Janice’s story is different from the other stories in this collection so I’m going to tell it differently. I’m going to include some of my own reactions here alongside her story.
Everyone’s story about living with excess weight holds pain, haunting images and torturous self talk. Janice’s story has these elements, and it also includes her journey into an eating disorder, one that she’s recovering from, and one that’s still fresh enough to sting in the retelling.
Her courage in sharing her journey is palpable as she describes her spiral into the throes of her sickness and her subsequent climb back out.
Why would I include her story here among people who have successfully moved beyond yoyo diets? Mainly because of the statistic that Janice shared with me: she is the face of a frightening demographic, post 30s women who are developing eating disorders, not as a recurrence but with the initial onset of the disease. Eating disorders are growing among this population more rapidly than any other (with the exception of young men).
“I look around the waiting room” in the eating disorders clinic of the St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, says Janice, and “I see women, frail old women who look like they’re 75, but they’re 50.”
Janice’s story is included here because there’s raw truth in it and because I’ve been up to the line that divides disordered eating and eating disorders. I’ve never crossed it myself, but it would be easy. Her story is here because it’s inspiring alongside these other women’s stories. Yes, of course, there are warnings in here. There’s pain and there’s very clear “don’t go there” messages. There’s also amazing inspiration from Janice about saying what’s really going on, about naming it and reaching out for help, and about sharing deeply from her heart, about wading into the muck of our inner thoughts and parsing through the pieces, noticing what works and what doesn’t, and about tenacity and forgiveness (mostly of ourselves) in recovery.
Janice in 2006.
Her story, as most of the other stories do, begins with yoyo dieting. In 1996, Janice was 27, living at home and weighing 250 pounds. “I just made a decision,” she remembers. “I did my own thing, exercising, watching what I ate, pretty basic calorie counting, and as things progressed, I just kept going.” Using a home treadmill for exercise, Janice was down 80 or 90 pounds by the end of the year.
After moving to her own apartment, Janice started going to a gym. “I wouldn’t have been caught dead being overweight in a gym,” she says with a smile in her voice. She got off the last 20 pounds, working out to excess: three hours a day for five or six days each week.
Janice still has the photo of herself at her first 5K. It’s got the date on it: October 4, 1997. That marked the beginning of several races that she completed. “I was really into it.”
“I started to notice an inability to maintain,” she remembers, and in retrospect, she recognizes how much she was bingeing on food at this point. From this vantage point, she can also trace this behavior back to her childhood.
Janice is quick to point out that her upbringing was pretty conventional regarding food. “I didn’t grow up in a household that had a particularly unhealthy attitude toward food. I had a normal family, three meals a day with normal amounts. My mother had her own weight problem, but I never observed bizarre food behaviors. I was aware of my mother trying to lose weight in a normal way – eating better or exercising more, but never with strange or drastic dieting.”
“As a young child, I remember craving and feeling comforted by food,” Janice says. “I don’t know why. I don’t know where that comes from. I remember looking for soda cans so that I could return them to the store and get the pennies and getting a chocolate bar or a donut or a bag of chips – trying to amass all of the things I wanted.”
Now Janice looks back at her weight loss in the late 90s, and she says, “I have no idea how I was able to manage that. At the time, I think the motivation came from watching the scale, and once a week, I would go out to dinner and have whatever I wanted. Once I got in the ballpark, near my goal weight, I started really struggling. I would have uncontrollable binge sessions. ‘I can’t go back, I can’t regain,’ I would tell myself.”
Knowing that something was wrong, Janice went to a counselor for the first time then. “I was a terrible patient,” she remembers. “I never told the truth. I was never honest about what I was feeling.”
Janice’s description of this phase in her journey is worth underlining. Her obsessive behavior, like exercising with precision (“Whatever I did last week, I had to do this week”) and her food binges really only kicked in when she got close to her goal weight. “Before I had goals like hanging up my clothes without folding them in on the sides or shopping off the rack, but once I got in the ballpark [with my weight], numbers became everything.”
