I Am Obese and It's All Our Fault

Last week witnessed a mini-flurry of internet stories which proclaimed that obesity is now "a lifestyle choice," or words to that effect. Apparently this is one of the premises (or at least the popular media think so) of the book The Fattening of America, by economist Eric Finkelstein. I haven't read it, don't know if I will, so I can't say anything about the book. But the threadbare spectre of blaming the ill for their disease once again confronted me as I scrolled through page after page of nutritionists and presumably thin folks piling on to fat people for being fat. The mothership of blame media, the NY Times, featured a glaring example.

If you are obese (and one third of you are according to the government), certainly you know the statistics. Certainly you have an idea of your cholesterol, your blood pressure, and the number of calories you consume each day. You certainly have a ballpark figure in mind when it comes to your weight. But what you also have, most certainly, is a significant amount of pain someplace inside that relates to your weight.

As America gets fatter, and the industrialized world along with us, we become more desparate, more fanatical about losing weight. The diet industry and big pharmaceuticals make billions of dollars from our pain. Our friends and family try to encourage us, and we do all that is expected, and more. We lose weight. We gain weight. We stay about the same. We eat, we starve, we fight, we negotiate. In the end, we give up. We give in to our culture, the money, the food, the stress, the pace, the overwhelming urge to eat what we want and just get on with life, for God's sakes. And we hurt.

And this hurt is what drives many of us to be obese. When we cannot find something to fill the place inside of us that longs to be filled, we eat. And when we eat, we eat what is available quickly and inexpensively. And then we hurt again. This cycle of pain-eat-pain drives many of us past despair to resignation. Yes, I am fat. Yes I will be fat, so what's the point in worrying about it. Here we see the "lifestyle choice" of obesity. It is more properly characterized as resignation to being fat and being in pain about it, because it is less painful to try to get on with life than to try again -- and fail -- to lose weight and become normal. Because we are abnormal. Abnormally fat. And this hurts a lot.

Last week I discovered that my body mass index (BMI) is now 40.1. According to the government, ADA, AHA, and all the other fat watchdogs, I am severely obese. Anything over a 40 BMI gets you that label. Anything over a 30 BMI is obese, for that matter. I have lost 109 pounds during the last 12 months (starting BMI 54.9, morbidly obese). I will need to lose another 76 pounds to be reclassified as overweight (BMI 29.9 or less). Then another 42 pounds to be "normal weight" (BMI <24.9). Such is the gauntlet of angst we obese must trudge to become normal.

These dietary gymnastics are intuitive to me. Put a chronic dieter, a bariatric physician, and a dietician in the same room and see who comes out on top of the food debate. Driven by the pain of obesity, lashed into a state of aggressive passive desperation, the obese chronic dieter can recite the nutritional content of any menu and discuss the latest New England Journal of Medicine article on the role of fat mobilizing molecules in obese rats. And along with all that knowledge, we have lived being fat. We know the deal. Solutions are fleeting as we become fatter and more resigned to being that way.

Under this lash of desperation I have found an approach that matches low-carbohydrate eating with an inner-directed search for love. Without struggling against my food, and without experiencing hunger, I have slowly, steadily lost weight and gained some understanding about the truth of my condition. The pain has diminished. I'm convinced that a spiritual solution is the only way I can stop using food as a substitute for love, or as a stop gap for my pain. It took me 20 years to understand and finally accept this way of living. But once I did, the results were immediate, effective, and long-lasting. For too long I saw the price of total surrender as being too high. And it is not without cost, especially at the outset when old ideas must surrender to new ones. When resignation turns to hope, and desperation turns to love, it's worth the cost at any price.

Predictable Mood Changes

I love getting the way I feel changed.

It didn't take long for me to discover the fastest and most acceptable way to change my feelings: put something in my belly. As a child, changing one's feelings isn't reasoned out. It is observed and intuited. And repeated.

Parents and other authority figures are our best source of learned behavior as young children. For many who are addicted to overeating, we observed compulsive food behavior in our immediate families. Yet many also discovered the mood change that came with eating certain foods, eating too much, or too little, or by controlling eating times. These behaviors vary by individual and are often "discovered" as eating patterns evolve.

