It is 1973. My high school years are behind me and I am at the University of Illinois to begin a whole new set of lessons. I have had almost no experience with drinking or drugs. Since 8th grade I have had a series of steady boyfriends. I don’t know how to be single and out in the world alone. Because of my late birthday I am only 17. My first night away from home I go to a bar with some new girlfriends. The minute we walk in the door an upperclassman invites us to sit at his table. We agree and follow him. This older student sits next to me and pours me a beer. I don’t like the taste but I gulp the liquid down anyway. He pours me another. I drink quickly because I want to seem grown up. When he takes me outside I am so drunk that I literally fall down on the sidewalk. It amazes me that a hard sidewalk can feel so heavenly, like a soft bed. I want to fall asleep with my cheek on the cool concrete but the young man pulls me up and takes me back to his room at the fraternity house. When I sober up I am appalled to find myself in bed and naked with someone I hardly know. My stomach feels queasy and I can’t believe what I have done. I make him take me home in the middle of the night because I don’t want anyone to know I had sex with a man I just met. I feel very ashamed and try not to think about what happened.
The next night I make another foray into the bar scene with a similar result. I am shocked at my behavior. The man I met the first night calls and we date for awhile but I am puzzled when he doesn’t have much time for me. We date for a month or two before one of his fraternity brothers tells me the truth. My new “boyfriend” already has a steady girlfriend he plans to marry. Every year he picks up a freshman girl to play around with for awhile. I feel foolish, humiliated, and soiled. I am angry at myself for being so stupid.
As a way to comfort and protect myself from a world that suddenly feels very dangerous, I start to eat. I quickly gain weight and the men around me just as quickly lose interest. In the space of a month I change from a girl men stare at to someone men hardly see at all. This is another dramatic lesson. Losing male attention makes me feel worthless and as if I don’t matter. I hardly know how to handle this change.
Surprisingly, this time brings some gifts I do not expect. Even though being ignored does nothing to make me feel loved by others, I begin to learn to love myself. Men have been staring at me since I was in 7th grade. I am used to their attention. At first I am shocked when they stop noticing me. With time, however, I am surprised to find that my new invisibility appeals to me very much. I think of myself fondly as “the little fat girl,” and am grateful for the cocooning comfort and safety of my new size. I walk around freely. No one is looking at me or hitting on me. I feel safer than before. Even though I sometimes feel inferior to thinner girls I also find I can be more myself when I am not attracting men. I learn a little bit about how to accept myself even when others are not attracted to me.
There is another gift from this experience that will serve me well in my later career as a psychologist. My weight gain teaches me some of the physiological and psychological realties of dieting. When I gain weight, I want to become thinner again as quickly as possible. Initially, I diet and lose weight easily. I feel great. However, this good feeling does not last for long. For some reason, I cannot maintain my new eating habits. I quickly gain the weight back again. As a matter of fact, each time I diet, I gain back even more weight than I lost. Then, when I diet again, I find it harder and harder to lose weight. Every time I restrict my eating, I break my diet with a binge and gain the weight back very quickly. With time, my diets become shorter and my binges longer. When the diets stop working, I try to become anorexic. This does not work because I am not able to force myself to stop eating for long. Then I try to become bulimic but my body refuses to purge.
I settle into the eating disorder that fits my personality – compulsive overeating and yo-yo dieting. I eat unbelievable quantities of food and still want to eat more. I wonder, “Are my legs hollow? How can I have such unlimited room in my body for food?”
Friday is one of my most depressed, tired times. After my last class I make my way home, stopping at various places for things to eat. There’s the coffee shop with chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven. I make a stop there. Then there’s a walk to Bubby and Zadies’s for a fresh bagel with a thick slab of cream cheese. I hardly taste the bagel and want more food immediately. Next I pick up a donut with my favorite cherry filling. I eat as I walk. At each stop I pretend I am famished and that this is the first snack I have had all afternoon. I don’t want anyone to guess I am stuffing myself. When I get home I eat a nutritious dinner that I hope will somehow balance out all the junk I have eaten. Then I drag myself off to bed in a depressed, bloated state.
I eat everything I can find but never feel full. My college roommates eventually hide their food because I am so out of control. Even though I am embarrassed when others see how much I eat, I can’t seem to change my behavior.