“It really fed into what was already a pre-existing perfectionist complex that I had always had. In everything else I did, I was a real achiever.” Janice’s understanding of how the perfectionism came into play here is pivotal to her recovery now. “A perfectionist will always see less than 100 percent as a failure,” she says now. “99 is the same as 1, and when I say that, I don’t really believe it, but my actions will sometimes follow it.”
Janice’s weight came back beginning in 1999. “Losing weight and gaining it back again is devastating. If you didn’t feel like a failure before, you sure do now. You had it in your grasp. You blew it, not just overnight, but you blew it one pound at a time in strange, weird dynamic that you don’t really understand yourself.”
“I sat there for a number of years with my weight,” says Janice.
About five years ago, Janice went back to Weight Watchers. “I had had good success with them in the past (“I used them to lose those last 20 pounds or so back in 1996-97”), and I decided to go back there and just take it one step at a time and slowly work away at it.” Janice went from a high of 267 to just over 200 pounds during this time.
Then, in 2007, “thing really started to go haywire.” Janice’s bingeing problems had continued but she hadn’t yet crossed into purging.
Janice ran into a life-long close friend who told her about her experience with Dr. Bernstein’s diet. “I had heard about them. I had a lot of reservations, it seemed near starvation, it seemed so strict.” Janice shared her concerns with her friend. “You know, it’s strict,” said her friend, “but it works.”
Desperate, Janice tried it. For $600 per month (Canadian), she went three times each week to the clinic where she was weighed, she got B6 and B12 injections, and she met with a nurse, and every two or three weeks, she would meet with the doctor.
Janice describes the approach there as very medical, and she’s careful about her words when she talks about her experience there. “It’s exactly as they advertise on TV. I can recite the commercial word for word. It’s medically supervised rapid weight loss. It’s a very strict diet, very low calorie, very low carb. There’s a fixed yes/no list. They check your urine when you come in so there’s no room for lying.”
“It was my choice to go there, and it was working,” says Janice. She started in late 2007 and by her birthday in early March, Janice was down to 160.
Around this time, Janice travelled to San Francisco for a conference. “I felt just like before, when I got close to the ballpark of my goal weight, things fell apart.” Janice talked to herself then, “’I can’t sustain this because of the bingeing.’” In holiday mode during her trip to San Francisco, Janice overate and purged for the first time.
“I had eaten so much, I could have almost been sick without even trying,” she remembers. “But I did try, and it gave me some physical relief. I remember thinking it wasn’t that hard.”
That was the beginning of her cycle. “The bingeing and purging would go in cycles,” Janice says. “Once I knew how to do it, it became a way to deal with it. It was like I had this technique in my back pocket – if I couldn’t keep the bingeing under control, I could use it.”
“It’s very bizarre,” she says now. “The whole time it’s like you’re a split personality. There’s a rational, intellectual self that’s looking down on the irrational self pushing a grocery cart in the store. It’s very strange.”
“Most people might not know that you actually end up gaining weight in the long run with this cycle. With the bingeing, some of that food stays in your system, and it’s very high sugar, very high fat. You also start to learn the rules of the game – some things purge better than others, the logistics of the purge itself, and you start to get quite expert at it, you plan how to binge.”
For most of that year, Janice continued to suffer. “I was in bad shape,” she says. “I was gaining weight, I had a lot of water retention and bloating, and I had this strange and warped mind. It was the worst of all possible worlds: I was gaining weight and now I had this other problem.”
Having left Dr. Bernstein’s weight loss clinic, Janice was forced to go to her general practitioner to “come clean.” She needed medical validation about why she had to extend her leave of absence from her PhD program. “It was the only way to get a year of medical leave. That was the impetus at the time.”
“Getting help from my doctor set me on a path that was helpful.” Janice started an outpatient program in an eating disorders clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.
