The “Nourished from the Inside” Diet

It was the summer of 2002, and I’d just turned thirty-five. I weighed three hundred and forty pounds and often found myself in front of refrigerators, half asleep in the middle of the night — never quite sure how I got there.

I’d migrated to Los Angeles from Paris ten years earlier — escaped would be a better word to describe what I did. Weighing anything north of 250 in Paris is like weighing 700 anywhere else. If nothing more than for optics, the move did me good. My deep sense of emptiness and heartache had come along, though; so had my toxic food habits. I continued to eat a lot, and continued to believe that food would satisfy me.

I used my scale for three distinct functions: validation, denial, and shock therapy.

If I ate well, I’d weigh every day. If I didn’t, I’d avoid it for months. If I was ready to get back on track, I’d get on my scale to scare myself into eating better. Before weighing in, I’d always remove underwear and jewelry; as if a bra and a necklace would make any difference in my 300+ range.

When I’d stepped onto the scale that particular morning, the needle banged with a scary thud, all the way to the right; so my weight was possibly even more than the 340 pounds on which it stopped.

That was my highest weight, and the lowest point in my life.

The verdict of that needle triggered complex feelings: horror for one, but also a kind of morbid pride. I weighed as much as the scale was built to read — as if to say, I am now as fat as it’s possible to be.

340. The number was hard to reconcile, but I wasn’t surprised. Not really. I got there from a lifetime of eating too much of the wrong foods, sitting in refrigerators late into the night since I was ten years old. The routine would typically roll out like this: wake up after a few hours in bed, feel alone and empty, sleepwalk to the fridge, eat everything in sight, go back to bed.

The day I hit 340 for the first time, I was living in my dream home. I’d successfully flipped severalhouses, and one of them, a modern 5000-square-feet in the Hollywood Hills, had become mine. Mark, my second husband, was always traveling for work. Leah, my daughter from my first marriage was sleeping at her dad’s. I could only do my food orgies when I was alone in the house.

I went to the kitchen that night and pulled a barstool right up to the fridge, as I would always do; might as well be comfortable.

It didn’t take long for the appliance to beep, reminding me that the door had been open too long. I covered the sensor with the corner of a piece of bread; I don’t like crust anyway. The beeping stopped. I took my time. The cold air felt good, even if the fluorescent light was unkind. I enjoyed delaying the start of my binge.

Not always in the same order, the feast would commence with either cold pizza, cream cheese on a bagel, chocolate-chip cookies, or honey on white bread. I’d spread so much honey and butter on the bread that I’d have to twirl it from the plate to my mouth to avoid dripping any. If I did, I would lick it off the counter. I hated sticky fingers and would wash them immediately if they ever came in contact with the honey.

Meanwhile I’d have opened a can of ravioli — the kind I brought home from Paris, which comes in two sizes: family and single portion. I always bought the family kind, hoping there’d be some left for the next day. As I heated it up, I added copious amounts of butter and shredded cheddar, giving the kitchen a hypnotic scent, which inevitably seduced me into finishing the entire family-size can, after all. Then, I would toast one more slice of bread, for good measure, and use it to soak up the sauce at the bottom of the ravioli pot.

By now, I’d be full, but not enough to stop. That’s when I’d typically be glad that I was wearing a loose nightgown. There’d always be a moment where I’d burp; the kind that brings a little food back up. That was my cue that the end was near.

I knew there was about a ten-minute window when I could still down something and not puke.

I’d argue with myself, begging not to add Nutella to the carnage, please. But while I negotiated in my head, I was also walking toward the pantry. By now, I would have licked the ravioli residue from my spoon to prepare for what I promised would just be a little bit, to change the taste. It never was just a little bit; I would find myself at the bottom of the jar, near the vomiting edge.

I was yanked out of my stupor thinking I heard a noise in another room. Being seen by Leah or Mark in this state would be my rock bottom; like an alcoholic stumbling out of a bar realizing she’d left her kid in the car. No one was home, but the spell was now broken. Plus there was positively no space left in my stomach. I went back to bed.

The next night, I found myself standing in front of the fridge, about to do it all over again. But something stopped me. It was not the beep, nor the light, nor the chill — but something I heard out loud, inside my head: “you can eat whatever you want, but first, can you feel your feelings?”

Whoever, whatever, said those words had more questions: “What exactly are you feeling right now? Are you sad? Are you lonely? Are you scared? Are you angry?”

Beep.

I was still sitting in the fridge and moved myself to the island to give some thought to these questions.

Yes, I was sad. Yes, I was lonely. Yes, I was scared. And yes, I was definitely angry.

My childhood was complicated: both my parents grew up in war zones; my mother Nazi Germany, my father, independent Algeria. Both were forced to abandon their true natures to fit in socially, creatively, societally, and sexually. Both lived lives that were not the lives they wanted. Neither did anything about their trauma and both dealt with their pain by not dealing with it. It had to spill somewhere. My brother and I were easy, if not conscious, scapegoats.

I had a concept for a children’s book when I was one myself. It was about an absurd world where people lived life parallel to themselves: pedestrians walking barefoot, their shoes skipping along next to them; bicyclists pedaling suspended in mid-air, next to their bikes, with no one riding them; passengers sitting on clouds, but on the outside of the plane. Way before I knew the words, I was attempting to process the dissociation to which I was exposed.

As an adult, sitting at the kitchen island in my own home, in my oversized nightgown, I interrupted my usual descent into food hell, and I remembered an exercise I’d learned in therapy years prior:

If [insert any problem] wasn’t the issue, then what was?

If [food] wasn’t the issue, then what was?

Sadness that my parents didn’t know a thing about parenting. Anger that my brother was the favorite. Loneliness that I didn’t belong anywhere. Fear that I was insignificant. Pain that I didn’t matter to anyone.

I’d been in therapy for almost half my life by now, and despite the work I’d done; I’d always found myself back in a refrigerator. In that time, I’d quit smoking three packs a day, stopped being a kleptomaniac, and gotten a handle on my sex addiction; but of all my self-destructive behaviors, food was the most difficult. Eating couldn’t just be eliminated — the lion had to come out of the cage multiple meals a day. I wrestled with that lion as much as I could, but I never won. Ravioli and Nutella always did.

Food had been an anesthesia my whole life, a sleeping pill for my feelings; it had given me a way to numb the pain that kept knocking from the inside.

Until that night, it never dawned on me how related my eating patterns were to my feelings. But in that moment, as I was willing to follow my inner guidance to not eat until I felt — it all came flooding.

I sobbed, recalling my dad consistently crossing my boundaries — his kisses, his touches, his stares — and my mom consistently doing nothing to stop him. Memories of small, big, endless betrayals, trespasses, intrusions, and invasions, came in waves, paused, peaked, then stopped, and started again. I wept, cursed, moaned, and wailed uncontrollably — maybe for ten minutes, or three hours.

With that simple act of allowing my feelings to be, I stopped carrying the unresolved stuff of my parents — my people.

A little dazed, nourished from the inside, I left the kitchen without eating a thing. What had led me to the fridge — loneliness and emptiness — was the exact opposite of what brought me back to bed. I had listened, let myself feel; and that took the place of a food massacre. I was unsure if it was a permanent resolve, or if it was just for one night; but on that night, I’d stopped the toxic sequence that had controlled me for decades.

It took me many years to actually lose the weight, but my mindset was altered that night. Little did I know, this would be the last time I found myself unconscious in a refrigerator. That moment yielded the epiphany I now look back on — 180 pounds later — as the pivotal before and after of my entire relationship with food.