Dare I Say It?

So of course I had to click when I saw "Are you a binge eater?" on Yahoo, referring me to a CNN article. (Of course I know I am one, but I’m always curious to read what, if anything, the media has to say about binge eating.)

I read about Natalie’s two pints of ice cream and sleeve of Ritz crackers with peanut butter, mentally measuring it against my own binges. I wondered if people who knew nothing about binge eating got any sense of the urgency of bingeing, the depths of self-loathing, and the sheer waste of days and weeks and years of a life spent thinking about food. (Personally, I didn’t get any sense of that from the article, and I know the feelings all too well.) And I sighed when I saw how prominently Overeaters Anonymous was mentioned.

On the continuum of self-loathing, I think I hated myself most during my two years of OA. I hated the cultishness of it – how, even in a room full of people who shared the same dirty secrets I did, I felt ostracized because I only had time to attend one meeting a week, as opposed to the three or four or seven a week most people managed (and therefore didn’t understand any of the inside jokes during meetings). I hated the quasi-religious aspects of it – the endless talk of higher powers and surrendering, when I felt like all I was doing was drowning in misery. I hated that, after wasting (that's how it felt) an hour in a meeting, people I didn’t know at all would call to check on me, asking me incredibly personal questions and feeling offended if I didn’t want to answer or chat with them for another 30 minutes. I hated that my life was such a mess that I was desperate enough to think that this would fix it. And I hated myself for hating it; hating nice, well-meaning, decent people and their nice, well-meaning, decent meetings.

Perhaps more than anything, I chafed at the complete lack of flexibility – the belief that it was the OA way or nothing. OA’s credo is three meals a day and life in between – meaning no snacks (though some members have a small one in the afternoon.) When I asked for advice about what to do about a dinner that didn’t start until 8:30 p.m., the response I received was to eat my "abstinent dinner" (abstinence being huge in OA) at home, and then not eat anything at the dinner. Or to not go, since the time didn’t suit my abstinence – and nothing in OA is more important than abstinence. Neither option was appealing.

Making OA – and therefore, my food and eating – the center of my life was the theme of all the answers to all of my questions. When I tried to explain why it was impossible for me to attend more meetings ("more meetings" being the answer to a lot of questions), I was told I’d have more time if I attended more meetings. Huh? (Yes, I assume the idea was that I’d obsess less about food and therefore have more time, but…) Another person suggested I get a new job, since mine didn’t seem compatible with OA. I nodded and said I'd think about it, and still spent another year and a half trying to surrender -- and hating myself for instead feeling like giggling or screaming.

According to its statistics, OA has worked for hundreds of thousands of people – and no doubt it has. But in all the meetings I went to in cities around the globe, I never found a person it worked for who I wanted to be.