#let's also talk about how! yes! in workplaces fat people are less likely to be given tasks

[fatphobiabusters]

Different mod here.

Since this post is gaining some traction, I wanted to delve into some of the information in the article to really make this sink in.

The highest wage gap listed in the article is 19%. Fat women (I'm guessing they're meaning AFAB people due to only mentioning statistics for "women" and "men") who have a graduate degree make 19% less money than thin women with graduate degrees. And keep in mind that people perceived as women already endure a wage gap, making less money than people perceived as men. So let's assume a scenario where a thin woman with a graduate degree makes $100,000, which is often possible with a graduate degree.

Fat women with a graduate degree would make nineteen thousand dollars less than their colleagues who are thin women.

Yes.

$19,000

This study was done using the data of 23,000 people and then even redone using the data of 90,000 people. The results of both groups of data were the same.

Now take this information a step further. Fat people endure way more oppression than just a wage gap. We face workplace harassment and job discrimination, just to name two of the plethora of aspects of oppression we endure. So not only are we paid less, we have a more difficult time obtaining jobs and being treated fairly at the jobs we do manage to obtain.

This video explains a little about the fatphobia we experience in the workplace. They also mention an old study about the wage gap fat people experience, and you can see from the original article linked just how much higher that wage gap actually is.

I also want to note that before YouTube made dislikes invisible, this video had far more dislikes than likes. Even now, nearly four years since this video was posted, almost all of the comments are fatphobic, cruel, and discriminatory. And yet when I've watched other CNBC videos like this one on YouTube, none of them no matter the topic or marginalized group talked about ever received this much hatred. It's just this video, which is probably related to something the video briefly mentions—while other forms of oppression have slowly become less acceptable, fatphobia is even more socially acceptable than ever. There has not been a decrease in fatphobic bias. No, not even with the body positivity movement that was taken over by thin people to be about "self love" and "body image issues" instead of ending fat people's oppression.

To go beyond the issues of socioeconomic status and job discrimination, this also means that fat people have less money to obtain medical care even though we already are given less healthcare than thin people regardless, and the "healthcare" we are given is of worse quality. More often than not, the healthcare fat people receive is actually deadly. The medical field is rampant with medical fatphobia, resulting in the medical neglect and abuse of fat patients. I can give you countless examples of the horror stories I have been told by fellow fat people over the years about their experiences. Just to name a few, I have heard from other fat people about:

A parent celebrating their fat child becoming thinner due to dying of cancer in a hospital

Fat anorexic people having their anorexia blatantly encouraged (which has also happened to yours truly even when the doctor knew it was a situation involving suicidal ideation)

Fat people in hospitals purposefully not being fed meals because "You don't need food"

A fat woman going to doctors for five years about pain, told every time to "just lose weight," and then being told she had a tumor that whole time and had a week left to live. That estimation of the life she had left was sadly and horrifically true. She used her obituary to ask people to please fight against medical fatphobia so other people won't also have to die

The worth of fat people's lives being debated during covid along with the lives of disabled people and the elderly

Hospitals and nursing homes not including fat people in their evacuation plans, leaving fat patients to die in natural disasters like hurricanes

Fat people being accidentally given chemotherapy and the harm of said treatment dismissed by their doctor because "At least it helped you lose weight!"

Fat people being denied organ transplants because our lives are not valued, causing those fat people to die cruel and completely avoidable deaths

Doctors encouraging every fat person they can to get weight loss surgeries, which mutilate the bodies of fat people for extremely temporary weight loss while giving lifelong health complications and even killing so many of the fat people who were pressured or forced to receive the surgery

And all of that is just 1% of the examples I can give you. So we have medical neglect and abuse of fat people combined with inability to even access healthcare due to fatphobia and socioeconomic status. That's already bad enough, but fat people also intentionally avoid going to see a doctor until a medical problem is far worse, making it harder to treat. Since we almost always just receive fatphobic medical abuse and neglect when we try to see a doctor, so many of us just stop trying to obtain healthcare at all. When we're told to "just lose weight" because doctors believe weight loss is the new bloodletting, and demanding impossible weight loss is also way easier than doing your job of actually examining a patient, we end up with more health problems. And yet fat people are blamed for any and all health problems we have instead of blaming the healthcare that was either inaccessible, harmful, neglectful, or even deadly, and all the while fatphobes complain about fat people "using up too much healthcare."

Everything I've mentioned is just a single aspect of the oppression that fat people endure. I could write a fifty page essay about all of the factors of fatphobia that exist. All of it is also extremely connected and usually cyclical.

Don't give fat people healthcare, fat people die, blame death on fatness instead of actual cause, weight loss corporations make more money, more stigma that prevents fat people from receiving healthcare, repeat.

Make sports inaccessible to fat people, don't even allow fat people to play, portray fat people in media as incompetent at sports so we don't even try, use lack of fat people in sports as "evidence" for fat people not being able to do sports, don't even give any attention or sponsorships to fat professional athletes, even less representation now of fat people doing sports, tell the next generation of fat kids that no fat people are good at sports while also harassing the fat kids who try, repeat.

If you claim to be progressive but don't include fat people in your activism (or worse, actively oppress and abuse fat people, especially those of us who talk about being oppressed), you are not progressive. You are not for equality. You still want an acceptable punching bag in society who you can use as the bottom rung of the social hierarchy you promote, and you've decided that fat people are perfect for the job. I'm also not going to explain unbiased weight science to you to prove our worth, to prove fatness is as unchangeable as everything else, because that shouldn't be necessary to care about a group's oppression. And yet, I have heard over and over again throughout the years from people who claim to be progressive that fatphobia is acceptable because oppression only matters if the identity "isn't a choice." The ignorance about weight science when progressives say this BS is so palpable, but it's also fucked up that there is apparently criteria that needs to be met for people who think they care about inequality to give a shit about *looks at notes* inequality.

I do not feel like searching for tons of links at the moment since all of this has been talked about before on this blog a million times. If you want links to research, I suggest looking at the blog @bigfatscience, listening to the podcast Maintenance Phase, reading the research links written on this post, reading Aubrey Gordon's published books or online articles, this list of fat activism literature, this list of ways that fatphobia is encouraged in the queer community, this discussion of just the tip of the iceberg of how fat people are horribly represented in media, the resource guide on this very blog, or just search this blog for topics you want to learn about. Because Tumblr's search system is as functional as Tumblr itself, you'll have better luck searching this blog using a desktop computer by typing the url and then "/search/" plus the key term you want. Use plus signs to separate words instead of spaces.

It's time to care about more than just thin people in marginalized groups. If you want to end oppression, you can't pick and choose which forms of oppression "actually matter."

Equality isn't achievable when written with an asterisk.

-Mod Worthy

So you definitely don't want to read the comments on this one, but there's a new study out showing just how bad weight discrimination in the work force can be.

I like how they examine how the impact intersects with class and gender (just men and women, with 23000 ppl in their sample, I'm 100% sure there were trans ppl, unless they were deliberately excluded)

tw: o word, lots of fatphobia in the comments.

These results suggest that the aggregate costs of wage discrimination borne by overweight workers in America are hefty. Suppose you assume that obese women, but not men, face a wage penalty of 7% (the average across all such women in our sample) and that this is the same regardless of their level of education. Then a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that they bear a total cost of some $30bn a year. But if you account for both the discrimination faced by men, and for the higher wage penalty experienced by the more educated (who also tend to earn more), the total cost to this enlarged group more than doubles, to $70bn per year.

-Mod Siarl

[katierosefun]

hot take but really should be an ice-cold take, but okay whatever, i feel like going off: fat-shaming is actually bad, no matter who you’re criticizing. if you’re going to criticize someone for being racist, sexist, homophobic, all the bad things, then criticize them purely because of that. do not go after their body shape/body type and add “fat” in there as an insult. 

when you do say “ah, this person is a fat, sexist, racist, homophobic asshole”, you’re lumping in “fat” as a bad trait. given that people who are fat (and i use this word purely as a description, not as an insult, because the term ‘fat’ has been so demonized by media), are already severely discriminated against by doctors and work spaces and just like...the media in general, using the term “fat” to describe someone who’s just an asshole feeds into the already-forced narrative that all fat people are greedy and lazy is so incredibly damaging. 

like. someone’s body shape or someone’s health is not something that should not be in the criteria for someone who’s a jerk. if someone’s a jerk, you can find other ways to explain why instead of going after their body shape.

[fatliberation]

I’m Abandoning Body Positivity and Here’s Why

In short: it’s fatphobic.

“A rallying cry for a shift in societal norms has now become the skinny girl’s reassurance that she isn’t really fat. Fatness, through this lens of ‘body positivity’, remains the worst thing a person can be.” (Kayleigh Donaldson)

•  •  •

I have always had a lot of conflicting opinions about the body positivity movement, but it’s much more widely known (and accepted, go figure) than the fat liberation movement, so I often used the two terms interchangeably in conversation about anti-fatness. But the longer I’ve been following the body positivity movement, the more I’ve realized how much it has strayed from its fat lib origins. It has been hijacked; deluded to center thin, able, white, socially acceptable bodies.

Bopo’s origins are undoubtedly grounded in fat liberation. The fat activists of the 1960s paved the way for the shred of size acceptance we see in media today, initially protesting the discrimination and lack of access to equal opportunities for fat people specifically. This early movement highlighted the abuse, mental health struggles, malpractice in the medical field, and called for equal pay, equal access, equal respect, an end to fatphobic structures and ideas. It saddens me that it hasn’t made much progress in those regards. 

Today, the #bopo movement encapsulates more the idea of loving your own body versus ensuring that individuals regardless of their weight and appearance are given equal opportunities in the workplace, schools, fashion and media. Somehow those demands never made it outside of the ‘taboo’ category, and privileged people would much more readily accept the warm and fuzzy, sugar-coated message of “love yourself!” But as @yrfatfriend once said, this idea reduces fat people’s struggles to a problem of mindset, rather than a product of external oppressors that need to be abolished in order for fat people to live freely.

That generalized statement, “love yourself,” is how a movement started by fat people for the rights of fat people was diluted so much, it now serves a thin model on Instagram posting about how she has a tummy roll and cellulite on her thighs - then getting praised for loving her body despite *gasp!* its minor resemblance to a fat body. 

Look. Pretty much everyone has insecurities about their bodies, especially those of us who belong to marginalized groups. If you don’t have body issues, you’re a privileged miracle, but our beauty-obsessed society has conditioned us to want to look a certain way, and if we have any features that the western beauty standard considers as “flaws,” yeah! We feel bad about it! So it’s not surprising that people who feel bad about themselves would want to hop on a movement that says ‘hey, you’re beautiful as you are!’ That’s a message everyone would like to hear. Any person who has once thought of themselves as less than beautiful now feels that this movement is theirs. And everyone has insecurities, so everyone feels entitled to the safe space. And when a space made for a minority includes the majority, the cycle happens again and the majority oppresses the minority. What I’m trying to explain here is that thin people now feel a sense of ownership over body positive spaces. 

Regardless of how badly thin people feel about their bodies, they still experience thin privilege. They can sit down in a theater or an airplane without even thinking about it, they can eat in front of others without judgement, they can go the doctor with a problem and actually have it fixed right away, they can find cute clothes in their size with ease, they do not suffer from assumptions of laziness/failure based on stereotype, they see their body type represented everywhere in media, the list goes on and on. They do not face discrimination based off of the size of their body. 

Yet diet culture and fatphobia affects everyone, and of course thin people do still feel bad about the little fat they have on their bodies. But the failure to examine WHY they feel bad about it, is what perpetuates fatphobia within the bopo movement. They’re labeled “brave” for showing a pinch of chub, yet fail to address what makes it so acceptably daring, and how damaging it is to people who are shamed for living in fat bodies. Much like the rest of society, thin body positivity is still driven by the fear of fat, and does nothing to dismantle fatphobia within structures or within themselves.

Evette Dionne sums it up perfectly in her article, “The Fragility of Body Positivity: How a Radical Movement Lost Its Way.”

“The body-positive media economy centers these affirming, empowering, let-me-pinch-a-fat-roll-to-show-how-much-I-love-myself stories while failing to actually challenge institutions to stop discriminating against fat people. More importantly, most of those stories center thin, white, cisgender, heterosexual women who have co-opted the movement to build their brands. Rutter has labeled this erasure ‘Socially Acceptable Body Positivity.’

“On social media, it actually gets worse for fat bodies: We’re not just being erased from body positivity, fat women are being actively vilified. Health has become the stick with which to beat fat people with [sic], and the benchmark for whether body positivity should include someone” (Dionne).

Ah, yes. The medicalization of fat bodies, and the moralization of health. I’ve ranted about this before. Countless comments on posts of big women that say stuff like “I’m all for body positivity, but this is just unhealthy and it shouldn’t be celebrated.” I’ve heard writer/activist Aubrey Gordon once say that body positivity has become something like a shield for anti-fatness. It’s anti-fatness that has been repackaged as empowerment. It’s a striking double-standard. Fat people are told to be comfortable in their bodies (as if that’s what’s going to fix things) but in turn are punished when they’re okay with being fat. Make it make sense.

Since thin people feel a sense of ownership over body positive spaces, and they get to hide behind “health” when they are picking and choosing who can and cannot be body positive, they base it off of who looks the most socially acceptable. And I’m sure they aren’t consciously picking and choosing, it comes from implicit bias. But the socially acceptable bodies they center are small to medium fat, with an hourglass shape. They have shaped a new beauty standard specifically FOR FAT PEOPLE. (Have you ever seen a plus sized model with neck fat?? I’m genuinely asking because I have yet to find one!) The bopo movement works to exclude and silence people who are on the largest end of the weight spectrum. 

Speaking of exclusion, let’s talk about fashion for a minute.

For some reason, (COUGH COUGH CAPITALISM) body positivity is largely centered around fashion. And surprise surprise, it’s still not inclusive to fat people. Fashion companies get a pat on the back for expanding their sizing two sizes up from what they previously offered, when they are still leaving out larger fat people completely. In general, clothing companies charge more for clothes with more fabric, so people who need the largest sizes are left high and dry. It’s next to impossible to find affordable clothes that also look nice. Fashion piggybacks on the bopo movement as a marketing tactic, and exploits the very bodies it claims to be serving. (Need I mention the time Urban Outfitters used a "curvy” model to sell a size it doesn’t even carry?)

The movement also works to exclude and silence fat Black activists.

In her article, “The Body Positivity Movement Both Takes From and Erases Fat Black Women” Donyae Coles explains how both white people and thin celebrities such as Jameela Jamil profit from the movement that Black women built.

“Since long before blogging was a thing, fat Black women have been vocal about body acceptance, with women like Sharon Quinn and Marie Denee, or the work of Sonya Renee Taylor with The Body Is Not An Apology. We’ve been out here, and we’re still here, but the overwhelming face of the movement is white and thin because the mainstream still craves it, and white and thin people have no problem with profiting off the work of fat, non-white bodies.”

“There is a persistent belief that when thin and/or white people enter the body positive realm and begin to repeat the messages that Black women have been saying for years in some cases, when they imitate the labor that Black women have already put in that we should be thankful that they are “boosting” our message. This completely ignores the fact that in doing so they are profiting off of that labor. They are gaining the notoriety, the mark of an expert in something they learned from an ignored Black woman” (Coles).

My next essay will go into detail about this and illuminate key figures who paved the way for body acceptance in communities of color. 

The true purpose of this movement has gotten completely lost. So where the fuck do we go from here? 

We break up with it, and run back to the faithful ex our parents disapproved of. We go back to the roots of the fat liberation movement, carved out for us by the fat feminists, the queer fat activists, the fat Black community, and the allies it began with. Everything they have preached since the 1960s and 70s is one hundred percent applicable today. We get educated. We examine diet culture through a capitalist lens. We tackle thin, white-supremacist systems and weight based discrimination, as well as internalized bias. We challenge our healthcare workers to unlearn their bias, treat, and support fat patients accordingly. We make our homes and spaces accessible and welcoming to people of any size, or any (dis)ability. “We must first protect and uplift people in marginalized bodies, only then can we mandate self-love” (Gordon).

Think about it. In the face of discrimination, mistreatment, and emotional abuse, we as a society are telling fat people to love their bodies, when we should be putting our energy toward removing those fatphobic ideas and structures so that fat people can live in a world that doesn’t require them to feel bad about their bodies. It’s like hitting someone with a rock and telling them not to bruise!

While learning to love and care for the body that you’re in is important, I think that body positivity also fails in teaching that because it puts even more emphasis on beauty. Instead of saying, “you don’t have to be ‘beautiful’ to be loved and appreciated,” its main lesson is that “all bodies are beautiful.” We live in a society obsessed with appearance, and it is irresponsible to ignore the hierarchy of beauty standards that exist in every space. Although it should be relative, “beautiful” has been given a meaning. And that meaning is thin, abled, symmetric, and eurocentric. 

Beauty and ugliness are irrelevant, made-up constructs. People will always be drawn to you no matter what, so you deserve to exist in your body without struggling to conform to an impossible and bigoted standard. Love and accept your body for YOURSELF AND NO ONE ELSE, because you do not exist to please the eyes of other people. That’s what I wish we were teaching instead. Radical self acceptance!

As of today, the ultimate message of the body positivity movement is: Love your body “despite its imperfections.” Or people with “perfect and imperfect bodies both deserve love.” As long as we are upholding the notion that there IS a perfect body that looks a certain way, and every body that falls outside of that category is imperfect, we are upholding white supremacy, eugenics, anti-fatness, and ableism.

[geekywritings]

JUNGKOOK X READER PART 2 - Is this real life or am I in a drama?

Part 2 of my little Jungkook x Reader story. For all who need a recap of Part 1: You are a young vet, just trying to make your way home from work when suddenly Jungkook falls right into your car, taking refuge from a group of sasaengs. You give him a ride home and he exchanges contact details with you, promising to stay in touch.

The prompt for part 2 is: “It’s pouring rain, why are you here?”

For the next few days, all you could think about was that meeting. It still seemed so very surreal. And you didn’t even dare tell anyone about the incident, because who would really believe you? Even your best friends and work colleagues would just raise and eyebrow and shake their heads most likely. Such things simply didn’t happen to people. They were part of k-drama scripts or popular web toons and after a week, you did start to wonder if it had all been some kind of strange dream.

But exactly that evening, when you had just come out of the shower to enjoy a cup of tea and a new episode of your favourite show, your phone beeped with a new Kakao Talk message. You gave your phone a lazy glance and then almost dropped your mug when you saw it was from none other than Jungkook.

JK: “I’m sorry for the late reply, Miss Vet. Things got kinda hectic. But I have not forgotten my promise. I still owe you that thank you.”

You had to reread that message a few times and for a second you wondered if it was a scam perhaps, but who else would now about that event but him? For a second you wondered what to answer before typing:

Y/N: “No problem. You are an idol after all. And you did already thank me.”

It took only a few seconds until his answer popped up.

JK: “It still doesn’t feel like enough.”

Wow, did he know how cool that sounded? 

Y/N: “You don’t have to worry. Really. I’m glad I could help.”

This time he took a bit longer to reply.

JK: “Do you like flowers?”

Y/N: “Yes of course. Who doesn’t?”

JK: “Which ones are your favourites?”

That one was harder to answer. You liked quite a few and just named them all, allowing him to make the final choice.

JK: “Great. Can I send them to your workplace? I don’t think florists deliver late in the evening.”

It was sweet that he was so dead set on sending you flowers as a proper thank you and while part of you was delighted, the other part wondered how to explain the bouquet to your colleagues at the vet office. Still, you typed in your adress and sent it out. 

From then on you thought the conversation would end, but apparently Jungkook was in a talkative mood. He revealed that he had a free evening and was just relaxing on the couch with a good meal, before asking you what you were up to. You told him about the drama and he suggested watching at the same time, sharing comments through text. 

You had never done anything like it before, least of all with a stranger, but Jungkook seemed so nice and it didn’t feel so intimidating to write with an idol over messages. And after the first few shared comments, you actually started to really enjoy it. You two ended up talking throughout the entire episode, which was almost an hour long and then even half an hour on top until Jungkook announced that he was heading to bed. Noticing the time, you realized it was time to hit the pillows yourself. 

But as you laid there in your bed, you kept reading through the chat history, as if making sure it was still real. Especially that “Goog Night” with the cute little emoji brought a smile to your face, before you finally turned off the night light.

____

For the next two weeks, he kept writing texts every other day. Sometimes it was just a random “How are you?” or a comment to your recently posted Kakao Story that he didn’t dare post publicly. But sometimes he would ask if you were watching that drama again to share comments in real time. It had become kind of a ritual when the third week started and a day without his messages felt weird. You still couldn’t tell anyone about it, but your friends and colleagues did start noticing your smiles and your eager grabs for the phone. But whenever they teased, you just said it was some guy online. Their would never believe the truth and you didn’t want to put Jungkook in trouble either. You had seen how crazy his fans could be, so the last thing he needed was your chats to become the topic of online gossip. Besides, it was kind of exhilarating to have a secret like that. At this point, you had already totally forgotten about the flowers.

During the fourth week of knowing Jungkook, you were staying late at the clinic, taking your regular night shift to take care of your little patients. You had just made your rounds, giving all the animals their medicine and checking on their bandages, before sitting down in the reception area, in case of emergencies coming in. But it was a super quiet evening, so you took out your phone. Almost on cue, a message popped up: “Finished work?”

Y/N: “Nope, having a night shift today.”

JK: “Oh, sounds tough.”

Y/N: “Not really. It’s quiet tonight.”

Nothing came after that and you put the phone away again, turning your head to the entry, the glassdoor giving you a perfect view of the rain shower outside. It really was coming down hard today. Bored, you took another round visiting your furry patients, giving them an extra round of cuddles. Suddenly the sound of the door tore through the hallway and you were quick to place the cat with the broken paw down to go and check on the new arrival.

You were utterly stunned to see Jungkook standing in the half opened door, dripping wet and with a huge bouquet of your favourite flowers in hand. 

“It’s pouring rain! Why are you here?!”, you exclaimed, approaching him with a shake of your head. 

“Well, florists dont deliver at this hour.”, he said cheekily with a shrug. “So I came personally.” 

He held out the dripping bouquet to you, which you took gratefully, enjoying the heavy fragrance of the flowers.

“You really shouldn’t have, but thank you. They are gorgeous.”, you said, sending him a smile, before inviting him to the staff room. 

“Let me make you a tea and grab you a towel.”

“You got coffee instead?”, he asked, running a hand through his hair. It had changed color, you noticed, though you also instantly thought that you prefered it black. 

A few minutes later you came back with a small towel and a steaming cup of coffee, taking a seat across from him at the small table. The entire room was tiny, but it was enough for the team.

“So this is where you work, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s a good place. It has nice people and I like how we truly take our time for each patient.”, you explained. You knew that not every clinic was like that, having done internships elsewhere during your studies. 

“Aren’t you busy though?”, it was now your turn to ask him a question.

“I am most nights, but we do get our time off as well.”, Jungkook replied. “Our agency is a good place too.” You nodded, having read up a bit about Big Hit since your meeting with one of their idols. You also realized that you did know and enjoy quite a few of BTS’ songs, even though you had never been able to put a face to them. Now you enjoyed them even more.

“Do you want a tour?”, you asked, after a minute of silence fell between you, during which Jungkook tried to dry his hair. He agreed with a nod, before following you around. There wasn’t much to show, but he did spend some time in the patient rooms, giving the animals some pets and cuddles. He was good with them, you notcied and they seemed to like him in return.

“You have two cats at home, right?”, he asked, his hand still stroking a fat tabby, who was at the clinic because of stomach problems. The owner insisted something was wrong with him, even though you had determined that he just needed a change in food and a consistent diet. 

“Yeah, Mr. Paws and Pogi.”, you replied. “I got them both from here, when the owners didn’t want them anymore.”

Jungkook’s eyes snapped to you, one of his eyebrows raised. “People do that?”

“Sometimes, unfortunately. Mr. Paws has a missing paw, ironically. We had to amputate it and the owner thought his cat would need special treatment because of it. And Pogi just needs regular medication and special food.” Small things really, but some owners just couldn’t handle it. 

“I saw pictures of them and I never notcied the missing paw.”, Jungkook said.

“I don’t make a point of making it the focus on pictures.” 

You ended the tour back in the staff room, where Jungkook took his coffee for a few sips, the drink instantly helping to warm him up. 

“I have to miss our drama this friday.”, he suddenly announced. “So you have to give me detailed updates or at least a good summary.”

“You could just watch the rerun online.”, you suggested.

“It’s no fun alone. So unless you can wait a day for the new episode...”

“I make no promises, since the last episode ended on a cliffhanger.. but I’ll try to be patient.” He smiled at your humor, but you were serous. The show was more enjoyable with him. 

“How did you get here?”, you eventually asked.

“I took a cab, but told them to let me out in front of a restaurant nearby. From there I walked.” In the pouring rain no less. Probably so the cab driver wouldn’t tell where he went. It was a clever ruse, but it was a shame that it was even necessary. 

“Need a ride home?”, you asked. “I think I’m not a bad driver and I have some minor experience with idol passengers.”

His smile grew even wider at that. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“But I do stil have to work for an hour before I can take my break.”, you said, glancing at the clock on the wall.

“Just a break? What time do you go home?”

“This is just like a hospital with normal night shifts. Usually they are covered by our senior staff, but because some are on holiday, the task falls to me. So today, I’m staying till 7am. But I get the next day off.”, you explained. Those almost 24 hour shifts were draining, but rare, so you didn’t mind them at all. 

“Oh, I think I will need loads of coffee to make it until 7am...”, he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I might as well keep you company. That will be the perfect way to show my gratitude.”

“You really don’t have you...”; you started. 

“I have a free day tomorrow as well, so I don’t mind.”, he insisted casually. “Besides, we get a chance to talk about that drama in person. It’s easier than typing.”

You still didn’t get why he wanted to stay. Somehow you could not imagine that it was because he simply started to enjoy your company through your online talks.

For almost the whole night, you just talked and drank copious amounts of coffee. He followed you on your patrol rounds, helping you with minor tasks whenever he could. And although it was strange, it was the best night shift ever. Most of the time, it didn’t feel like you were hanging out with an idol, but just with a really nice guy. A really handsome one at that. 

“This is nice.”, Jungkook said, voicing what you had been thinking. “But I do need another coffee.”

“You could also just take a nap.”, you offered. “I’ll wake you before it’s time to go.” It was already 4 am at this point. 

He seemed to think about the offer. “Ok, but we will grab some breakfast together to make up for lost time.”

Did he really feel like he owed you all this time? You weren’t quite sure what to answer, so you just nodded and went to grab him a blanket. There was a small sofa in the staff room specifically for the nightshift or patients who could not see blood. 

“Goodnight, Jungkook.”

“Goodnight, Y/N”

Hearing it live was so much better than reading his text you decided. And with a smile you made yourself another coffee to last the remaining hours. 

[kastartss]

I really need help with my mental health condition, please take your time to read my story (if you are willing to only)

Here’s an introduction. Hey, my (not real) name is Kat. I’m 14 (yes, I know, a literal fetus) and I’m from Vietnam.

Two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with anxiety, and honestly, I was not surprised. But then the more I think about it, the more I realize that I have had it for almost my entire life, and I have only been around for 14 years. I felt my social anxiety kick in when I was about in year one in primary school. I remember how bubbly I was of a toddler, always waving and saying hi to adults in my neighborhood. But then I went to school and things changed. I got 2 close friends, let’s call them A and P. I hung out with them, but before I had those two friends, I never recall being in a place without friends. In kindergarten, as far as I could remember, I have many friends. So when I go to school for the first time, I didn’t have close friends. I was still bubbly at the time, talking to kids in my class, but in break time, I have no one to talk with. Even after I got A and P as my friends, sometimes they would gang up on me and I would have total breakdowns and sitting alone, feeling betrayed because no one likes me.

I think that's when I started being less of an exuberant child. I noticed that I have stopped waving to adults, I became more terrified of being around strangers or performing on stage (which was a thing I did all the time in kindergarten). And as time goes on, I develop the fear of trivial things, getting worried every time I go on a trip or holiday (eg. fear that the plane will crash, fear that there would be tsunami at the beach, etc.) or having existential crisis or death related worries. And then when I reach grade four, I got my first crush, I spent all night crying because wow, new emotion unlocked. He’s this sporty boy, sitting next to me in classes, and guess what? He had a crush on my then best friend. I slowly realize, when I reach secondary school, that I am less valuable than many. 

On the second week of sixth grade (secondary school), I had a mental breakdown and I stayed in the bathroom for the entire English lit lesson. The teachers found me, but I couldn’t explain why I ran away. I found it too embarrassing. I ran away because every seats next to a girl is taken and I would’ve had to sit next to this big, scary boy. I didn't know why I felt that way, why I panicked over such a small and stupid thing, but that night I went home, told my mom school’s fine, and found a knife to just end myself.

But of course I didn’t. I was afraid of getting hurt. I was afraid of seeing the life leaving my body. And I remember my mom telling me my life is the most important thing I have.

The reason I’m afraid of getting hurt is pretty damn simple: my mom hit me all the time as a kid. I’m not traumatized by it. But do I cry at night, getting upset and guilty about the things I did to deserve it? Yes, yes I did. But did I think much of it or find ways to stop getting hit? No, no I didn't. I got hit all the time for lying, for not obeying, for being lazy. But my mom really loves me, she does. She yelled at me, she slapped me, she threw books at my face, humiliated me sometimes in public, and hit me with broomsticks and clothes hangers because she said “she wanted the best for me”. She wanted me to change for the better but haha jokes on her, the more she hit me the more stubborn I get. And so update: I’m still getting hit by her for doing shits recently. I have questioned if it’s abusive or not, because I know she got anger issues and she said that herself, to not let her get angry. But in my country, getting hit by your moms is like a casual thing. It’s like depression jokes, we joke about our fucked up mental health and in my place we joke about getting hit my our moms. It's too common that I don't know if it’s abusive or not anymore, that’s one thing I need help on.

Back to the main story. So sixth grade is the time I start feeling conscious about my body. I’m gonna bluntly say this: my body is disproportionally fat. It was as a kid, and it still is now. My legs and arms are normal, not too skinny, but normal, but my body, the torso and chest area, oh boy, that's where all the fat is. If my body fat is spread out evenly, I wouldn’t have complained, it would be beautiful. But despite how much I tried, the fat would only be in that area, and I look ugly in everything. I got self conscious when we did a movie project, I got self conscious when I have to wear stage costumes, and I start acknowledging that I’m not the popular girl. I don't get why girls my age use lipstick and make up, and how they have money to buy expensive clothes. I was naïve, and I wanted to be like them: popular and valued by people. I was the wallflower, no one knows me except my few friends and I don't expect them to. I started developing a mindset that no one remembers me, and I’m insignificant. 

Grade seven, I changed school. And it’s when I found out about fandoms. I liked Harry Potter, and I wrote some fanfictions that one of my friends encourage me to post it on Wattpad, so I did. That’s when I made internet friends, and I got exploited to issues like lgbtqa+, pop culture, and mental health. One of my internet friends, let’s call her W, is queer and got depression. That’s when I started digging deep in these issues, learning about mental health and how to help people with them. And that’s when I start realizing I may have a mental health problem. W attempted suicide last year, in 2017. Fortunately, she survived. I had spent many nights texting her out of it, cheering her up, and the more I’m around her, the more I discover about myself.

