How I Gained the First 30 Pounds

This isn’t your typical story of weight gain. I wasn’t falling off the wagon of a diet and just eating more. I didn’t stop exercising, keeping up with running consistently from 160 pounds to 190 pounds. It all started when I was in Germany last time, about a year and a half ago. At the time, I was taking Adderall- not a common drug for symptoms of bipolar depression- but it was working well for a number of months. At some point around the time of our trip, the Adderall stopped working. No longer was I waking up early to beat the crowd at thrift stores and spending hours on my feet. Exercising got a lot harder, and I just couldn’t motivate to do any Ebay listings, despite the huge stash of photos I had at the ready. Aside from the decline in energy from the Adderall, I was all of a sudden in a foreign country with none of the same foods and with frequent holidays where all of the shops would close for days. And as my diet started to unravel, I decided to deal with it in the best way I knew how: to eat whatever I wanted.

This will sound crazy to most people, but I swear this method has worked miracles for me in the past. At the end of high school all the way through college and into my twenties, I followed an anti-diet program that I still swear by for curing compulsive overeating. Two female psychologists in New York City wrote books on the program in the eighties and nineties, and there are still monthly workshops in one of the authors’ offices. The basic idea, which is difficult to explain in a sentence or two, is that when foods are no longer forbidden, when you stop dieting, when you eat according to your hunger, your body achieves its natural weight. It may sound like a fantasy to eat whatever you want and be thin, but this method gave me just that when I was younger. Dealing with compulsive eating since childhood, I was able to learn the difference between stomach hunger (physical hunger) and mouth hunger (emotional hunger). I learned to take better care of myself emotionally, and slowly my mouth hunger decreased. And then once I was eating mostly from stomach hunger, my weight went down and stabilized. I enjoyed any and every kind of food that popped into my head when I asked myself, ”What am I hungry for?” And I enjoyed a low, stable weight without dieting or intense exercising. The brilliant feminist theory behind these books is absolutely mind-blowing. They are: Overcoming Overeating and When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies by Carol Munter and Jane R. Hirschmann. (Ms. Munter still runs the monthly workshop in NYC, as well as an annual conference.) Both books draw from the classic Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach which was first published in the seventies. I am a true believer in this method despite my current circumstances and would defend it regardless. But when I tried to implement it that day in Germany, I did not get what I expected. Initially with this method, you binge. This usually lasts a matter of weeks or months until you’ve rebelled against dieting enough. Then food is no longer taboo, you start to get a handle on the emotional self-care component, and your weight drops down to rest at its natural level.

So I started out bingeing and waited for it to taper off. Having done this before, I knew about all the little psychological traps that can keep the process from happening. I persisted. I surrounded myself with an abundance of food, I listened to my emotional needs, and I fed myself according to my hunger. But this time, it wasn’t working, at least not as quickly as I’d expected. I was going through true agony with my mental illness since the Adderall had stopped working. I sobbed every day, my husband gave me intense foot massages every night, and I found it unbearable to be seen in public. I forced myself to go running in the cold, but aside from that, I was in a downward spiral. A plummet is more like it. I couldn’t go see my doctor, and my mood continued to decline until I decided to go home to the States several weeks early. Throughout this time, I was still trying to “legalize” food and stop dieting. I believed wholly in this method and could not accept that it wasn’t working for me at the time. But my emotional needs were a bottomless pit due to my mental illness. And so no amount of bingeing got it out of my system. I steadily gained weight throughout the month-long trip, the months following at home, and then ultimately when I started taking Seroquel. I’ve often referred to my weight gain from Seroquel here on this blog, but that was only the last 30 pounds. I was already up to 190 when I started on it. And I attribute that weight to my insatiable need for comfort. I could not comfort myself emotionally; I could not talk to myself in a kind or compassionate way. And so I could not remove the need to overeat in the middle of my violent depression. And that’s where those first 30 pounds came from. From trying and failing at a brilliant anti-dieting method, because I could not get a handle on the emotional component. I truly believe that if I were not suffering so deeply and chemically, the food would have worked out fine. But I was a black hole, both emotionally and physically.

The only other example of this type of failure that I can compare it to would be my failure with meditation. In the throes of my worst symptoms, akathisia particularly, meditation was a nightmare. It only made me more acutely aware of how horrible I felt, and did nothing to help it. Lots of experts prescribe meditation for any and every ailment, from general stress to back pain, but I don’t feel mental illness should always be one of them. At certain times meditation has only increased my symptoms and my suffering. And so I put this anti-dieting method in the same category with meditation: brilliant and life-changing for the average mentally healthy person, but not necessarily good for those with severe mental illness.