My story. Part One.

My Story. Part One.


My issues with food go back as far as I can remember.

My story begins before my memories.

My birth-mother went to a Catholic half-way house for girls in trouble, where she had me, and gave me up for adoption. It was the last I’d see her for many years.

My parents (for Jim and Frances, the couple who adopted me, will always be my actual parents) were ready to bring me home, when dad had a heart attack. It meant that I stayed in the orphanage till I was about a year old, or close to it. No one is left from my immediate family whose memories go back that far, so I can’t ask anyone to clarify the details.

I was a pretty happy child; enthusiastic, curious, bright, with two much older brothers and a younger sis, all of us adopted. Old photos show a cute, chubby little girl who almost always smiled, except when her mother made her wear dresses.

My parents did well, made a good living with the local farm and animal supply store/feed mill they owned. We lived in a big, colonial house in a small, historic Pennsylvania town.
We drank whole milk, used real butter on our white bread, didn’t concern ourselves with sugar and had no idea there were any oils besides vegetable or corn. I don’t know if that’s completely true, but I’d be willing to bet there was no olive oil in our pantry. It was a pretty typical American diet. I recall Captain Crunch or peanut butter toast for breakfast, toasted cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup for lunch, meat and potatoes for dinner. Well-cooked veggies. Salads were iceberg lettuce.

I loved to eat. I loved junk food. My favorite part of swimming lessons at the local YMCA was the change mom gave me to buy myself a treat from the vending machines after the lesson. Hair wet, gym bag over my shoulder, I’d run up the stairs from the basement locker room to get my goody. It was almost always a packet of nip-chee crackers. You got six crackers! That would last a lot longer than a candy bar or a bag of chips. Not that any snack lasted long around me.

I was the only one in the family with a weight problem.

My dad had his second heart attack when I was six. It was December, a few weeks before Christmas when he died. I was in my first grade classroom when the call came, and the nuns told me. I remember they made me get up in front of all the classrooms and say “My daddy died today.” That might have been the beginning of my disillusionment with religion and religious leaders, a topic for another column, perhaps.

Mom took over the business. Even more processed foods crept into the household, as she had less time to prepare meals. We dined out a lot in the evenings. I never minded. I loved having beef-a-roni for lunch, visiting restaurants for dinner. I especially loved all-you-can-eat spaghetti night at the Family Cafeteria.

Somewhere around the age of eight or nine, my weight was discussed with our family physician, who put me on diet pills. Were they speed? I don’t remember, but that seemed to be the diet pill of choice in those days. That may have begun my disillusionment with the medical industry. At the time, it wasn’t me who was concerned with my weight, it was the people around me. And really, I wasn’t that big. I was chubby. But the mind-set had officially begun.

Mom got sick when I was ten. I knew she was ill, what I didn’t understand was that incurable colon cancer had invaded her body. She died just before Easter.

My oldest brother Vince became guardian for my sis and me, but we went to live with my grandmother. She taught me the sugar-rush-joy of peanut butter toast mixed with dark Karo syrup for breakfast. And wilted lettuce salads with warm bacon dressing. In fact, she always had a can of bacon fat in the fridge, which she would use to fry potatoes, eggs, even hamburgers, in her big cast iron skillet. I loved her cooking.

At fourteen I went to a Catholic private boarding school. My freshman year, Vince died while I was home on Thanksgiving break, which left my sister-in-law as guardian.

I knew I was fat. Now and then, diets would be discussed. Meetings were attended. My heart was never in them. In fact, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I ever put any effort into seriously reducing. I joined the legions of women in search for something simple that would make me thin. Something that wouldn’t take away my food. Something magical.

Was I attempting to fill some kind of void with food? Who knows? But that’s an argument that both complicates and over-simplifies things. In other words, it’s inadequate. All lives are filled with joy and pain, and we all cope differently. Does some mysterious something in our psyches dictate to us to overeat? How do we cross into that mode where we are no longer eating to satisfy and nourish, but mindlessly gorging?

If you can come up with a definitive answer…sell it.

But we can’t discount the types of foods we eat. That boxed cereal I loved as a child is bereft of any nutrients. I could eat box after box after box, and my body would never get what it needs.

To be continued….

Stuff I love!

Politically Incorrect Nutrition, by Michael Barbee
It's one of those books that helps us to wake from the Matrix, and take a good look at what we're eating.

The Yoga of Eating/Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self, by Charles Eisenstein
I don't follow all his practices, but it's a wonderful book meant to inspire you into making body/mind/spirit connections to what you eat. He has been both vegetarian and omnivore.