personally I find it just too difficult to battle these urges on my own. I also find that not being able to defeat the desire to eat makes me feel quite pathetic and low, which drives the vicious circle and makes my eating become even more dysfunctional.

Anyone else who feels like this about food, sign up here and we can give each other an arm to lean on when things get too tough to handle alone. The aim is to try and adopt a more measured and less psychologically loaded approach to slimming, moderate exercise and sensible eating rather than oscillating beween starvation and bingeing. No food diaries, no weigh-ins, no pressure - just somewhere we can talk about the issues that underlie our eating, identify our "food flashpoints", and aid each other towards a healthier relationship with food.

I'll start:

I am stuck in a pretty horrendous cycle with food at the moment. I lost four stone over a year, and went down to a size 12, which made me feel terrific and my confidence was sky-high. Over the last year I have put more than half of that weight back on, which is making me very miserable. My mother's relationship with food was similar and she was given to expressing disappointment quite openly when I gained weight, which set up issues of shame etc. I find it very difficult to overcome the feelings I have about eating/weight, which means that I crash-diet (virtual starvation) whenever I feel strong enough, and when I am depressed/anxious I binge-eat, I can eat more than dh suring one of these phases. I tend to think that anything momentous that happens in our lives, good or bad means that we "deserve" a big blow-out, and I find it difficult to relocate that feeling of being "treated" onto anything inedible. I'm hoping if this thread works, I will be able to come here when I feel like bingeing, when I am anxious/depressed and likely to start "abusing" food, and when I know I am crash-dieting and need to find a better way of slimming.

I don't even eat crap, not really. I haven't got fat on biscuits and crips (bar the odd packet of Wotsits). I have the odd square of 70% cocoa solid chocolate but I don't really eat crap. I eat mostly organic but I have too much olive oil, too much wine and bread and chicken skin and that type of thing. But hey, I don't suppose it matters, once it's fat it's fat, it doesn't really matter how it got there.

I smoked compulsively pre-kids, too, and in fact got into a bit of a rut with smoking dope far too much too - I do think food has replaced those things to a degree, as if I need to be in a dependent out-of-control relationship with something. I hadn't seen that link before, but it is obvious now!

I also agree with the point about being limited as a child. I was the youngest of three (and later the middle of six, then the oldest at home for quite a while) and we were very limited in what we were allowed to have - not in terms of "no junk", just no helping yourself etc - I remember being in serious trouble for having a drink of milk from the fridge. It must have something to do with that, as well as the fact that being fat was a disgusting and shameful thing in our house (and my mother was overweight and hated herself for it).

Oh and bread. I could live on bread. Even though I deliberately buy an organic wholemeal that I don't madly like I still eat too much of it. And I mostly don't buy butter because if I did I'd slather half a pound of it onto a big slice of bread. And another, and another. Has anyone read The Hungry Years? It's v good.

I think I do feel like an unloved child when I have to curtail my desire to eat. When we go out for a meal and I feel anxious that I won't get everything I want - exactly like being a child again and my mother saying "you'll get what you're given". It's silly, because we weren't starved, far from it - an example would be a day out at the beach, where my mother would send my stepdad to get 5 pasties for us all, and I would seethe because I didn't even like pasties, other kids were allowed to CHOOSE what they wanted. Similarly when he had dinner from the chippy occasionally, she would choose what she wanted and then say "sausage and chips each for the kids". I hated chip shop sausages. I sound like a petulant brat when I say that - and I think that's where I am with food - stuck in this awful, infantile "I want, I want" state!

Oh, I posted something on the other food thread yesterday, will copy and paste it here as I think it's relevant, hang on

Also the time I have felt most "in control" and happy with myself was when I was in my last couple of years at school - I was stick-thin, thin enough for adults to say "you're too thin", which I loved hearing - I was ultra-controlled and lived on green apples and black coffee. Which is no healthier than bingeing on crap, really.

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Im not so bad in the shops as i used to be.It was always the bars that were 5 for a £1 or whatever.And they would all be gone by the end of the day.
Now i can generally buy one bar and be ok about it.

My toast in the morning is thick with butter.Thats quite a new thing for me.I used to eat cereal until my favourite got discontinued and i couldn't find any other one i liked.

That's a good post Dior, it sums it all up very well IMO. It's like living in a constant state of internal turmoil - failure hanging over you all the times. I know my self-respect and my happiness are far too closely linked to my weight - it doesn't matter how many times I try to tell myself that's a shallow and silly way to value a person (and oddly enough I don't judge other people that way at all). It's ingrained. I despise myself a lot of the time for not being able to control myself.

It's almost as though there are two people inside me - the one before the curry is ordered/chocolate is unwrapped, and the one after it has been eaten.

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OK, copied and pasted from the other thread, might as well get ALL my neuroses out on the one thread!

Oh marvellous, this is still going! Thank you Bozza et al. Sorry if I sound smug. Ok, in an effort to not seem so, er, smug, I'd like to point out that my relationship with food isn't dead simple either.

My mum was a good cook and almost everything we ate was cooked from scratch, mainly because we were v poor and also, probably, because there wasn't much choice, this was the 70s. So a chicken would HAVE to feed 5 of us AND yield leftovers, portion sizes were seriously controlled. There were NEVER sweets/treats in the house although my mum now tells me she baked reasonably often but I don't remember it. I didn't care about food at all and ate to stay alive, that was it. Was v v skinny and then left home at 17 and WENT ON UTTER POT NOODLE FEST for years and years. And lived on pizza and chips and fags and wine and somehow, stayed v thin. Nervous energy maybe. Boyfriends would comment on my lack of vitamin and mineral intake, nay, apologise if they cooked a meal that was good for me.