One day my mother says, “Karin, you never had a problem with your weight or with eating until you started to diet.” I reflect on her words. She is right. My very first diet was in high school when I wanted to lose 5 pounds. I was far slimmer then than I am now. Ever since that first diet I have been obsessed with food. Before I dieted I rarely overate. My mother’s comment helps me realize that diets actually make me gain weight in the long run. As a matter of fact, after awhile, I find that just thinking about going on a diet is enough to make me start compulsively overeating. I need to find a new way to lose weight and keep it off.
I learn something else valuable. Even when I eat voraciously, I gain a limited amount of weight. The little fat girl is never technically obese. During a medical procedure my doctor is surprised to see that the top of my stomach has expanded to an unusual size. He tells me he has only seen this condition in people who are very large. I suspect that I deserve to weigh much more than I do. I learn that body size is much more than a simple matter of caloric intake and exercise. It seems that different bodies use and store food in very different ways.
Toward the end of my freshman year in college I feel something new coming. I somehow know that I will soon be able to lose weight and keep it off. When I first sense this approaching change, I feel some sadness and reluctance. I know I will miss the safe feeling my fat brings me. I don’t want to say good bye to the little fat girl and wonder what will happen to this part of me that has been my friend through these difficult times. (Now I know she is still here, sitting on my shoulder, letting me know that regardless of how I am seen by others, she will never leave me. She planted seeds of love and acceptance that have grown slowly through the years.)
Though I believe it is time to lose weight, I know I can’t go on a diet. I look for something different. At a garage sale I find a book with the title, Think Yourself Thin. This is an older book written by a doctor who uses hypnosis. It was printed in the 1950’s. Even though this is 1974, and 20 years after the book was published, I am fascinated. The message feels so right that I easily read the whole book in one sitting. Afterward I am delighted to find that simply reading the book changes me. I am quickly drawn into the suggestions and my desire to binge leaves. I can hardly wait to eat sensibly and well! By the time I go home for summer vacation, I have lost most of my extra weight. This is easy! Can it be that I have found the Holy Grail for weight control?
However, after my summer vacation I start to eat again and the weight creeps back up. I read and reread the book and do the exercises the author suggests in a thorough and conscientious way but it seems the book’s magic is gone. I never get the same results again. In subsequent years I will use hypnosis extensively again when I try to quit smoking. I will also use hypnotic trances with my clients. Hypnosis can be very effective but I now believe that the results will be temporary until the underlying issues have been resolved. Because I am still afraid to be thin at college, no amount of hypnosis is enough to override my fear.
I spend my sophomore year of college weighing more again. I try to diet but can’t. I binge and hate myself. Sometimes I am able to self soothe but other times I feel fat and ugly. At the end of the year I find another way to lose weight. I use caffeine to study for finals and my stomach gets so upset I can’t eat. I have trouble sleeping and lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks. By the time finals are over, I weigh dramatically less. Again I go home for the summer with a thinner body. By the time I return for my junior year I will have gained that weight back again. It seems my body will not let me be thin when I am away at college. At home during summer vacations I feel safe enough to lose the weight again.
During my junior year in college I feel another change coming. I am drawn to regular exercise. I’ve always loved swimming so I head for the pool. Swimming laps seems to release all my worries. After my daily swim I feel cleansed and happy. The more I swim, the less I want to overeat. It seems that when I swim, I always have a good day. So during this time of my life, I learn the value of consistent exercise as a way to control emotion and body weight. I feel better about myself when I am swimming. I feel strong. The inner emptiness goes away for awhile and I lose some weight as a result. I am proud to have the self discipline to swim laps every single day. Because I feel stronger when I am swimming I don’t need as much fat for protection. As a result, some of the extra pounds come off. I have finally found a way to stabilize my weight. As I finish college I feel better about myself because I am a swimmer.
- Being attractive has a down side and can lead me into dangerous situations.
- Men in college are not as interested in me as the boys in high school.
- Being less attractive actually feels good in some ways.
- Prettiness is no guarantee when it comes to happiness.
- Diets don’t work, but exercise does.
- My body has amazing transformational powers.
- Body size is affected by psychological factors and is more than a simple matter of caloric intake.
Chapter 3 "Single Adulthood - A roller coaster ride of dreams that come true and despair from being treated like a sex object" will be posted next.
Send me an email when Karin adds the next chapter ...