This year, I’ve learnt things about myself that I would've had no idea about two years ago. I identify as bisexual, and thinking about a year ago, I still thought being gay is unfortunate. In my country, same sex marriage is legal, but is not very welcomed by the people and is considered a touchy subject. Many consider it an illness and pity people whom identify as such. Generally, no one really cares until it’s their children. My mom didn't like it. She thinks it’s a phase (classic.) and being bi would bring disadvantages to my life (she’s very wrong I daresay it’s literally 20gayteen and two women from the Bachelor Vietnam just ditched the guy for each other???) and that makes me doubt if my mom is ever right (she’s very convincing in most situations, unfortunately). 

I also learnt about my anxiety, like I noted. Two weeks ago, I seek help from the school counselor after being tempted to kill myself out of pure self hate. I have had extreme self hate for the last month but I thought it’s normal. One event that lead to me thinking this way is that one fight I had with my parents that my mom threatened to jump off the window to die and to leave the house forever, she said how terrible I am and I felt like being slapped across the face being it just hit me then: I am terrible. When I was younger I thought people don't like me because im ugly and I really wanted them to like me for my personality. But then the fight happen and I found out: im ugly both inside and outside. That’s when I started to lose hope, my grades (which was going bad before) got worse and when I got a bad result for maths finals, I got devastated and got a panic attack. I climbed to the tallest floor in my school building and lie there, falling asleep and let my mind shut down. My plan was to jump off the building and end my life but the door to outside was locked so I just curled up there and cry. I got found two hours later, and the teachers told me absolute bullshit because my country is absolutely obsolete about mental health. 

It just got worse and worse since March. My mom says I should stop being lazy, stop procrastinating, be more productive and I hate being at home, because my mom use my bedroom as her workplace and I have no privacy. I have to face my mom all day in summer, and that drove me crazy. Even when I had the chance to go to England for a month for summer camp, I still feel insignificant and lonely when I stare at the crowds being happy. My anxiety is super clear, but oh boy how funny I was. 

I thought I was faking it. I thought all of this is me wanting people to pity me, so I have to fake my anxiety and depression. Most of the times I look up for symptoms of depression and anxiety, I hope those symptoms match. Because I wanna be right, I don't wanna be an attention seeker, I want something to blame for my behaviors. 

All the tests I took for depression tell me I have severe depression. But some days I don't feel down or anything. I just felt fine, and deep down I feel guilty for not caring, because does this mean i’m faking my mental illness oh my god. I have a girlfriend. We broke up once, and now we are talking again. She’s in America and we only can text each other, but I don't feel like im ever good enough for her. All I feel is self hate and unworthiness. 

This is the thing I want you guys to help me about: Do I really have these mental illnesses? Am I making it up? Am I just paranoid and crave attention?

The thing that makes me doubting myself is the fact that around me, many kids are raised like me. Being hit my their moms, have the same education, but they’re not depressed. they don't have social anxiety. They’re doing alright. So I’m afraid this is because I got myself into this myself by going on the internet and reading about gay shits and befriend depressing people and got this myself. I’m afraid I’m making this up to be relevant. 

Please help me with this, or just reblog to help me find an answer. I’m so sorry I’m wasting your time. But please, I need to find myself. I don't want to feel suicidal again.

[thenervousmedic]

A coffee a day... (Connor X Reader)

Note : (Dying noises)

Word count : just over 3k.

Chapter 6 : Lose one thing to gain another.

Teenagers can be so cruel.

At a time in your life where every little interaction means the world to you, outside influence can change an angel to a brat or a shy girl into a monster.

Fortunately for you, bullies didn't get to you very often. If anything you found their dumb insults funny because of the many vastly better ones you had already thought of. Just calling you ‘Fat’ or ‘ugly’ wasn't enough anymore- if they wanted a fight they'd have to work for it.

That being said… you had a pretty big weakness. Other bullied students.

You hated watching them get torn to shreds by some tough guy dumbass and their trio of mindless minions.

“G-Gavin, please, I j-just need to get past-” A small, dorky looking, man cried out as he was pushed into the dirt. His glasses skidding across the gravel towards your feet. The bullies shouted mean things, but you barely noticed, interrupting their enjoyment with a rough punch to his face. It stung your knuckles like hell, but the look of shock they gave you was more than worth it.

“Go fuck yourself, Gavin.” You spat harshly as they turned tail to tell a teacher on you; the runty child at your back dusting himself off.

“T-thanks…” He fumbled with his glasses, sliding them awkwardly up a wonky button nose. “You didn't have to.”

“Of course I did.” You scoff proudly, holding yourself a lot more confidently than your new companion. “Come on, you're staying with me now, they won't bother you anymore.What is your name?”

He stares at you, at a complete loss for words, before nodding briskly and taking your hand. “My name Is J-Jayden, you?”

“Y/N.”

--

“Y/N, I must insist you rest-”

“Nuh-uh. You said I should help if I could, so I'm going to help.” Your determination came off as stubbornness but it was all in good intentions. Today was going to be a slow day, but if you could at the very least stay with your two guardians during their work hours you'd feel a little less awkward about being left in Hanks home by yourself.

“Hank, how do I get them to cooperate-” It was then you noticed him watching the two of you. Clearly finding this funny, a big shit eating grin plastered to his muzzle. The lack of drinking the night before meant to hangover- something Hank sometimes wished he had anyway to tolerate Connors non-stop working demeanor.

“Give up, Connor, it's not worth getting your wires in a twist.”

“My wires can't get twisted, lieutenant, they're not-”

“For fucks sake, just forget it-” It was your turn to grin like a dumbass as Connors lip twinged into a tiny smirk. If you didn't know better you'd think Connor was annoying his partner on purpose.

“Don't be too hard on Puppydroid, he's still learning to adapt to your attitude.” You and Hank share an amused glance at one another. Connor suddenly looking a little lost in the conversation.

“In that case he's got a whole lot to adapt to.”

“You don't say?”

The face you made, the rising inflection in your tone, Hank knew what you just referenced and tried not to reply in a joking manner. He had a job to do, as annoying as that was, and the idea of Connor reminding him yet again how much time they were wasting just pissed him off internally.

“Would you like me to catch you up on what we discovered last night? Y/N made some very interesting connections.”

A grumble was all Connor got as everyone left the house, taking that as an invitation to continue. “Y/N brought a speech made by Mr.Kamski to my attention. It has mention of the codeword we are using for our connective focus. Biocode. It sounds like, as well as our mechanical coding, androids have been embedded with experiences that predate our creation.”

“It's like putting your actual thoughts into someone else's head!” You added In the moment Connor paused to let Hank process the information.

“So wait.-" His pace slowed slightly, allowing for the three of you to walk side by side Instead of slightly behind his lead. “-You're suggesting androids have emotions and free will hidden in their code before they deviate? That's insane.”

Connor frowned, clearly wanting to defend your discovery as the police station lurked in the distance. “It would explain the sudden rise in Deviant reports. As well as make sense of how deviancy spreads so easily. Anyone with the key to unlock that source code could potentially deviate anyone they come into contact with. What's worse is that… It might be manipulated if someone knows how to access it.”

“And what about you, Connor, huh?” The way Hank’s growl turned aggravated gave you a sense of caution. How was it a man with only his voice could make you feel safe one moment then urge you to keep away from them the next? “If your ‘theory’ is right, that makes everyone a deviant, just waiting to realise it. That means technically you’re a-”

“I am not a deviant, I have a mission to complete and that’s what I intend to do.” You noticeably flinched as Connor raised his voice, something you’d not seen him do before. That calm analytical  tone was all you were used to, not the sudden burst of anger that had just snapped beside you. His face softened on noticing the concern in your eyes. The abrupt change in temperment sent errors up in his sight here and there.

Hank sighed, it was long, heavy, like someone just let the air out of a very old balloon. “Yeah. You’re right… like you’d give a damn about anything other than the fuckin’ mission.” It was like the witty banter you all shared moments ago had never happened. Something electrical and stone cold squeezed your heart tightly; threatening to break it. A figurative dark cloud hanging over everyone despite the bright sunshine that shone overhead.

Your opinion was an unpopular one. That deviants didn’t need ‘fixing’, that they felt love and hate and everything in between, and your now-gone friend Adam was proof of that. He had dreams and aspirations He was so nice and continued to do his job even after deviating because of how much he enjoyed it. But now you’d…. Never see him again.

It hit you like a truck. Loss, realisation, anger, denial. Everything at once crashed onto your throat making you unable to join in the conversation to ease the tension.

Neither Connor nor Hank seemed to notice, your blank warm-hearted smile masking the inner workings that started to scream out his name. It wasn't too bad. You told yourself it was fine. The guilt you felt at forgetting him so easily, the need to tell him you were sorry, strangled out as a strained cough amongst the silence. It came out almost like a choking sound, Connor’s head turning sharply to look at you with hollow eyes, your composure faltering for but a small second before you started walking regularly again.

It was a lot all at once, but you would handle it… they didn't need to know...

The police station was quite nice, a mix of modern technology and design without compromising any accessibility. People sat at their workplaces in neat uniform with equally neat desks save for a few here and there that were less organised than the others. As always it made you nervous. You had nothing against cops, most of them were really nice people, it’s just the force behind them. People armed to the teeth with ways to subdue and kill you, people trained to appear friendly even if they dislike you in order to uphold the precincts reputation. That being said, there were also plenty of shitty law officers who would gladly talk shit for the sake of doing so. Come to think of it-

“Oh goodie, here comes the walking calculator.” Most everyone, including Connor, completely ignored the voice that approached from afar. Hank headed to his desk, not looking back, as Connor’s path was blocked by a slightly shorter man. He wore scruffy messy clothing, barely enough to make him look like he actually cared about his job, with just as messy brown hair spiking out in all directions. You had to hide an angry grin at noticing the name on his jacket and the crooked scar across his nose. “Got yourself a girlfriend, huh?”

As he squared his gaze with yours the defiant smile you wore was enough to catch him by surprise. “Hi Gavin.” You growled, very uncharacteristically hostile toward the officer as he continued to get in Connor's way. “How’s your face?”

“Better than yours by the looks of it.” He grumbled back, much to Connor’s confusion as you two continued to glare at one another like your eyes were doing all the fighting. He huffed, leaning against the wall in front of you two. “Look who isn’t an officer-”

“Look who is still an asshole-”

“Y/N, please, we have work to do.” Connor’s hand reached for your shoulder as the rivalry escalated, your nerves tingling at the thought of getting to have another fight with your long-time childhood opponent. But he was right. You couldn’t fight him here, it’s literally a police station, and your wound wouldn’t exactly fair well from a scrap either. You shrugged his hand away from your side, crossing your arms with an irritated pout before following Connor as you both walked around Gavin. “You know Officer Reed?” His curiosity was inevitable considering what just occurred.

“Yes. I know Gavin.” The spite in your voice had obviously intrigued the android since he wouldn't stop staring at you expectantly.

“You don't seem to like each other.”

“I broke his nose.” You pointed out, motioning to your own nose before flicking a glance back at Gavin (Who was now sauntering his way to the break room like your conversation never happened.) God you hate Gavin.

“Oh…” Connor’s face expressed an awkwardness that made you smile again, it seems he realised that this conversation would be best left for later. “Well, lets focus on the task at hand.”

--

You were right, today was gonna be a long one, the time seemed to tick on almost as slowly as when you were at your real job. Though it wasn’t really a bad thing, you had plenty of time to watch Hank yell at his boss and glare at Gavin from across the room.

You didn’t want to mention anything about it to Connor, but Gavin had liked you quite a lot in high school… you hated admitting when you were wrong, but you knew for certain that back then you had done plenty of wrong deeds. It was such a shame. Gavin had started out so promising, charming even, and yet during his time with you he just got meaner and meaner. Beating up Jayden was the last straw for you back then, you couldn’t just stand aside and enable his bad habits.

To be truthful you hadn’t meant to break his nose… turns out you punch a hell of a lot stronger than you might think.

“Y/N, come look at this.” Hank had finally said something after seemingly being pissed off at connor for several hours. You jumped at the opportunity to get involved, jogging light bouncy steps to his side of the desk before leaning over to look at his screen.

Rumours of the mass-hostage situation had already gone public, people were ranting all sorts of nonsense online, people were even videoing themselves throwing their androids down pits or off of bridges. Tearing limbs off, beating them with bats, setting them on fire. You could see the fear in their eyes, the pure terror, the complete hopelessness as they bled out blueblood onto the floor.

“Do you think- Hey, you alright?” You hadn’t realised you were tearing up until Hank closed the page and held your arm tightly. “Easy kiddo…”

“I-I’m ok.” you smiled, sniffling while rubbing your eyes roughly with your sleeve. Mind reeling from the sudden outburst of information in your head. “-Just forgot to blink is all.”

But it was too late. You only barely held it together earlier, seeing the androids treated this way was enough to push you over the edge. Tears dribbled uncontrollably across your face despite your best efforts to fight them away. All you were thinking about is not looking upset, and that wasn’t going to plan.

You tried laughing quietly to make it less painful to sniffle back breaths but it wasn’t much help. “Hey, hey, it’s ok. Don’t be like that.” A large pair of arms wrapped around your shoulders, comfortably cuddling you up against a rough shirt. Hank’s concerned voice was almost fatherly and as much as it was getting him strange looks he was doing his best to calm you down. Rocking ever so slightly from side to side as you sobbed helplessly into his arm. “It’s alright, you’re ok, let it out.”

“Lieutenant?” Connor had risen from his desk, watching with conflicted confusion as Hank held you in an almost protective stance.

“I’m ok.” You whimpered softly, at this point numb to the fact you were breaking down in a public place.

Adam was gone, Connor had almost been destroyed, and you had nobody to go to. Knowing next time you go to work, after all of this, you’ll walk into an empty building and spend the day with a replacement android… it was tearing at your throat. You'd never hear his laugh again. Never see the cute happy dances he did when talking about coffee, or the beaming grin that welcomed you every single morning without fail. He was so sweet, why did he have to die? He didn’t deserve that! It wasn’t fair!

“He w-was alive, Hank, he was D-deviant.” You mumbled past the hitched breaths, already feeling the burning stare that was Connor's eyes on your back. It made you shiver. You didn’t feel safe. “Why are people treating androids like this- they’re not just MACHINES!” you pushed Hank away, struggling out of his grip before harshly clutching at your stomach as it began to ache.

Connor caught you as you stumbled backwards. His grip was unwavering- unlike hank’s gentle hold. “You have to calm down, you’re going to hurt yourself-”

“Yeah that’d really slow you down wouldn’t it Connor?” You sounded bitter, and wow did it sting. You couldn’t see past the blurry vision, but his face looked utterly heartbroken. It’s like someone just told him his dog died, his grip slackened enough for you to realise what you had said might’ve been a little harsh. He had insisted he wasn’t deviant…. But you knew he had something in there. Whether it was emotion or just an accurate simulation of them you felt an immediate regret for saying what you did.

“I’m… sorry.” He let go, taking a step away while you finally managed to rub the water off of your face. “T-that was uncalled for.”

“No, it’s alright, you’re experiencing delayed symptoms of mourning. The android you worked with must have been very close to you. This is ok-.” Hank, who had backed away a little, gestured your way. Encouraging Connor to take control of the situation. He was hesitant but eventually leaned our towards you- lightly cupping you in his embrace much like how Hank had done before. You didn’t fight it, but you didn't hug back either, just kind of leaning on him with your forehead on his chest. You could swear you could feel his ‘heart’ bumping underneath his jacket. “You are ok now, just try to breathe.”

You tried, god you tried so hard, but the more you put effort into it the more you sniffled and paused. It was eventually possible to take longer, less shuddering, breaths. You didn't have the energy to feel embarrassed or ashamed. The periodic ‘babump’ of the Thirium pump beneath his shirt was something to focus on, your upcoming headache making you groan irritably. “It was nice having you in today but I think it’s about time to take you home.” He let go of you, keeping one arm over your back and around your shoulder so he could walk you out.

You were silent almost the entire walk home. Barely noticing the aura of worry and unease that radiated from your assistant…

--

It was like how he imagine being shot must have felt, hearing what you had said, the burning in his chest sending false system reports through his processor. Yes, yes it would slow him down, but it wasn’t like that. He didn’t want you to be safe just for the sake of the mission - but even the thought of wanting outside of his objective was… doing something. Was it… fear? Did he fear the idea of thinking he’s more than just hardware built for a certain purpose? Surely not, that’s silly. Androids don’t feel fear.

“Deviants do.” He mumbled aloud, not realising he had done so until your sore reddened eyes were spotted tiredly googling up at him. “Your coworker. He was deviant?”

He could almost see the pain that shot into your gaze before you looked back at the street. “Yeah…” He was going to have to dig if he was going to get more than that, your appeared exhausted despite getting more than enough rest for a woman your age.

A bit of time passed before he eventually tried again, giving you a moment to think. “Deviants feel fear and anger, unlike regular androids, why would you want that?” It was unclear why, but you truly did seem to believe that deviancy was a good thing despite all the trouble it has caused.

“That's only one side of the coin, Connor, fear isn’t everything.”

“But it is a part of it…”

“Yes, of course it is!” Your voice raised ever so slightly but a sore throat calmed it back down. The sadness slowly melted away as you spoke about it, getting replaced with some quieter form of passion that bubbled deep under the surface. “Anger and fear exist but that’s not the point, the point is there's better feelings than those ones. Like contentment, happiness, pride-”

“Love?” His contribution made you hesitate. Was he wrong? Love was certainly something… able to tear a man apart or rebuild him from the ground up. Connor’s experiences with these emotions were limited to reading their definition out of a dictionary or observing what they did to others.

“Yeah…” your cheeks had turned red, a fever? No. you were.. .what's the word… blushing. His LED spun yellow, unable to look away at the lost look on your face, totally immersed in whatever it was you were thinking about.

“…I think I’d like to feel that someday.” He should’ve thought more carefully about saying these words out loud. If Cyberlife caught wind of this it would mean being deactivated to erase those thoughts. But this wasn't on his mind right now.

It's like he's seeing you for the first time. That faint sparkle in your eye, every little imperfection on your skin, the way a few stray strands of hair curled down across your forehead. His Thirium pump having the same system error he had experienced before. “You'd need to deviate to feel love, Connor, you said…” Your heart rate had increased, coupled with another number of minute details that surely only an android would notice. Otherwise in your tone, the way your pupils dilated when they met his own.

Hanks house stood in front of both of you as he let go, fighting quietly with the choices laid out before him. Taking as much effort as he could muster to ignore his prime directive. He could feel the way your heart skipped a beat the moment he put both hands firmly on either shoulder. Bringing you forward to plant a gentle kiss on your forehead, the fire he'd felt in his chest before slowly smouldering back to life as he took a step back and tried not to betray the fear that churned at his stomach.

“Rest. I will come back soon.” He turned back the way you had come. Leaving you flustered and confused on the dirtridden path.

[olicityforlifearrowfan]

My Journey to discovery: (Recovering from an eating disorder)

I am not a sufficient writer, nor have I had the ability to be one, but I want to tell my story so that others in my situation do not feel alone. I will start at the beginning that date being January 11th 2017, that was the day I decided to change my life and to no longer put the blame on external factors. I had to except that if I wanted to be happy, I had to be the one to make a difference. On this day, after getting back from a summer holiday I felt so miserable about my physical self-image (how I looked) and my mental self-image (my interpretation of what others thought of me). I seriously believed that in order to be happy and loved by others (my friends and family) I needed to look a certain way. So, I woke up that morning, had a bowl of special K and went for a run. (By the way this was the first run that I had been on in years). From this moment on I promised myself that I was no longer going to feel bad about myself. So, I kept doing this for a week, (I lost 2 kg’s), then 2 weeks (3 kg’s) and then a month had passed by and I had lost 5 kgs. I began to see the progress I was making, starting off at a weight of around 86 kg’s to 81 kg’s within a month. Now, for someone who is 173 cm I was pretty well over my ideal ‘healthy’ weight range, therefore, seeing this progress was substantial and so rewarding. For the first time in my life I felt that I had control over something. Unfortunately, I did not know nor could I predict that this would eventually take over my life in a literal and mental sense.

First, of all when you have been let down, either in your workplace, school or family life, and have this be the consistency for many years; you forget to focus on the positives and mainly focus on the negatives. For me, I had been told I was not good enough to continue doing ballet and a curriculum at school. Let’s just say that I thought I was fine and then be told that I was not cut out for it when those in higher positions of power (e.g. teachers) told me that I was good enough to do them in the first place. This shattered my self-esteem, and even worse the first occurrence was when I was 12. So, just as I was going through my pre-pubescence and discovering who I was as a person; being told that I was not good at something, even though I had been doing ballet for 10 years, practicing 4 times a week, 2 hours a day was mind blowing to me. I could not understand how they had left this to the last minute as well because they took not just me but two other girls as well out of class two days before our final exam!!! TWO DAYS!!! I mean how could they be so irresponsible as to leave it so close!!! Anyway, I sidetrack, little did I know that this would happen to me in high school, when I was told in my final year that I had to change school curriculums, even though they had done this with many girls BUT the year before. This would have allowed them to catch up on all the course material before graduation. So, my final year consisted of anxiety and self-doubt because no-one (the teachers) were keeping track of me. (At least, I had learnt a vital lesson; don’t rely on others to be successful!). Without this guidance I was left alone to somehow catch up on all the coursework I had missed and attain all the requirements to graduate and get into university!!! At the end of the year I missed out by one credit, which I had to make up for in my summer holidays but at least I still got in to the university and residence I had applied for.

These were just some of the instances which triggered an unhealthy perception of myself. This voice reminding me that even if I had tried to do something it would eventually fail. However, probably the worst incident which really set me aback (this accumulated over many years) was how my family treated me, mostly my father and brothers. The event took place at this restaurant where the portion sizes were big, and since I have a big appetite I of course devoured it without hesitation and as soon as the meal came to a close my brothers and father were like “isn’t that too much”, “you need to be careful”, “your fat” and plenty more which I would have brushed off to the side but in this case I had enough. I did make a scene but I believed I had the right to, I mean why could they eat like that and not get the same ridicule from me or anyone else? They did not take this seriously. We had a big argument, made a scene, people did stare and then we left. Afterwards I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for the rest of the night; no apologies were made. This was the type of treatment I had to deal with pretty much every time I went for a bite to eat which did eventuate into having me believe the negative things said about myself.

Furthermore, when I began losing weight, since I had been in such a negative mental set for such a long period of time, it was to me a huge achievement! I began to focus on this part of my life more and more, especially when people began to notice and make comments on how well I looked. My discovery into what really had been affecting me all these years was the eating disorder I had developed when I was at university for a semester. I began to restrict thinking that less calories and more exercise would help me to lose weight, which it did at first in a slow and sustainable way. Unfortunately, when you get to a lower weight it begins to take longer to drop even more weight, especially when your body is trying to keep you at the weight it is at. My restricting got so bad that I would be consuming less than a thousand calories a day, still going to classes and the gym. I was literally running myself into the ground; still dropping in weight, which is why it became so I became so addicted. To me, restriction in a way was an addiction, because, if I could say to myself that I could live off what a ‘normal’ human could not, I felt like I had an advantage, a win over others; which in my eyes I could not have had anywhere else. When I say that I was ‘restricting’, in a way it is still on-going. I have been to see therapists and nutritionists and they have all said, “you need to eat more”, but it is so much more than that. It is a problem which has to be targeted at the subconscious level, something that is so engrained into your psyche that it takes years to even contemplate and understand. For me, this discovery has taken me ever since I was a child and it is only now that I am able to understand these conniptions. I am still living with these problems every single day, some days being better than others. But for those who do not understand what it is like to live with an eating disorder, we are constantly living with it, even if we do not show it. Recovery is only by discovering the real problem, and it is not the food, the constant obsession with the scale (because believe me, I still have to weigh myself twice a day), nor for the appearance factor. These mechanisms are only hiding us from the problems in which we have to face and that is for me at least loving myself unconditionally no matter what others think.

Overall, I decided to write this because I had just weighed myself after not weighing myself for at least a couple of days; which consisted of eating to when I was satisfied and to how much I was ‘supposed’ to eat and yes, I’m up around 6 pounds heavier than when I last weighed myself. Now, before any of you ask, I know that my problems are not going to go away with the numbers I see on the scale. Plus, rationally, I also know that because I’ve been eating enough healthy and nutritious food (which I am grateful for). There are a whole lot of factors attributing to this and not actual fat/weight gain. I have had this happen to me before, even at a heavier weight and I still lost weight eventually. I do know how weight loss is supposed to happen, I have gone from 86 kg’s to 61 kg’s (give or take) within a period of a year. My eating disorder came from a place of not feeling like I had any control over my life, so by seeing quick results via the scale feeds my thirst for control as well as the restriction.

If any readers have their own story, please share, tag, comment below. I have felt like the only way to succeed in managing and recovering from this disorder is to talk it through with people have gone through similar experiences.

[webmarket01]

we got weight loss tips for Women’s History Month, interviewer thought I was lying, and more

New Post has been published on https://weightlosshtiw.com/we-got-weight-loss-tips-for-womens-history-month-interviewer-thought-i-was-lying-and-more/

we got weight loss tips for Women’s History Month, interviewer thought I was lying, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. We got weight loss tips for Women’s History Month

This happened months ago but it’s still bugging me. I work for a large corporation that promotes diversity in the workplace. In celebration of Women’s History Month, we received an email with info on women’s health issues .. with tips like maintain a healthy weight, lose weight, having a thick waist ups your risk of stroke, consume less sugar and fat, and don’t smoke. There’s also information that women are more likely to experience urinary tract problems due to the way the female urinary tract is structured.

Am I wrong in thinking … WTF??? I can’t recall ever seeing an email with info about my male coworker’s urinary tract. Or suggestions that my male coworkers lose weight, eat less sugar, etc. How does this celebrate diversity? This whole thing feels really tone-deaf. I want to say something, but then I stop and ask if I’m overreacting. I need perspective, please.

You are not overreacting. Observing Women’s History Month by talking about diet and weight (and urinary tracts — WTF?) is bizarre and frankly kind of insulting. They would have been better off doing nothing! How about donating to a women-focused charity, seeking out women-owned businesses for your vendors, sending women on staff to leadership events, doing a pay equity analysis and releasing the info, and/or designing and implementing family-friendly policies around things like flex time and parental leave? “Eat less fat” isn’t it.

2. I think my interviewer thought I was lying about my degree

I had a very bad interview experience the other day. I am currently seeking a better opportunity for myself while working from home. I’m in my late 20s and I have been at my current job for two years. Unfortunately, the money isn’t good and I don’t enjoy the job either. The good news is that I just completed my second bachelor’s in business administration in May. Previously I received my B.A. in psychology. When I was updating my resume, I only included my business degree.

This brings me to the awkward moment of my interview call. I have been having severe connection issues during the entire period that I have been working from home. I was on a phone screen with a recruiter at a company in my industry. We seemed to be having a great call. She made a comment that my work history was very diverse and so I told her that my degree was in psychology and I worked at a shelter but didn’t feel it was my calling. Then there was this absolute silence (from her being confused about my major) and we lost the connection. I tried calling her back but it said “call failed.” About one hour later, the internet was restored and I opened my email only to find a rejection letter.

Because second degrees are a bit rare, I’m sure she thought I was lying about my background and presumed I hung up after realizing I was caught up in a lie. The rejection email said I don’t have the “qualifications and background needed,” which is not true. I haven’t sent her a follow-up or thank-you email but now I am wondering if I should reach out and explain the situation. Would you recommend I reach out to her and explain?

Yes. It might not change her decision, but you have nothing to lose by trying. I would say, “Thank you so much for your time talking with me. Our call was disconnected while we were still speaking — my service went down for an hour at the worst possible time! — so I didn’t get a chance to explain that while my resume lists my recent business degree, it doesn’t list my earlier bachelor’s degree in psychology from NYU (received in 2007). I think I may have introduced some confusion by referencing the psychology degree without explaining it’s not on my resume — and then we got cut off before I could. I realize you likely have many qualified candidates, but if this affects your assessment of my qualifications, I’d love to keep talking. If not, I wish you all the best in filling the role and with the work you’re doing. I appreciate your time!”

For what it’s worth, it’s possible that she didn’t think you were lying but tried to call you back, couldn’t reach you, rejected you for other reasons, and moved on. It’s still worth clarifying — it won’t hurt and could help — but I wouldn’t assume your interpretation is definitely what happened.

Also, any reason you don’t have the psychology degree on your resume? There might be good reason to leave it off, but if you ever bring it up in an interview, you need to quickly explain it’s not on your resume, or people are going to be confused.

3. Former boss is asking me about assignments I don’t remember receiving

I left my previous job in the midst of COVID-19 in March to start a new position halfway across the country. My boss at my previous workplace was great — very supportive, clear communicator. She assigned work, and I would complete it well. I would usually submit work on time (95% of the time). My boss was very happy to be my reference for the position I’m currently working in.

Fast forward to four months later. After months of not hearing from her, she is now emailing me (four times in the last two weeks) asking me for the file location for work that she claims she asked me to do that I never submitted. I have no recollection of her assigning this work to me. It would be out of character for me not to complete work as assigned, even on my way out the door. However, COVID-19 and moving across the country was stressful and weird. It would be out of character for me but I suppose it is possible this work was assigned to me and I didn’t do it (although I have no memory of that).

Is it unreasonable that she’s contacting me to ask where this work is four months after I left, seemingly irritated that she thinks I didn’t do what she asked? If it’s not unreasonable, what do I do? I have no access to my previous files. If she did ask me and I didn’t complete the work as assigned, I wish she could have contacted me sooner because wow I don’t remember much pre-COVID. Should I worry about my reference now around this?

It’s not unreasonable for her to ask about the location of one or two items a few months after you left in case you happened to be able to easily answer, but it’s not reasonable for her to sound irritated if you no longer remember (and four separate queries is too many).

I wouldn’t get into “hmmm, maybe I didn’t do it, it’s possible, I’m not sure” — that won’t serve either of you well! Instead, say something like, “I really wish I could help! So much has happened since I left that I don’t remember many specifics about projects I did for you before I went. I know I tried to be vigilant about getting everything done and it was really important to me to leave everything in good shape — but at this point I don’t have many of the specifics still in my head. I’m sorry I can’t help!”

As for how much to worry about it affecting your reference … it’s hard to say with certainty. If you’d always done good work and you sent me that email, I’d be inclined to just move on (figuring it was on me for not looking for the work sooner). Some managers would be more put out. If she knows for sure that she assigned it (for example, if she still has emails she sent you assigning the projects) and the work was important … well, she still should have looked for it earlier, ideally before you left! I can’t speak to how reasonable she is or whether it will affect her reference, but I can say that it shouldn’t, at least not unless there are more details than what’s here.