THEN, aged 30, I got pregnant with ds and realised I ought to start to care about this stuff. So I started to do some research and read a lot and taught myself to cook and found I liked it a lot and was ok at it.

So anyway, I've been verging on being a smug bastard wrt food ever since. See, I'm like one of those reformed smokers! Hang on, I'm one of them too, er, hmmm. But I am very fat as a result of not smoking and loving food so really, loving food and cooking hasn't done me an awful lot of good in the past few years.

Anyway, I know your heart isn't bleeding here but actually, I wish I didn't love food so much. My idea of heaven is a crisp roast chicken skin or some garlic mayo with fat prawns or crisp roast potatoes or pork with cracking...

Dior That statement about choc is just how i am.I scoff the 1st bars then realise the last one is all ive got so eat it slowly.

Dior know what you mean so so much, am also sick to teeth of either dieting or pigging out, and most of my friends and colleagues are as well, it seems to be a female thing.

However I have to say, when I was ttc, I couldn't do dieting/binging, and I eventually stabilised at a fairly steady weight, and the deire to pig out completely disappeared. I managed to maintain a stable weight for 5 months, which was the first stable weight for as long as I can remember, certainly back to teen years.

Now have dd and back on diet/binge again. where doest it end?

I do think people judge fat people. And I detest the fact that I'm probably one of those being judged. The cookbook Fat Girl Slim is very good on the subject.

I'm not a good cook.So i eat too much crap food and as its just me once the DC are fed i normally chuck some chips in the fryer.
Ive been better lately and making homemade chips! Also fryer uses light and mild olive oil. I now feel less guilty about eating chips because they might be healthier.

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WWW, I have similar tastes in food to you I think - and I agree it doesn't much matter whether we are craving junk or just fattening foods which aren't "bad" in moderation - it's the need for excess that's the problem. I can't just eat enough - if I am going to eat, I have to eat EVERYTHING, and if I am going to be "good", I drink green tea with lemon and eat raw vegetables and apples. I haven't the patience or the emotional strength/stamina to do slimming the "hard way", with sensible eating and moderate exercise. I just can't do it.

My dad said to me regretfully a few days ago "I don't know what's happened, a year ago you were as slim as a pencil" . I know he didn't mean to hurt me but it's been in my head since he said it and it won't go away. In fact I think I gorged myself even more at the restaurant the other night because I was unhappy about it, my mind was swimming with excuses like "it's my antidepressants, they make me gain weight", "it's difficult to do exercise with two small children", "other people eat what they want and they don't get fat". Feeling judged is just humiliating and makes things worse.

Hi,I'm like this too. Have also used ww in past and lost loads of weight but as soon as i got to goal weight I felt more lost and tormented than ever- I just slowly reverted to the old habits of eating when stressed, bored, angry etc so am now heavier than ever. Am now on ww again but am really frightened of getting to "goal" again as the inner me who overeats will be there waiting! I eat unbelievable amounts when bingeing, and the more I hate myself for it the more I eat. I haven't gone out to any social events with dh all year because I'm too ashamed of the state of myself, and dh has said how much it upsets him- having an invisible wife, he said people will start thinking hes made me up! I'm a size 14-16 .. I really relate to what everyone has already said here.

Welcome ella

I know what you mean about the invisible wife. I make myself go out and see people anyway now - although I am always feeling tortured about how fat I look in my clothes. But before i lost all the weight a couple of years ago (have put most of it back on now) I did refuse to go out and woldn't go to dh's work functions in case people laughed at us.

Interesting that so many of us have been "successful" in reaching our target weights in the past but are here again - it does suggest there are deeper issues around food which can't be overcome simply by "reaching your ideal weight and looking and feeling terrific", which the big dieting companies sell as the solution to everything.

Thanks aviatrix

I think basically just using slimming clubs when you have real psychological issues with food isn't enough. I have never had any hypnotherapy/councelling about it , maybe I should. When I decide I am not dieting I just want to eat everything in site until I feel sick(have never actually been sick though).Because you know sooner or later you will not be allowed to have what you want again. Have tried eating what i want and not restricting anything but still naturally eat too much of the wrong things. I have a very sweet tooth. As a child I remember stealing traybakes from the kitchen and climbing up a tree in the garden to scoff them!

Dior, I could have written your last post. To me, self-confidence and feeling attractive are horribly bound up in how much I weigh. I am not big but bigger than I have been in a few years. Last year, without trying or being even aware of it, I lost about half a stone and people really started to comment on my figure. To my shame, I loved it and felt 'approved of'. I went out and bought a set of scales to check and have been obsessed by reaching that magical figure again ever since (which weight charts all detail as being underweight . )

Like lots of other posters, I love to cook and am quite good at it, don't eat sweet stuff but could happily live of bread, butter, cheese, olive oil, wine etc. And like someone else says, I would never judge my friends by their weight but am obsessed by my own which makes me feel horribly selfish and self-absorbed.

Often, I will cook for my family and sit and eat with them but instead of say Sunday lunch, I would eat a salad. The awful thing is my dd (9) who is like a stick is starting to question her weight.