Dinner for Two Lovely People by Tracy Harris

You can tell when a binge is about to happen. Just as the sky darkens and the air grows thick with moisture before a thunderstorm, a binge starts with warning signs.  Unlike a thunderstorm, however, a binge does not signal its approach with rumbling, because a binge is not about your stomach or actual physical hunger.  Binging is a crime of opportunity. The moment presents itself, and your blood starts to race, maybe adrenaline kicks in. Whether you’ve got 15 minutes or a whole afternoon, getting to the food is all you can think about.  You may try to fight it, you may turn on the TV, race upstairs away from the kitchen, fold laundry, anything; but there is no distraction strong enough to blow this storm off course.  

It’s like getting a song lodged in your brain. Once it gets started, you can’t turn it off.  

It starts slowly.  A low hum creeps into the back of your consciousness. You may tell yourself that this time, you’ll just have a little. You take a piece of whole wheat bread from the freezer and the chunky peanut butter from inside the refrigerator door. Your breath starts to slow as you open the jar, dip in the knife, and swipe out a golf ball-size glob. Slather it on the bread.  Maybe this is all you’ll need. To reassure yourself you plunge the knife in again and scoop out another, smaller glob that you swipe off the knife with your finger and smear directly into your mouth. Swallow, and do it again. That’s it.  Better. Your heart is pounding a little less.

You sit down with the slice of bread, which has defrosted in the time it’s taken you to cover it with peanut butter.  You eat around the top, side and bottom, then fold the bread in toward the remaining side crust to make a sort of sandwich.  You’ve spread the peanut butter so thick that it oozes out the sides as you bite in, but that’s how you like it.

After the first slice you wait a minute.  One slice of bread and a small boatload of peanut butter wouldn’t be so bad.  You could stop here.  

But the drumbeat gets louder. The rhythm quickens.  And you know you can’t stop.

That’s why you left the knife propped by the sink, instead of washing it right away.  Like those first fat drops of rain that splat hard and loud against the window, those first few bites are just the prologue.  It’s happening.  And now that you’ve given in, you’re calm.  Your heart is no longer racing, or if it is you don’t feel it because you have in essence detached yourself from your body.  You are not controlling the legs that carry you back and forth across the kitchen, the hands that reach and scoop and pour, the mouth that chews and gulps and swallows.  It’s not up to you; all you can do is let the binge run its course.  

You get another slice of bread, slather it with more peanut butter.  

And before you know it, the storm is raging, the music has gone full volume, drums and chords and vocals, and you are gone.

Count out eight Triscuit crackers.  Pop a couple of broken pieces into your mouth to eat while you get the cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator.  Take a slice from the package. Fold in half, then half again.  Take each quarter section and fold it in half.  Eight pieces.  Carry this stash to the table on a paper napkin.  Eat it all, one cheese square per cracker.

When you’re finished, do it again.

And maybe again.

The specifics vary a little depending on what’s available in the refrigerator, freezer and cupboards, but by now you are on auto-pilot.  Muscle memory takes over. You are marching through the steps like a soldier executing a drill she’s carried out hundreds of times before.

Microwave two slices of leftover pizza from the freezer, then set them to crisp up in the toaster oven.

While the pizza is warming, reach up to the high shelf where your husband keeps his smoked almonds.  Eat as many handfuls as possible without noticeably diminishing his supply.  

Glob a few fingers full of cold leftover chili from the container in the refrigerator.

If the pizza’s still cooking, find the open box of granola bars.  Eat one, bury the wrapper beneath the trash already in the garbage can.  Eat another.

Eat the pizza and wash the toaster oven tray right away, so it can dry and be put back in the drawer before anyone gets home.

Dessert.  If the cookies from last week are still unopened, go on to the half-gallon of ice cream in the freezer.  Moose Tracks or Jamocha fudge. Eat 10-12 large spoonfuls.