4. Should we offer severance to a belligerent, hostile employee?

I am a board member of a condo who recently had to fire our resident manager for a belligerent, profanity-laden outburst during a zoom board meeting. He has not been doing his job and has been suspected to be drinking or have been drunk while working (although no proof). He has gotten into heated arguments with owners. To further complicate things, our property manager has not done his job by documenting his complaints and appears to be protecting him rather than the board/owners. The property manager is pushing for some sort of severance for good will however the board is opposed to it. We feel we have a termination with cause for insubordination (lots of “F” words directed at us and calling names). What is your suggestions on whether we need to pay severance in this instance? He is talking to a lawyer regarding a possible hostile workplace or wrongful termination lawsuit.

As a general rule, it’s both kind and wise to give when you let someone go, because (a) it’s the right thing to do when you curtail someone’s source of income, (b) it’s likely to make your other employees feel better about the situation, and (c) you typically have the person sign a release of legal claims in exchange for the payment. The first two aren’t as compelling when you’re dealing with such egregious behavior (as opposed to, say, firing someone whose work just wasn’t up to par even though they were trying), but that release of claims is always a good idea, especially if a hostile workplace claim might have any legs. (Even if it doesn’t, you might not want to deal with the hassle of a lawsuit you expect to eventually win.)

Talk to a lawyer though. If he’s speaking with a lawyer himself, it’s likely that he’ll try to negotiate any severance you offer for a higher amount, and you should have a lawyer guiding you on your side as well.

5. Grouping jobs by functional area on your resume

I noticed that you’ve written about college career centers not being so helpful to students in their advice and how hiring managers dislike functional resumes. I have a question that combines these two things: my college career center advises students to organize their work experience on their resume by creating functional headers with experiences listed reverse chronologically below. (For example: as someone with a lot of editorial experience looking for communications jobs, I’ve been advised to create a “Communications Experience” section with my past relevant internship/job experience listed in reverse-chronological order below the heading. I also have one with “Project Management Experience.”) This format still involves listing out specific companies, positions, and dates—it’s just not lumped under one large “Work Experience” section.

Is this a new phenomenon that’s acceptable? Or just a mutation of the functional resume that still frustrates hiring managers?

That’s fine to do! The functional resumes that are awful are the ones that list skills and accomplishments without connecting them to specific jobs — just a list of things you did, without any context about when you did them or who you did them for. That makes it impossible to assess your experience in the way hiring managers want to, and looks like you’re hiding something. But what you’re describing is fine; it’s the same thing as a chronological resume, just with the jobs grouped according to subject area.

That said, I question whether it’s really serving you. It can make sense if you have a lot of varied experience and want to highlight one or two areas over the others. But if you’re a student or a recent grad, it most cases that will be unnecessary and will just make your resume a little harder to follow. If you have some specific reason to do it this way, then carry on — but if your career center is just telling everyone to do this, then ignore them.

HR director’s wellness program is invasive and sexist

how to respond to comments about weight in the office

I don’t get to go on my office’s weight loss reward cruise

we got weight loss tips for Women’s History Month, interviewer thought I was lying, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

This content was originally published here.

[wooju-lee-blog]

I had a dream a couple weeks ago where I was at a butcher shop—and before I continue, I know this is all severely superfluous; being subjected to hearing other peoples’ dreams is the social equivalency of being shown your friends’ baby photos when you never asked. But hear me out... because I really could not think of any other way to start this blog post otherwise. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a fever dream, obviously because I wasn’t sick, but the ambiance of it all: the ominous droplets of water echoing from a leaking facet somewhere, the red-tinged, Lynchian hue of the entire dream, the fact that no one was actually there but me. All of it made it just so unsettling. I didn’t see the butcher or any staff for that matter. But the meats were lined up neatly behind the glass partition and was priced in what seemed to be Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Why do I mention this? Well, I recently made a blog post that went over the matter of me officially starting the process of trying to de-vegetarian (not a word, I know) myself in the past few months. To avoid reiterating myself in full detail, it has been a tad bit of a challenge. But is it really that serious to warrant an entire dream about it? I don’t think so. I didn’t get caught up over decoding just what that dream was supposed to symbolize, I just found it funny that I would be doing something similar for school.

Now, to segue into what I should be talking about: I really don’t know anything about the specifics of meats—be it the cuts or how to handle and cook said parts. I look at one of those diagrams of a pig or cow where all the parts are outlined, and the only thing I can think of is 1. It looks cool, in a morbid way 2. I can’t believe consuming living animals has been reinforced/normalized in our society for so long to the point where we have identified every part and crevice of most if not all animals 3. A friend of mine used to have a poster of a pig diagram on her wall. I don’t know why because she’s studying physics right now. It could be the fact that she was a heavy metal fan. Something about a pig carcass is totally metal, it seems.

Truth be told, I was never fond of beef. Even before going vegetarian, the only instance where I would actually have it is if it was incorporated into a certain dish. With that said, I’m Korean. And yes, we love our pork—especially samgyeopsal (삼겹살). Fun-yet-semi-depressing fact: the whole pork belly and soju combo has more or less become a nightmarish touchstone in the hierarchical system of the South Korean office workplace (or just about any workplace in general). Forget calling it a tradition, it is more or less a mandatory ritual for all employees to go out together nearly bi-monthly: yes, that means the boss is there, as well, and they don’t even pay usually. Rookie employees are often peer-pressured in gulping down soju like water. They are then peer-pressured some more to do ridiculous things to entertain their superiors, like sticking a spoon in an empty bottle of soju and singing a song in front of the whole restaurant. Because refusing to do so means you will be remembered as the disobedient one. The rebel. Abuse of authority happens in just about any environment where there are striking imbalances in power, but it is more extreme over there.

This blog post is getting dark real fast, so let’s get back on track. You may say that I’m already familiar with pork so writing about it seems obsolete, but that’s really not the case. I mean, if I really think about it, the only cut of a pig I’ve tried is the belly. Now, I haven’t had pork in a long while, and I’m still not really sure if I’ll ever wake up one morning and get a craving for it. But I also proclaimed in that aforementioned post that I want to gradually lessen the lifestyle I chose solely for the purpose of going somewhere in this industry. Because whether I like it or not, I’m going to have to cook all sorts of animal flesh. Pardon me if that sounds morbid, but so it goes!

My choice of pig part (there really is no eloquent way in phrasing this) is the shoulder blade, or if you will, the top portion of the front leg of the hog. According to Pork Be Inspired, a website that is apparently dedicated to pork lovers, the terminology for pork shoulder can vary widely depending on the region. The lower ‘arm’ portion of the shoulder is most commonly called the arm pork roast, while the upper part is often called the blade roast, stemming from the area near the loin. The blade is known for its well-marbled cut, making it ideal for pot-roasting it whole, or dicing it up into pieces for stews, or even cooking it over moist smoke to make a classic pulled pork barbecue. Honestly speaking, I don’t know what any of this means. Vegan meats generally just come in chunks, or less commonly, a block (think Spam); the more expensive brands are usually pre-seasoned and don’t really require any other additional cooking other than heating it up.

Some of the most popular methods of cooking this cut are braising, grilling/barbecuing (is that even a word?), roasting, using a slow cooker, or stewing. The shoulder or shoulder blade cuts are also rather inexpensive; it can also be purchased with the bone intact (averaging to about six to nine pounds) or boneless (averaging four to seven pounds). Pork shoulder is also used for making ground pork, which sounds… interesting, to say the least.

My initial plan was to go to the St. Lawrence Market for some exploring, some sight-seeing (because, hell, the last time I was there was on a school trip in high school). Maybe get a smoothie or something. It’s crazy: I always walk by it, and every time I do, I keep telling myself “Hey man, you have the privilege of living in semi-poverty in one of the most diverse cities on earth. Why can’t you get off the bed and explore?”. But alas, I went there after-school this past Monday only for it to be closed. So note to self: do your assignments early next time. Also maybe use Google for the hours of operation. Because Google is free and it’s in the palm of your hands.

So, what to do next? I had to compromise. My option was either the Loblaws near Church-Wellesley (I personally call it the Loblaws Dome, because that’s literally what it is) or the Metro near the Ryerson Rogers Communication Centre. Honestly, that Loblaws makes my anxiety go haywire: it’s too bright (the entire building is one big sensory overload), the lighting makes me look like I spent a month drinking Vodka in a hole, and there’s always too many people there. And thus I ventured over to the Metro instead. I know what you’re thinking: you’re wasting time and energy, Wooju. So what if it’s further? I barely exercise so I could really use this. I need this, man.

Unrelated-but-sort-of-related-note: The assignment asked us to take photos with a personal belonging for the sake of preventing plagiarism. That’s why my keys make an annoying appearance. You have no idea how much of a challenge it was for me to find the right timing to take a photo of this on the cold, hard floors of Metro.

The recipe I chose is a Korean dish called bossam (보쌈), less commonly just called sooyook (수육), which literally translates to “water-meat” and sounds just as unappetizing in English as it does in Hangul. Bossam is cooked through a wet (moist-heat) cooking method that is essentially just boiling the meat in flavoured brine. Aside from the obvious, this is done to remove excess fat, grease, and blood from the meat, resulting in tender mouthfeel. If I remember correctly, pork sometimes has a very distinctive odour that varies in severity depending on which packet you buy at the groceries; it’s kind of like an innocuous game of Russian roulette. The good news is that this unwanted smell can be removed by boiling the pork with an assortment of things, such as onions, garlic bulbs, bay leaves, and, yes, instant coffee mix. Some higher-end restaurants will bump up the price tag just because they use ginseng or other medicinal herbs, but that can be reserved for yuppies.

So why did I choose bossam? Despite being recognized as one of the more popular comfort foods in Korea, bossam is actually a pretty healthy dish (well, as healthy as pork can get), care of its wet cooking method. There’s no cooking oil or any additional trans-fat involved, making it healthier than, say, bokkeum (pan-fried) or twigim (deep fried) type dishes.

Truth be told, I haven’t actually had bossam since I was about 12 or so, but it is generally served with a side of napa cabbage leaves and perilla leaves. The Korean way to eat any meats, grilled or otherwise, is to wrap it in the aforementioned vegetables with a smattering of ssamjang (쌈장)—a traditional Korean sauce made of gochujang and doenjang. Some prefer to just dip it in saeujeot (새우젓), a fermented food made with small shrimps. It’s all up to personal preference!

This post has been unexpectedly lengthy, so I’ll cap it off with the recipe. I found this rendition through a YouTube cook by the name of Maangchi. She is a Korean-Canadian ahjumma who apparently started her YouTube channel out of sheer boredom. What an icon and a queen! I adore her attitude, and the fact that she single-handedly built a brand for herself is pretty incredible. It goes to show that women should never feel the need to be held back or withhold their passions, just because this patriarchal society reinforced the idea that marriage should be their ultimate end-game. it is not, and it never will be.

Fun but hedonistic fact: It’s socially acceptable to drink in public in South Korea. It’s like a watered-down version of the infamous North legalizing (and possibly advocating) the use of an assortment of illicit drugs. As for us South, we really love our alcohol. Hell, soju now comes in little juice box containers with the straw and everything.

Ingredients:

3 lb pork shoulder, shoulder blade, or pork belly, rinsed and drained

1 large onion, cut into quarters or sliced

2 tbsp ginger, sliced thinly

12 garlic cloves

2 tbsp Korean fermented soybean paste (doenjang)

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp instant coffee or any ground coffee

10 cups water

1 lb napa cabbage leaves, washed and drained

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup white vinegar

1 tbsp salt

¾ cup water

Method:

Add the pork, onion, ginger, garlic, soybean paste, brown sugar, coffee mix, and the water to a large pot. Cover and cook for 1 hour over medium-high heat.

When it boils vigorously, turn the pork over with a wooden spoon or tongs.

After 1 hour of boiling, turn down the heat to low and cook for another 15 minutes.

Take out the cooked pork and let it cool down until ready to serve.

Combine sugar, vinegar, salt, and water in a large bowl. Mix well until it turns into a clear pickle brine.

Add the cabbage and mix well by hand.

Let it sit for 15 minutes, then mix well and turn it over so the leaves pickle evenly. Repeat this every 10 to 15 minutes for 1 to 2 hours until the cabbage gets soft and withered.

Squeeze out the excess water and refrigerate until ready to serve.

[Logo design by me; bossam image courtesy of Fooding Me]

[whorchataaa]

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

  At one point, Gabe weighed more than 550 pounds. Today, he and Lisa remember and discuss the extreme pain and slow healing process of living with binge-eating disorder. Gabe shares his shame in being so overweight, his intense relationship with food, the story of his gastric bypass and the difficult process of learning new coping mechanisms.

How did Gabe’s bipolar and panic attacks tie in with his binge eating? And, importantly, how is he managing the illness today? Join us for an open and honest discussion on living with an eating disorder.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews! 

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Gabe: You need food to survive. So we all get that you have to eat to live. But food has sort of taken on a little bit extra, right? If I give you a cupcake, it means I love you. If it’s your birthday and I don’t get you a birthday cake. You don’t need a birthday cake to live. We do these things to express love, right?

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Gabe: Woo! And that’s where we really sort of get into, I’m gonna go with crux of our discussion today, which is binge eating disorder. Many people don’t know, I used to weigh 550 pounds. I’m six foot three. My top weight was five hundred and fifty pounds.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Lisa: The day you had gastric bypass, you weighed 554 pounds, but you’d been on a diet for several weeks and you’ve been fasting for several days. I’m willing to bet you lost 20 or 30 pounds at least.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me. 

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Gabe: Do you think that there is a difference from a storytelling perspective between weighing five hundred and fifty pounds and weighing six hundred pounds? I mean, just I guess I maybe I qualified for This 600-lb Life.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Gabe: Well, I’m not going to retroactively go back and try to be on a fat-sploitation show. But just the thing that I want the audience to know is that I weighed over five hundred and fifty pounds. Now, the weight that I weigh today, which according to the BMI chart is in fact obese, is 260 pounds. I’m six foot three and I’m a big guy. I’m broad shouldered. I’m not a small person. But 260 pounds is is less than half of 550. I lost a person. I lost a person and change.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years. 

Gabe: Let’s move past how I lost the weight and let’s talk about life as a five hundred and fifty pound man. Because I thought that I just ate a lot. Like, I thought that I needed to go on a diet. And when you first met me. I don’t know. You know, the more we tell our story, Lisa,

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No. 

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true. 

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina? 

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Gabe: I wasn’t doing any of that. We can fight about the timeline until we’re blue in the face. But here’s what we know, I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds and I wasn’t doing much about it. Why do you keep

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Gabe: Here’s the thing, though, that I think you’re not considering. You’re tying together Gabe trying to get gastric bypass with Gabe understanding that he had binge eating disorder and those two things are not in any way related.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Gabe: I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did want gastric bypass because I was 24 years old and I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. I saw gastric bypass as a quick fix, which we’ll get into that later in the show. But let’s focus on binge eating disorder. Have we established that Gabe was overweight and had issues with food?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat. 

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Gabe: Let’s talk about our language for a moment. You and I weren’t, we’re not big language police. We kind of think that the goal should be communication and context, not so much the words. But I got called fat a lot. You, Lisa, saying that I was fat, it does not offend me. It does not bother me. But other people doing it, it did. As you can imagine, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds. I got a lot of sideways glances, stares, giggles, comments, and it hurt my feelings a lot. And the other reason I kind of bring this up is because why are we so cavalier about it? I know how damaging body image can be, because, again, even though I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds, even though I couldn’t walk from my car to my office desk without taking a break, the only thing I cared about was how I looked. I didn’t care that I would lose my breath standing up. I cared that I wasn’t pretty enough and that maybe I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Gabe: I wasn’t. You know, I was 22, 23, 24, I was invincible. I cared that I couldn’t find clothes that fit me. I cared that I was ugly. I cared that women wouldn’t want to sleep with me. I’m not trying to make Lisa out to be a bad person. But Lisa and I were not exclusive because Lisa gave me a fake name when we first met.

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Gabe: That’s fair. I was circus freak fat, apparently. I’m just saying that these are kind of the things that went through my mind. But what I was really surprised to learn and tying it all the way back to you thinking that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when we met because I was trying to get gastric bypass, is my entire motivation for getting gastric bypass was wanting to look better. I did not know that I had binge eating disorder until I was in the steps of gastric bypass. One of the things that I had to go through was a psychological examination where they started talking to me about why I ate. And I ate because it made me feel better.

Lisa: Everything surrounding gastric bypass was a lot different back then. Insurance companies were paying for it in a different way. The surgery was still relatively new. It was kind of a halcyon days for gastric bypass. And there were still stand alone surgery centers that specialized in this. You just don’t see those types of programs anymore. You don’t see the ads on TV anymore. And every surgeon was doing it. Every hospital had a program. You specifically went out of your way. Well, at the time, I thought you had gone out of your way to find this really good program with really high success rates. And one of the reasons they had such a high success rate was because they were so comprehensive. They had all this psychological counseling and nutritional counseling and this really long waiting period and on and on and on. And at the time, I thought, oh, there’s a health care consumer. He has made the best choice for him. Good job. But I found out later, no, he just knew this lady who went there. So he was like, sure.

Gabe: You’re half right and half wrong. When I looked at the other places they kind of scared me a little bit. I know this is a stupid thing to say, but one of the reasons that I felt comfortable at the bariatric treatment centers was because they had wide chairs.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Gabe: When I went to the other place, it was just in a regular, it was a well-known hospital. I don’t know. I had to pay more money to go where I went. So in theory, I could have picked the cheaper place. So.

Lisa: Through a variety of good decision making and luck, you ended up at a place with an excellent program that was very intensive in the pre surgical period. They had a lot of psychological and nutritional counseling, which most programs did not have then or now.

Gabe: So here I am, I walk in and they’re like, why do you want to have this? And I say, because I’m ugly and I don’t want to be ugly. And they say, OK, that’s what we get. Like, what are some things that you would do if you weren’t this size? And, you know, I said I wouldn’t sit in the handicapped seats at hockey games, for example. I would sit in booths instead of tables. I would ride roller coasters again. But in the back of my mind, what I was thinking is I would get laid more. I felt so bad because I felt so ugly and I tied that directly to my weight. Now, I didn’t know that I had bipolar disorder at this time. I did not know that I was untreated. There was obviously a lot going on, but those were my initial reasons. That’s why I wanted to do it. And through that process, I ended up at an eating disorder clinic and I remember my very first appointments. Were you around for that appointment or had I already gone to it and told you about it?

Lisa: You know, I don’t remember if that was your first appointment. Very early, I remember going to the eating disorder clinic. Yeah, it was just like a whole other world. It was so odd to go there because obviously most people getting treated for eating disorders are anorexics because those are the people who are most likely to die of their eating disorder. So they’re the people most likely to get treatment. And most of the binge eaters were quite large. So it was this bizarre mix of very, very small, mostly young women, just painfully thin young women and extremely overweight, you know, 20 some, 30 some year olds. And I went to one of their family support groups and the majority of the people there, their family members, family or friends, were anorexic. And they had the exact same behaviors, the exact same attitudes, the exact same everything. Even though their problem was that they didn’t eat enough. And your problem was that you ate too much. That really went to show that eating disorders were not about the food. It was about the psychological thing.

Gabe: Well, that’s interesting because while it was psychological, it was also about the food. For example, if I was feeling sad, I needed birthday cake. Because birthday cake was tied to happy memories. You couldn’t just give me 20,000 thousand calories in.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Yeah. So I looked up the definition of binge eating disorder, because how do you know when you’re binge eating and how do you know when you’re just over eating? Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food very quickly and often to the point of discomfort and a feeling of loss of control during the binge, experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards and then not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures such as purging, because that’s a whole other eating disorder. And this was interesting, I actually didn’t know this until today. The binge eating occurs on average at least once a week for three months. And this is how you can get diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was not its own separate mental illness until 2013 with the new DSM.

Gabe: You know, all the eating disorders have things in common, right? And the thing that it has in common is this unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food is that you eat to survive. You start to get into a gray area when you eat to survive but you also enjoy what you eat.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: The goal of food is not enjoyment. The goal of food is sustenance. The reason that we get in a gray area is because who’s ever eaten that extra bite? Because it tastes so good. That’s a gray area. You do not need that extra bite. But also, why do we have foods that go with holidays or occasions? That’s a gray area, right? There is no reason on Earth that we need to celebrate our occasions with food.

Lisa: But that’s an evolutionary thing. What encourages the animal to eat? Because it’s enjoyable. It’s pleasant. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. We’d all starve to death. So it goes together. Humans throughout time would not survive if they did not find enjoyment in food because then they wouldn’t eat and they’d all die.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: I suppose alleviating that hunger provides joy. I don’t know why we fell down the rabbit hole on it’s a gray area. But I do I think that it’s important to establish that sometimes our relationship with food, while healthy, is a gray area. There is absolutely no reason that we have to have cake on our birthday. But I would venture to guess that anybody who didn’t get a birthday cake or some sort of special dessert on their birthday would feel that they were left out or that they missed something.

Lisa: Well, that could be its own separate show about the emotional relationship to food and American’s relationship with food, because we just have this ridiculous eating pattern that nobody else has. Nobody in history has had previously.  

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area. 

Gabe: Lisa, the point that I am making, when I was sad, I ate. That is what I learned by going to a nutritionist and examining my relationship with food. And I think that everybody in America has sort of a messed up relationship with food to a certain extent. What I called the gray area, but it was just so extreme. 

Lisa: When you were sad, you ate to comfort yourself. When you were happy, you ate to celebrate. When you were angry, you ate to calm down. When you were fill in an emotion, you responded to it with food and to a lesser extent, so do I. Which once again is why I’m overweight. But it was very extreme, and still is extreme for you.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Lisa: Horrifying. I would call it horrifying. I think you have lost track of how far outside of the norm you still are. You are much better than used to be, obviously. But I think you’ve normalized in your mind a lot of your behavior, and it is not. This is not the way the average person, even the average American, reacts to food.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Lisa: Whenever we go out, there has to be food. It’s not fun for you if there’s not food. All activities have a food that goes with it, a food that must go with it. You can’t go to a movie and not have popcorn or snacks. There’s no enjoyment in the movie if you don’t do it. You can’t go to a Blue Jackets game and not get concessions. You know, a lot of people say, oh, well, I like to have a beer while I watch the game. No, it’s a whole different level for you. You would rather not go at all than go and not eat.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one? 

Lisa: The level at which you want popcorn at the movie theater and the level of distress you go through, if for some reason, you can’t have it. If I told you in advance, hey, the popcorn machine is broken at the movie theater. You wouldn’t go. Even if it was Star Wars on opening night. You would not go.

Gabe: I think that is untrue. 

Lisa: One of the things Gabe and I don’t know if you remember this, that I think really showed the emotional relationship you had with food is a few weeks after you had gastric bypass. We were in the parking lot of your apartment building. And I don’t remember, we had argued about something. And you got so upset that you started crying and you actually said, I just feel so bad and now I don’t even have food. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even have food.

Gabe: I remember.

Lisa: The idea being that was what you were going to turn to make yourself feel better. And this was so soon after surgery that you couldn’t and you were devastated at that. You were so distraught because you just couldn’t come up with anything else to soothe those emotions. 

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Gabe: But, you know, fish and house guests smell after three days. And they had been there for a week. And I was ready to get my privacy back. And I had asked you to stay to kind of be a buffer. And you said that you were ready to go home. You’d been there for a while

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Gabe: Just, you know, come on, come on, come on. And, you know, you were like, no, I gotta get going. I’ve got to go back to work. So I had walked you out to your car and you asked me what was wrong. And I just, I just started crying. And then, of course, I had trouble standing because I just had surgery and I fell down next to your car.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And it was one of the things that really drove home to me how much your emotions were tied up with food. That there was this thing you had always been able to turn to and now you couldn’t and you didn’t know what to do or how to behave. And it was heartbreaking. 

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you 

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Lisa: So she started getting all upset because she thought, well, we’re not going to be able to pick him up. He’s fallen down and we can’t lift him back up. So there was humor in it. Sort of. Looking back.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: In order to have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you need to have three or more of the following: eating much more rapidly than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone because of feeling embarrassed or by how much you’re eating, and feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed or very guilty afterward. And when I read that, the thing that really struck me is eating much more rapidly than normal. It was amazing how fast you could eat. Like you could be a competitive eater.

Gabe: One of the things that really struck me is the things that I used to do to hide how much I was eating. Like, I would order pizza and I would say, you know, hey, I need two large pizzas. And they’re like, OK, do anything else? Well, hang on. Hang on, guys, you think two large pizzas is enough? Hang on, hang on. You got like a special for three. Go, go ahead and. There was just me. There was literally just me. I wasn’t even married. I was just. I was.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Gabe: Yeah, and I would go through drive-throughs and I would order multiple value meals. Same level of, you know, I’d like a number two and number three, both with Diet Cokes. All right, what sauce do you want? You know, my girlfriend likes your barbecue. So let’s go ahead and grab that. And on that other one, I think my buddy said he wanted no ketchup. Yeah, these were all for me.

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Gabe: Oh, yeah. It was important to me that nobody thought that I was eating all of that food. Also, if I had, like, appointments. I was going out to lunch or something for work or business, I would eat before I went.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza? 

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: And I ate more pizza than him. And I thought, huh? I’m a giant cow person and I need to eat less pizza. But no, it turned out that you had ordered two and eaten a whole one before I got there. And now were pretending that this pizza had just arrived and we were now sitting down together for the first time. When you had, in fact, already consumed an entire pizza.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Lisa: One of the things that was interesting when we went to the eating disorder clinic is you did try to hide how much you would eat, but you didn’t have a problem with eating in front of me. One of your doctors told me that was a little bit unusual, that most people literally do not want to be seen chewing in front of other people. But you never seemed to have that particular problem.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go. 

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you. 

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say. 

Lisa: I remember that day because we were eating and then eventually I’m not eating and I’m just watching this because it was like watching. Oh, I don’t know, a snake swallowing its food or something. It was like watching some sort of extreme physical feat. It was amazing. Like, ignoring that it’s pizza, I would not have thought the human body could chew and swallow that rapidly, that a human being could do that. And you couldn’t look away. I do recognize, especially looking back, that was really mean. But I kind of feel almost justified in it. This thing I was watching in front of me was just so stunning and so extreme. How could I not stop and stare and comment on it? It was just incredible in a really, really horrifying way. Yeah.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Gabe: When I got to the eating disorder clinic, you know, they put me through a lot of paces and I started to realize that my relationship with food was not good. I mean, my weight, you know, over 550 pounds, my girlfriend looking at me in disbelief as I ate, the side glances, the comments, not being able to fit into things like roller coasters or booths or I had to sit in the handicapped section. I needed the seatbelt extender for my mid-sized car. It’s not like I was in a tiny car. I had a Ford Taurus. A family car. And I needed a seatbelt extender.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Lisa: Because I don’t let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt and I thought, what kind of fool doesn’t wear a seat belt? And then, lo and behold, you didn’t wear a seatbelt because it didn’t fit, because he couldn’t wear a seat belt.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit. 

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Gabe: Just call the dealership or call the manufacturer and they will mail them to you. Also side note, if you’re on an airplane, just ask the flight attendant when you get on. Just whisper I need a seatbelt extender and they will bring you one or hand you one. Highly recommend doing that as well. Very, very important. But here I am at the eating disorder clinic. I finally got a surgery date. And what was it like a month and a half before I finally got gastric bypass after like two years of fighting for it is when I went to the psychiatric hospital.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Right. That’s what comorbidity is. You had a lot of things going on at one time. This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to treat mental illness and binge eating disorder because there’s all these factors coming together. And how do you tease out what’s what?

Gabe: I guess I don’t remember the specific day that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder. I do remember my aha! moment. I had to do a few things and one of the things that I did is meet with a nutritionist. And she had flash cards and she held up the flash cards. And she was like, what has more calories? And the only one that I remember was she held up a donut, cream filled, icing, and she held up a muffin. She said, Which one has more calories? And I said, the donut. I know this one. Muffins are a diet food. And she said, no, the muffin has more calories. And I said, how is that possible? Muffins are healthy. Muffins have less fat. But they have way more sugar. But I thought a muffin had less calories. It didn’t.

Lisa: Lots of people don’t understand the specifics of nutrition or aren’t quite sure what the right foods are to choose, etc. That’s why they have eat this, not that. What does that have to do with binge eating disorder? Why was that your aha! moment?

Gabe: Because up until that moment, I thought I completely understood what was going into my body, why I was eating it. And that was the first thing that let me know that, no, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong. I did not understand how any of this worked, but I thought I did. That’s the part I’m getting at. If I can be so wrong about what constitutes a healthy meal, then what else am I wrong about? And she helped me understand that I don’t know what’s going on. I clearly do not have a good understanding of my relationship with food, food in general, nothing. And that opened my mind.

Lisa: So your lack of understanding of nutrition made you feel like, hey, maybe I don’t understand a lot of things about eating and how I eat, and therefore maybe I should consider that these people are telling me something of value rather than something I can dismiss?

Gabe: Sure. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of putting it. But what I actually thought in the moment is, holy shit. I don’t know what I’m eating. I do not understand food. I am putting food in my mouth and I think I am making healthy choices. You know what I used to eat and I thought it was a health food? A Snickers bar. Because the advertising was packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies. I was hungry and I needed a snack to get to the next meal. So clearly peanuts. I was eating a candy bar with peanuts, but I thought I was eating a nutrition bar. I thought I was eating something healthy because the advertising got to me. I did not understand what I was putting in my mouth, but I’m supposed to believe that I understand the psychology behind my desire to eat? No. That’s when I started to become much more malleable. That’s when I started listening. That’s when I wanted to understand why I was making the choices that I was making.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Gabe: I believed in that. Aww, my metabolism that’s broken. I don’t have good genes. It’s not that the people who weigh less or are a healthier weight or are healthier in general are making better food choices. No, no, no. They won the genetic lottery.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Gabe: Right. Yeah. I didn’t believe it was my fault at all. It was bad luck. Everybody else was eating just as much as Gabe. But because of their bodies, their metabolism. Oh, well, she just has a good metabolism, and that’s why she’s not overweight. I have a bad metabolism and that. It’s not my fault. It’s just I didn’t even realize I had any control. I.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Gabe: See, I thought that surgery was the magic cure. People have said to me, you know, surgery is the easy way out. It’s not. I don’t know who believes that or why they say it. I don’t know why there is a moral value in what method you use if you are super morbidly obese like I was. But I gotta tell you, spending four days in the hospital, being cut from the top of my chest to below my belly button, opened up, having my insides rearranged, the six week recovery time, the vomiting on your mother, the crying in the parking lot, all of the problems going through two years of therapy and nutrition appointments and re learning everything, with the aid of the therapy, over the next year and a half to finally lose all of the weight and then having to have a secondary surgery to remove the massive amounts of excess skin and male breasts that I had then developed. I had a full mastectomy. So, attention, listeners, I don’t have nipples.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Lisa: Well, I think that people what they don’t understand is that the surgery is not magic in that you can still eat. You’re not somehow prevented from chewing. You can still eat. You just react differently to it. And as evidence of surgery is not the easy way out, the failure rate is really high. And what is the definition of success, you ask?  Someone has had a successful gastric bypass if they have kept off 50% of their excess weight over the course of five years.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Lisa: The failure rate for gastric bypass, depending on the numbers you look, is up to 70%. So after five years, 70%. It’s now been 18 years for you. So even if you gain all the weight back tomorrow, even if you weigh 700 pounds tomorrow, you have had a successful gastric bypass. And then also let’s do some approximate numbers here. Say that you had 300 pounds to lose. Right. And you lost 280 of them. You realize that you could gain, right now, 130 pounds and still be successful. You could right now weigh over 400 pounds. And when it came time to count up all the gastric bypass numbers, you would be in the success category. So when some people say, oh, Gabe had a successful gastric bypass. No, you didn’t just have a successful gastric bypass, you had the A plus, gold standard, amazing of gastric bypasses. Because you could weigh substantially more than you do now and still be a success. You have plenty of people in your life now who never knew you then. People don’t realize how much weight you have lost and this backstory that you have. They just look at you and you look normal

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: No one’s gonna describe you as thin, but you’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly normal weight. Nobody stares at you in public. And that makes people think that you’re done, that you no longer have this messed up relationship with food, that you’re no longer struggling. And that’s not true. I don’t think you get enough credit for that. You are actively struggling with your weight and with your eating disorder on a daily basis. And it just doesn’t show anymore because you’re not so fat. People look at you and they think it went away. It didn’t go away.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words. 