“Things were up and down in 2009. I had to come clean to my boyfriend (who lives in London). He’d actually suspected some things. I thought I was really good at hiding it, but I probably purged in every restaurant bathroom in Vancouver. He saw things, but he didn’t know how to broach the subject.”
“That was my lowest point,” says Janice. “My nerves were shot. I couldn’t handle anything. I was on autopilot. All of my work got done on schedule, and I got awesome reviews. In fact, I was teaching at three different universities on probably a 200% work schedule – this would be considered insane by any university/college instructor. But no one had any idea that my life was literally in the toilet.”
After Janice started therapy and started talking to her boyfriend, “things got better. We actually ended up connecting much better, and I started to see what a big support he was. He didn’t profess to understand. He just wanted to help.”
Janice is now over a year into her recovery. “I’ve learned to understand the disorder. It’s like a lot of recovery. The chance for relapse is always there, like alcoholism. You can have 10 years of sobriety and tomorrow have a drink. The amount of time that goes by is irrelevant. You can’t let your guard down.”
Janice has had relapses. She travelled to London to spend six weeks with her boyfriend, and she had cycles of bingeing and purging. “I don’t even know the answer to why. It’s completely irrational. I have to stop trying to solve an irrational problem with a rational solution. I’m a ‘to do’ list person. I’m task oriented. I’m an organizer, and to be told that this doesn’t work that way, it’s much more organic, I’ve only recently started to get underneath all that.”
“I have gained some weight. I want to approach this in a normal way. I use Weight Watchers. The accountability is helpful, but I still have the yes/no lists in my head.”
“It’s not deep, dark things. It’s a combination of my basic personality and how I deal with emotions. Even at the level of recognition, even having my feelings, I’m a real minimizer. I allow it for everyone else, but not for myself. I have always skipped over the contemplation to the moving on part. Through therapy and talking – I’ve learned that those are necessary steps. Sooner or later, things erupt. If you don’t deal with your crap, whatever it is, it’s going to come out, it’s going to force its way out.”
Janice is incredulous that she was told that residential care would be best for her. Even having someone suggest this option to her horrified her. “It’s not what you want, it’s what you need. You need something that’s going to jolt you. It’s not like in the movies, it’s a real process. It’s really, really hard. Real change is really hard.” While Janice has not gone to residential treatment, “it’s something that’s always looming out there, and more than one of my counselors have (and continue to) recommend it, insisting that I’m a good candidate for that kind of program (mature, rational, motivated).”
Even now, Janice sees that she’s got a journey in front of her. “I can have 100 rational thoughts, and the one irrational thought can win.”
“I can see them for what they are now,” she says. “I still have a scale. I look at it as a tool. I get on it if I want to get on it. This is going to take a while.”
“My goal is to be a lot kinder to myself when I get there,” she says.
Janice in 2008.
Now 41, Janice is also reaching for sustainability in her eating. “I want to eat in a way that’s sustainable. I want to manage it myself.”
“My biggest goal is learning to accept myself. What if I never lost another pound? Would that be okay? I’m still grappling with that one. If this were someone else’s story, I’d say, ‘That’s great, you should be proud of yourself, you’ve come a long way both on the scale and in life.’ But when it’s you, it’s just a negative. When I was this weight coming down, I was happy. What’s the difference between 170 pounds now and 170 pounds then?”
In the weeks since I interviewed Janice, she sent me this update as we sent edits back and forth on this post: “I’m down to about 160 and working on getting to a comfortable 150, where I intend to maintain for the rest of my life! Weight Watchers is going well, and I haven’t relapsed in 6 weeks (today). I’m feeling positive and learning to live with food, which means all food.”
Near the end of our interview, Janice said something that wraps up her story well: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” She’s liberated herself from her secrets, and she’s shared them here with stark courage and grace. And I extend my gratitude to her. Thanks, Janice.
Beyond Yoyos 