The box of Frosted Mini Wheats is almost full.  Pour yourself a full bowl.  Add maple syrup, milk.  Sit down and enjoy the sweet, the cool and the crunch.

At this point, you are starting to relax. You may grab a handful of chocolate chips from the freezer to top off, but basically, it’s over. You barely notice the pressure of all that food pushing outward from your gut; you stop because you’ve eaten pretty much everything that’s available without having to cook or open new packages. You float back into your body and note that your heartrate and breathing have returned to normal. Still you feel sad and resigned. Because it happened again, like it always happens, almost any afternoon you’re at home with nothing in particular to do.  But for now the storm has subsided, and the soundtrack is fading.  

At least the kitchen looks spotless:  clean, but more important, unimpeachable.  There is no evidence of the tempest that’s been raging for the past hour.  Dinner tonight will be pasta with meat sauce and plenty of parmesan cheese; garlic bread; one of those pre-made salads that comes with all the components in a bag.  

Even after a binge you will eat as planned, if anything you’ll eat more than you might have on a night when you don’t need to punish yourself for an hour or more of nonstop eating.  In the inevitable flood of regret that follows each binge, making yourself feel even fatter is the natural next step.  Besides, your husband will be curious if you don’t eat, and you certainly won’t want to tell him what you’ve been doing all afternoon.  

* * *

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) became an official diagnosis in May 2013, when the American Psychiatric Association released the DSM-5.  From my reading of the criteria, I’d say I suffered from Binge Eating Disorder for maybe 45 years.  At just a few binges per week, my case was mild, moderate at most.  But each time it happened, I’d feel sick, not so much from the thousands of calories of food I’d taken in, but from the shame of knowing my eating was out of control.   

When I was a teenager, eating disorders meant anorexia or bulimia.  1970s media were starting to present cautionary but sympathetic tales about anxious young women dying in their quest to be thin. There were no movies-of-the-week about girls who just crammed themselves full of food whenever the opportunity arose.  I overate without the dignity of a disease, and I assumed I was the only one who went on these secret, shameful food orgies.  Turns out Binge Eating Disorder is the most common eating disorder in the U.S.

I started sneaking food when I was around 10, about the time I started pudging up before adolescence. My mother would threaten me with the Chubbies department (fat-girl clothes) if I was sullen or sarcastic during shopping trips, which I generally was. I never ended up needing the amply-cut, humiliatingly-named clothes that my mother brandished like a lion tamer with a whip. I was plump, but I fit easily into the standard sizes. Still I never disputed the logic that underlay my mother’s threat: I was only chubby when I was misbehaving, which meant that being fat and being bad were essentially the same thing.  By the age of 10, I knew that I was both.  

Despite my ostensible weight problem, those excursions always ended with lunch in a restaurant and a separate stop for ice cream. After the emotional roller coaster of shopping, lunch was a nervous standoff.  My mother, my little sister, my grandmother who usually accompanied us, everyone ordered what they wanted. But I was afraid. Fried chicken AND French fries?  More butter for my bread?  My mother glared at me as I reached for the basket. Was I not supposed to have bread? The ice cream shop brought even more of a quandary. It was Grandma’s treat, and we were supposed to be having fun. But would I get in trouble if I ordered a sundae? Should I order sherbet, which my mother said had fewer calories? The wrong choice and I knew my mother would yell at me all the way home after we dropped off Grandma.  

Luckily, 10 was also about the age my mother decided I was old enough to be left at home alone if she had to run a few errands or take my younger sister somewhere. 

“I’ll only be gone a few minutes!”  She’d grab her keys and close the door behind her; and I’d wait, peering out the window until she backed the station wagon out of the driveway and was headed safely down the street.  

Once she was gone, I worked fast.  Thrust my hand into the box of Cheez-its; cram the salty crackers into my mouth; savor the crunch, the cheese flavor, the thick lump of chewed crackers wadding up in my teeth.  Roll up a slice or two of bologna from the resealable package. Grope through the cookie jar. Chew and swallow as fast as I could. Each frantic mouthful released a tiny bit of the pressure inside my chest, like an escape valve for the words I wished I were brave enough to shout back at my mother. 

