Food Fight
By: Joshua Koerner

In recovery we have an expression: "The war is over." It means that we admitted that we were powerless over our addictions, and so gave up, surrendered, and stopped trying to use successfully. It is the first critical step of the 12 steps of recovery, the only one we have to do perfectly all the time, because it is the one that allows us to cease using the addictive substance. But of all the substances to which I have been addicted — alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and nicotine among them — food is in some ways the worst. With food the war is never over, because food is a necessity of life. You never stop using it, and so the battles never end.

Food was my first addiction; I learned early that chocolate bars, Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes made me feel better. Those were the sweet food group. The salty group included pretzels, Fritos, and later, when my palette became more sophisticated, Doritos with French onion dip. Potatoes were their own group: French fries, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, potato skins (with bacon and cheese) and, God help me, I went through a Tater Tot phase as well.

It wasn’t just what I ate: it was the manner in which I ate that was also disordered. I didn’t eat, chew, savor, swallow. I crammed. As I learned years later, the brain takes a while to realize the stomach is full, so by the time I finished eating I wasn’t just full -- I was stuffed. To this day I am embarrassed when I see that a whole table’s worth of dinner companions are still eating, while the plate before me has been empty for ten minutes.

I ate because I was unhappy, shy, quiet, alienated and withdrawn. The more overweight I became, the more I became an outcast, and so more alienated, more unhappy. Even my friends would treat me one way when we were alone, yet make fun of me if other kids were around. Food was my only true friend. By age 16 I weighed nearly 250 pounds. I was enormous; my ill-fitting clothes accentuated my bulk. Cinched at the waist by pants that were a size and a half too small, each button of my shirt seemed ready to pop off from the pressure of rolls of fat underneath.

Shopping for clothes was a nightmare: having to behold my misshapen form in the multiple perspective mirrors of the fitting room was horrifying. Eventually, my choices at the regular clothing outlets dwindled to the point where I could shop only at Big and Tall Men’s stores. I was frequently the only customer there who didn’t shave yet, and although I had a much wider selection (pun intended) of clothes, just walking into such a place was an additional humiliation.

In my family I was certainly not an exception: my father had already died of a heart attack, secondary to both obesity and high blood pressure, and both my mother and sister were overweight. Food addictions, like any other, run in families. But I was fortunate because my mother decided that we were all going to lose weight together. First, all the bad foods were removed from the house. Goodbye, Oreos! So long, sundae cones! Then she started to cook Weight Watcher meals. Back then there were no Weight Watcher frozen dinners, or Lean Cuisine, or Healthy Choice. If you wanted diet food you had to cook it from scratch. Mom used to make lean ground turkey meat into a variety of foods, like chili, or meatloaf, and for dessert there was Alba 77, a skim powdered chocolate milk you could put it in a blender with ice and make into a diet shake.

Over the next year I lost 65 pounds. It was an amazing transformation. I went from a 46 waist to a 34. I could buy regular sized clothes off the rack at a regular store! It was like becoming a member of society for the first time. But inside there was still a miserable, maladjusted fat boy trying to get out. At 18 I switched addictions: I started to smoke pot. And of course pot gives you the munchies. I took a healthy approach to weight control: I started smoking cigarettes. Whenever I got the urge to put something in my mouth I lit up. By the time I dropped out of college I was addicted to booze, drugs, and cigarettes. But at least I was thin.

The drugs wrecked my life, and the ensuing mental illness brought it to a grinding halt.

I have since come to realize that being The Fat Kid was my first stigma, the one that taught me that I was different, and that it was acceptable for everyone else — friends, casual acquaintances and even total strangers — to treat me as if the most important facet of my being was Fatness. As a Mental Patient, I was already trained to allow Illness to become the most salient aspect of who I was. I would again have people taunting me for being different, only this time it would be cops and psych techs, and this time my tormentors had handcuffs, restraints and medications.

The one time I put most of the weight back on was during my longest hospitalization. I was locked in for six months, more depressed and isolated than ever. My family brought food at every visit. Under my bed I had cheese in a can and Triscuits. When I had grounds passes I would go down to the gift shop and buy half pound bags of peanut M&Ms.

That was seventeen years ago. I haven’t had any symptoms of acute mental illness since 1991. I haven’t had a drink or a drug since 1992, and I quit smoking in 1994. Yet food continues to bedevil me. When I tell people I am a food addict, they frequently respond with surprise: "But you’re so thin!" How little they understand that maintaining my weight is a constant, never ending series of battles. The holiday season is always difficult: a seemingly endless round of parties at the office, among friends, even at twelve step meetings. There is also the endless series of daily battles. 9:30 PM is a minefield: too late to eat, too early to go to bed. The weekends are tricky because they lack the regimentation of the weekdays, and there are other, frequent enticements to eat: at the movie theatre, or visiting someone whose house is chock full of stuff that I don’t keep at home, like Triscuits, pretzels, Chex mix. In fact, I go shopping every two days, because I only keep a two-day supply of food in my house.

How much simpler life would be if I could just avoid food altogether. It was tough giving up drugs, and cigarettes were the worst, but in both cases I had only one objective: don’t use. The longer I go without a joint or a line or a pill or a smoke, the easier it becomes. But food? Worse even than the plethora of daily eating choices is the cacophony of emotions that accompanies every food-related decision: You shouldn’t have eaten that! You’re weak! Did you have to have TWO pieces of bread with dinner? You’re fat! You should have had the baked potato, not the fries!

I shall never be free of food, its joys but also its misery. Every meal is a temptation to binge, an invitation to indulge. It was an apple that got Adam tossed out of Eden; it is food that consigns me to Hell.