I can trace its earliest manifestations back to a camping trip with my best friend and her grandparents. They stopped at a 7-11 on the way out of town with us pre-teens in the back of the camper. They gave us each $5 and told us to buy whatever candies we wanted. It was a crap-load.

I remember eating mine very quickly as the first few days passed. My friend still had most of hers left. As I saw mine quickly depleting, I started taking from her stash before mine was empty.

There was a thrill to it, like theft or shoplifting must feel. There was a self-disgust feeling in there too. Shame. Guilt. Emptiness.

Candy aside, I consumed nearly everything in sight. Had double servings of pancakes at breakfast. Went throug whole bags of marshmallows on my own. Finished what was left of my friend's lunch.

I didn't think much of it, until I got home. Until my friend's grandparents remarked to my mother, jokingly, that I was a "hungry girl" on the trip and mentioned how much I ate.

My mother absolutely flipped out on me. She sat me down and scolded me - telling me how embarrassed *I* should be for how much I ate, but more importantly how embarassed *she* was of me. How my lack of self-control with food made *her* look bad. I understand this in retrospect, but couldn't at the time.

And that's when she started hiding food from me. Watching my portion sizes. Watching what food I ate and was constantly nagging me about what I was eating and how much, even though I wasn't overweight (yet).

I formed the habit of rewarding every emotion with food. A success at school deserved a treat. A fun day with my friends deserved a treat. A hard day at work deserved a treat. A fight with my mother deserved a treat. A fight with my friends deserved a treat. A long bike ride deserved a treat. A lonely evening feeling depressed deserved a treat. Feelings of guilt for having eaten too much deserved a treat.

And so the cycle continued.

But not only did my attachment of food and emotions solidify over time, but my need to do so in hiding. I would purchase all sorts of bad food for myself without my mother knowing and eat them in the seclusion of my locked bedroom. Keep my own garbage bag and throw it in the public bin on the way to school so that there would be not audit trail for my mother to follow.

I would look forward to babysitting not because I wanted the money or because I liked the kids (both of which are true, though) but because I longed for the ability to raid the cupboards of the homes I would be babysitting at.

I would find out later that the reason I would be called more and more seldom to babysit was because the parents couldn't keep enough food in the house to feed me.

I remember an occassion where I ate a whole box of Nature's Path granola bars. The next day the little girl's mom called me to ask if I had moved the box. I told her I hadn't seen it. She told me that it was for her husband's lunches and asked if I could remember seeing it. I lied.

How hot my cheeks were with the lies I had started to tell not only to my mother, but to these people I babysat for.

The worst of all my embarrassing babysitting binges was when I was at my mom's best friend's house looking after her two young boys. There was a container full of homemade peanut butter brittle on top of the refrigerator. I ate at least half if not 2/3rds of it.

The mother called my house to ask what happened to the peanut butter brittle and I lied saying I fed it to the boys. She angrily told me that she'd made the peanut butter brittle as a gift for her father's birthday which was the next day and that her boys didn't care for it.

I cried with embarassment. She never called me to babysit again.

I would eat whole packages of macaroni and cheese to myself, sometimes two. I would buy packages of oreo cookies that wouldn't last an evening. Bags of wine gums or ju jubes, gone in one sitting.

Eating absolutely consumed me.

It wasn't until sometime in university that I stopped hoarding, at least. It dawned on me one day that no one around me gave two hoots what I ate or how much. No one was keeping track.

It was around then that I started to hold myself accountable for what I ate. Letting myself realize that even what I ate in hiding still counted. It didn't go into an invisble stomach.

I stopped binge eating sometime in fourth year university when I started to lose weight. Although I would later regain my weight, it wasn't really from binge eating so much as it was from eating too much and too much of the wrong types of foods.

But the desire to binge doesn't ever go away. It is a ghost that follows me. Taunts me when I am weak. Tells me the only way to escape my troubles is to feed them.

I nearly binged twice this past weekend and it has scared me half to death.

I have worked SO HARD this past year to lose the 80+ pounds that I have lost. I refuse to let that hard work go because of some stress and low feelings.

I suppose it's a first step is recognizing it for what it is and calling the binge ghost out of hiding. Make him face the light.

Today I will go to the gym, admire my bulging arm muscles unashamedly in the mirror and remind myself that binge eating will not make me feel better.


I. am. STRONGER. than. that.