As focused as I was on eating as much as I could in the few minutes available, I did not forget to be careful about being caught.  I smoothed over furtive dips into the ice cream like a sculptor modeling wet clay, so my mother wouldn’t see the jagged ravines I’d dug out with my spoon. I angled the cheese slicer like a surgeon wielding a scalpel, so I wouldn’t leave deep, incriminating ridges in the block of cheddar. I wiped up all my crumbs. I never ate the last of anything. If there were wrappers, I hid them at the bottom of the trash.

I grew up, I left home, my mother no longer had jurisdiction over what I ate or what I wore; still my binging traveled with me around the country.  As a college student at Boston University, I’d celebrate Friday afternoons with a 26-ounce jar of Planters dry roasted peanuts. I could easily polish off the jar while I walked back to the dorm, toss the evidence in the trash before anyone could see, and head out an hour later for all-you-can eat dinner at the cafeteria.  Later that evening, a group would inevitably form for pizza, and I never said no.  Double cheese and mushrooms.  

After college, I worked at a community newspaper in San Francisco.  Once a week, on production night after we’d put the paper to bed, the boss would treat the staff to a full Chinese banquet.  And each week I’d continue the celebration as a party of one, stopping for a chicken parmigiana sandwich at the Burger King I passed on my post-banquet walk to the BART station. 

I married Will a couple of years later. We lived on the far Upper West Side in Manhattan; I commuted to Greenwich Village for work. I’d eat breakfast at home, then buy an over-sized blueberry muffin to scarf down during the 15-minute walk between the subway and my office at NYU. I’d always get a full meal during my lunch hour. Who wouldn’t? It was Greenwich Village! I’d eat a pre-dinner slice of pizza on the walk back to the subway at the end of the day. Sometimes I’d get a gyro instead of pizza, although those were harder to walk with.  

Would a mental health clinician, armed with the DSM-5, count all those extra muffins and peanuts and pizza slices as binges?  Maybe not in the classic sense: an extra sandwich or a gratuitous slice of pizza is not in and of itself an unusually large amount of food, one of the elements that defines a binge. The real binging took place at home, where my access to food was not limited by how much money I had in my wallet or the amount I could reasonably consume while I walked 5 or 10 city blocks.  

I was a full-on, married adult, but it was as if I never stopped being the 10-year-old girl who rebelled by bursts of eating whenever her mother was out of the house. The habits incubated in adolescence simply matured into pure reflex.   As sure as I’d jerk my leg when the doctor hit my knee with that little hammer, if I was home alone, I’d eat.  I did not eat because I was hungry or bored or in need of emotional comfort.  I ate because I could.

Binging never had anything to do with my mood.  College, my first real job in San Francisco, I could not have been happier.  My early married life in New York? Living the dream.  And my mother was nowhere around. So why was I doing it?  I have no idea, and maybe that’s what “lack of control” means in the official criteria.  

The criteria for BED also talk about eating alone and feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment.  Check, check and check. Keeping my eating a secret was always part of the binge experience. It just required a new set of skills once I was married.  

Will and I started our married life in New York. We learned our way around the Met, we studied Italian, we went to the ballet at Lincoln Center, and we ate out a lot, as New Yorkers do. We couldn’t afford the expensive restaurants, but we didn’t care. There were hamburgers, barbecue, and diners all around us; and at least once a week we’d treat ourselves to the Dinner for Two Lovely People, our favorite meal at the Chinese restaurant a few blocks from our apartment.  

The Dinner was a set menu:  Hot and Sour Soup, Moo Shu Pork, Kung Pao Chicken, House Special Fried Rice. It was as if the meal had been created just for us:  all our favorites, and of course, the name.  We got it every time, although it embarrassed us to order it out loud.  We didn’t want the waiter to think we were bragging.  

