The Sweet Taste of Acceptance

I'm done obsessing about my weight, what I eat, and how I look. Bring on the candy!

By Marion Winik, Prevention

The other day, I did something I'd never done before. I bought myself a chocolate bar. After the first few bites, it hit me: I was eating candy, just like a normal person. Have I become a normal person? I wondered. Is that possible? It's certainly been a long, strange trip.

When I went to college in the fall of 1975, I was 5-foot-3 and weighed 140 pounds, not much heavier or thinner than I'd ever been or am right now. I'd wasted much of my adolescence torturing myself about my weight. Already I had tried diet pills, Weight Watchers, Nashville, Scarsdale, Beverly Hills—all with my mother's collaboration. She was chubby as a child and wanted to save me the trouble. I don't fault her for that; a mother now myself, I too want to save my offspring the trouble, but I think of "the trouble" somewhat differently.

Far worse than the weight itself was feeling so bad about it, working so hard to make it go away, and failing all the time. But now I was done with all this body-hating woe: A blossoming feminist, I was about to wade deep into women's studies courses at college and "de-objectify" my body for good.

Shortly after I moved into the dorm, though, something weird began to happen. Right after lunch or dinner, without my feeling nauseated, the food I had eaten would reverse direction. It was a more polite sort of regurgitation than you get with a stomach bug, but it was not optional, either.

And it didn't go away. Months later, the daily vomiting started to seem a little worrisome, so I went to the student health center. After a series of tests, they told me that there was nothing wrong with me physically. The reason I was throwing up must be psychological.

I thought they were out of their minds. The eating disorder bulimia wasn't even named until 1980—years in the future. I had never imagined vomiting on purpose, never mind that I could make myself do so without realizing it.

By my early 20s, I was going to grad school in New York, working, having problems with drugs and boyfriends, and still throwing up after big meals. In a way, I didn't know if I wanted to do anything about the vomiting, because it let me eat without gaining weight, and I liked to eat a lot. (Bulimia comes from the Greek for "the hunger of an ox.") Then I heard that the C.G. Jung Institute of New York offered a deal on therapy if you worked with a student analyst—like getting a haircut at a beauty school. I wanted to talk about my love life; the therapist wanted to talk about my drug use; we settled on what she insisted was an eating disorder. She had me say out loud some of the negative thoughts in my head and then imagine that these criticisms came from other people. The one I imagined most vividly was The Bitch, who wore a pink sweat suit and was a cross between my childhood gym teacher and my mother, though meaner than either.

You ate too much, you pig, she whispered coldly. Look at your thighs.

This is when I saw how I had done this to myself.

Suddenly, some of the cultural critiques I'd absorbed in my academic years began to hit home. I'd learned that women can have good reasons for gaining weight. They don't want to be small, harmless, inconsequential; they want to claim some space. I felt that. I wanted to be big and powerful. I also wanted to be a wraith and a sylph and a waif.

So you see. One of us walked into the bathroom, one of us walked out.

I still threw up after I began to understand all this, but less often. I met and then married a handsome bartender, and our love was a powerful medicine for my messed-up psyche. A few years later, we decided to have a baby.

"Pull over!" I shouted at my husband one morning in my 5th month—we were on our way to a wedding, and I needed huevos rancheros immediately. During pregnancy, I truly did have the hunger of an ox—a pregnant ox. I wasn't hungry because I was crazy, I was hungry because I had a baby inside me, and he was hungry too, for God's sake. Now pull over!

And then came nursing. Some women hate the day their breasts turn into parenting equipment. For me, it was blissful—not the sucking so much as the pure adoration in my son's eyes. My hated hips revealed themselves as excellent, womanly perches for a baby. For the first time, I felt just right.

Growing up has brought me gifts other than children. Exercise was never fun when its purpose was to burn calories, but now I love the way it makes me feel. And with weight lifting, it turns out, you can be small without being weak.

At 49, I am a different person than I was at 18. I don't compare myself with girls on magazine covers, and I gave up obsessive dieting long ago. But I still avoid candy and dessert. Okay, I might sneak a Halloween candy out of the pile—but my mother did not raise a person who goes into a store and purchases a chocolate bar for solo consumption.

Then I did it anyway.

You hear a lot of good things about chocolate these days—endorphins, antioxidants, that sort of thing. But I believe the feeling that rushed through me as that dark, sweet bite melted in my mouth was something else entirely. It was liberation.

Provided by Prevention