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Lisa: Overweight or heavy or excess weight or more weight or something like that. Why are you adding extra words? It’s like when people say, oh, no, you’re not just bipolar. Yeah, I know. Why are you adding in words? I’m saying to you, hi, I’m bipolar. That’s not all you are. You’re also blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know. You’re the one who added all the baggage to the word. I was just fine with the descriptive phrase, fat.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Lisa: Well, don’t get me wrong, usually I do not care for it when people tell me I’m fat because they mean it as a pejorative. But as a simple description, am I overweight? Am I heavier than those charts and everything? Or even heavier than I personally would like to be? Would I like to be smaller than I currently am? Yes, I am fat. Accept that. I’m also blond and relatively short. Accept it. Yeah, I’ve got a big nose and I’m fat. There you go.

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Lisa: I know. I hadn’t noticed how huge it was until we started doing this so much and with the video and all. I knew it was big, but, oh, my God. Like a toucan. This is the part where you say something nice, like it’s very attractive or, or, you know.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Lisa: Fair, fair. So anyway, we could talk for a long time about all the high points of amazing stories surrounding Gabe and his extremely disordered eating and the struggles of gastric bypass. And to hit a few, when he said the whole thing about struggling after surgery and throwing up on your mom. He didn’t mean his mom, OK? He threw up on my mom. He didn’t vomit on his own mother, although you actually did that as well. He vomited on my mother. That’s the story he’s telling.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it makes me, people are like, oh, why are you angry about that? The poor little dear, he got sick. I told him not to eat that. I told him it was gonna make him throw up. He ate it anyway, and then he threw up on my mother. That’s all I’m saying. That’s OK. We’ll get that over now. Are there any high point stories you’d like to hit? Do you remember how you’d written that list of things that you wanted to do once you lost the weight?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Lisa: And we went out. We were at the mall. He went off to go shop. I’m looking at clothes. And then he comes over to me and goes, Well, I asked them for the largest size they had and it didn’t fit me. And I thought, aww. And I said, well, honey, it’s okay. It will. You’re still losing. It’s okay. And then he goes, and that’s why I got the size three down,

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Lisa: Yep. There had been a lot of places that he couldn’t go because they didn’t have tables. They only had those fixed booths and there’s nothing you can do. And yeah, occasionally he would try because someone would ask him to go to that restaurant. He’d try to squeeze himself in. And, oh, God, it was so painful to watch. You would say things like, oh, no, I can fit in that chair. Dude, you cannot fit into that chair. Please don’t make all of us uncomfortable by trying. Please stop.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Just, it was terrible on so many levels. Yeah. I got you that for Christmas one year. I did like a ten dollar gift card to all these restaurants you hadn’t been able to go to. And you insisted, even as we were walking in the door, that you would not fit. And I thought, yeah, you’re, dude, you’re going to fit. And then you crawled into the booth and started like wiggling around to show how much extra space there was. And of course, listeners can’t see this, but the look on your face right now and how much you’re smiling like it’s just the greatest thing you could ever remember. It’s, that’s so sweet.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Gabe: Because, remember, roller coaster is on there. And again, I was worried. You said that I was at the right weight and we went up to the first roller coaster and I said, will I fit? And the gentleman said.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here. 

Lisa: And you know, these lines can be very long. You might be in line for an hour or more. So they have one of the roller coaster cars sitting at the front of the line, so you can test it. Because no one wants to wait in line for an hour, only to be told, hey, you don’t fit in this seat. Get out of line. 

Gabe: So the roller coaster attendant was super nice. I sat down in it and as he was pulling the thing down, and he said, we just have to make sure that it will latch over your shoulders because of your height. And I said, you’re testing this because I’m tall? Of course, he’s just this kid. He just looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, oh, my God, I just, no, I was asking because I’m fat. 

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him. 

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying? 

Lisa: You turned to him, you said, oh, my God, you said that because I’m tall. And he was like, Yeah? He was so confused. And you spent the next forty five minutes repeating that. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m too tall. Oh my God, he said that because I’m tall. Yeah you did. You started to cry a little bit. You were so excited.

Gabe: That was a good day. Lisa, you touched on comorbidity a little bit. I believe very strongly that I, of course, do have binge eating disorder, but I also believe that it was driven by the excess of untreated bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: I was doing pretty much anything that I could to manage the emotional overload of depression and grandiosity and mania and suicidality. And anything that could provide me even a moment of joy, whether it was drugs, alcohol, food, sex, spending money, I would do. What do you think the intersection of all of this Is?

Lisa: Well, obviously, having gastric bypass was an amazing choice for you, and it worked out great. And who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t had it done? But I actually recommended at the time that maybe you not do it because you had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and everything was changing so fast. And I thought, well, hey, maybe his eating disorder isn’t actually the thing. Maybe this has always just been an almost symptom of bipolar disorder. And once he has that under better control, he’ll just be able to control his eating and he won’t need to go through the surgery, etc. And of course, you have a gastric bypass, you were losing a pound a day. Think of how delicate that balance of all your different medications are and then think about how you get that balance when your body is changing so rapidly. 

Gabe: One of the things that I think about in terms of comorbidity, is mistaking feelings, and the big one is that it took a long time to be diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder because I honestly thought that panic attacks were hunger pains.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: Every time that I would have a panic attack, I would think that I was hungry. Which, of course, created a Pavlov’s dog effect where a panic attack was very much associated with food. And in fact, more importantly, the cure for the panic attack was associated with food. So every time I have a panic attack, I would have to eat.

Lisa: We’d be standing in line or something, and I recognize now that you would start having a panic attack, but what you’d say, you’d turn to me and say, I’m hungry and, oh, I’m so hungry, my blood sugar, ack. I actually thought back then, I thought, well, I mean, he is really heavy. So, I mean, I don’t know what that does to your body chemistry and stuff. Maybe he really is feeling hunger this often? And looking back on it, yeah, those were panic attacks. And you had them a lot.

Gabe: I did. I really did. 

Lisa: Well, what happened? When did you figure out that it was actually not hunger? I mean, what do you do now? One of the things you told me years ago is that when you had the urge to binge that you didn’t even try to stop the urge anymore. That was impossible. It never worked. Just forget it. That what you did instead was try to substitute different foods. So instead of bingeing on chips or pizza, you were now bingeing on strawberries or yogurt.

Gabe: So, a few things, you are right, making healthier choices does help to try to put those feelings or emotions at bay in a healthier way. Some of the things that I do now when I have a panic attack is one, I understand that it is a panic attack. So sometimes I can stop them just because I am aware of what they are. And I have all kinds of other coping skills, you know, sit down for a moment, count to 10, remove myself from whatever is causing the panic attack if I can see the cause. Splash water on my face.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Gabe: I mean, yeah, there’s just so many coping skills. You know, salty snacks help. Once again is probably in the gray area, it’s not the healthiest choice. But, you know, sometimes, like eating saltines, eating crackers, eating pretzels.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I try to find a healthy choice. You know, sometimes sitting, drinking a diet soda, eating some pretzels, counting to ten, taking a 20 minute break. These things help. But remember, before, all of this would happen, I would go eat a large pizza. I would go eat two, three, four, five, six thousand calories in order to get rid of that panic attack. And because I didn’t know it was a panic attack, I was having multiple of these a day. This would happen once or twice a day on top of all of my regular eating.

Lisa: I tried to look at it now as kind of a harm reduction thing. It is not the greatest for you to sit down and drink that much Diet Coke or to consume that many pretzels. But in comparison to the things that you were doing to deal with this before, this is much better. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t do any of this stuff. You wouldn’t have panic attacks to start with. You wouldn’t need the coping mechanism to begin with. But since you do, this is a much better choice than what you were using before.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really? 

Gabe: I would say that I start to binge maybe once a week. But that’s an advanced skill, right? I put all of the food on the plate. Like I’m ready. I am ready to just binge. And I realize before I get too many calories, oh, this is bad. And I’m willing to get rid of the food. I’m willing to wrap it up and put in the refrigerator or push it down the garbage disposal or just not eat and I never would have done that before, because, after all, that would be wasteful. So I’m proud of myself for being able to stop. I still order too much. I have an unrealistic view of what a serving is. One time I had four people coming over, so I ordered three pizzas. Three large pizzas, and it was you. And you said, why did you order so many? I’m like, well, there’s 

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Lisa: He does that all the time. You always have way too big of servings. It doesn’t matter what size pie you have. It’s a little tiny pie, or if you get, like the giant pie at Sam’s Club, you will count how many people are in the room and cut the pie into that many pieces regardless of pie size.

Gabe: I want to make sure that everybody gets enough pie. I am learning. I am learning to let people cut their own pie and to ask other people to cut for me. I also had to accept along the way that I can have seconds before I thought that I had to take all the food that I wanted now.

Lisa: So obviously food is love, mixed up with all this emotion. A lot of it, you can tell is very clearly rooted in your childhood. Have you figured out the origin story or the backstory on this? Why did this hit you? Where does this come from? Your brother and sister don’t have this problem. They’re normal weight, maybe even thin. Nobody else is at the level that you were.

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: You know, I’m a foot taller than every member of my family. I’m the only redhead. For those paying attention, that does, in fact, make me a red headed stepchild. I’m the only one with severe and persistent mental illness. I don’t know. I had to find a lot of coping skills. You know, some of the questions that I asked myself is, you know, why did I gravitate toward food and sex? Why didn’t I gravitate toward

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Gabe: Or whatever. I think that sometimes there’s just no answer. I don’t know why my brother and sister don’t have this problem. Of course, they both have kids and I don’t. Why did that happen? I mean, just it just did. And on and on and on.

Lisa: You don’t really think it’s a worthwhile problem to even contemplate, then. You just feel like, hey, these things happen and. Because on TV, people can always pinpoint it to like one specific experience. Oh, it was the day that I was so sad and my great grandmother gave me cake, you know? But you’re saying in real life, no, you don’t have anything like that.

Gabe: I think that there is that. When I was sad, my grandmother did give me cake and my mother gave me cake and my mother would make the foods that we wanted on our birthday. And food is love. As you said, food is love. My family loved me a lot. I don’t know what you want. We celebrated every single success with food. We licked our wounds with food. We went to the buffets all the time. Buffets were huge, huge things when I was growing up. What do you want? Name something and I will tell you how food is involved.

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Gabe: Whether it’s substance use disorder, whether it’s hoarding, whether it’s. The reality is, you don’t need any of this stuff. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Absolutely. But there are people who do, in fact, get lung cancer that never smoked a day in their life. Yeah. There’s not always a clear and present cause for these things. Sometimes there are. Sometimes the thing that we think is a clear and present cause isn’t. We’ve just assigned it to that.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: I work with families all the time and they’re like, oh, my God, the mental illness started when he lost his job. OK, well, let’s talk about what he was like before he lost his job. And they would tell me all of these things that are clearly symptoms of mental illness. But in their minds, it was the job loss that triggered the mental illness, even though there was a decade’s worth that they ignored. And I think we do that to ourselves, too. Lisa, what are the takeaways? I mean, binge eating disorder, it’s played a major role in my life.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Gabe: And I know that it’s played a major role in other people’s lives. And I think largely that a lot of eating disorders don’t really get the respect that they deserve. They’re dangerous and people die from them and.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Lisa: Probably because you can’t have an all in. Right. Oh, you’re an alcoholic? Never have another drop. That’s it, problem solved. You have to eat. That was always, because a lot of the treatment things that you did were focused on this food as addiction model or 12 steps, et cetera. When complete abstinence is not an option, how do you manage an addiction? I did not notice until after you had gastric bypass, every other commercial is for food and the food looks so good. And it’s always for food that’s bad for you. No one ever has a commercial for carrots, you know. No, it’s a commercial for fast food or pizza. And it’s so desirable looking.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works. 

Gabe: One of the things I think about is the fast food restaurant that advertises fourth meal. Fourth meal is not a thing. They’re advertising it as if it’s real. Don’t forget fourth meal. And now second breakfast is a thing. The marketing is literally tell you to eat when you do not need to eat. And we’re proud of this, you know, fourth meal, second breakfast. It’s exciting.

Lisa: Well, and if you’re the average person, no problem. It’s like alcohol ads. The alcohol ads are telling you that, hey, when you’re having a good time, you got a beer in your hand. All celebrations go with alcohol. And for most people, hey, that’s fine. No problem. That’s the ad. But if you’re an alcoholic, that’s a real problem. How do you get over that? Most people look at the fast food and are like, oh, yeah, I might stop there for lunch, but for you, it’s a whole thing.

Gabe: It is, and it is very difficult. I’m so glad that I lost the weight. And when people look at me now, like you said earlier, Lisa, they don’t see it. I have deeply entrenched issues with food, things that I struggle with every day. And because I’m a normal body weight, we’ll just go with that, nobody realizes this is a problem and it makes it difficult to seek out community. I remember when I went to my first binge eating group, I was really large and the other members of the group were also very large. And in walked this man who was thin. He was thinner than I am now, and I consider myself to be a normal size. And he was lanky and he just talked about his struggle and how he ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the way there. And we were mean to him. We did not pay attention to him. We did not offer him any help. We as a group were not kind to him. And now I kind of feel like I’m that guy.

Gabe: I don’t want to go to the binge eating support group because I’m afraid that they’re going to look at me and say, you know what? You’re thin. I’d kill to look like you. And I understand. I understand why they would want to have the success that I’ve had over the last 18 years. So I don’t know where to get support or. I’m very fortunate that I can afford traditional therapy and that I have a therapist and I have good supports. And of course, the online communities are really, really helpful. And I’ve advanced to a stage where I don’t need as much support as I used to. But I do remember. I remember what an asshole I was. I don’t think I said anything, but I certainly didn’t put any effort into trying to help him because in my mind, he didn’t need it. And that’s an important lesson I want to get out there. Binge eating disorder is not dependent on your looks. It’s not dependent on your weight. It’s not dependent on your size. It’s dependent on your unhealthy relationship with food.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Gabe: Ok. Listen up, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Obviously, the whole world believes that food is love, but you know what else is love? Subscribing to our podcast, sharing our podcast, rating our podcast, telling everybody that you can about our show. The official link for this show is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. Share it everywhere and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person?  Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

  from https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l Check out https://peterlegyel.wordpress.com/

[ashley-unicorn]

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

  At one point, Gabe weighed more than 550 pounds. Today, he and Lisa remember and discuss the extreme pain and slow healing process of living with binge-eating disorder. Gabe shares his shame in being so overweight, his intense relationship with food, the story of his gastric bypass and the difficult process of learning new coping mechanisms.

How did Gabe’s bipolar and panic attacks tie in with his binge eating? And, importantly, how is he managing the illness today? Join us for an open and honest discussion on living with an eating disorder.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews! 

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Gabe: You need food to survive. So we all get that you have to eat to live. But food has sort of taken on a little bit extra, right? If I give you a cupcake, it means I love you. If it’s your birthday and I don’t get you a birthday cake. You don’t need a birthday cake to live. We do these things to express love, right?

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Gabe: Woo! And that’s where we really sort of get into, I’m gonna go with crux of our discussion today, which is binge eating disorder. Many people don’t know, I used to weigh 550 pounds. I’m six foot three. My top weight was five hundred and fifty pounds.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Lisa: The day you had gastric bypass, you weighed 554 pounds, but you’d been on a diet for several weeks and you’ve been fasting for several days. I’m willing to bet you lost 20 or 30 pounds at least.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me. 

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Gabe: Do you think that there is a difference from a storytelling perspective between weighing five hundred and fifty pounds and weighing six hundred pounds? I mean, just I guess I maybe I qualified for This 600-lb Life.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Gabe: Well, I’m not going to retroactively go back and try to be on a fat-sploitation show. But just the thing that I want the audience to know is that I weighed over five hundred and fifty pounds. Now, the weight that I weigh today, which according to the BMI chart is in fact obese, is 260 pounds. I’m six foot three and I’m a big guy. I’m broad shouldered. I’m not a small person. But 260 pounds is is less than half of 550. I lost a person. I lost a person and change.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years. 

Gabe: Let’s move past how I lost the weight and let’s talk about life as a five hundred and fifty pound man. Because I thought that I just ate a lot. Like, I thought that I needed to go on a diet. And when you first met me. I don’t know. You know, the more we tell our story, Lisa,

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No. 

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true. 

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina? 

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Gabe: I wasn’t doing any of that. We can fight about the timeline until we’re blue in the face. But here’s what we know, I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds and I wasn’t doing much about it. Why do you keep

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Gabe: Here’s the thing, though, that I think you’re not considering. You’re tying together Gabe trying to get gastric bypass with Gabe understanding that he had binge eating disorder and those two things are not in any way related.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Gabe: I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did want gastric bypass because I was 24 years old and I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. I saw gastric bypass as a quick fix, which we’ll get into that later in the show. But let’s focus on binge eating disorder. Have we established that Gabe was overweight and had issues with food?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat. 

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Gabe: Let’s talk about our language for a moment. You and I weren’t, we’re not big language police. We kind of think that the goal should be communication and context, not so much the words. But I got called fat a lot. You, Lisa, saying that I was fat, it does not offend me. It does not bother me. But other people doing it, it did. As you can imagine, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds. I got a lot of sideways glances, stares, giggles, comments, and it hurt my feelings a lot. And the other reason I kind of bring this up is because why are we so cavalier about it? I know how damaging body image can be, because, again, even though I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds, even though I couldn’t walk from my car to my office desk without taking a break, the only thing I cared about was how I looked. I didn’t care that I would lose my breath standing up. I cared that I wasn’t pretty enough and that maybe I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Gabe: I wasn’t. You know, I was 22, 23, 24, I was invincible. I cared that I couldn’t find clothes that fit me. I cared that I was ugly. I cared that women wouldn’t want to sleep with me. I’m not trying to make Lisa out to be a bad person. But Lisa and I were not exclusive because Lisa gave me a fake name when we first met.

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Gabe: That’s fair. I was circus freak fat, apparently. I’m just saying that these are kind of the things that went through my mind. But what I was really surprised to learn and tying it all the way back to you thinking that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when we met because I was trying to get gastric bypass, is my entire motivation for getting gastric bypass was wanting to look better. I did not know that I had binge eating disorder until I was in the steps of gastric bypass. One of the things that I had to go through was a psychological examination where they started talking to me about why I ate. And I ate because it made me feel better.

Lisa: Everything surrounding gastric bypass was a lot different back then. Insurance companies were paying for it in a different way. The surgery was still relatively new. It was kind of a halcyon days for gastric bypass. And there were still stand alone surgery centers that specialized in this. You just don’t see those types of programs anymore. You don’t see the ads on TV anymore. And every surgeon was doing it. Every hospital had a program. You specifically went out of your way. Well, at the time, I thought you had gone out of your way to find this really good program with really high success rates. And one of the reasons they had such a high success rate was because they were so comprehensive. They had all this psychological counseling and nutritional counseling and this really long waiting period and on and on and on. And at the time, I thought, oh, there’s a health care consumer. He has made the best choice for him. Good job. But I found out later, no, he just knew this lady who went there. So he was like, sure.

Gabe: You’re half right and half wrong. When I looked at the other places they kind of scared me a little bit. I know this is a stupid thing to say, but one of the reasons that I felt comfortable at the bariatric treatment centers was because they had wide chairs.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Gabe: When I went to the other place, it was just in a regular, it was a well-known hospital. I don’t know. I had to pay more money to go where I went. So in theory, I could have picked the cheaper place. So.

Lisa: Through a variety of good decision making and luck, you ended up at a place with an excellent program that was very intensive in the pre surgical period. They had a lot of psychological and nutritional counseling, which most programs did not have then or now.

Gabe: So here I am, I walk in and they’re like, why do you want to have this? And I say, because I’m ugly and I don’t want to be ugly. And they say, OK, that’s what we get. Like, what are some things that you would do if you weren’t this size? And, you know, I said I wouldn’t sit in the handicapped seats at hockey games, for example. I would sit in booths instead of tables. I would ride roller coasters again. But in the back of my mind, what I was thinking is I would get laid more. I felt so bad because I felt so ugly and I tied that directly to my weight. Now, I didn’t know that I had bipolar disorder at this time. I did not know that I was untreated. There was obviously a lot going on, but those were my initial reasons. That’s why I wanted to do it. And through that process, I ended up at an eating disorder clinic and I remember my very first appointments. Were you around for that appointment or had I already gone to it and told you about it?

Lisa: You know, I don’t remember if that was your first appointment. Very early, I remember going to the eating disorder clinic. Yeah, it was just like a whole other world. It was so odd to go there because obviously most people getting treated for eating disorders are anorexics because those are the people who are most likely to die of their eating disorder. So they’re the people most likely to get treatment. And most of the binge eaters were quite large. So it was this bizarre mix of very, very small, mostly young women, just painfully thin young women and extremely overweight, you know, 20 some, 30 some year olds. And I went to one of their family support groups and the majority of the people there, their family members, family or friends, were anorexic. And they had the exact same behaviors, the exact same attitudes, the exact same everything. Even though their problem was that they didn’t eat enough. And your problem was that you ate too much. That really went to show that eating disorders were not about the food. It was about the psychological thing.

Gabe: Well, that’s interesting because while it was psychological, it was also about the food. For example, if I was feeling sad, I needed birthday cake. Because birthday cake was tied to happy memories. You couldn’t just give me 20,000 thousand calories in.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Yeah. So I looked up the definition of binge eating disorder, because how do you know when you’re binge eating and how do you know when you’re just over eating? Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food very quickly and often to the point of discomfort and a feeling of loss of control during the binge, experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards and then not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures such as purging, because that’s a whole other eating disorder. And this was interesting, I actually didn’t know this until today. The binge eating occurs on average at least once a week for three months. And this is how you can get diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was not its own separate mental illness until 2013 with the new DSM.

Gabe: You know, all the eating disorders have things in common, right? And the thing that it has in common is this unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food is that you eat to survive. You start to get into a gray area when you eat to survive but you also enjoy what you eat.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: The goal of food is not enjoyment. The goal of food is sustenance. The reason that we get in a gray area is because who’s ever eaten that extra bite? Because it tastes so good. That’s a gray area. You do not need that extra bite. But also, why do we have foods that go with holidays or occasions? That’s a gray area, right? There is no reason on Earth that we need to celebrate our occasions with food.

Lisa: But that’s an evolutionary thing. What encourages the animal to eat? Because it’s enjoyable. It’s pleasant. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. We’d all starve to death. So it goes together. Humans throughout time would not survive if they did not find enjoyment in food because then they wouldn’t eat and they’d all die.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: I suppose alleviating that hunger provides joy. I don’t know why we fell down the rabbit hole on it’s a gray area. But I do I think that it’s important to establish that sometimes our relationship with food, while healthy, is a gray area. There is absolutely no reason that we have to have cake on our birthday. But I would venture to guess that anybody who didn’t get a birthday cake or some sort of special dessert on their birthday would feel that they were left out or that they missed something.

Lisa: Well, that could be its own separate show about the emotional relationship to food and American’s relationship with food, because we just have this ridiculous eating pattern that nobody else has. Nobody in history has had previously.  

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area. 

Gabe: Lisa, the point that I am making, when I was sad, I ate. That is what I learned by going to a nutritionist and examining my relationship with food. And I think that everybody in America has sort of a messed up relationship with food to a certain extent. What I called the gray area, but it was just so extreme. 

Lisa: When you were sad, you ate to comfort yourself. When you were happy, you ate to celebrate. When you were angry, you ate to calm down. When you were fill in an emotion, you responded to it with food and to a lesser extent, so do I. Which once again is why I’m overweight. But it was very extreme, and still is extreme for you.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Lisa: Horrifying. I would call it horrifying. I think you have lost track of how far outside of the norm you still are. You are much better than used to be, obviously. But I think you’ve normalized in your mind a lot of your behavior, and it is not. This is not the way the average person, even the average American, reacts to food.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Lisa: Whenever we go out, there has to be food. It’s not fun for you if there’s not food. All activities have a food that goes with it, a food that must go with it. You can’t go to a movie and not have popcorn or snacks. There’s no enjoyment in the movie if you don’t do it. You can’t go to a Blue Jackets game and not get concessions. You know, a lot of people say, oh, well, I like to have a beer while I watch the game. No, it’s a whole different level for you. You would rather not go at all than go and not eat.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one? 

Lisa: The level at which you want popcorn at the movie theater and the level of distress you go through, if for some reason, you can’t have it. If I told you in advance, hey, the popcorn machine is broken at the movie theater. You wouldn’t go. Even if it was Star Wars on opening night. You would not go.

Gabe: I think that is untrue. 

Lisa: One of the things Gabe and I don’t know if you remember this, that I think really showed the emotional relationship you had with food is a few weeks after you had gastric bypass. We were in the parking lot of your apartment building. And I don’t remember, we had argued about something. And you got so upset that you started crying and you actually said, I just feel so bad and now I don’t even have food. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even have food.

Gabe: I remember.

Lisa: The idea being that was what you were going to turn to make yourself feel better. And this was so soon after surgery that you couldn’t and you were devastated at that. You were so distraught because you just couldn’t come up with anything else to soothe those emotions. 

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Gabe: But, you know, fish and house guests smell after three days. And they had been there for a week. And I was ready to get my privacy back. And I had asked you to stay to kind of be a buffer. And you said that you were ready to go home. You’d been there for a while

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Gabe: Just, you know, come on, come on, come on. And, you know, you were like, no, I gotta get going. I’ve got to go back to work. So I had walked you out to your car and you asked me what was wrong. And I just, I just started crying. And then, of course, I had trouble standing because I just had surgery and I fell down next to your car.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And it was one of the things that really drove home to me how much your emotions were tied up with food. That there was this thing you had always been able to turn to and now you couldn’t and you didn’t know what to do or how to behave. And it was heartbreaking. 

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you 

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Lisa: So she started getting all upset because she thought, well, we’re not going to be able to pick him up. He’s fallen down and we can’t lift him back up. So there was humor in it. Sort of. Looking back.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: In order to have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you need to have three or more of the following: eating much more rapidly than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone because of feeling embarrassed or by how much you’re eating, and feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed or very guilty afterward. And when I read that, the thing that really struck me is eating much more rapidly than normal. It was amazing how fast you could eat. Like you could be a competitive eater.

Gabe: One of the things that really struck me is the things that I used to do to hide how much I was eating. Like, I would order pizza and I would say, you know, hey, I need two large pizzas. And they’re like, OK, do anything else? Well, hang on. Hang on, guys, you think two large pizzas is enough? Hang on, hang on. You got like a special for three. Go, go ahead and. There was just me. There was literally just me. I wasn’t even married. I was just. I was.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Gabe: Yeah, and I would go through drive-throughs and I would order multiple value meals. Same level of, you know, I’d like a number two and number three, both with Diet Cokes. All right, what sauce do you want? You know, my girlfriend likes your barbecue. So let’s go ahead and grab that. And on that other one, I think my buddy said he wanted no ketchup. Yeah, these were all for me.

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Gabe: Oh, yeah. It was important to me that nobody thought that I was eating all of that food. Also, if I had, like, appointments. I was going out to lunch or something for work or business, I would eat before I went.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza? 

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: And I ate more pizza than him. And I thought, huh? I’m a giant cow person and I need to eat less pizza. But no, it turned out that you had ordered two and eaten a whole one before I got there. And now were pretending that this pizza had just arrived and we were now sitting down together for the first time. When you had, in fact, already consumed an entire pizza.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Lisa: One of the things that was interesting when we went to the eating disorder clinic is you did try to hide how much you would eat, but you didn’t have a problem with eating in front of me. One of your doctors told me that was a little bit unusual, that most people literally do not want to be seen chewing in front of other people. But you never seemed to have that particular problem.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go. 

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you. 

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say. 

Lisa: I remember that day because we were eating and then eventually I’m not eating and I’m just watching this because it was like watching. Oh, I don’t know, a snake swallowing its food or something. It was like watching some sort of extreme physical feat. It was amazing. Like, ignoring that it’s pizza, I would not have thought the human body could chew and swallow that rapidly, that a human being could do that. And you couldn’t look away. I do recognize, especially looking back, that was really mean. But I kind of feel almost justified in it. This thing I was watching in front of me was just so stunning and so extreme. How could I not stop and stare and comment on it? It was just incredible in a really, really horrifying way. Yeah.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Gabe: When I got to the eating disorder clinic, you know, they put me through a lot of paces and I started to realize that my relationship with food was not good. I mean, my weight, you know, over 550 pounds, my girlfriend looking at me in disbelief as I ate, the side glances, the comments, not being able to fit into things like roller coasters or booths or I had to sit in the handicapped section. I needed the seatbelt extender for my mid-sized car. It’s not like I was in a tiny car. I had a Ford Taurus. A family car. And I needed a seatbelt extender.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Lisa: Because I don’t let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt and I thought, what kind of fool doesn’t wear a seat belt? And then, lo and behold, you didn’t wear a seatbelt because it didn’t fit, because he couldn’t wear a seat belt.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit. 

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Gabe: Just call the dealership or call the manufacturer and they will mail them to you. Also side note, if you’re on an airplane, just ask the flight attendant when you get on. Just whisper I need a seatbelt extender and they will bring you one or hand you one. Highly recommend doing that as well. Very, very important. But here I am at the eating disorder clinic. I finally got a surgery date. And what was it like a month and a half before I finally got gastric bypass after like two years of fighting for it is when I went to the psychiatric hospital.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Right. That’s what comorbidity is. You had a lot of things going on at one time. This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to treat mental illness and binge eating disorder because there’s all these factors coming together. And how do you tease out what’s what?

Gabe: I guess I don’t remember the specific day that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder. I do remember my aha! moment. I had to do a few things and one of the things that I did is meet with a nutritionist. And she had flash cards and she held up the flash cards. And she was like, what has more calories? And the only one that I remember was she held up a donut, cream filled, icing, and she held up a muffin. She said, Which one has more calories? And I said, the donut. I know this one. Muffins are a diet food. And she said, no, the muffin has more calories. And I said, how is that possible? Muffins are healthy. Muffins have less fat. But they have way more sugar. But I thought a muffin had less calories. It didn’t.

