Food: it's a four-letter word

I thought I would celebrate the start of my 10th week of regular exercise by finally talking about the subject I have been avoiding. My relationship with food is complicated. It's not a love/hate relationship, but it is definitely dysfunctional.

One of my first memories is of eating so many cookies in kindergarten that I threw up. Same result on Mother's Day when I was eight or nine, except then it was cheese and crackers. In my teens I began a love affair with Ronald McDonald (we have broken up several times, but I keep going back). I was in my twenties the first time I ate an entire box of big chocolate donuts. I gained 100 pounds in a year, and I still have almost every one of them. I have not weighed less than 245 pounds in over twenty years.

I use food the way some people use alcohol or drugs or other addictions. Compulsive eating, binge eating...whatever you want to call it. What is so frustrating about it is that I can sometimes go weeks or months without an episode. Then I have days or weeks of uncontrolled consumption. I mostly binge on sweets, but sometimes its meat and potatoes or pizza or hot dogs. It's never veggies, unless you count potatoes as a veggie (which nobody does).

I've done a lot of research, and have come to the conclusion that a combination of a genetic predisposition to addiction (alcoholism on both sides of the family) and establishing these emotional eating patterns early in life is my problem. Neither of these, thank God, is impossible to overcome.

So I'm taking a clue from my success with exercise, and have decided to find a coach to help me with the food side of the fitness equation. Or coaches. Or a group. Or I may go back to a group I was part of a few years ago. Whatever it takes.

Those of you who have never had a food issues probably cannot even imagine what it is like to be compelled to eat even when you know it's hurting you. You may see somebody like me and be completely baffled...not knowing how the hell a person lets herself get that way. You may feel digust or you may feel sympathy.

When you see an obese person keep this in mind...you might be seeing someone who is where I was in my twenties - out of control and overeating to relieve stress or dull pain. Or you might be seeing somebody like me today - working on it, making progress, one day or one meal at a time.

And before you judge too harshly, take a good look at your own life. Contemplate whether you use anything - drugs, sex, shopping, gambling, television - as a way to relieve your stress or dull your pain. And then give thanks that food is not your drug.

Because you can be addicted to almost anything and still look attractive to the world. But being fat in this society sucks.