That habit of eating out followed us to Boulder, Colorado and then to St. Paul, Minnesota, where we settled and raised our family.  Nothing ever compared to The Dinner for Two Lovely People, but we seemed to find a signature meal wherever we lived.  In Boulder it was T.C.’s burgers: two blocks from our house and only $3.99 for a half pound cheeseburger and fries; two-for-one if you had the coupon, which we always did.  You couldn’t afford not to eat them.  In our early years in St. Paul, it was Sunday afternoons at Rudolph’s, a barbecue restaurant with a silent movies theme.  (Rudolph as in Valentino, not the reindeer.)  We’d order the loaded potato skins as an appetizer and then I’d get the “Norah Desmond.”  Half a barbecue chicken, a pile of French fries, a slab of Texas toast.  We’d share a brownie sundae for dessert.

Obviously, Will knew how much I ate when we went out to dinner together.  What I kept secret was that more often than not, I was absolutely stuffed even as the server was leading us to our table. My ability to rally for dinner after a full day of binging would have been the stuff of legends, if only anyone had known. Will never knew, and those signature meals became the center of our life together. 

* * *

Neither weight nor appearance is part of the diagnostic criteria for BED, although they are the disorder’s most obvious manifestations.  Binge Eating Disorder and the resulting obesity can bring a host of complications:  heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol; Type 2 diabetes; sleep apnea; gallbladder disease; depression and other mood disorders. There are more.  I was lucky.  I suffered none of the comorbidities.  

On the other hand, I gained 40 pounds within three years of getting married. It wasn’t Will’s fault.  He didn’t force me to go to restaurants, and he never even suspected how much I was eating in addition to all our cheeseburgers and Chinese food. The worst thing he did was to become my eating partner. Small surprise that in the decades that followed, Will also gained a lot of weight. My snowballing size, however, left him in the dust.

Snowballs melt, and even with all the binging, I was able occasionally to shrink myself in size. Not by standing out in the sun, but over the years I tried lots of methods. Near-starvation diets. Individual therapy. Overeaters Anonymous.  Group therapy. Weight Watchers, which in the end is the system through which I had some success. Temporary success, but enough to create brief, triumphant interludes when I was at or near a healthy weight.  Weight Watchers worked so well, in fact, that I lost weight on their program four times: in 1976 (15 pounds), 1987 (30 pounds), 1999 (73 pounds) and 2018 (65 pounds).   That’s a career total of 183 pounds lost. A whole person, a whole large person.  A person almost as big as me. 

I am still here, inside this body, even though I have lost, gained, and lost my physical self so many times over more than 40 years. Binge eating has shaped my body, it has shaped my life, given me ritual and a way of marking time.  Like a cross between scream therapy and meditation, binging is how I let myself go and calm myself down.  It is not a great behavior, but it has served a purpose.  My binges these days are smaller, more intentional, more within my control.  I give myself permission to binge, for example, after any visit to a doctor, especially if it involves needles. I allow, but do not require, snacks at the airport if a flight is delayed.  I grant a special exemption for grocery stores on the days they offer free samples.  

Those grocery store binges are my favorite, at least they were before COVID.  I am an expert at circling two or three times through the aisles. I push an empty cart and stare into the distance as if I am scanning the shelves for a particular, hard-to-find item. I feign surprise when I come upon one of the aproned, usually gray-haired ladies offering me a mini slice of pizza or a dollop of pasta salad in a neat paper container.  

“Thanks, I’d love to try some,” I say, adding a note of delight as I take the snack from her tray. Then I take a bite and I smile, as if scavenging as many of these treats as possible were not the entire purpose of my outing.  The sample lady does not know I’ve been aiming my cart for her all along.  

Tracy Harris is a writer in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Nowhere Magazine, The Common, and the Tahoma Literary Review, among others. She is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, a graduate of Hamline University’s MALS program, and a former board member of Water-Stone Review.