Lisa: Lots of people don’t understand the specifics of nutrition or aren’t quite sure what the right foods are to choose, etc. That’s why they have eat this, not that. What does that have to do with binge eating disorder? Why was that your aha! moment?

Gabe: Because up until that moment, I thought I completely understood what was going into my body, why I was eating it. And that was the first thing that let me know that, no, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong. I did not understand how any of this worked, but I thought I did. That’s the part I’m getting at. If I can be so wrong about what constitutes a healthy meal, then what else am I wrong about? And she helped me understand that I don’t know what’s going on. I clearly do not have a good understanding of my relationship with food, food in general, nothing. And that opened my mind.

Lisa: So your lack of understanding of nutrition made you feel like, hey, maybe I don’t understand a lot of things about eating and how I eat, and therefore maybe I should consider that these people are telling me something of value rather than something I can dismiss?

Gabe: Sure. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of putting it. But what I actually thought in the moment is, holy shit. I don’t know what I’m eating. I do not understand food. I am putting food in my mouth and I think I am making healthy choices. You know what I used to eat and I thought it was a health food? A Snickers bar. Because the advertising was packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies. I was hungry and I needed a snack to get to the next meal. So clearly peanuts. I was eating a candy bar with peanuts, but I thought I was eating a nutrition bar. I thought I was eating something healthy because the advertising got to me. I did not understand what I was putting in my mouth, but I’m supposed to believe that I understand the psychology behind my desire to eat? No. That’s when I started to become much more malleable. That’s when I started listening. That’s when I wanted to understand why I was making the choices that I was making.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Gabe: I believed in that. Aww, my metabolism that’s broken. I don’t have good genes. It’s not that the people who weigh less or are a healthier weight or are healthier in general are making better food choices. No, no, no. They won the genetic lottery.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Gabe: Right. Yeah. I didn’t believe it was my fault at all. It was bad luck. Everybody else was eating just as much as Gabe. But because of their bodies, their metabolism. Oh, well, she just has a good metabolism, and that’s why she’s not overweight. I have a bad metabolism and that. It’s not my fault. It’s just I didn’t even realize I had any control. I.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Gabe: See, I thought that surgery was the magic cure. People have said to me, you know, surgery is the easy way out. It’s not. I don’t know who believes that or why they say it. I don’t know why there is a moral value in what method you use if you are super morbidly obese like I was. But I gotta tell you, spending four days in the hospital, being cut from the top of my chest to below my belly button, opened up, having my insides rearranged, the six week recovery time, the vomiting on your mother, the crying in the parking lot, all of the problems going through two years of therapy and nutrition appointments and re learning everything, with the aid of the therapy, over the next year and a half to finally lose all of the weight and then having to have a secondary surgery to remove the massive amounts of excess skin and male breasts that I had then developed. I had a full mastectomy. So, attention, listeners, I don’t have nipples.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Lisa: Well, I think that people what they don’t understand is that the surgery is not magic in that you can still eat. You’re not somehow prevented from chewing. You can still eat. You just react differently to it. And as evidence of surgery is not the easy way out, the failure rate is really high. And what is the definition of success, you ask?  Someone has had a successful gastric bypass if they have kept off 50% of their excess weight over the course of five years.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Lisa: The failure rate for gastric bypass, depending on the numbers you look, is up to 70%. So after five years, 70%. It’s now been 18 years for you. So even if you gain all the weight back tomorrow, even if you weigh 700 pounds tomorrow, you have had a successful gastric bypass. And then also let’s do some approximate numbers here. Say that you had 300 pounds to lose. Right. And you lost 280 of them. You realize that you could gain, right now, 130 pounds and still be successful. You could right now weigh over 400 pounds. And when it came time to count up all the gastric bypass numbers, you would be in the success category. So when some people say, oh, Gabe had a successful gastric bypass. No, you didn’t just have a successful gastric bypass, you had the A plus, gold standard, amazing of gastric bypasses. Because you could weigh substantially more than you do now and still be a success. You have plenty of people in your life now who never knew you then. People don’t realize how much weight you have lost and this backstory that you have. They just look at you and you look normal

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: No one’s gonna describe you as thin, but you’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly normal weight. Nobody stares at you in public. And that makes people think that you’re done, that you no longer have this messed up relationship with food, that you’re no longer struggling. And that’s not true. I don’t think you get enough credit for that. You are actively struggling with your weight and with your eating disorder on a daily basis. And it just doesn’t show anymore because you’re not so fat. People look at you and they think it went away. It didn’t go away.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words. 

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Lisa: Overweight or heavy or excess weight or more weight or something like that. Why are you adding extra words? It’s like when people say, oh, no, you’re not just bipolar. Yeah, I know. Why are you adding in words? I’m saying to you, hi, I’m bipolar. That’s not all you are. You’re also blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know. You’re the one who added all the baggage to the word. I was just fine with the descriptive phrase, fat.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Lisa: Well, don’t get me wrong, usually I do not care for it when people tell me I’m fat because they mean it as a pejorative. But as a simple description, am I overweight? Am I heavier than those charts and everything? Or even heavier than I personally would like to be? Would I like to be smaller than I currently am? Yes, I am fat. Accept that. I’m also blond and relatively short. Accept it. Yeah, I’ve got a big nose and I’m fat. There you go.

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Lisa: I know. I hadn’t noticed how huge it was until we started doing this so much and with the video and all. I knew it was big, but, oh, my God. Like a toucan. This is the part where you say something nice, like it’s very attractive or, or, you know.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Lisa: Fair, fair. So anyway, we could talk for a long time about all the high points of amazing stories surrounding Gabe and his extremely disordered eating and the struggles of gastric bypass. And to hit a few, when he said the whole thing about struggling after surgery and throwing up on your mom. He didn’t mean his mom, OK? He threw up on my mom. He didn’t vomit on his own mother, although you actually did that as well. He vomited on my mother. That’s the story he’s telling.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it makes me, people are like, oh, why are you angry about that? The poor little dear, he got sick. I told him not to eat that. I told him it was gonna make him throw up. He ate it anyway, and then he threw up on my mother. That’s all I’m saying. That’s OK. We’ll get that over now. Are there any high point stories you’d like to hit? Do you remember how you’d written that list of things that you wanted to do once you lost the weight?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Lisa: And we went out. We were at the mall. He went off to go shop. I’m looking at clothes. And then he comes over to me and goes, Well, I asked them for the largest size they had and it didn’t fit me. And I thought, aww. And I said, well, honey, it’s okay. It will. You’re still losing. It’s okay. And then he goes, and that’s why I got the size three down,

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Lisa: Yep. There had been a lot of places that he couldn’t go because they didn’t have tables. They only had those fixed booths and there’s nothing you can do. And yeah, occasionally he would try because someone would ask him to go to that restaurant. He’d try to squeeze himself in. And, oh, God, it was so painful to watch. You would say things like, oh, no, I can fit in that chair. Dude, you cannot fit into that chair. Please don’t make all of us uncomfortable by trying. Please stop.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Just, it was terrible on so many levels. Yeah. I got you that for Christmas one year. I did like a ten dollar gift card to all these restaurants you hadn’t been able to go to. And you insisted, even as we were walking in the door, that you would not fit. And I thought, yeah, you’re, dude, you’re going to fit. And then you crawled into the booth and started like wiggling around to show how much extra space there was. And of course, listeners can’t see this, but the look on your face right now and how much you’re smiling like it’s just the greatest thing you could ever remember. It’s, that’s so sweet.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Gabe: Because, remember, roller coaster is on there. And again, I was worried. You said that I was at the right weight and we went up to the first roller coaster and I said, will I fit? And the gentleman said.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here. 

Lisa: And you know, these lines can be very long. You might be in line for an hour or more. So they have one of the roller coaster cars sitting at the front of the line, so you can test it. Because no one wants to wait in line for an hour, only to be told, hey, you don’t fit in this seat. Get out of line. 

Gabe: So the roller coaster attendant was super nice. I sat down in it and as he was pulling the thing down, and he said, we just have to make sure that it will latch over your shoulders because of your height. And I said, you’re testing this because I’m tall? Of course, he’s just this kid. He just looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, oh, my God, I just, no, I was asking because I’m fat. 

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him. 

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying? 

Lisa: You turned to him, you said, oh, my God, you said that because I’m tall. And he was like, Yeah? He was so confused. And you spent the next forty five minutes repeating that. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m too tall. Oh my God, he said that because I’m tall. Yeah you did. You started to cry a little bit. You were so excited.

Gabe: That was a good day. Lisa, you touched on comorbidity a little bit. I believe very strongly that I, of course, do have binge eating disorder, but I also believe that it was driven by the excess of untreated bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: I was doing pretty much anything that I could to manage the emotional overload of depression and grandiosity and mania and suicidality. And anything that could provide me even a moment of joy, whether it was drugs, alcohol, food, sex, spending money, I would do. What do you think the intersection of all of this Is?

Lisa: Well, obviously, having gastric bypass was an amazing choice for you, and it worked out great. And who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t had it done? But I actually recommended at the time that maybe you not do it because you had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and everything was changing so fast. And I thought, well, hey, maybe his eating disorder isn’t actually the thing. Maybe this has always just been an almost symptom of bipolar disorder. And once he has that under better control, he’ll just be able to control his eating and he won’t need to go through the surgery, etc. And of course, you have a gastric bypass, you were losing a pound a day. Think of how delicate that balance of all your different medications are and then think about how you get that balance when your body is changing so rapidly. 

Gabe: One of the things that I think about in terms of comorbidity, is mistaking feelings, and the big one is that it took a long time to be diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder because I honestly thought that panic attacks were hunger pains.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: Every time that I would have a panic attack, I would think that I was hungry. Which, of course, created a Pavlov’s dog effect where a panic attack was very much associated with food. And in fact, more importantly, the cure for the panic attack was associated with food. So every time I have a panic attack, I would have to eat.

Lisa: We’d be standing in line or something, and I recognize now that you would start having a panic attack, but what you’d say, you’d turn to me and say, I’m hungry and, oh, I’m so hungry, my blood sugar, ack. I actually thought back then, I thought, well, I mean, he is really heavy. So, I mean, I don’t know what that does to your body chemistry and stuff. Maybe he really is feeling hunger this often? And looking back on it, yeah, those were panic attacks. And you had them a lot.

Gabe: I did. I really did. 

Lisa: Well, what happened? When did you figure out that it was actually not hunger? I mean, what do you do now? One of the things you told me years ago is that when you had the urge to binge that you didn’t even try to stop the urge anymore. That was impossible. It never worked. Just forget it. That what you did instead was try to substitute different foods. So instead of bingeing on chips or pizza, you were now bingeing on strawberries or yogurt.

Gabe: So, a few things, you are right, making healthier choices does help to try to put those feelings or emotions at bay in a healthier way. Some of the things that I do now when I have a panic attack is one, I understand that it is a panic attack. So sometimes I can stop them just because I am aware of what they are. And I have all kinds of other coping skills, you know, sit down for a moment, count to 10, remove myself from whatever is causing the panic attack if I can see the cause. Splash water on my face.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Gabe: I mean, yeah, there’s just so many coping skills. You know, salty snacks help. Once again is probably in the gray area, it’s not the healthiest choice. But, you know, sometimes, like eating saltines, eating crackers, eating pretzels.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I try to find a healthy choice. You know, sometimes sitting, drinking a diet soda, eating some pretzels, counting to ten, taking a 20 minute break. These things help. But remember, before, all of this would happen, I would go eat a large pizza. I would go eat two, three, four, five, six thousand calories in order to get rid of that panic attack. And because I didn’t know it was a panic attack, I was having multiple of these a day. This would happen once or twice a day on top of all of my regular eating.

Lisa: I tried to look at it now as kind of a harm reduction thing. It is not the greatest for you to sit down and drink that much Diet Coke or to consume that many pretzels. But in comparison to the things that you were doing to deal with this before, this is much better. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t do any of this stuff. You wouldn’t have panic attacks to start with. You wouldn’t need the coping mechanism to begin with. But since you do, this is a much better choice than what you were using before.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really? 

Gabe: I would say that I start to binge maybe once a week. But that’s an advanced skill, right? I put all of the food on the plate. Like I’m ready. I am ready to just binge. And I realize before I get too many calories, oh, this is bad. And I’m willing to get rid of the food. I’m willing to wrap it up and put in the refrigerator or push it down the garbage disposal or just not eat and I never would have done that before, because, after all, that would be wasteful. So I’m proud of myself for being able to stop. I still order too much. I have an unrealistic view of what a serving is. One time I had four people coming over, so I ordered three pizzas. Three large pizzas, and it was you. And you said, why did you order so many? I’m like, well, there’s 

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Lisa: He does that all the time. You always have way too big of servings. It doesn’t matter what size pie you have. It’s a little tiny pie, or if you get, like the giant pie at Sam’s Club, you will count how many people are in the room and cut the pie into that many pieces regardless of pie size.

Gabe: I want to make sure that everybody gets enough pie. I am learning. I am learning to let people cut their own pie and to ask other people to cut for me. I also had to accept along the way that I can have seconds before I thought that I had to take all the food that I wanted now.

Lisa: So obviously food is love, mixed up with all this emotion. A lot of it, you can tell is very clearly rooted in your childhood. Have you figured out the origin story or the backstory on this? Why did this hit you? Where does this come from? Your brother and sister don’t have this problem. They’re normal weight, maybe even thin. Nobody else is at the level that you were.

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: You know, I’m a foot taller than every member of my family. I’m the only redhead. For those paying attention, that does, in fact, make me a red headed stepchild. I’m the only one with severe and persistent mental illness. I don’t know. I had to find a lot of coping skills. You know, some of the questions that I asked myself is, you know, why did I gravitate toward food and sex? Why didn’t I gravitate toward

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Gabe: Or whatever. I think that sometimes there’s just no answer. I don’t know why my brother and sister don’t have this problem. Of course, they both have kids and I don’t. Why did that happen? I mean, just it just did. And on and on and on.

Lisa: You don’t really think it’s a worthwhile problem to even contemplate, then. You just feel like, hey, these things happen and. Because on TV, people can always pinpoint it to like one specific experience. Oh, it was the day that I was so sad and my great grandmother gave me cake, you know? But you’re saying in real life, no, you don’t have anything like that.

Gabe: I think that there is that. When I was sad, my grandmother did give me cake and my mother gave me cake and my mother would make the foods that we wanted on our birthday. And food is love. As you said, food is love. My family loved me a lot. I don’t know what you want. We celebrated every single success with food. We licked our wounds with food. We went to the buffets all the time. Buffets were huge, huge things when I was growing up. What do you want? Name something and I will tell you how food is involved.

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Gabe: Whether it’s substance use disorder, whether it’s hoarding, whether it’s. The reality is, you don’t need any of this stuff. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Absolutely. But there are people who do, in fact, get lung cancer that never smoked a day in their life. Yeah. There’s not always a clear and present cause for these things. Sometimes there are. Sometimes the thing that we think is a clear and present cause isn’t. We’ve just assigned it to that.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: I work with families all the time and they’re like, oh, my God, the mental illness started when he lost his job. OK, well, let’s talk about what he was like before he lost his job. And they would tell me all of these things that are clearly symptoms of mental illness. But in their minds, it was the job loss that triggered the mental illness, even though there was a decade’s worth that they ignored. And I think we do that to ourselves, too. Lisa, what are the takeaways? I mean, binge eating disorder, it’s played a major role in my life.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Gabe: And I know that it’s played a major role in other people’s lives. And I think largely that a lot of eating disorders don’t really get the respect that they deserve. They’re dangerous and people die from them and.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Lisa: Probably because you can’t have an all in. Right. Oh, you’re an alcoholic? Never have another drop. That’s it, problem solved. You have to eat. That was always, because a lot of the treatment things that you did were focused on this food as addiction model or 12 steps, et cetera. When complete abstinence is not an option, how do you manage an addiction? I did not notice until after you had gastric bypass, every other commercial is for food and the food looks so good. And it’s always for food that’s bad for you. No one ever has a commercial for carrots, you know. No, it’s a commercial for fast food or pizza. And it’s so desirable looking.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works. 

Gabe: One of the things I think about is the fast food restaurant that advertises fourth meal. Fourth meal is not a thing. They’re advertising it as if it’s real. Don’t forget fourth meal. And now second breakfast is a thing. The marketing is literally tell you to eat when you do not need to eat. And we’re proud of this, you know, fourth meal, second breakfast. It’s exciting.

Lisa: Well, and if you’re the average person, no problem. It’s like alcohol ads. The alcohol ads are telling you that, hey, when you’re having a good time, you got a beer in your hand. All celebrations go with alcohol. And for most people, hey, that’s fine. No problem. That’s the ad. But if you’re an alcoholic, that’s a real problem. How do you get over that? Most people look at the fast food and are like, oh, yeah, I might stop there for lunch, but for you, it’s a whole thing.

Gabe: It is, and it is very difficult. I’m so glad that I lost the weight. And when people look at me now, like you said earlier, Lisa, they don’t see it. I have deeply entrenched issues with food, things that I struggle with every day. And because I’m a normal body weight, we’ll just go with that, nobody realizes this is a problem and it makes it difficult to seek out community. I remember when I went to my first binge eating group, I was really large and the other members of the group were also very large. And in walked this man who was thin. He was thinner than I am now, and I consider myself to be a normal size. And he was lanky and he just talked about his struggle and how he ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the way there. And we were mean to him. We did not pay attention to him. We did not offer him any help. We as a group were not kind to him. And now I kind of feel like I’m that guy.

Gabe: I don’t want to go to the binge eating support group because I’m afraid that they’re going to look at me and say, you know what? You’re thin. I’d kill to look like you. And I understand. I understand why they would want to have the success that I’ve had over the last 18 years. So I don’t know where to get support or. I’m very fortunate that I can afford traditional therapy and that I have a therapist and I have good supports. And of course, the online communities are really, really helpful. And I’ve advanced to a stage where I don’t need as much support as I used to. But I do remember. I remember what an asshole I was. I don’t think I said anything, but I certainly didn’t put any effort into trying to help him because in my mind, he didn’t need it. And that’s an important lesson I want to get out there. Binge eating disorder is not dependent on your looks. It’s not dependent on your weight. It’s not dependent on your size. It’s dependent on your unhealthy relationship with food.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Gabe: Ok. Listen up, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Obviously, the whole world believes that food is love, but you know what else is love? Subscribing to our podcast, sharing our podcast, rating our podcast, telling everybody that you can about our show. The official link for this show is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. Share it everywhere and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person?  Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

  from https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l Check out https://daniejadkins.wordpress.com/

[brentrogers]

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

  At one point, Gabe weighed more than 550 pounds. Today, he and Lisa remember and discuss the extreme pain and slow healing process of living with binge-eating disorder. Gabe shares his shame in being so overweight, his intense relationship with food, the story of his gastric bypass and the difficult process of learning new coping mechanisms.

How did Gabe’s bipolar and panic attacks tie in with his binge eating? And, importantly, how is he managing the illness today? Join us for an open and honest discussion on living with an eating disorder.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews! 

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Gabe: You need food to survive. So we all get that you have to eat to live. But food has sort of taken on a little bit extra, right? If I give you a cupcake, it means I love you. If it’s your birthday and I don’t get you a birthday cake. You don’t need a birthday cake to live. We do these things to express love, right?

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Gabe: Woo! And that’s where we really sort of get into, I’m gonna go with crux of our discussion today, which is binge eating disorder. Many people don’t know, I used to weigh 550 pounds. I’m six foot three. My top weight was five hundred and fifty pounds.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Lisa: The day you had gastric bypass, you weighed 554 pounds, but you’d been on a diet for several weeks and you’ve been fasting for several days. I’m willing to bet you lost 20 or 30 pounds at least.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me. 

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Gabe: Do you think that there is a difference from a storytelling perspective between weighing five hundred and fifty pounds and weighing six hundred pounds? I mean, just I guess I maybe I qualified for This 600-lb Life.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Gabe: Well, I’m not going to retroactively go back and try to be on a fat-sploitation show. But just the thing that I want the audience to know is that I weighed over five hundred and fifty pounds. Now, the weight that I weigh today, which according to the BMI chart is in fact obese, is 260 pounds. I’m six foot three and I’m a big guy. I’m broad shouldered. I’m not a small person. But 260 pounds is is less than half of 550. I lost a person. I lost a person and change.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years. 

Gabe: Let’s move past how I lost the weight and let’s talk about life as a five hundred and fifty pound man. Because I thought that I just ate a lot. Like, I thought that I needed to go on a diet. And when you first met me. I don’t know. You know, the more we tell our story, Lisa,

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No. 

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true. 

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina? 

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Gabe: I wasn’t doing any of that. We can fight about the timeline until we’re blue in the face. But here’s what we know, I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds and I wasn’t doing much about it. Why do you keep

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Gabe: Here’s the thing, though, that I think you’re not considering. You’re tying together Gabe trying to get gastric bypass with Gabe understanding that he had binge eating disorder and those two things are not in any way related.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Gabe: I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did want gastric bypass because I was 24 years old and I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. I saw gastric bypass as a quick fix, which we’ll get into that later in the show. But let’s focus on binge eating disorder. Have we established that Gabe was overweight and had issues with food?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat. 

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Gabe: Let’s talk about our language for a moment. You and I weren’t, we’re not big language police. We kind of think that the goal should be communication and context, not so much the words. But I got called fat a lot. You, Lisa, saying that I was fat, it does not offend me. It does not bother me. But other people doing it, it did. As you can imagine, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds. I got a lot of sideways glances, stares, giggles, comments, and it hurt my feelings a lot. And the other reason I kind of bring this up is because why are we so cavalier about it? I know how damaging body image can be, because, again, even though I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds, even though I couldn’t walk from my car to my office desk without taking a break, the only thing I cared about was how I looked. I didn’t care that I would lose my breath standing up. I cared that I wasn’t pretty enough and that maybe I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Gabe: I wasn’t. You know, I was 22, 23, 24, I was invincible. I cared that I couldn’t find clothes that fit me. I cared that I was ugly. I cared that women wouldn’t want to sleep with me. I’m not trying to make Lisa out to be a bad person. But Lisa and I were not exclusive because Lisa gave me a fake name when we first met.

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Gabe: That’s fair. I was circus freak fat, apparently. I’m just saying that these are kind of the things that went through my mind. But what I was really surprised to learn and tying it all the way back to you thinking that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when we met because I was trying to get gastric bypass, is my entire motivation for getting gastric bypass was wanting to look better. I did not know that I had binge eating disorder until I was in the steps of gastric bypass. One of the things that I had to go through was a psychological examination where they started talking to me about why I ate. And I ate because it made me feel better.

Lisa: Everything surrounding gastric bypass was a lot different back then. Insurance companies were paying for it in a different way. The surgery was still relatively new. It was kind of a halcyon days for gastric bypass. And there were still stand alone surgery centers that specialized in this. You just don’t see those types of programs anymore. You don’t see the ads on TV anymore. And every surgeon was doing it. Every hospital had a program. You specifically went out of your way. Well, at the time, I thought you had gone out of your way to find this really good program with really high success rates. And one of the reasons they had such a high success rate was because they were so comprehensive. They had all this psychological counseling and nutritional counseling and this really long waiting period and on and on and on. And at the time, I thought, oh, there’s a health care consumer. He has made the best choice for him. Good job. But I found out later, no, he just knew this lady who went there. So he was like, sure.

Gabe: You’re half right and half wrong. When I looked at the other places they kind of scared me a little bit. I know this is a stupid thing to say, but one of the reasons that I felt comfortable at the bariatric treatment centers was because they had wide chairs.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Gabe: When I went to the other place, it was just in a regular, it was a well-known hospital. I don’t know. I had to pay more money to go where I went. So in theory, I could have picked the cheaper place. So.

Lisa: Through a variety of good decision making and luck, you ended up at a place with an excellent program that was very intensive in the pre surgical period. They had a lot of psychological and nutritional counseling, which most programs did not have then or now.

Gabe: So here I am, I walk in and they’re like, why do you want to have this? And I say, because I’m ugly and I don’t want to be ugly. And they say, OK, that’s what we get. Like, what are some things that you would do if you weren’t this size? And, you know, I said I wouldn’t sit in the handicapped seats at hockey games, for example. I would sit in booths instead of tables. I would ride roller coasters again. But in the back of my mind, what I was thinking is I would get laid more. I felt so bad because I felt so ugly and I tied that directly to my weight. Now, I didn’t know that I had bipolar disorder at this time. I did not know that I was untreated. There was obviously a lot going on, but those were my initial reasons. That’s why I wanted to do it. And through that process, I ended up at an eating disorder clinic and I remember my very first appointments. Were you around for that appointment or had I already gone to it and told you about it?

Lisa: You know, I don’t remember if that was your first appointment. Very early, I remember going to the eating disorder clinic. Yeah, it was just like a whole other world. It was so odd to go there because obviously most people getting treated for eating disorders are anorexics because those are the people who are most likely to die of their eating disorder. So they’re the people most likely to get treatment. And most of the binge eaters were quite large. So it was this bizarre mix of very, very small, mostly young women, just painfully thin young women and extremely overweight, you know, 20 some, 30 some year olds. And I went to one of their family support groups and the majority of the people there, their family members, family or friends, were anorexic. And they had the exact same behaviors, the exact same attitudes, the exact same everything. Even though their problem was that they didn’t eat enough. And your problem was that you ate too much. That really went to show that eating disorders were not about the food. It was about the psychological thing.

Gabe: Well, that’s interesting because while it was psychological, it was also about the food. For example, if I was feeling sad, I needed birthday cake. Because birthday cake was tied to happy memories. You couldn’t just give me 20,000 thousand calories in.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Yeah. So I looked up the definition of binge eating disorder, because how do you know when you’re binge eating and how do you know when you’re just over eating? Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food very quickly and often to the point of discomfort and a feeling of loss of control during the binge, experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards and then not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures such as purging, because that’s a whole other eating disorder. And this was interesting, I actually didn’t know this until today. The binge eating occurs on average at least once a week for three months. And this is how you can get diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was not its own separate mental illness until 2013 with the new DSM.

Gabe: You know, all the eating disorders have things in common, right? And the thing that it has in common is this unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food is that you eat to survive. You start to get into a gray area when you eat to survive but you also enjoy what you eat.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: The goal of food is not enjoyment. The goal of food is sustenance. The reason that we get in a gray area is because who’s ever eaten that extra bite? Because it tastes so good. That’s a gray area. You do not need that extra bite. But also, why do we have foods that go with holidays or occasions? That’s a gray area, right? There is no reason on Earth that we need to celebrate our occasions with food.

Lisa: But that’s an evolutionary thing. What encourages the animal to eat? Because it’s enjoyable. It’s pleasant. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. We’d all starve to death. So it goes together. Humans throughout time would not survive if they did not find enjoyment in food because then they wouldn’t eat and they’d all die.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: I suppose alleviating that hunger provides joy. I don’t know why we fell down the rabbit hole on it’s a gray area. But I do I think that it’s important to establish that sometimes our relationship with food, while healthy, is a gray area. There is absolutely no reason that we have to have cake on our birthday. But I would venture to guess that anybody who didn’t get a birthday cake or some sort of special dessert on their birthday would feel that they were left out or that they missed something.

Lisa: Well, that could be its own separate show about the emotional relationship to food and American’s relationship with food, because we just have this ridiculous eating pattern that nobody else has. Nobody in history has had previously.  

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area. 

Gabe: Lisa, the point that I am making, when I was sad, I ate. That is what I learned by going to a nutritionist and examining my relationship with food. And I think that everybody in America has sort of a messed up relationship with food to a certain extent. What I called the gray area, but it was just so extreme. 

Lisa: When you were sad, you ate to comfort yourself. When you were happy, you ate to celebrate. When you were angry, you ate to calm down. When you were fill in an emotion, you responded to it with food and to a lesser extent, so do I. Which once again is why I’m overweight. But it was very extreme, and still is extreme for you.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Lisa: Horrifying. I would call it horrifying. I think you have lost track of how far outside of the norm you still are. You are much better than used to be, obviously. But I think you’ve normalized in your mind a lot of your behavior, and it is not. This is not the way the average person, even the average American, reacts to food.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Lisa: Whenever we go out, there has to be food. It’s not fun for you if there’s not food. All activities have a food that goes with it, a food that must go with it. You can’t go to a movie and not have popcorn or snacks. There’s no enjoyment in the movie if you don’t do it. You can’t go to a Blue Jackets game and not get concessions. You know, a lot of people say, oh, well, I like to have a beer while I watch the game. No, it’s a whole different level for you. You would rather not go at all than go and not eat.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one? 

Lisa: The level at which you want popcorn at the movie theater and the level of distress you go through, if for some reason, you can’t have it. If I told you in advance, hey, the popcorn machine is broken at the movie theater. You wouldn’t go. Even if it was Star Wars on opening night. You would not go.

Gabe: I think that is untrue. 

Lisa: One of the things Gabe and I don’t know if you remember this, that I think really showed the emotional relationship you had with food is a few weeks after you had gastric bypass. We were in the parking lot of your apartment building. And I don’t remember, we had argued about something. And you got so upset that you started crying and you actually said, I just feel so bad and now I don’t even have food. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even have food.

Gabe: I remember.

Lisa: The idea being that was what you were going to turn to make yourself feel better. And this was so soon after surgery that you couldn’t and you were devastated at that. You were so distraught because you just couldn’t come up with anything else to soothe those emotions. 

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Gabe: But, you know, fish and house guests smell after three days. And they had been there for a week. And I was ready to get my privacy back. And I had asked you to stay to kind of be a buffer. And you said that you were ready to go home. You’d been there for a while

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Gabe: Just, you know, come on, come on, come on. And, you know, you were like, no, I gotta get going. I’ve got to go back to work. So I had walked you out to your car and you asked me what was wrong. And I just, I just started crying. And then, of course, I had trouble standing because I just had surgery and I fell down next to your car.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And it was one of the things that really drove home to me how much your emotions were tied up with food. That there was this thing you had always been able to turn to and now you couldn’t and you didn’t know what to do or how to behave. And it was heartbreaking. 

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you 

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Lisa: So she started getting all upset because she thought, well, we’re not going to be able to pick him up. He’s fallen down and we can’t lift him back up. So there was humor in it. Sort of. Looking back.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: In order to have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you need to have three or more of the following: eating much more rapidly than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone because of feeling embarrassed or by how much you’re eating, and feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed or very guilty afterward. And when I read that, the thing that really struck me is eating much more rapidly than normal. It was amazing how fast you could eat. Like you could be a competitive eater.

