Envying an Anorexic

Wait, wait, before you think I'm nuts, it's not what you think! I would never aspire to anorexia or any other eating disorder. My own battle with overeating has been enough of a long and painful road for me to know better than that.

Let me explain. Yesterday I watched the re-broadcast of Oprah's interview with Portia Degeneres. She has just written a book that reveals her struggles with bulimia and anorexia. I do not in any way envy her experiences or desire to be even a little anorexic, no matter what. What caught my attention was why she struggled and how she overcame it.

It sounded like pressures to be a thin actress and feeling insecure got her obsessed with being thin and in control of her eating and the deprivation created binging and purging.

Now she realizes her normal weight and size are a good thing and she accepts being a healthy weight. The pressure is off. She also feels loved and lovable and worthy of being accepted and successful. She said that the key for her now is never to restrict herself from any food, that as long as she can eat as much as she wants whenever she wants, food becomes normal and she doesn't need to eat or over-eat any food. She finds she just wants to eat to feel good and energized and the food amounts and kinds take care of themselves, as does her weight.

I'm watching Oprah listen to this with the same perplexity I'm feeling. We're both trying to figure out how applying that to ourselves could possibly have the same result it does for Portia. I know Oprah eats chips when she's stressed, I go for chocolate. Emotional eating is different than binge eating from over-dieting. Eating a good healthy diet doesn't entirely fix emotional eating, and emotional eating is much less tied to food deprivation.

Right now I'm feeling that tension with food that doesn't feel healthy. I'm aware all the time of needing to eat less to support my goals to lose weight, and so hunger and eating and food are all heavy with anxiety for me. I weigh in every week at my TOPS meeting and I'm in a bad cycle of desperately trying at the last minute to get some weight off before meeting and eating in relief for a few days after. This is not why I'm doing the accountability of weigh ins. I have to figure out how to be honest in my whole week and put the weigh-in into a healthy place in that.