Rituals of Perfection
How I tried to fix myself through binging religion, food, exercise, and pretty much anything else you can think of
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My first revelation that I had a disordered relationship with food arrived about a decade ago as I watched Mika Brzezinski disclose a life-long eating disorder on live TV. She described how she would "binge,” such as wolfing down an entire large pizza or eating a whole tray of brownies in one sitting.
I sat there dumbfounded.
These were things I did, but I had never thought of myself as having an eating disorder.
But as Mika continued to explain the dynamic of overeating "bad" foods and then abstaining from eating them—or maybe even from eating anything—to make up for the binge, I had to admit it had a certain familiarity.
The anxiety disorder that had plagued my entire adult life tended to suppress my appetite, and I would often forget to eat until I was ravenous. At that point, I would gorge on french fries and burgers or pizza or any so-called unhealthy food (I think these foods are fine in moderation) I could get my hands on.
I wouldn't just have a meal. I would hoover up everything in sight.
And then I would eat nothing until I was starving again. I didn't realize that this was my version of binging and purging—I thought purging meant that you had to make yourself vomit.
As my anxiety was brought under control in the last five years, I began to be hungry throughout the day, like most people. This, combined with going into perimenopause, meant weight gain.
When I started gaining weight, I did my best to curb my binging habit and eat healthily. At home, there were no temptations. We kept (and still keep) only whole foods in stock and no sugary foods or crackers or things that I wouldn't be able to resist.
After all, who wants to binge on healthy food?
I thought I had everything under control until one night when I was staying at my friend Jonathan's apartment in New York City. He had gone to sleep, and I found myself in the kitchen eating an entire bag of caramel popcorn, then a few KIND bars, and finally rifling through his freezer to see what it had to offer. I was suddenly chipping away at a frozen chocolate pie that was supposed to be defrosted before it was consumed.
I couldn't wait for it to unfreeze. I had to eat it right that moment.
The compulsiveness of my behavior was not lost on me. I wasn't even that hungry—we had eaten dinner just hours before. But I felt like I needed to eat every "bad" food in the house.
I could not stop myself.
It's important to underscore this point. No amount of shame or embarrassment over rifling through a friend's pantry to consume everything with sugar in it could prevent me from engaging in this behavior.