Gabe: One of the things that really struck me is the things that I used to do to hide how much I was eating. Like, I would order pizza and I would say, you know, hey, I need two large pizzas. And they’re like, OK, do anything else? Well, hang on. Hang on, guys, you think two large pizzas is enough? Hang on, hang on. You got like a special for three. Go, go ahead and. There was just me. There was literally just me. I wasn’t even married. I was just. I was.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Gabe: Yeah, and I would go through drive-throughs and I would order multiple value meals. Same level of, you know, I’d like a number two and number three, both with Diet Cokes. All right, what sauce do you want? You know, my girlfriend likes your barbecue. So let’s go ahead and grab that. And on that other one, I think my buddy said he wanted no ketchup. Yeah, these were all for me.

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Gabe: Oh, yeah. It was important to me that nobody thought that I was eating all of that food. Also, if I had, like, appointments. I was going out to lunch or something for work or business, I would eat before I went.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza? 

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: And I ate more pizza than him. And I thought, huh? I’m a giant cow person and I need to eat less pizza. But no, it turned out that you had ordered two and eaten a whole one before I got there. And now were pretending that this pizza had just arrived and we were now sitting down together for the first time. When you had, in fact, already consumed an entire pizza.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Lisa: One of the things that was interesting when we went to the eating disorder clinic is you did try to hide how much you would eat, but you didn’t have a problem with eating in front of me. One of your doctors told me that was a little bit unusual, that most people literally do not want to be seen chewing in front of other people. But you never seemed to have that particular problem.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go. 

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you. 

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say. 

Lisa: I remember that day because we were eating and then eventually I’m not eating and I’m just watching this because it was like watching. Oh, I don’t know, a snake swallowing its food or something. It was like watching some sort of extreme physical feat. It was amazing. Like, ignoring that it’s pizza, I would not have thought the human body could chew and swallow that rapidly, that a human being could do that. And you couldn’t look away. I do recognize, especially looking back, that was really mean. But I kind of feel almost justified in it. This thing I was watching in front of me was just so stunning and so extreme. How could I not stop and stare and comment on it? It was just incredible in a really, really horrifying way. Yeah.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Gabe: When I got to the eating disorder clinic, you know, they put me through a lot of paces and I started to realize that my relationship with food was not good. I mean, my weight, you know, over 550 pounds, my girlfriend looking at me in disbelief as I ate, the side glances, the comments, not being able to fit into things like roller coasters or booths or I had to sit in the handicapped section. I needed the seatbelt extender for my mid-sized car. It’s not like I was in a tiny car. I had a Ford Taurus. A family car. And I needed a seatbelt extender.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Lisa: Because I don’t let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt and I thought, what kind of fool doesn’t wear a seat belt? And then, lo and behold, you didn’t wear a seatbelt because it didn’t fit, because he couldn’t wear a seat belt.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit. 

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Gabe: Just call the dealership or call the manufacturer and they will mail them to you. Also side note, if you’re on an airplane, just ask the flight attendant when you get on. Just whisper I need a seatbelt extender and they will bring you one or hand you one. Highly recommend doing that as well. Very, very important. But here I am at the eating disorder clinic. I finally got a surgery date. And what was it like a month and a half before I finally got gastric bypass after like two years of fighting for it is when I went to the psychiatric hospital.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Right. That’s what comorbidity is. You had a lot of things going on at one time. This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to treat mental illness and binge eating disorder because there’s all these factors coming together. And how do you tease out what’s what?

Gabe: I guess I don’t remember the specific day that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder. I do remember my aha! moment. I had to do a few things and one of the things that I did is meet with a nutritionist. And she had flash cards and she held up the flash cards. And she was like, what has more calories? And the only one that I remember was she held up a donut, cream filled, icing, and she held up a muffin. She said, Which one has more calories? And I said, the donut. I know this one. Muffins are a diet food. And she said, no, the muffin has more calories. And I said, how is that possible? Muffins are healthy. Muffins have less fat. But they have way more sugar. But I thought a muffin had less calories. It didn’t.

Lisa: Lots of people don’t understand the specifics of nutrition or aren’t quite sure what the right foods are to choose, etc. That’s why they have eat this, not that. What does that have to do with binge eating disorder? Why was that your aha! moment?

Gabe: Because up until that moment, I thought I completely understood what was going into my body, why I was eating it. And that was the first thing that let me know that, no, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong. I did not understand how any of this worked, but I thought I did. That’s the part I’m getting at. If I can be so wrong about what constitutes a healthy meal, then what else am I wrong about? And she helped me understand that I don’t know what’s going on. I clearly do not have a good understanding of my relationship with food, food in general, nothing. And that opened my mind.

Lisa: So your lack of understanding of nutrition made you feel like, hey, maybe I don’t understand a lot of things about eating and how I eat, and therefore maybe I should consider that these people are telling me something of value rather than something I can dismiss?

Gabe: Sure. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of putting it. But what I actually thought in the moment is, holy shit. I don’t know what I’m eating. I do not understand food. I am putting food in my mouth and I think I am making healthy choices. You know what I used to eat and I thought it was a health food? A Snickers bar. Because the advertising was packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies. I was hungry and I needed a snack to get to the next meal. So clearly peanuts. I was eating a candy bar with peanuts, but I thought I was eating a nutrition bar. I thought I was eating something healthy because the advertising got to me. I did not understand what I was putting in my mouth, but I’m supposed to believe that I understand the psychology behind my desire to eat? No. That’s when I started to become much more malleable. That’s when I started listening. That’s when I wanted to understand why I was making the choices that I was making.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Gabe: I believed in that. Aww, my metabolism that’s broken. I don’t have good genes. It’s not that the people who weigh less or are a healthier weight or are healthier in general are making better food choices. No, no, no. They won the genetic lottery.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Gabe: Right. Yeah. I didn’t believe it was my fault at all. It was bad luck. Everybody else was eating just as much as Gabe. But because of their bodies, their metabolism. Oh, well, she just has a good metabolism, and that’s why she’s not overweight. I have a bad metabolism and that. It’s not my fault. It’s just I didn’t even realize I had any control. I.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Gabe: See, I thought that surgery was the magic cure. People have said to me, you know, surgery is the easy way out. It’s not. I don’t know who believes that or why they say it. I don’t know why there is a moral value in what method you use if you are super morbidly obese like I was. But I gotta tell you, spending four days in the hospital, being cut from the top of my chest to below my belly button, opened up, having my insides rearranged, the six week recovery time, the vomiting on your mother, the crying in the parking lot, all of the problems going through two years of therapy and nutrition appointments and re learning everything, with the aid of the therapy, over the next year and a half to finally lose all of the weight and then having to have a secondary surgery to remove the massive amounts of excess skin and male breasts that I had then developed. I had a full mastectomy. So, attention, listeners, I don’t have nipples.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Lisa: Well, I think that people what they don’t understand is that the surgery is not magic in that you can still eat. You’re not somehow prevented from chewing. You can still eat. You just react differently to it. And as evidence of surgery is not the easy way out, the failure rate is really high. And what is the definition of success, you ask?  Someone has had a successful gastric bypass if they have kept off 50% of their excess weight over the course of five years.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Lisa: The failure rate for gastric bypass, depending on the numbers you look, is up to 70%. So after five years, 70%. It’s now been 18 years for you. So even if you gain all the weight back tomorrow, even if you weigh 700 pounds tomorrow, you have had a successful gastric bypass. And then also let’s do some approximate numbers here. Say that you had 300 pounds to lose. Right. And you lost 280 of them. You realize that you could gain, right now, 130 pounds and still be successful. You could right now weigh over 400 pounds. And when it came time to count up all the gastric bypass numbers, you would be in the success category. So when some people say, oh, Gabe had a successful gastric bypass. No, you didn’t just have a successful gastric bypass, you had the A plus, gold standard, amazing of gastric bypasses. Because you could weigh substantially more than you do now and still be a success. You have plenty of people in your life now who never knew you then. People don’t realize how much weight you have lost and this backstory that you have. They just look at you and you look normal

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: No one’s gonna describe you as thin, but you’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly normal weight. Nobody stares at you in public. And that makes people think that you’re done, that you no longer have this messed up relationship with food, that you’re no longer struggling. And that’s not true. I don’t think you get enough credit for that. You are actively struggling with your weight and with your eating disorder on a daily basis. And it just doesn’t show anymore because you’re not so fat. People look at you and they think it went away. It didn’t go away.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words. 

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Lisa: Overweight or heavy or excess weight or more weight or something like that. Why are you adding extra words? It’s like when people say, oh, no, you’re not just bipolar. Yeah, I know. Why are you adding in words? I’m saying to you, hi, I’m bipolar. That’s not all you are. You’re also blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know. You’re the one who added all the baggage to the word. I was just fine with the descriptive phrase, fat.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Lisa: Well, don’t get me wrong, usually I do not care for it when people tell me I’m fat because they mean it as a pejorative. But as a simple description, am I overweight? Am I heavier than those charts and everything? Or even heavier than I personally would like to be? Would I like to be smaller than I currently am? Yes, I am fat. Accept that. I’m also blond and relatively short. Accept it. Yeah, I’ve got a big nose and I’m fat. There you go.

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Lisa: I know. I hadn’t noticed how huge it was until we started doing this so much and with the video and all. I knew it was big, but, oh, my God. Like a toucan. This is the part where you say something nice, like it’s very attractive or, or, you know.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Lisa: Fair, fair. So anyway, we could talk for a long time about all the high points of amazing stories surrounding Gabe and his extremely disordered eating and the struggles of gastric bypass. And to hit a few, when he said the whole thing about struggling after surgery and throwing up on your mom. He didn’t mean his mom, OK? He threw up on my mom. He didn’t vomit on his own mother, although you actually did that as well. He vomited on my mother. That’s the story he’s telling.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it makes me, people are like, oh, why are you angry about that? The poor little dear, he got sick. I told him not to eat that. I told him it was gonna make him throw up. He ate it anyway, and then he threw up on my mother. That’s all I’m saying. That’s OK. We’ll get that over now. Are there any high point stories you’d like to hit? Do you remember how you’d written that list of things that you wanted to do once you lost the weight?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Lisa: And we went out. We were at the mall. He went off to go shop. I’m looking at clothes. And then he comes over to me and goes, Well, I asked them for the largest size they had and it didn’t fit me. And I thought, aww. And I said, well, honey, it’s okay. It will. You’re still losing. It’s okay. And then he goes, and that’s why I got the size three down,

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Lisa: Yep. There had been a lot of places that he couldn’t go because they didn’t have tables. They only had those fixed booths and there’s nothing you can do. And yeah, occasionally he would try because someone would ask him to go to that restaurant. He’d try to squeeze himself in. And, oh, God, it was so painful to watch. You would say things like, oh, no, I can fit in that chair. Dude, you cannot fit into that chair. Please don’t make all of us uncomfortable by trying. Please stop.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Just, it was terrible on so many levels. Yeah. I got you that for Christmas one year. I did like a ten dollar gift card to all these restaurants you hadn’t been able to go to. And you insisted, even as we were walking in the door, that you would not fit. And I thought, yeah, you’re, dude, you’re going to fit. And then you crawled into the booth and started like wiggling around to show how much extra space there was. And of course, listeners can’t see this, but the look on your face right now and how much you’re smiling like it’s just the greatest thing you could ever remember. It’s, that’s so sweet.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Gabe: Because, remember, roller coaster is on there. And again, I was worried. You said that I was at the right weight and we went up to the first roller coaster and I said, will I fit? And the gentleman said.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here. 

Lisa: And you know, these lines can be very long. You might be in line for an hour or more. So they have one of the roller coaster cars sitting at the front of the line, so you can test it. Because no one wants to wait in line for an hour, only to be told, hey, you don’t fit in this seat. Get out of line. 

Gabe: So the roller coaster attendant was super nice. I sat down in it and as he was pulling the thing down, and he said, we just have to make sure that it will latch over your shoulders because of your height. And I said, you’re testing this because I’m tall? Of course, he’s just this kid. He just looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, oh, my God, I just, no, I was asking because I’m fat. 

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him. 

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying? 

Lisa: You turned to him, you said, oh, my God, you said that because I’m tall. And he was like, Yeah? He was so confused. And you spent the next forty five minutes repeating that. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m too tall. Oh my God, he said that because I’m tall. Yeah you did. You started to cry a little bit. You were so excited.

Gabe: That was a good day. Lisa, you touched on comorbidity a little bit. I believe very strongly that I, of course, do have binge eating disorder, but I also believe that it was driven by the excess of untreated bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: I was doing pretty much anything that I could to manage the emotional overload of depression and grandiosity and mania and suicidality. And anything that could provide me even a moment of joy, whether it was drugs, alcohol, food, sex, spending money, I would do. What do you think the intersection of all of this Is?

Lisa: Well, obviously, having gastric bypass was an amazing choice for you, and it worked out great. And who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t had it done? But I actually recommended at the time that maybe you not do it because you had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and everything was changing so fast. And I thought, well, hey, maybe his eating disorder isn’t actually the thing. Maybe this has always just been an almost symptom of bipolar disorder. And once he has that under better control, he’ll just be able to control his eating and he won’t need to go through the surgery, etc. And of course, you have a gastric bypass, you were losing a pound a day. Think of how delicate that balance of all your different medications are and then think about how you get that balance when your body is changing so rapidly. 

Gabe: One of the things that I think about in terms of comorbidity, is mistaking feelings, and the big one is that it took a long time to be diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder because I honestly thought that panic attacks were hunger pains.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: Every time that I would have a panic attack, I would think that I was hungry. Which, of course, created a Pavlov’s dog effect where a panic attack was very much associated with food. And in fact, more importantly, the cure for the panic attack was associated with food. So every time I have a panic attack, I would have to eat.

Lisa: We’d be standing in line or something, and I recognize now that you would start having a panic attack, but what you’d say, you’d turn to me and say, I’m hungry and, oh, I’m so hungry, my blood sugar, ack. I actually thought back then, I thought, well, I mean, he is really heavy. So, I mean, I don’t know what that does to your body chemistry and stuff. Maybe he really is feeling hunger this often? And looking back on it, yeah, those were panic attacks. And you had them a lot.

Gabe: I did. I really did. 

Lisa: Well, what happened? When did you figure out that it was actually not hunger? I mean, what do you do now? One of the things you told me years ago is that when you had the urge to binge that you didn’t even try to stop the urge anymore. That was impossible. It never worked. Just forget it. That what you did instead was try to substitute different foods. So instead of bingeing on chips or pizza, you were now bingeing on strawberries or yogurt.

Gabe: So, a few things, you are right, making healthier choices does help to try to put those feelings or emotions at bay in a healthier way. Some of the things that I do now when I have a panic attack is one, I understand that it is a panic attack. So sometimes I can stop them just because I am aware of what they are. And I have all kinds of other coping skills, you know, sit down for a moment, count to 10, remove myself from whatever is causing the panic attack if I can see the cause. Splash water on my face.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Gabe: I mean, yeah, there’s just so many coping skills. You know, salty snacks help. Once again is probably in the gray area, it’s not the healthiest choice. But, you know, sometimes, like eating saltines, eating crackers, eating pretzels.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I try to find a healthy choice. You know, sometimes sitting, drinking a diet soda, eating some pretzels, counting to ten, taking a 20 minute break. These things help. But remember, before, all of this would happen, I would go eat a large pizza. I would go eat two, three, four, five, six thousand calories in order to get rid of that panic attack. And because I didn’t know it was a panic attack, I was having multiple of these a day. This would happen once or twice a day on top of all of my regular eating.

Lisa: I tried to look at it now as kind of a harm reduction thing. It is not the greatest for you to sit down and drink that much Diet Coke or to consume that many pretzels. But in comparison to the things that you were doing to deal with this before, this is much better. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t do any of this stuff. You wouldn’t have panic attacks to start with. You wouldn’t need the coping mechanism to begin with. But since you do, this is a much better choice than what you were using before.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really? 

Gabe: I would say that I start to binge maybe once a week. But that’s an advanced skill, right? I put all of the food on the plate. Like I’m ready. I am ready to just binge. And I realize before I get too many calories, oh, this is bad. And I’m willing to get rid of the food. I’m willing to wrap it up and put in the refrigerator or push it down the garbage disposal or just not eat and I never would have done that before, because, after all, that would be wasteful. So I’m proud of myself for being able to stop. I still order too much. I have an unrealistic view of what a serving is. One time I had four people coming over, so I ordered three pizzas. Three large pizzas, and it was you. And you said, why did you order so many? I’m like, well, there’s 

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Lisa: He does that all the time. You always have way too big of servings. It doesn’t matter what size pie you have. It’s a little tiny pie, or if you get, like the giant pie at Sam’s Club, you will count how many people are in the room and cut the pie into that many pieces regardless of pie size.

Gabe: I want to make sure that everybody gets enough pie. I am learning. I am learning to let people cut their own pie and to ask other people to cut for me. I also had to accept along the way that I can have seconds before I thought that I had to take all the food that I wanted now.

Lisa: So obviously food is love, mixed up with all this emotion. A lot of it, you can tell is very clearly rooted in your childhood. Have you figured out the origin story or the backstory on this? Why did this hit you? Where does this come from? Your brother and sister don’t have this problem. They’re normal weight, maybe even thin. Nobody else is at the level that you were.

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: You know, I’m a foot taller than every member of my family. I’m the only redhead. For those paying attention, that does, in fact, make me a red headed stepchild. I’m the only one with severe and persistent mental illness. I don’t know. I had to find a lot of coping skills. You know, some of the questions that I asked myself is, you know, why did I gravitate toward food and sex? Why didn’t I gravitate toward

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Gabe: Or whatever. I think that sometimes there’s just no answer. I don’t know why my brother and sister don’t have this problem. Of course, they both have kids and I don’t. Why did that happen? I mean, just it just did. And on and on and on.

Lisa: You don’t really think it’s a worthwhile problem to even contemplate, then. You just feel like, hey, these things happen and. Because on TV, people can always pinpoint it to like one specific experience. Oh, it was the day that I was so sad and my great grandmother gave me cake, you know? But you’re saying in real life, no, you don’t have anything like that.

Gabe: I think that there is that. When I was sad, my grandmother did give me cake and my mother gave me cake and my mother would make the foods that we wanted on our birthday. And food is love. As you said, food is love. My family loved me a lot. I don’t know what you want. We celebrated every single success with food. We licked our wounds with food. We went to the buffets all the time. Buffets were huge, huge things when I was growing up. What do you want? Name something and I will tell you how food is involved.

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Gabe: Whether it’s substance use disorder, whether it’s hoarding, whether it’s. The reality is, you don’t need any of this stuff. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Absolutely. But there are people who do, in fact, get lung cancer that never smoked a day in their life. Yeah. There’s not always a clear and present cause for these things. Sometimes there are. Sometimes the thing that we think is a clear and present cause isn’t. We’ve just assigned it to that.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: I work with families all the time and they’re like, oh, my God, the mental illness started when he lost his job. OK, well, let’s talk about what he was like before he lost his job. And they would tell me all of these things that are clearly symptoms of mental illness. But in their minds, it was the job loss that triggered the mental illness, even though there was a decade’s worth that they ignored. And I think we do that to ourselves, too. Lisa, what are the takeaways? I mean, binge eating disorder, it’s played a major role in my life.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Gabe: And I know that it’s played a major role in other people’s lives. And I think largely that a lot of eating disorders don’t really get the respect that they deserve. They’re dangerous and people die from them and.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Lisa: Probably because you can’t have an all in. Right. Oh, you’re an alcoholic? Never have another drop. That’s it, problem solved. You have to eat. That was always, because a lot of the treatment things that you did were focused on this food as addiction model or 12 steps, et cetera. When complete abstinence is not an option, how do you manage an addiction? I did not notice until after you had gastric bypass, every other commercial is for food and the food looks so good. And it’s always for food that’s bad for you. No one ever has a commercial for carrots, you know. No, it’s a commercial for fast food or pizza. And it’s so desirable looking.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works. 

Gabe: One of the things I think about is the fast food restaurant that advertises fourth meal. Fourth meal is not a thing. They’re advertising it as if it’s real. Don’t forget fourth meal. And now second breakfast is a thing. The marketing is literally tell you to eat when you do not need to eat. And we’re proud of this, you know, fourth meal, second breakfast. It’s exciting.

Lisa: Well, and if you’re the average person, no problem. It’s like alcohol ads. The alcohol ads are telling you that, hey, when you’re having a good time, you got a beer in your hand. All celebrations go with alcohol. And for most people, hey, that’s fine. No problem. That’s the ad. But if you’re an alcoholic, that’s a real problem. How do you get over that? Most people look at the fast food and are like, oh, yeah, I might stop there for lunch, but for you, it’s a whole thing.

Gabe: It is, and it is very difficult. I’m so glad that I lost the weight. And when people look at me now, like you said earlier, Lisa, they don’t see it. I have deeply entrenched issues with food, things that I struggle with every day. And because I’m a normal body weight, we’ll just go with that, nobody realizes this is a problem and it makes it difficult to seek out community. I remember when I went to my first binge eating group, I was really large and the other members of the group were also very large. And in walked this man who was thin. He was thinner than I am now, and I consider myself to be a normal size. And he was lanky and he just talked about his struggle and how he ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the way there. And we were mean to him. We did not pay attention to him. We did not offer him any help. We as a group were not kind to him. And now I kind of feel like I’m that guy.

Gabe: I don’t want to go to the binge eating support group because I’m afraid that they’re going to look at me and say, you know what? You’re thin. I’d kill to look like you. And I understand. I understand why they would want to have the success that I’ve had over the last 18 years. So I don’t know where to get support or. I’m very fortunate that I can afford traditional therapy and that I have a therapist and I have good supports. And of course, the online communities are really, really helpful. And I’ve advanced to a stage where I don’t need as much support as I used to. But I do remember. I remember what an asshole I was. I don’t think I said anything, but I certainly didn’t put any effort into trying to help him because in my mind, he didn’t need it. And that’s an important lesson I want to get out there. Binge eating disorder is not dependent on your looks. It’s not dependent on your weight. It’s not dependent on your size. It’s dependent on your unhealthy relationship with food.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Gabe: Ok. Listen up, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Obviously, the whole world believes that food is love, but you know what else is love? Subscribing to our podcast, sharing our podcast, rating our podcast, telling everybody that you can about our show. The official link for this show is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. Share it everywhere and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person?  Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

  Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder syndicated from

[erraticfairy]

Podcast: Life with Binge Eating Disorder

  At one point, Gabe weighed more than 550 pounds. Today, he and Lisa remember and discuss the extreme pain and slow healing process of living with binge-eating disorder. Gabe shares his shame in being so overweight, his intense relationship with food, the story of his gastric bypass and the difficult process of learning new coping mechanisms.

How did Gabe’s bipolar and panic attacks tie in with his binge eating? And, importantly, how is he managing the illness today? Join us for an open and honest discussion on living with an eating disorder.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews! 

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “Binge Eating Disorder” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Not Crazy. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am here with my ever present co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, everyone, and today’s quote is Food is love, food is life by Edwina O’Connor.

Gabe: Ok. There’s so much to say about this. But food is life. It’s life. Oxygen is life. Oh, that’s so deep, you should put this.

Lisa: It’s profound.

Gabe: Like this is like live, laugh, love.

Lisa: Right

Gabe: You need food to survive. So we all get that you have to eat to live. But food has sort of taken on a little bit extra, right? If I give you a cupcake, it means I love you. If it’s your birthday and I don’t get you a birthday cake. You don’t need a birthday cake to live. We do these things to express love, right?

Lisa: So it works both directions, giving people food is love and accepting their food says I love you back.

Gabe: Woo! And that’s where we really sort of get into, I’m gonna go with crux of our discussion today, which is binge eating disorder. Many people don’t know, I used to weigh 550 pounds. I’m six foot three. My top weight was five hundred and fifty pounds.

Lisa: You realize your top weight was a lot closer to six hundred and fifty pounds.

Gabe: That’s not true. I never weighed over 600.

Lisa: I’m willing to bet that you weighed over six hundred.

Gabe: I did not. I know for a fact.

Lisa: The day you had gastric bypass, you weighed 554 pounds, but you’d been on a diet for several weeks and you’ve been fasting for several days. I’m willing to bet you lost 20 or 30 pounds at least.

Gabe: There is one thing that fat people know more than anything else, especially fat people who have lost a lot of weight, they know their top weights.

Lisa: Ok, well, never mind. Go back, unpause.

Gabe: No, we don’t need to pause at all. I think you should leave this in there. I want people to see how often Lisa pauses to correct me. 

Lisa: You’re welcome.

Gabe: Do you think that there is a difference from a storytelling perspective between weighing five hundred and fifty pounds and weighing six hundred pounds? I mean, just I guess I maybe I qualified for This 600-lb Life.

Lisa: Yeah, see, there you go. I didn’t set the limit. Somebody else did.

Gabe: Well, I’m not going to retroactively go back and try to be on a fat-sploitation show. But just the thing that I want the audience to know is that I weighed over five hundred and fifty pounds. Now, the weight that I weigh today, which according to the BMI chart is in fact obese, is 260 pounds. I’m six foot three and I’m a big guy. I’m broad shouldered. I’m not a small person. But 260 pounds is is less than half of 550. I lost a person. I lost a person and change.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s very impressive. This was a long time back. You had gastric bypass in 2003 and you’ve kept it off all these years. 

Gabe: Let’s move past how I lost the weight and let’s talk about life as a five hundred and fifty pound man. Because I thought that I just ate a lot. Like, I thought that I needed to go on a diet. And when you first met me. I don’t know. You know, the more we tell our story, Lisa,

Lisa: The crazier I sound?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

Gabe: You met a man that weighed five hundred and fifty pounds with untreated bipolar disorder. And you were like, yeah.

Lisa: You were very engaging. You Gabe magicked me.

Gabe: Gonna get me some of that.

Lisa: Yeah. You carried it well. What can I say?

Gabe: Oh, really? I just I dressed so well? You know, you get the right tailor, you can hide anything with clothing.

Lisa: It’s amazing. Yeah.

Gabe: But back to our point, I thought that I just ate a lot. I thought I was just overweight, like so many Americans and I.

Lisa: You’re remembering the story a little bit different. By the time I met you, you had already been diagnosed with binge eating disorder.

Gabe: That’s not true. That is completely untrue.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: That’s not true. Nope.

Lisa: That is true.

Gabe: No. 

Lisa: That is true. I don’t know what to tell you.

Gabe: No, it is not true. 

Lisa: I never thought that you were just, just fat. You know what I mean?

Gabe: You had me join Weight Watchers.

Lisa: Although Weight Watchers is obviously not designed for people with serious eating disorders, it is a mechanism to keep track of what you eat.

Gabe: Yes, an umbrella is a mechanism to not get wet. But would you hand it to a hurricane?

Lisa: I’m not saying that it was the best choice for you.

Gabe: Is this what you recommended, like for Katrina? 

Lisa: But what were the options?

Gabe: Like medical intervention?

Lisa: You were doing that too.

Gabe: I wasn’t doing any of that. We can fight about the timeline until we’re blue in the face. But here’s what we know, I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds and I wasn’t doing much about it. Why do you keep

Lisa: I disagree.

Gabe: Why do you keep shaking your head? I love how you’re shaking your head.

Lisa: You told me not to talk. So I shake my head. By the time we started dating, you were already trying to get a gastric bypass.

Gabe: Here’s the thing, though, that I think you’re not considering. You’re tying together Gabe trying to get gastric bypass with Gabe understanding that he had binge eating disorder and those two things are not in any way related.

Lisa: You don’t think so?

Gabe: I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did want gastric bypass because I was 24 years old and I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. I saw gastric bypass as a quick fix, which we’ll get into that later in the show. But let’s focus on binge eating disorder. Have we established that Gabe was overweight and had issues with food?

Lisa: You were very overweight and you definitely had clear issues with food. As I might have said to you at one point, you were, in fact, circus freak fat. 

Gabe: You did.

Lisa: Sorry about that, that was rude.

Gabe: I don’t know how our relationship made it.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Gabe: I think that the divorce was probably inevitable.

Lisa: I’m pretty sure I said that after you lost the weight, but I’m not positive.

Gabe: Let’s talk about our language for a moment. You and I weren’t, we’re not big language police. We kind of think that the goal should be communication and context, not so much the words. But I got called fat a lot. You, Lisa, saying that I was fat, it does not offend me. It does not bother me. But other people doing it, it did. As you can imagine, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds. I got a lot of sideways glances, stares, giggles, comments, and it hurt my feelings a lot. And the other reason I kind of bring this up is because why are we so cavalier about it? I know how damaging body image can be, because, again, even though I weighed five hundred and fifty pounds, even though I couldn’t walk from my car to my office desk without taking a break, the only thing I cared about was how I looked. I didn’t care that I would lose my breath standing up. I cared that I wasn’t pretty enough and that maybe I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: You weren’t worried about the health?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Not necessarily worried about the health consequences, but it wasn’t things like you had trouble getting upstairs? You weren’t concerned about stuff like that?

Gabe: I wasn’t. You know, I was 22, 23, 24, I was invincible. I cared that I couldn’t find clothes that fit me. I cared that I was ugly. I cared that women wouldn’t want to sleep with me. I’m not trying to make Lisa out to be a bad person. But Lisa and I were not exclusive because Lisa gave me a fake name when we first met.

Lisa: Well, I wasn’t going to give you my real name.

Gabe: That’s fair. I was circus freak fat, apparently. I’m just saying that these are kind of the things that went through my mind. But what I was really surprised to learn and tying it all the way back to you thinking that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when we met because I was trying to get gastric bypass, is my entire motivation for getting gastric bypass was wanting to look better. I did not know that I had binge eating disorder until I was in the steps of gastric bypass. One of the things that I had to go through was a psychological examination where they started talking to me about why I ate. And I ate because it made me feel better.

Lisa: Everything surrounding gastric bypass was a lot different back then. Insurance companies were paying for it in a different way. The surgery was still relatively new. It was kind of a halcyon days for gastric bypass. And there were still stand alone surgery centers that specialized in this. You just don’t see those types of programs anymore. You don’t see the ads on TV anymore. And every surgeon was doing it. Every hospital had a program. You specifically went out of your way. Well, at the time, I thought you had gone out of your way to find this really good program with really high success rates. And one of the reasons they had such a high success rate was because they were so comprehensive. They had all this psychological counseling and nutritional counseling and this really long waiting period and on and on and on. And at the time, I thought, oh, there’s a health care consumer. He has made the best choice for him. Good job. But I found out later, no, he just knew this lady who went there. So he was like, sure.

Gabe: You’re half right and half wrong. When I looked at the other places they kind of scared me a little bit. I know this is a stupid thing to say, but one of the reasons that I felt comfortable at the bariatric treatment centers was because they had wide chairs.

Lisa: I remember that.

Gabe: When I walked in, they had these wide chairs that I fit in.

Lisa: They were like benches.

Gabe: When I went to the other place, it was just in a regular, it was a well-known hospital. I don’t know. I had to pay more money to go where I went. So in theory, I could have picked the cheaper place. So.

Lisa: Through a variety of good decision making and luck, you ended up at a place with an excellent program that was very intensive in the pre surgical period. They had a lot of psychological and nutritional counseling, which most programs did not have then or now.