I worked so hard at changing my mood by eating that I would experience a feeling shift during the process of eating or acting out with food. These became powerful personality changes that started an addictive process. This phenomenon, along with a brief description of the entire addiction cycle, can be found in Craig Nakken's powerful book, the Addictive Personality.

The seductive thing about acting out with food and the events surrounding food is that these actions have powerful, effective results. Never did I fail to alter my feelings when I overate, or when I cruised fast food drive throughs, or ritually set up a night of bingeing and movie watching at home. When I search for solutions outside of myself, I am never disappointed. Temporarily.

Why doesn't searching for permanent feeling change in objects and events work?

1. The change it produces is not a real change
2. It causes an addictive process to form
3. Tolerance develops so more of the acting out is required
4. A high cost is associated with the behavior (i.e., obesity, illness, frustration, low self esteem)
5. The spirit is diminished and relationship with diety or higher power decays
6. Loss of things most dear to us as we wall off those who object to our addiction
7. The behavior always leads to frustration and real pain, which usually is more hurtful than the reason we acted out in the first place
8. Reality becomes distorted and addictive logic takes hold; those who care about us can't break ito the denial and we shut them out

There are many, many other reasons why seeking fulfillment in temporary actions and objects does not work. Certainly we live in a society that prides itself on individualism (while rewarding being part of the crowd) and an attitude of "hey man, it's a free country." So taking comfort in food is only a natural part of life, right? Yes, for ordinary people. I am not ordinary when it comes to food, and that was a bitter, ugly truth to confront...but it set me free.

The best reason I can think of for not investing time, energy, and emotions in food and acting out behaviors with food is simply this. The food and those behaviors cannot love me in return.

Food is Not Love

It's ok to hurt sometimes.

The media messages we receive daily imply or clearly state that tolerating pain is optional. The central message is, if we can only make good purchasing decisions, our pain may be fully ameliorated.

I am interested in the way we are asked to use food -- in particular starchy, sugary foods -- to handle our pain. Paying careful attention to fast food ads, one sees the addictive process demonstrated unashamedly. "I can't believe I ate it all," "It's a guilty pleasure," "Taste the extreme," each of these ties in emotion and feelings with nutrition.

For many who suffer from some form of food addiction or compulsive behavior concerning food, the idea of being still and feeling badly is unthinkable. Of course pain avoidance is a universal human quality; nobody likes to suffer. But for those who tend to love themselves with food, the sensitivity to pain is somehow heightened. It's sometimes referred to as low resilience - small slights and mild discomforts are too much to bear, unless accompanied by the love we felt we needed and deserved. Especially as children, when the most readily available drug available to us was in the refrigerator, we hunted for a way to change our mood and find the extra love we craved. Many of us turned to food.

Fantasy coping schemes are not unique to overeaters. In fact, one could scroll through a long list of compulsions that are perhaps more deadly in the short term, more risky, less socially acceptable. Yet are any of these as insidious as the desire to eat for love? This desire is so attractive, yet ultimately the harm done meets or exceeds the harm experienced by those who abuse drugs, alcohol, or sex.

When it becomes necessary, in life, to eat to cover our feelings, we have lost control. When we cannot be still and cope with our pain in a manner that does not hurt ourselves or others, we are in the highest state of selfishness. With those first bites, we anticipate that feeling good is an option; that good feeling is just around the corner, about to happen to us (never within us). That next bite will surely provide the locking mechanism that snaps us into place with the good life. It will surely make us feel loved.

Sugar-starchy combinations of food seem to work best for such an eating strategy. A personality change becomes evident when the bolus of various sugars reaches our blood and, very quickly, our brains (even rats show addictive behavior to sugar according to Princeton researchers). Increased heart rate accompanied by rapid palpitations, light sweating, bloating discomfort, gas, and subsequent drowsiness and lethargy -- "sugar crash" -- substantially altered our moods and put us in a twilight state of dullness, and the pain was forgotten momentarily.

The reasons for the pain were inconsequential at the time of that first bite. Low esteem, guilt, shame, cynicism, debts, fear, anxiety, him or her -- any of these provided reasons for us to escape into food. Once again, we loved ourselves with food. Yet we continued to love ourselves with a substance and an event...the preparing (or procuring) and eating are what we looked to for love and relief. For a few minutes, we found it.