Gabe: So here I am, I walk in and they’re like, why do you want to have this? And I say, because I’m ugly and I don’t want to be ugly. And they say, OK, that’s what we get. Like, what are some things that you would do if you weren’t this size? And, you know, I said I wouldn’t sit in the handicapped seats at hockey games, for example. I would sit in booths instead of tables. I would ride roller coasters again. But in the back of my mind, what I was thinking is I would get laid more. I felt so bad because I felt so ugly and I tied that directly to my weight. Now, I didn’t know that I had bipolar disorder at this time. I did not know that I was untreated. There was obviously a lot going on, but those were my initial reasons. That’s why I wanted to do it. And through that process, I ended up at an eating disorder clinic and I remember my very first appointments. Were you around for that appointment or had I already gone to it and told you about it?

Lisa: You know, I don’t remember if that was your first appointment. Very early, I remember going to the eating disorder clinic. Yeah, it was just like a whole other world. It was so odd to go there because obviously most people getting treated for eating disorders are anorexics because those are the people who are most likely to die of their eating disorder. So they’re the people most likely to get treatment. And most of the binge eaters were quite large. So it was this bizarre mix of very, very small, mostly young women, just painfully thin young women and extremely overweight, you know, 20 some, 30 some year olds. And I went to one of their family support groups and the majority of the people there, their family members, family or friends, were anorexic. And they had the exact same behaviors, the exact same attitudes, the exact same everything. Even though their problem was that they didn’t eat enough. And your problem was that you ate too much. That really went to show that eating disorders were not about the food. It was about the psychological thing.

Gabe: Well, that’s interesting because while it was psychological, it was also about the food. For example, if I was feeling sad, I needed birthday cake. Because birthday cake was tied to happy memories. You couldn’t just give me 20,000 thousand calories in.

Lisa: Veggies? Salad?

Gabe: Man, that’s be a lot of salad and veggies, but

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I needed like the foods that I grew up with. I guess a better way to say it is it was about the psychological connection to the food.

Lisa: Yeah. So I looked up the definition of binge eating disorder, because how do you know when you’re binge eating and how do you know when you’re just over eating? Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food very quickly and often to the point of discomfort and a feeling of loss of control during the binge, experiencing shame, distress or guilt afterwards and then not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures such as purging, because that’s a whole other eating disorder. And this was interesting, I actually didn’t know this until today. The binge eating occurs on average at least once a week for three months. And this is how you can get diagnosed with binge eating disorder, which was not its own separate mental illness until 2013 with the new DSM.

Gabe: You know, all the eating disorders have things in common, right? And the thing that it has in common is this unhealthy relationship with food. A healthy relationship with food is that you eat to survive. You start to get into a gray area when you eat to survive but you also enjoy what you eat.

Lisa: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair. You can eat to survive and enjoy what you eat. You probably get into a gray area once you get overweight. And I am overweight.

Gabe: The goal of food is not enjoyment. The goal of food is sustenance. The reason that we get in a gray area is because who’s ever eaten that extra bite? Because it tastes so good. That’s a gray area. You do not need that extra bite. But also, why do we have foods that go with holidays or occasions? That’s a gray area, right? There is no reason on Earth that we need to celebrate our occasions with food.

Lisa: But that’s an evolutionary thing. What encourages the animal to eat? Because it’s enjoyable. It’s pleasant. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. We’d all starve to death. So it goes together. Humans throughout time would not survive if they did not find enjoyment in food because then they wouldn’t eat and they’d all die.

Gabe: Well, I disagree with that. Why can’t it work the other way? We don’t eat, so we feel pain. We feel hunger.

Lisa: It’s both.

Gabe: I suppose alleviating that hunger provides joy. I don’t know why we fell down the rabbit hole on it’s a gray area. But I do I think that it’s important to establish that sometimes our relationship with food, while healthy, is a gray area. There is absolutely no reason that we have to have cake on our birthday. But I would venture to guess that anybody who didn’t get a birthday cake or some sort of special dessert on their birthday would feel that they were left out or that they missed something.

Lisa: Well, that could be its own separate show about the emotional relationship to food and American���s relationship with food, because we just have this ridiculous eating pattern that nobody else has. Nobody in history has had previously.  

Gabe: So would you say that that’s a gray area?

Lisa: Ok, fine gray area. 

Gabe: Lisa, the point that I am making, when I was sad, I ate. That is what I learned by going to a nutritionist and examining my relationship with food. And I think that everybody in America has sort of a messed up relationship with food to a certain extent. What I called the gray area, but it was just so extreme. 

Lisa: When you were sad, you ate to comfort yourself. When you were happy, you ate to celebrate. When you were angry, you ate to calm down. When you were fill in an emotion, you responded to it with food and to a lesser extent, so do I. Which once again is why I’m overweight. But it was very extreme, and still is extreme for you.

Gabe: But I don’t think it’s fair to call it extreme anymore.

Lisa: Why?

Gabe: It was extreme before I got help. I don’t think it’s extreme anymore. I do think it’s outside of the normal lines.

Lisa: Ok. Well, that’s just a semantic argument, it’s much more than for the average person. How about that?

Gabe: Well, I’m just saying, if my relationship with food is extreme now, how would you classify it before I got help? When I weighed five hundred fifty pounds, what word would you use there?

Lisa: Even worse.

Gabe: Well, but we need a word here. We’re using extreme for my relationship with food now.

Lisa: Horrifying. I would call it horrifying. I think you have lost track of how far outside of the norm you still are. You are much better than used to be, obviously. But I think you’ve normalized in your mind a lot of your behavior, and it is not. This is not the way the average person, even the average American, reacts to food.

Gabe: It’s the way you react to food.

Lisa: Well, yes, but that’s not a good measure because I am also overweight. But it’s worse with you. It’s a lot worse.

Gabe: Give some examples.

Lisa: Whenever we go out, there has to be food. It’s not fun for you if there’s not food. All activities have a food that goes with it, a food that must go with it. You can’t go to a movie and not have popcorn or snacks. There’s no enjoyment in the movie if you don’t do it. You can’t go to a Blue Jackets game and not get concessions. You know, a lot of people say, oh, well, I like to have a beer while I watch the game. No, it’s a whole different level for you. You would rather not go at all than go and not eat.

Gabe: You think that’s out? Popcorn at a movie theater? Me wanting popcorn and a movie theater?

Lisa: No.

Gabe: You’ve decided that is extreme and outside the norm? So I’m the only one? 

Lisa: The level at which you want popcorn at the movie theater and the level of distress you go through, if for some reason, you can’t have it. If I told you in advance, hey, the popcorn machine is broken at the movie theater. You wouldn’t go. Even if it was Star Wars on opening night. You would not go.

Gabe: I think that is untrue. 

Lisa: One of the things Gabe and I don’t know if you remember this, that I think really showed the emotional relationship you had with food is a few weeks after you had gastric bypass. We were in the parking lot of your apartment building. And I don’t remember, we had argued about something. And you got so upset that you started crying and you actually said, I just feel so bad and now I don’t even have food. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even have food.

Gabe: I remember.

Lisa: The idea being that was what you were going to turn to make yourself feel better. And this was so soon after surgery that you couldn’t and you were devastated at that. You were so distraught because you just couldn’t come up with anything else to soothe those emotions. 

Gabe: My mom and grandma were staying with me. I asked them to come and take care of me. You know, I was single.

Lisa: Well, you needed someone, major surgery.

Gabe: But, you know, fish and house guests smell after three days. And they had been there for a week. And I was ready to get my privacy back. And I had asked you to stay to kind of be a buffer. And you said that you were ready to go home. You’d been there for a while

Lisa: Oh,

Gabe: And I walked you out to your car. So we didn’t really argue. I had pleaded with you to stay.

Lisa: I don’t remember that part.

Gabe: Just, you know, come on, come on, come on. And, you know, you were like, no, I gotta get going. I’ve got to go back to work. So I had walked you out to your car and you asked me what was wrong. And I just, I just started crying. And then, of course, I had trouble standing because I just had surgery and I fell down next to your car.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And I was going through so many emotions. And my coping mechanism at that point was eating. And I didn’t have it. I had not learned new coping mechanisms yet.

Lisa: Just how emotional you were at this loss. Almost as if your best friend had died.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And it was one of the things that really drove home to me how much your emotions were tied up with food. That there was this thing you had always been able to turn to and now you couldn’t and you didn’t know what to do or how to behave. And it was heartbreaking. 

Gabe: You know, on one hand that a devastatingly sad story.

Lisa: It was.

Gabe: But the reason I’m snickering is because do you remember my neighbors walking by? And one of them said hi to you 

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: But of course, as they rounded, they see this 550 pound guy hunched over in his bathrobe on the

Lisa: On the ground.

Gabe: On the ground. They’re just like, OK. I, yeah.

Lisa: When a really large person hits the ground, people, people react.

Gabe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: And then your mom thought that you had just fallen

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: Because she didn’t know that you’re upset and you didn’t want her to know how upset you were.

Gabe: Pandemonium.

Lisa: So she started getting all upset because she thought, well, we’re not going to be able to pick him up. He’s fallen down and we can’t lift him back up. So there was humor in it. Sort of. Looking back.

Gabe: You know, hindsight,

Lisa: Mm hmm.

Gabe: Hindsight is always funny-funny.

Lisa: Fun times. Fun times.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing binge eating disorder.

Lisa: In order to have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you need to have three or more of the following: eating much more rapidly than normal, eating until feeling uncomfortably full, eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry, eating alone because of feeling embarrassed or by how much you’re eating, and feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed or very guilty afterward. And when I read that, the thing that really struck me is eating much more rapidly than normal. It was amazing how fast you could eat. Like you could be a competitive eater.

Gabe: One of the things that really struck me is the things that I used to do to hide how much I was eating. Like, I would order pizza and I would say, you know, hey, I need two large pizzas. And they’re like, OK, do anything else? Well, hang on. Hang on, guys, you think two large pizzas is enough? Hang on, hang on. You got like a special for three. Go, go ahead and. There was just me. There was literally just me. I wasn’t even married. I was just. I was.

Lisa: So, you were pretending there were other people on the phone to the pizza place because you didn’t want them to know you were ordering for yourself?

Gabe: Yeah, and I would go through drive-throughs and I would order multiple value meals. Same level of, you know, I’d like a number two and number three, both with Diet Cokes. All right, what sauce do you want? You know, my girlfriend likes your barbecue. So let’s go ahead and grab that. And on that other one, I think my buddy said he wanted no ketchup. Yeah, these were all for me.

Lisa: Right. And you knew that.

Gabe: Oh, yeah. It was important to me that nobody thought that I was eating all of that food. Also, if I had, like, appointments. I was going out to lunch or something for work or business, I would eat before I went.

Lisa: You remember that night with the pizza? 

Gabe: Yep.

Lisa: And I ate more pizza than him. And I thought, huh? I’m a giant cow person and I need to eat less pizza. But no, it turned out that you had ordered two and eaten a whole one before I got there. And now were pretending that this pizza had just arrived and we were now sitting down together for the first time. When you had, in fact, already consumed an entire pizza.

Gabe: Yeah, and I hid the box.

Lisa: Yeah, you would hide the box or the wrappers.

Gabe: It wasn’t even like I said that I ate. I didn’t want you to think that I was a giant fat ass. That was important to me.

Lisa: One of the things that was interesting when we went to the eating disorder clinic is you did try to hide how much you would eat, but you didn’t have a problem with eating in front of me. One of your doctors told me that was a little bit unusual, that most people literally do not want to be seen chewing in front of other people. But you never seemed to have that particular problem.

Gabe: Well, I didn’t have that problem in front of you.

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair. You want to tell the story?

Gabe: I don’t want to tell the story, but I think now you’re going to have to. The people just heard you give the punchline away.

Lisa: You go. 

Gabe: We were at a pizza buffet, all you can eat pizza buffet, and I was eating and I looked up and you were looking at me and.

Lisa: I had stopped eating by this time and was just watching you. 

Gabe: And I said, what? And you said, wow, you can really put it away. And I was like, that’s so mean. I’m just trying to eat my lunch. And you’re just like, I don’t know what to say. 

Lisa: I remember that day because we were eating and then eventually I’m not eating and I’m just watching this because it was like watching. Oh, I don’t know, a snake swallowing its food or something. It was like watching some sort of extreme physical feat. It was amazing. Like, ignoring that it’s pizza, I would not have thought the human body could chew and swallow that rapidly, that a human being could do that. And you couldn’t look away. I do recognize, especially looking back, that was really mean. But I kind of feel almost justified in it. This thing I was watching in front of me was just so stunning and so extreme. How could I not stop and stare and comment on it? It was just incredible in a really, really horrifying way. Yeah.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: It was disturbing.

Gabe: When I got to the eating disorder clinic, you know, they put me through a lot of paces and I started to realize that my relationship with food was not good. I mean, my weight, you know, over 550 pounds, my girlfriend looking at me in disbelief as I ate, the side glances, the comments, not being able to fit into things like roller coasters or booths or I had to sit in the handicapped section. I needed the seatbelt extender for my mid-sized car. It’s not like I was in a tiny car. I had a Ford Taurus. A family car. And I needed a seatbelt extender.

Lisa: By the way, you’re welcome.

Gabe: Yeah, that was all Lisa. I just didn’t wear a seatbelt before.

Lisa: Because I don’t let anyone ride in my car without a seat belt and I thought, what kind of fool doesn’t wear a seat belt? And then, lo and behold, you didn’t wear a seatbelt because it didn’t fit, because he couldn’t wear a seat belt.

Gabe: Remember when I said it doesn’t fit? And you said, bullshit? Show me. You didn’t believe me.

Gabe: You’ve seen how far those things stretch out.

Gabe: Didn’t fit. 

Lisa: So, yeah, that was really shocking. And just within a couple of days, we had seatbelt extenders for all the cars of everybody we knew.

Gabe: Yeah. Thank you. That.

Lisa: They will give them to you for free if you ask.

Gabe: Just call the dealership or call the manufacturer and they will mail them to you. Also side note, if you’re on an airplane, just ask the flight attendant when you get on. Just whisper I need a seatbelt extender and they will bring you one or hand you one. Highly recommend doing that as well. Very, very important. But here I am at the eating disorder clinic. I finally got a surgery date. And what was it like a month and a half before I finally got gastric bypass after like two years of fighting for it is when I went to the psychiatric hospital.

Lisa: Yeah, like two months before. But you already had the date scheduled

Gabe: Yeah. And so as I’m losing the weight, I’m also getting treated for bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Right. That’s what comorbidity is. You had a lot of things going on at one time. This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to treat mental illness and binge eating disorder because there’s all these factors coming together. And how do you tease out what’s what?

Gabe: I guess I don’t remember the specific day that I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder. I do remember my aha! moment. I had to do a few things and one of the things that I did is meet with a nutritionist. And she had flash cards and she held up the flash cards. And she was like, what has more calories? And the only one that I remember was she held up a donut, cream filled, icing, and she held up a muffin. She said, Which one has more calories? And I said, the donut. I know this one. Muffins are a diet food. And she said, no, the muffin has more calories. And I said, how is that possible? Muffins are healthy. Muffins have less fat. But they have way more sugar. But I thought a muffin had less calories. It didn’t.

Lisa: Lots of people don’t understand the specifics of nutrition or aren’t quite sure what the right foods are to choose, etc. That’s why they have eat this, not that. What does that have to do with binge eating disorder? Why was that your aha! moment?

Gabe: Because up until that moment, I thought I completely understood what was going into my body, why I was eating it. And that was the first thing that let me know that, no, you’re just wrong. You’re just wrong. I did not understand how any of this worked, but I thought I did. That’s the part I’m getting at. If I can be so wrong about what constitutes a healthy meal, then what else am I wrong about? And she helped me understand that I don’t know what’s going on. I clearly do not have a good understanding of my relationship with food, food in general, nothing. And that opened my mind.

Lisa: So your lack of understanding of nutrition made you feel like, hey, maybe I don’t understand a lot of things about eating and how I eat, and therefore maybe I should consider that these people are telling me something of value rather than something I can dismiss?

Gabe: Sure. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of putting it. But what I actually thought in the moment is, holy shit. I don’t know what I’m eating. I do not understand food. I am putting food in my mouth and I think I am making healthy choices. You know what I used to eat and I thought it was a health food? A Snickers bar. Because the advertising was packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies. I was hungry and I needed a snack to get to the next meal. So clearly peanuts. I was eating a candy bar with peanuts, but I thought I was eating a nutrition bar. I thought I was eating something healthy because the advertising got to me. I did not understand what I was putting in my mouth, but I’m supposed to believe that I understand the psychology behind my desire to eat? No. That’s when I started to become much more malleable. That’s when I started listening. That’s when I wanted to understand why I was making the choices that I was making.

Lisa: Well, what did you think before, though? What did you think your relationship with food was up until then?

Gabe: I thought that I overate, like everybody, but I also thought that it wasn’t my fault because after all, I didn’t get a good metabolism.

Lisa: Oh, metabolism.

Gabe: I believed in that. Aww, my metabolism that’s broken. I don’t have good genes. It’s not that the people who weigh less or are a healthier weight or are healthier in general are making better food choices. No, no, no. They won the genetic lottery.

Lisa: It was not something that you could control. It was just this swirl around you that was impacting you.

Gabe: Right. Yeah. I didn’t believe it was my fault at all. It was bad luck. Everybody else was eating just as much as Gabe. But because of their bodies, their metabolism. Oh, well, she just has a good metabolism, and that’s why she’s not overweight. I have a bad metabolism and that. It’s not my fault. It’s just I didn’t even realize I had any control. I.

Lisa: So stuff just kind of happened to you. You weren’t directing the action.

Gabe: Yeah, I was the victim. I very much felt that I was a victim. That my body had somehow failed me. That it wasn’t in my control or my fault.

Lisa: Well, did that matter though? I’ve been cursed with a bad body, which means that I must now make different choices than other people.

Gabe: Yes. And one of those choices that I thought I needed to make was to have surgery to correct it.

Lisa: Oh, ok.

Gabe: See, I thought that surgery was the magic cure. People have said to me, you know, surgery is the easy way out. It’s not. I don’t know who believes that or why they say it. I don’t know why there is a moral value in what method you use if you are super morbidly obese like I was. But I gotta tell you, spending four days in the hospital, being cut from the top of my chest to below my belly button, opened up, having my insides rearranged, the six week recovery time, the vomiting on your mother, the crying in the parking lot, all of the problems going through two years of therapy and nutrition appointments and re learning everything, with the aid of the therapy, over the next year and a half to finally lose all of the weight and then having to have a secondary surgery to remove the massive amounts of excess skin and male breasts that I had then developed. I had a full mastectomy. So, attention, listeners, I don’t have nipples.

Lisa: He likes to get that into every conversation.

Gabe: It’s you know, it’s a fun fact. I just. Then people look at me and they’re like, Oh, you had surgery? You did it the easy way.

Lisa: Well, I think that people what they don’t understand is that the surgery is not magic in that you can still eat. You’re not somehow prevented from chewing. You can still eat. You just react differently to it. And as evidence of surgery is not the easy way out, the failure rate is really high. And what is the definition of success, you ask?  Someone has had a successful gastric bypass if they have kept off 50% of their excess weight over the course of five years.

Gabe: Well, I’m successful.

Lisa: You’re very successful.

Gabe: To be fair, I went from five hundred fifty pounds all the way down to two hundred and thirty at my lowest weight. Now, my average walking around weight is about 260

Lisa: The failure rate for gastric bypass, depending on the numbers you look, is up to 70%. So after five years, 70%. It’s now been 18 years for you. So even if you gain all the weight back tomorrow, even if you weigh 700 pounds tomorrow, you have had a successful gastric bypass. And then also let’s do some approximate numbers here. Say that you had 300 pounds to lose. Right. And you lost 280 of them. You realize that you could gain, right now, 130 pounds and still be successful. You could right now weigh over 400 pounds. And when it came time to count up all the gastric bypass numbers, you would be in the success category. So when some people say, oh, Gabe had a successful gastric bypass. No, you didn’t just have a successful gastric bypass, you had the A plus, gold standard, amazing of gastric bypasses. Because you could weigh substantially more than you do now and still be a success. You have plenty of people in your life now who never knew you then. People don’t realize how much weight you have lost and this backstory that you have. They just look at you and you look normal

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And they think, oh, there’s Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: No one’s gonna describe you as thin, but you’re perfectly normal. You’re perfectly normal weight. Nobody stares at you in public. And that makes people think that you’re done, that you no longer have this messed up relationship with food, that you’re no longer struggling. And that’s not true. I don’t think you get enough credit for that. You are actively struggling with your weight and with your eating disorder on a daily basis. And it just doesn’t show anymore because you’re not so fat. People look at you and they think it went away. It didn’t go away.

Gabe: I still want to give you a little push back on, is it OK that we’re using the word fat so cavalierly?

Lisa: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to get out all this?

Gabe: No, I, mean, thank you for all of the kind words. 

Lisa: We’re both still fat.

Gabe: I kind of wonder if I was listening to the show and we just kept saying, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

Lisa: Well, but you’re adding the pejorative. What does fat mean?

Gabe: Overweight, I guess.

Lisa: Overweight or heavy or excess weight or more weight or something like that. Why are you adding extra words? It’s like when people say, oh, no, you’re not just bipolar. Yeah, I know. Why are you adding in words? I’m saying to you, hi, I’m bipolar. That’s not all you are. You’re also blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know. You’re the one who added all the baggage to the word. I was just fine with the descriptive phrase, fat.

Gabe: Are we taking it back?

Lisa: Not even that necessarily. Just why are you adding in this pejorative of fat is inherently bad and we shouldn’t throw it around so cavalierly? You were heavy. You were big.

Gabe: It’s true.

Lisa: The word for that is fat. And I would like to point out, for the record, that both of us are currently fat.

Gabe: I guess that is my question. As much as I love you, Lisa, you are not the same size as you were when you were 23.

Lisa: Yeah, even then, I was not thin.

Gabe: So are you, are you fat now or would you prefer that I say nothing because I’m not dumb?

Lisa: Well, don’t get me wrong, usually I do not care for it when people tell me I’m fat because they mean it as a pejorative. But as a simple description, am I overweight? Am I heavier than those charts and everything? Or even heavier than I personally would like to be? Would I like to be smaller than I currently am? Yes, I am fat. Accept that. I’m also blond and relatively short. Accept it. Yeah, I’ve got a big nose and I’m fat. There you go.

Gabe: Your nose is gigantic.

Lisa: I know. I hadn’t noticed how huge it was until we started doing this so much and with the video and all. I knew it was big, but, oh, my God. Like a toucan. This is the part where you say something nice, like it’s very attractive or, or, you know.

Gabe: If I had that ability, we would not be divorced.

Lisa: Fair, fair. So anyway, we could talk for a long time about all the high points of amazing stories surrounding Gabe and his extremely disordered eating and the struggles of gastric bypass. And to hit a few, when he said the whole thing about struggling after surgery and throwing up on your mom. He didn’t mean his mom, OK? He threw up on my mom. He didn’t vomit on his own mother, although you actually did that as well. He vomited on my mother. That’s the story he’s telling.

Gabe: In a fancy restaurant.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it makes me, people are like, oh, why are you angry about that? The poor little dear, he got sick. I told him not to eat that. I told him it was gonna make him throw up. He ate it anyway, and then he threw up on my mother. That’s all I’m saying. That’s OK. We’ll get that over now. Are there any high point stories you’d like to hit? Do you remember how you’d written that list of things that you wanted to do once you lost the weight?

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And one of them was buy clothing in a normal store.

Gabe: Yeah,

Lisa: Sit in a booth at a restaurant

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: And ride a roller coaster.

Gabe: The roller coaster.

Lisa: And we went out. We were at the mall. He went off to go shop. I’m looking at clothes. And then he comes over to me and goes, Well, I asked them for the largest size they had and it didn’t fit me. And I thought, aww. And I said, well, honey, it’s okay. It will. You’re still losing. It’s okay. And then he goes, and that’s why I got the size three down,

Gabe: It was.

Lisa: Because it turned out that he had gone below the largest size they had in the store. He was so excited.

Gabe: It was. It was a good day. The booth. Do you remember one year

Lisa: I remember.

Gabe: For Christmas. You got me a gift card to every restaurant that I couldn’t go to because they only had booths.

Lisa: Yep. There had been a lot of places that he couldn’t go because they didn’t have tables. They only had those fixed booths and there’s nothing you can do. And yeah, occasionally he would try because someone would ask him to go to that restaurant. He’d try to squeeze himself in. And, oh, God, it was so painful to watch. You would say things like, oh, no, I can fit in that chair. Dude, you cannot fit into that chair. Please don’t make all of us uncomfortable by trying. Please stop.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Just, it was terrible on so many levels. Yeah. I got you that for Christmas one year. I did like a ten dollar gift card to all these restaurants you hadn’t been able to go to. And you insisted, even as we were walking in the door, that you would not fit. And I thought, yeah, you’re, dude, you’re going to fit. And then you crawled into the booth and started like wiggling around to show how much extra space there was. And of course, listeners can’t see this, but the look on your face right now and how much you’re smiling like it’s just the greatest thing you could ever remember. It’s, that’s so sweet.

Gabe: Do you remember when we went to the amusement park?

Lisa: Uh-huh.

Gabe: Because, remember, roller coaster is on there. And again, I was worried. You said that I was at the right weight and we went up to the first roller coaster and I said, will I fit? And the gentleman said.

Lisa: The ride attendant.

Gabe: Yeah, the ride attendant said, I’m not sure, but we have a seat here. 

Lisa: And you know, these lines can be very long. You might be in line for an hour or more. So they have one of the roller coaster cars sitting at the front of the line, so you can test it. Because no one wants to wait in line for an hour, only to be told, hey, you don’t fit in this seat. Get out of line. 

Gabe: So the roller coaster attendant was super nice. I sat down in it and as he was pulling the thing down, and he said, we just have to make sure that it will latch over your shoulders because of your height. And I said, you’re testing this because I’m tall? Of course, he’s just this kid. He just looked at me like I was a crazy person. I was like, oh, my God, I just, no, I was asking because I’m fat. 

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: And for real, I just wanted to, like, hug him. 

Lisa: When you walked up to him and said, hey, I’m worried that I might not fit, he thought you were saying I might not fit because you were tall.

Gabe: Yup.

Lisa: It never occurred to him that you were saying because you were fat.

Gabe: I cried. This poor kid. He’s like 19 years old and he’s like, Why is this man crying? 

Lisa: You turned to him, you said, oh, my God, you said that because I’m tall. And he was like, Yeah? He was so confused. And you spent the next forty five minutes repeating that. Oh, my God, he thinks I’m too tall. Oh my God, he said that because I’m tall. Yeah you did. You started to cry a little bit. You were so excited.

Gabe: That was a good day. Lisa, you touched on comorbidity a little bit. I believe very strongly that I, of course, do have binge eating disorder, but I also believe that it was driven by the excess of untreated bipolar disorder.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: I was doing pretty much anything that I could to manage the emotional overload of depression and grandiosity and mania and suicidality. And anything that could provide me even a moment of joy, whether it was drugs, alcohol, food, sex, spending money, I would do. What do you think the intersection of all of this Is?

Lisa: Well, obviously, having gastric bypass was an amazing choice for you, and it worked out great. And who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t had it done? But I actually recommended at the time that maybe you not do it because you had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and everything was changing so fast. And I thought, well, hey, maybe his eating disorder isn’t actually the thing. Maybe this has always just been an almost symptom of bipolar disorder. And once he has that under better control, he’ll just be able to control his eating and he won’t need to go through the surgery, etc. And of course, you have a gastric bypass, you were losing a pound a day. Think of how delicate that balance of all your different medications are and then think about how you get that balance when your body is changing so rapidly. 

Gabe: One of the things that I think about in terms of comorbidity, is mistaking feelings, and the big one is that it took a long time to be diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder because I honestly thought that panic attacks were hunger pains.

Lisa: Yeah, you would say that all the time.

Gabe: Every time that I would have a panic attack, I would think that I was hungry. Which, of course, created a Pavlov’s dog effect where a panic attack was very much associated with food. And in fact, more importantly, the cure for the panic attack was associated with food. So every time I have a panic attack, I would have to eat.

Lisa: We’d be standing in line or something, and I recognize now that you would start having a panic attack, but what you’d say, you’d turn to me and say, I’m hungry and, oh, I’m so hungry, my blood sugar, ack. I actually thought back then, I thought, well, I mean, he is really heavy. So, I mean, I don’t know what that does to your body chemistry and stuff. Maybe he really is feeling hunger this often? And looking back on it, yeah, those were panic attacks. And you had them a lot.

Gabe: I did. I really did. 

Lisa: Well, what happened? When did you figure out that it was actually not hunger? I mean, what do you do now? One of the things you told me years ago is that when you had the urge to binge that you didn’t even try to stop the urge anymore. That was impossible. It never worked. Just forget it. That what you did instead was try to substitute different foods. So instead of bingeing on chips or pizza, you were now bingeing on strawberries or yogurt.

Gabe: So, a few things, you are right, making healthier choices does help to try to put those feelings or emotions at bay in a healthier way. Some of the things that I do now when I have a panic attack is one, I understand that it is a panic attack. So sometimes I can stop them just because I am aware of what they are. And I have all kinds of other coping skills, you know, sit down for a moment, count to 10, remove myself from whatever is causing the panic attack if I can see the cause. Splash water on my face.

Lisa: All the thousand and one coping things that you have for panic attacks.

Gabe: I mean, yeah, there’s just so many coping skills. You know, salty snacks help. Once again is probably in the gray area, it’s not the healthiest choice. But, you know, sometimes, like eating saltines, eating crackers, eating pretzels.

Lisa: Pretzels, so many pretzels.

Gabe: I try to find a healthy choice. You know, sometimes sitting, drinking a diet soda, eating some pretzels, counting to ten, taking a 20 minute break. These things help. But remember, before, all of this would happen, I would go eat a large pizza. I would go eat two, three, four, five, six thousand calories in order to get rid of that panic attack. And because I didn’t know it was a panic attack, I was having multiple of these a day. This would happen once or twice a day on top of all of my regular eating.

Lisa: I tried to look at it now as kind of a harm reduction thing. It is not the greatest for you to sit down and drink that much Diet Coke or to consume that many pretzels. But in comparison to the things that you were doing to deal with this before, this is much better. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t do any of this stuff. You wouldn’t have panic attacks to start with. You wouldn’t need the coping mechanism to begin with. But since you do, this is a much better choice than what you were using before.

Gabe: I’m certainly in more control today than I ever have been in my entire life. But it’s not perfect. I still binge to this very day.

Lisa: Well, that’s a question, how often would you say you binge these days? Because it used to be daily. What is it now?

Gabe: Maybe once a month.

Lisa: Really? 

Gabe: I would say that I start to binge maybe once a week. But that’s an advanced skill, right? I put all of the food on the plate. Like I’m ready. I am ready to just binge. And I realize before I get too many calories, oh, this is bad. And I’m willing to get rid of the food. I’m willing to wrap it up and put in the refrigerator or push it down the garbage disposal or just not eat and I never would have done that before, because, after all, that would be wasteful. So I’m proud of myself for being able to stop. I still order too much. I have an unrealistic view of what a serving is. One time I had four people coming over, so I ordered three pizzas. Three large pizzas, and it was you. And you said, why did you order so many? I’m like, well, there’s 

Lisa: There’s four of us.

Gabe: There’s four of us. And you said, you realize that if you ordered two pizzas, that would be half a large pizza per person and you ordered more. And you have chips. I was like, huh?

Lisa: He does that all the time. You always have way too big of servings. It doesn’t matter what size pie you have. It’s a little tiny pie, or if you get, like the giant pie at Sam’s Club, you will count how many people are in the room and cut the pie into that many pieces regardless of pie size.

Gabe: I want to make sure that everybody gets enough pie. I am learning. I am learning to let people cut their own pie and to ask other people to cut for me. I also had to accept along the way that I can have seconds before I thought that I had to take all the food that I wanted now.

Lisa: So obviously food is love, mixed up with all this emotion. A lot of it, you can tell is very clearly rooted in your childhood. Have you figured out the origin story or the backstory on this? Why did this hit you? Where does this come from? Your brother and sister don’t have this problem. They’re normal weight, maybe even thin. Nobody else is at the level that you were.

Gabe: Nobody else is bipolar in my family either. There’s

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: You know, I’m a foot taller than every member of my family. I’m the only redhead. For those paying attention, that does, in fact, make me a red headed stepchild. I’m the only one with severe and persistent mental illness. I don’t know. I had to find a lot of coping skills. You know, some of the questions that I asked myself is, you know, why did I gravitate toward food and sex? Why didn’t I gravitate toward

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Gabe: Toward alcohol and drugs?

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: So I think that sometimes

Lisa: Or extreme sports or any other thing?

Gabe: Or whatever. I think that sometimes there’s just no answer. I don’t know why my brother and sister don’t have this problem. Of course, they both have kids and I don’t. Why did that happen? I mean, just it just did. And on and on and on.

Lisa: You don’t really think it’s a worthwhile problem to even contemplate, then. You just feel like, hey, these things happen and. Because on TV, people can always pinpoint it to like one specific experience. Oh, it was the day that I was so sad and my great grandmother gave me cake, you know? But you’re saying in real life, no, you don’t have anything like that.

Gabe: I think that there is that. When I was sad, my grandmother did give me cake and my mother gave me cake and my mother would make the foods that we wanted on our birthday. And food is love. As you said, food is love. My family loved me a lot. I don’t know what you want. We celebrated every single success with food. We licked our wounds with food. We went to the buffets all the time. Buffets were huge, huge things when I was growing up. What do you want? Name something and I will tell you how food is involved.

Lisa: Well, yeah. But almost everyone can say that.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: Why did it hit you different than anybody else?

Gabe: I have no idea. Why does your brother ride a bike 100 miles a day and you don’t?

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.

Gabe: I have no idea and I don’t think you do either. Lisa’s brother, like for real.

Lisa: He’s an athlete.

Gabe: If you Google super athletic bro dude, I’m pretty sure Lisa’s brother comes up. And if you Google refuses to go out in the sun, hates to walk, Lisa comes up.

Lisa: Look at me, for God’s sakes. You think the sun is safe? The sun is not safe. I could burst into flames.

Gabe: You have the same parents, were raised in the same small town, raised in the exact same way, grew up on the same foods.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: How come he likes to ride a bike a thousand miles uphill for no apparent reason?

Lisa: That’s true.

Gabe: And you don’t like to talk about bikes?

Lisa: Ok, that’s fair.

Gabe: Remember when your husband bought you a bike and you just started laughing at him uncontrollably?

Lisa: What were we going to do with that? Oh, we can go for bike rides. That’s just stupid. Anyway.

Gabe: Lisa hates that bike so much, she won’t even use it as a clothing rack.

Lisa: That’s true. That is true. It’s in the garage now. We’re probably gonna get rid of that the next time we move.

Gabe: I think that reality television is really skewed people to believe that mental disorders, mental illnesses and issues have to have some triggering event.

Lisa: An easily found one.

Gabe: Whether it’s substance use disorder, whether it’s hoarding, whether it’s. The reality is, you don’t need any of this stuff. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Absolutely. But there are people who do, in fact, get lung cancer that never smoked a day in their life. Yeah. There’s not always a clear and present cause for these things. Sometimes there are. Sometimes the thing that we think is a clear and present cause isn’t. We’ve just assigned it to that.

Lisa: That’s fair.

Gabe: I work with families all the time and they’re like, oh, my God, the mental illness started when he lost his job. OK, well, let’s talk about what he was like before he lost his job. And they would tell me all of these things that are clearly symptoms of mental illness. But in their minds, it was the job loss that triggered the mental illness, even though there was a decade’s worth that they ignored. And I think we do that to ourselves, too. Lisa, what are the takeaways? I mean, binge eating disorder, it’s played a major role in my life.

Lisa: Yes it has.

Gabe: And I know that it’s played a major role in other people’s lives. And I think largely that a lot of eating disorders don’t really get the respect that they deserve. They’re dangerous and people die from them and.

Lisa: The death rate is a lot higher than you think.

Gabe: Why do we as a society not take eating disorders seriously?

Lisa: I don’t know, maybe because we live in a time of abundant food? Which has not always been the case for humanity, isn’t the case everywhere in the world. Maybe because you can’t see it?

Gabe: We take substance abuse disorder seriously.

Lisa: Probably because you can’t have an all in. Right. Oh, you’re an alcoholic? Never have another drop. That’s it, problem solved. You have to eat. That was always, because a lot of the treatment things that you did were focused on this food as addiction model or 12 steps, et cetera. When complete abstinence is not an option, how do you manage an addiction? I did not notice until after you had gastric bypass, every other commercial is for food and the food looks so good. And it’s always for food that’s bad for you. No one ever has a commercial for carrots, you know. No, it’s a commercial for fast food or pizza. And it’s so desirable looking.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: Yeah, and cheap.

Gabe: And cheap.

Lisa: There’s a reason why marketing is everywhere, it works. 

Gabe: One of the things I think about is the fast food restaurant that advertises fourth meal. Fourth meal is not a thing. They’re advertising it as if it’s real. Don’t forget fourth meal. And now second breakfast is a thing. The marketing is literally tell you to eat when you do not need to eat. And we’re proud of this, you know, fourth meal, second breakfast. It’s exciting.

Lisa: Well, and if you’re the average person, no problem. It’s like alcohol ads. The alcohol ads are telling you that, hey, when you’re having a good time, you got a beer in your hand. All celebrations go with alcohol. And for most people, hey, that’s fine. No problem. That’s the ad. But if you’re an alcoholic, that’s a real problem. How do you get over that? Most people look at the fast food and are like, oh, yeah, I might stop there for lunch, but for you, it’s a whole thing.

Gabe: It is, and it is very difficult. I’m so glad that I lost the weight. And when people look at me now, like you said earlier, Lisa, they don’t see it. I have deeply entrenched issues with food, things that I struggle with every day. And because I’m a normal body weight, we’ll just go with that, nobody realizes this is a problem and it makes it difficult to seek out community. I remember when I went to my first binge eating group, I was really large and the other members of the group were also very large. And in walked this man who was thin. He was thinner than I am now, and I consider myself to be a normal size. And he was lanky and he just talked about his struggle and how he ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the way there. And we were mean to him. We did not pay attention to him. We did not offer him any help. We as a group were not kind to him. And now I kind of feel like I’m that guy.

Gabe: I don’t want to go to the binge eating support group because I’m afraid that they’re going to look at me and say, you know what? You’re thin. I’d kill to look like you. And I understand. I understand why they would want to have the success that I’ve had over the last 18 years. So I don’t know where to get support or. I’m very fortunate that I can afford traditional therapy and that I have a therapist and I have good supports. And of course, the online communities are really, really helpful. And I’ve advanced to a stage where I don’t need as much support as I used to. But I do remember. I remember what an asshole I was. I don’t think I said anything, but I certainly didn’t put any effort into trying to help him because in my mind, he didn’t need it. And that’s an important lesson I want to get out there. Binge eating disorder is not dependent on your looks. It’s not dependent on your weight. It’s not dependent on your size. It’s dependent on your unhealthy relationship with food.

Lisa: And the important thing is that you’re so much better now. The struggle isn’t over. You’re still struggling with it. But it’s night and day. You are so much better.

Gabe: I love it when we have microphones. You’re so much nicer to me when we have microphones. I’m just going to carry around.

Lisa: You know I think you’re better.

Gabe: A podcast kit and just every time you get, like, mean to me, I’m just gonna, like, thrust a microphone in your face and be like podcast time.

Lisa: To think we’ve been arguing all these years for free. How wasteful,

Gabe: Ok. Listen up, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Obviously, the whole world believes that food is love, but you know what else is love? Subscribing to our podcast, sharing our podcast, rating our podcast, telling everybody that you can about our show. The official link for this show is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. Share it everywhere and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.

Lisa: Don’t forget, there are outtakes after the credits and we’ll see you next Tuesday.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person?  Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

  from World of Psychology https://ift.tt/2ZKw15l via theshiningmind.com

[angstymcspicy-blog]

22/05/20

1 year and 2 months. it took me 14 months before i broke all kinds of self defences and decided to seek refuge here. i love being at home, i really do. i dont have to force myself to talk to people, dont have to get tempted by food outside, dont have to exhaust my emotions, i dont have to put on makeup, i dont have to think of what to wear and regret it later for looking too fat and ugly, dont have to disappoint anyone and dont have to feel disappointed by anyone. 

but being at home starts to feel overwhelming at some point. its not that i crave physical interaction or that i miss my friends (do i have any, really?), or the boi for that matter — i just get really afraid of myself. you see, once i start sitting down with myself, i dont ever get up. 

i dont even know where to start... is life falling apart? not really. yes, we’re living in the middle of a pandemic. but i am blessed alhamdulillah to have a roof over my head, for my family members and for a s/o. but this period of being at home and everyone having so much time on their hands... really puts certain things into perspective. for instance, with so much time everyone has to offer now that we’re all confined to the comforts of our own four walls, how come not a single soul that i once called my friends have reached out. yes! i had 3 so far... in the span of 2 months. that’s a great feat, i aint gonna deny. but you see, the people i thought who could give 2 shits abt apparently rather give 2 shits to other people instead. so that makes me think — where do i stand in your life? how do i emerge from this quarantine and what do i make of our relationships after this? pretend like we totally know whats happening in each other’s lives via superficial and menial social media updates that you selectively show after having retaking them 100s of times or do i act all weird bec literally, i do not know whats happening to who anymore. this is simply bec im not talking to anyone. if i dont initiate a conversation, no one comes to me. im really not that interesting of a friend and not that exciting to have me around. i just float and exist... hence my insignificance in their lives. at one point, i guess it was just out of convenience that we were friends. & now due to circumstantial factors, it is not convenient or important having me around anymore.

yes i do have friends. yes we havent spoken in months. on some days though... i get really glad that my social circle has reduced to almost nothing. but on some days... i realise that im just not that strong after all. i want to be ok, i want to learn how to be ok. but how do i? how do i come to terms with the fact that either im a girl who turned all her friends away from her bec she thought she was too good for them or that her world too accelerated too quickly to revolve around her boyfriend that now she forgot how having friends ever felt like.

the people whom i thought literally saw me grew up are now too busy mingling amongst themselves and themselves only. they do make the effort to send one text message in 6 months... but the lack of sincerity is more than just apparent. there is 0 effort to even keep the conversation going and no matter how hard i once tried, i cant find it in me to be as giving anymore. 

to my best friend that i lost, im just taking things in my stride. every single day you never fail to exhibit the love you’re constantly being showered with (without me in your life anymore). im happy that you’re in a place where you get to shine in the spotlight given and that your circle of friends has expanded to one that drowns me out. maybe im also too exhausted and found myself to be too demanding for you to fit me anywhere in your life anymore. im just a puzzle piece that was forcing to fit till early this year. maybe now i really am prepared to want to let it all go.

i lost a workplace buddy recently. as much as i know that maybe this is for the better of him, a part of me still wishes we could maintain the same co-worker relationship and we can keep this friendship going. we have too many similarities and interests and it hurts to know that things will never be the same again. i have teared about it but i think one day these feelings are going to come charging at me in full force that it might be too late to calm those emotions down by then.

this quarantine period has also cost me lots of fights in my family. every single day i urge myself to keep the anger down and not get so agitated but i still fail. i disappoint myself time and again. i dont know how to fix this, neither do i see the light at the end of the tunnel for this. the ability to be so fucking patient with the useless beings i deal with at work and the inability of me being tolerant of my closest and most loved ones, appalls me the most. i am the biggest hypocrite i know. i fought with my beloved grandma. i was planning to check in on her but i never did and before i knew, she ended up in the hospital and i found myself sinking in knee-dip into a bottomless pit i knew i was sooner or later, doomed for.

the holy month is about to come to an end and i see people achieving milestones in their life as they close this chapter but this year feels just about the same as another. and i only have myself to blame and hate for it. i could have done so much more. coulda started on the quran, coulda been more consistent, coulda been more committed but i let it all slip in front of me and before i know it, it’s too late to do anything about it anymore. i am my biggest disappointment. i only seek for your forgiveness la Ya Allah.

i have no qualms about the person i call my partner. but having an anxiety attack all bec of him... it has truly been a long while. i wanna blame it on the period. i wanna blame it on the fact that i have too much time and too many emotions too feel, too sensitive. i wanna blame it on his lack of awareness for his surroundings and the people around him. i wanna blame it on his immaturity and ego. but i think we all know, it is ultimately just me. the same issues... over and over again. is it a lack of interest or understanding? i sincerely wonder. i want to work this out, but it gets really hard. sometimes i just want us to stop hurting. how is it that we dont get by a week without fighting? how is it that you still have issues understanding me why i get hurt even after repeatedly explaining myself? how is it that you still talk in a way that annoys the fuck out of me sometimes? i know you dont mean it. but are you really that wrapped up in your head to not notice all these things? everything’s either a fucking joke or too complicated for your brain to even process. i dont wish to make the situation bigger than what it is, but i never felt truly at peace at emptying my emotions to you. when was the last time you were keen about me and my mental health? then again, not everything is about me. and you didnt seem to understand so i backed off. i dont want to find fault in a situation that you dont want to help yourself in. why is that you can bear to part hours of your day to game but not spare 10 minutes of your time to ask me how im feeling lately. or spend 10 minutes of your time looking up what anxiety really is. i tell you im fine and you really think im fucking fine. if that was really all it took to cure my fucking anxiety m8... i’d be bloody Gandhi by now. i want to give all my love to you. but at times i cant even be truly happy for people by my side, sometimes i feel like i still have a lot more to learn before i deserve true happiness in my life. you dont always have the best words to say, but i know you do try. 

i started working out but i still dont like what i see. the more time i spend at home, the less i want to see myself in the mirror. its been 2 weeks and my arms are still so fucking flabby,,, my thighs are gigantic it can choke and the rolls on my tummy makes me nauseous. i pray to God seeking for strength every single day but i still cant find it in me to want to embrace the now me to pursue the version that i eventually want to be. the internet is not making my head a better place but it does remind me that im fat and that i deserve less and less food each day. i dont know why i allowed myself to get this obese but i am truly regretting every second of it. 

in conclusion... am i falling apart? maybe. am i losing myself? maybe. do i have friends? not anymore. and do i hate my s/o constantly reassuring me that i have friends that even i dont know the existence of? maybe. do i hate myself for being a dick to my own family? maybe. do i blame myself for being an incompetent and emotionally worrisome partner? maybe. do i blame myself for having a body as big as mine? maybe. ultimately... am i drowning myself in a bottomless pit of self loathe as i swim in self-pity? hell mother fucking yes.

[iamkellyadams]

How to Overcome The Carbon Dioxide Health Crisis

Article by, guest author – Brad Pilon, best selling author Eat, Stop, Eat and The CO2 Health Crisis

Limited time digital edition pre-release, you can buy this brand new book, here at a special discounted price.

NASA proves this is the FIRST STEP to peak health → 

The emails/articles you see daily on how to lose weight and get in shape – all the tricks, supplements, and 3 mistakes to avoid – they can all sound exciting.

There seems to be some mythology still on the market that some odd secret, a hard-to-find ingredient in a supplement, or some weird diet trick can instantly deliver the body and health you want.

Mainly, that’s for emails, fake news, and fancy talk from pseudo-experts.

To get the body and health you desire, there’s no argument among professionals, among scientists, among academics — or anybody who is active in a serious way in better health — that focusing on a key element in your home or work is the key ‘First Step’ for getting the body and health you want.

I promise you – In two or three years, the pseudo-experts who email you daily will all be on this bandwagon.

However, right now, if you were an expert scientist at NASA, worked at the headquarters at Amazon, or were an elite athlete, you’d already be focusing on what I reveal on this page.

I’ll warn you it’s not a mystical discovery. It’s not something I only discovered with some crazy story, or trip up an ancient mountain. It’s a discovery backed with over thirty years of hard evidence, and it’s the new normal for getting the body and health you want.

In fact, I think the only reason you haven’t heard about it is because it is literally invisible.

I ask you to hold off your ideas about diet and exercise for better health and discover what professional experts now know and do.

→ Why for some people the best answer is “Screw Diet and Exercise to Advance your Health”

Discover The Surprising Connection Between Exhaustion, Lethargy, Weight Gain and The Air You Breathe

Have you ever suffered from nagging and unexplained fatigued, headaches, lethargy, mysterious weight problems or headaches and even migraines?

If yes, have you tried everything – including diets, exercises, countless doctors, acupuncture, alternative medicine, and the list goes on – to get relief?

Would you be surprised to hear that a recent poll of American found that even among folks sleeping 7-8 hours per night, 93% of people wake up feeling fatigued at least 3-4 days a week?

And as you’re about to discover, your nagging challenges may have nothing to do with your…

…diet or your exercise. And a simple 10 second trick along with a few other easy to implement strategies outlined in The CO2 Health Crisis could start reversing ALL your symptoms in less than 20 Minutes. Let me explain…

All the symptoms described earlier are identical to those outlined in a groundbreaking yet little-known report released by the US Air Force. And as strange as this sounds, it turns out there’s strange link between these mysterious Chronic Fatigue-like symptoms and research into a certain Greenhouse Gas.

In other words. The air you are breathing right now could be making you fat, tired and sick!

The document reported that the majority of workplace buildings in the US had levels of this Greenhouse Gas high enough to effect up to 80% of workers with these same symptoms.

Have you guessed the Greenhouse Gas I’ve been talking about? You’ll be shocked…

It’s nothing more complicated than everyday Carbon Dioxide or CO2…

However when you look into what’s happening it’s terribly frightening. If you consider our human evolution you’ll see we evolved to breathe an atmosphere with CO2 concentrations of about 300 parts per million (or ppm)…

Yet thanks to Greenhouse Gas emissions, even average OUTDOOR levels of CO2 are now over 400 ppm. But that’s just OUTDOOR levels. Get this…

I discovered “good” office building levels are in the range of 600-800 ppm if you’re lucky. And that it’s not uncommon for many buildings to be twice or three times those levels!….

While recent study by KPMG and Middlesex Universities found that even levels of CO2 in the 600 ppm range could reduce concentration by as much as 30 percent. At levels above 1,500 ppm 79% of people reported feeling lethargic.

Think about that number for a second… That’s almost 8 out of every 10 people feeling exhausted because of the air they’re breathing!

The US Air Force report warned that even at 600 ppm many people will suffer sleepiness, fatigued, poor concentration, and a sensation of stuffiness…

And we haven’t even started talking about the air you are breathing in modern houses.

Yet as I continued my research I discovered something even more shocking…

Danish researchers are now discovering how rising CO2 concentrations are making humans hungrier and fatter…

The researchers were surprised to see that both fat and thin people taking part in their studies over a 22-year period put on weight – and the increase was proportionately the same. The only consistent factor they could find across the entire group was rising CO2 levels…

Looking for a deeper explanation they stumbled on something called Orexins. These are a type of hormone in the brain that affect wakefulness and energy expenditure and they can be disrupted by high CO2 in your blood, and this can cause you to go to bed later, affecting your metabolism so it is easier for you to put on weight…

Worse… Orexins are also DIRECTLY involved in the stimulation of your hunger and food intake. Yep! it looks like science is now proving that CO2 makes you eat more…

And it doesn’t stop there. A Swiss study demonstrated signs of increased insulin resistance and waist-circumference in people exposed to poor air quality. Which means these folks had trouble storing nutrients in their muscles and other lean tissue. The science tells us that since the body needs to get rid of the sugar in the blood that results from eating, it quickly stores it as fat!…

I explain all this research and much more in a very easy to understand and quick to read book called The CO2 Health Crisis.

In the book I also lay out a simple plan you can start implementing today that will help you reclaim your energy and reboot your fat burning metabolism.

An as I mentioned, the first tip takes only 10 seconds or less and you’ll begin noticing the effects in under 20 minutes!

The CO2 Health Crisis is currently ONLY available as a pre-release limited-time special offer here. To get it now at this discounted pre-sale price just use the link below to secure the special deal for early readers only.

→ Get This Book At Discounted Price, here ←

jQuery(document).ready(function(){ setTimeout(function(){ window.newVuukleWidgets({ elementsIndex: 3709, articleId: 3709, img: "https://gethealthremedies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/GHR-FI-min-10-150x150.jpg", title: "How to Overcome The Carbon Dioxide Health Crisis", tags: "", url: "https://gethealthremedies.com/how-to-overcome-the-carbon-dioxide-health-crisis/", }); }, 2000); });

The post How to Overcome The Carbon Dioxide Health Crisis appeared first on Food, Health & You.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Bright Wall/Dark Room September 2018: For Love or Money by Kellie Herson

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for their September issue is WORK, and in addition to Kellie Herson's essay below on "Goodfellas," they''ll also be featuring essays on "Sharp Objects," "Paterson," "Support the Girls," "Five Easy Pieces," "You Were Never Really Here," "The Sting," "Fat City," "Blue Collar," "The Hours," "Mildred Pierce," "Only Angels Have Wings," "Beautiful Things," and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." The above art is by Tony Stella. 

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here. 

I don’t think the world needs another definitive declaration of what Goodfellas is about. There are far too many, and the vast majority represent a particular viewer’s desire to claim ownership over a cultural phenomenon rather than any substantive effort to engage with the narrative. But since we’re here: it’s a movie about capitalism, or, more specifically, about the way capitalism structures not only our labor and how we get compensated for it, but also our families and our relationships. Every successful mob narrative is on some level a workplace comedy, and Goodfellas is the most incisive one we have. Yes, it’s also about friendships between men, and food, and jealousy, and it offers some tremendous dog content—but the thread holding all those disparate parts together is its comprehensive dissection of the belief that if you get the chance to do a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

That idea is coercive bullshit, of course. Not being miserable at work is something to aspire to, but having a job you love doesn’t magically liberate your labor from its economic or social context, even if that job ostensibly exists outside the bounds of polite society. If anything, love makes it far easier to let your work absorb your life and suck you dry. It doesn’t exempt you from wanting something in return for your work, whether it’s status or money or validation; it just makes it harder to distinguish the things you do joyfully from the things you do transactionally, to figure out the difference between who you are and what you do. It’s like graduate school, if graduate students weren’t quite as into stimulants.

The protagonists of Goodfellas choose their work early in the film because it’s thrilling and fun, because it’s something they love to do, and love to do together. The way these characters sustain themselves is always illegal and often immoral, but their joy is so contagious that I catch myself envying them despite my better judgment. Why, I inevitably ask myself while watching, do my friends and I sit in offices all day when we could be managing a tiki bar that’s a front for other illicit business and then burning it down for the insurance payout? (The answer is, just for the record, Catholic guilt and health insurance. Please let me know if any crime syndicates offer a full benefits package.) At first, the money and respect they accrue seem tangential, an unnecessary bonus. You assume they’d be engaging in theft, assault, and murder anyway as some sort of perverse but exciting group bonding activity.

But their fun decomposes as they get older, and the fantasy of Goodfellas gradually becomes a cautionary tale. Stretching the limits of what they can earn for themselves—whether it’s money or respect or belonging—through these activities becomes all-consuming. Their gradual lurch into the transactional is neither as nihilistic as Casino’s or as hedonistic as The Wolf of Wall Street’s. But it represents a similar effort to excise the rot at the core of events that seem fun and glamorous and aspirational, to expose how people who seem wholly unbound by the rules end up with lives just as limited as the rest of ours. The narrative that emerges here isn’t unsettling because it’s about social deviance; it’s unsettling because it’s deeply normal. Carefree, collective youthfulness gets devoured by individualism and acquisition, unraveling not only these characters’ separate lives but their relationships with one another. By the time Jimmy, who loves to steal, nears the end of his career, he can’t even enjoy executing the most impressive theft in American history. The success leaves him miserable, consumed by paranoia that anyone involved could send the whole thing tumbling down. These characters constantly expand their wealth and their influence, but none of them can ever have the specific kind of power they want—Jimmy and Tommy, in particular, can never become made men. And this perpetual dissatisfaction becomes the core of what motivates them, gradually replacing the love and excitement that once sucked them in.

Of course this journey into the mercenary shapes both the collective and the individual rises and falls of Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy. But for me, the film’s most compelling window into how people struggle to navigate a system that depends on constantly striving for something that’s always held just slightly out of reach is Karen Hill’s journey from (hilariously bored) date to wife to unofficial business partner. It’s a thread some viewers lose—and, to be fair, there’s a lot going on here and the run time is, like that of every Scorsese film, at least a hair too long; it’s easy to hold onto the scenes that stand most memorably on their own and forget the larger narrative context. But I’m always fascinated by her, and left struggling to separate out the things she does for money from the things she does for love, to mark where her desire for things she can never have ends and her resigned willingness to grab whatever she can get begins.

In fact, I would argue that her development is the backbone of Goodfellas, the piece that enables much of its thematic and emotional heft. It’s a narrative achievement, of course, but most of the credit belongs to Lorraine Bracco, whose performance is one of my all-time favorites: funny and charming, dark and terrifying, sometimes all of these things at once. Through her, we get to know Karen’s point of view better than any other characters’, and through Karen, we get to understand what it’s like to be simultaneously inside and outside the illegal, immoral, and violent work the movie depicts. Her perspective lends the movie much of its complexity and nuance—not just because her voice-overs frame so many pivotal moments, but because her narration so compellingly contradicts not only itself but also what we watch her see. When she tells us that Henry and his friends are “just blue-collar guys,” gaming the capitalist system, it’s not an effort to convince us but to convince herself. She’s close enough to see what’s happening, distant enough that she can recognize that it’s spiraling out of control, and embedded enough to have a vested interest in talking herself out of that recognition. Her domestic labor is inseparable from but not identical to her husband’s criminal labor, and her negotiation of her own complicity swings wildly between mercenary pragmatism and hopeful idealism.

You could read her constantly shifting relationship to her work as unrealistic character development, or interpret her inconsistency as yet another troubling entry into the “Bitches Be Crazy” canon—or you can understand her as a liminal subject trying to navigate an overwhelming context with mixed results. Her journey is not so much a straightforward arc from idealism into greed as it is a messy recursive process, a constant cycle of learning and unlearning and relearning how to get by as a woman who supports and is supported by this particular work. In a less biting movie, Karen would be a well-behaved middle-class Jewish girl corrupted by a criminal husband; in a Scorsese movie, the boundary between polite society and its criminal underbelly is far too blurred for such simplicity.

From the beginning of Karen and Henry’s relationship, love and acquisition are hard to separate from one another. She loathes him instantly, identifying him as a selfish dirtbag and spending their first double-date wearing an expression that I am, as a sufferer myself, both allowed and required to note is a god-tier achievement in resting bitch face. But the moment Henry signals that he’s unattainable, she must correct this, hunting him down in the street to yell at him. And while she’s intrigued by the expensive dates that follow, she doesn’t fully commit to loving Henry until he pistol-whips the man who sexually assaults her and then asks her to hide the gun. That decision—and it feels like just that, a decision, albeit one in which desire is included in her calculations—captures exactly what being attracted to an asshole entails. It’s a combination of the hope that his unearned confidence wears off on you, the validation of occasionally being the exception to the rule of how badly he treats people, and the thrill of getting to borrow that bad behavior for your own ends.

But even after this decision is formalized at their wedding, she still harbors reservations about Henry. She’s always evaluating her surroundings, trying to determine whether this life is worth what she receives in exchange for participating in it. Whenever she verbalizes her fear that the trade-off isn’t worth it—a fear that often emerges from her awareness that she will never fully belong—Henry talks her out of it. And as Henry grows more absent, she takes over this responsibility, talking herself out of everything she knows. Her rationalizations of her role in her husband’s work aren’t a regurgitation of things he’s told her previously; her explanations are far more nuanced and observant than his, grounded not in the desire to have an exceptional life but the need to hang onto a normal one. Her rationalizations offer a way of making her life livable, of holding onto the hope that she might get what she wants from adulthood—but they serve a meta-purpose as well, exposing the logic the film critiques and revealing the ways we convince ourselves to comply with our own destruction.

Karen’s compliance is never permanent, of course. She can explain in meticulous detail how her husband games the capitalist system, but she still knows what she knows. And the most urgent thing she knows is that the things she wants in exchange for her work—some influence, but also some loyalty, some kindness—are never going to take shape. Henry fails to be reliable in any capacity beyond the material: he lies to her, cheats on her, gaslights her, and leaves her isolated for long stretches of time, sometimes because he’s incarcerated but other times because he just feels like having more fun elsewhere. The only power she can leverage is the fact that her husband’s colleagues are terrified of her—because while Henry has compartmentalized her away into a very small section of his expansive personal life, his friends already know she’s part of their enterprise. Of course, this minimal power is not enough to get her what she wants; even if it did, the fact that this is her one small measure of influence still reveals the extent to which her life is interwoven with her husband’s violence and greed.

As Goodfellas nears its end, Karen seems resigned to her perpetual dissatisfaction, treating her marriage like a miserable job at a floundering company and grabbing whatever she can get before it goes under. She has every material possession she could want—an expansive wardrobe, free cocaine, a truly hideous remote-controlled rock wall—but this glamorous excess is contradicted by the empty affect of someone who’s just trying to get through a workday. As Henry’s solo business reaps more and more chaos, she gives up trying to assert herself or find a coherent explanation for anything; she is, in a few scenes, literally just along for the ride. No one in the history of cinema has ever come down with such a severe case of the fuck-its.

And yet when everything implodes, she comes alive again—briefly. As her husband is arrested and her home is surrounded by police, she disposes of everything that could incriminate him. It’s an act of love, or at least one of loyalty; it once again makes her complicit in Henry’s business, but it also protects Henry and their family. But when Henry learns what she’s done, he’s not grateful, just furious that she flushed $60,000 of cocaine down the toilet. His reaction lays bare the void at the core of their marriage, the extent to which their conflation of love and money turns even acts of pure, irrational loyalty into a question of exchange value. She sees it clearly, but it’s far too late to extricate herself; even Henry selling out his friends, entering witness protection, and leaving his work behind doesn’t grant her a way out. His job has ended, but hers has not. Just like the men she’s surrounded by, she loved it once—and we know, finally, that love, not money or glamour or interminably delayed gratification, is the force that allows her work to consume her life.

from All Content https://ift.tt/2MhWJrT