By Stephanie Covington Armstrong
Those three words screamed out on on a loop in my head for years because I didn’t understand why that one simple act proved so difficult for me. At eighteen I wrote my first play and saw it produced off-Broadway, and by nineteen I rented a newly rehabbed apartment in my native Brooklyn, one train stop away from Manhattan. When I focused my mind on accomplishing something as challenging as leaving New York for Los Angeles, at twenty-one, I just did it, and barely looked back. In L.A., I created a full life for myself. That’s why I couldn’t understand my failure when it came to sticking to a diet.
Pre-bulimia, I suffered from B.E.D., binge eating disorder. Binge Eating Disorder is the inability to stop bingeing compulsively. This made it impossible for me to stick to a diet. Any diet. I was too far gone. Trust me when I tell you that I tried them all... for an hour, a day, or a week but I could never stop myself from eventually taking that first compulsive bite, which led to the second and then the third until I found myself at the grocery store, a drive-thru window or a donut shop. I believed that my failure to control my food intake pointed to a basic lack of self-control and unsteady willpower instead of faulty internal hardwiring.
I didn’t understand why at the slightest hint of anxiety, stress, fear, shame, pain, exhaustion, or even joy I’d stuff my mouth or why a normal amount of food had zero ability to curve my hunger. This was not something I could explain to normal people. They would parrot back the same things I told myself. Just stop eating compulsively. Duh! Have some self-control. Stop being so lazy. No more excuses. Beating myself up didn’t change my behavior around food it just covered me in a thicker veil of shame.
Years into my recovery from compulsive eating and body obsession, I’m still finding that many people who struggle with food have similar core issues. Recently, I learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences, or in medical shorthand, ACES and that led me to an Aha! moment. The original study was conducted with the CDC and Kaiser Hospital to help patients dealing with obesity. Today the test is used to access the longterm effects of cumulative childhood stressors. Think of it as a cholesterol score for childhood toxic stress. Learning my ACEs score helped me to accept the link between my childhood trauma and a need to overeat. This is not to say that everyone with food issues has high ACEs scores. The ACEs test scores in three separate categories; abuse, household challenges, and neglect using ten questions. Each question counts as one ACE. An ACES score of 4 or more signifies is attributed to increased risk of early death, adult risky behaviors, chronic health issues, including depression, eating disorders and addiction. My ACEs score is above 4, and lower than 8.
My high ACEs score illuminates why dieting never worked for me. I wasn’t eating compulsively because of gluttony. Food was the way I coped with adverse childhood experiences and until I got help. Dieting removed the only coping skill I had and made me feel more vulnerable and exposed. Eventually I hit bottom with my eating disorder and realized that I couldn’t recover alone. The work I needed to do included delving into my past with a trained professional, which along with a support group helped me to break free of my addiction to bingeing and starving. Learning your ACEs score may give permission for the first time in our lives to not be ok with having a difficult past, and to truly understand the genesis of your hunger.
The participants of the initial ACES study were 74% white, 54% female and 39% had a college degree or higher. Today the ACEs are used on children 0-18 in an effort to prevent childhood trauma.
Another necessary component to my recovery had to do with building a support network of trustworthy people. I am able to call or text these individuals to check in about my feelings before I pick up the food to self-medicate. The remind me of the necessity of staying on course. I also have a meditation and spiritual practice. One thing I do is set my alarm ten minutes early in order to spend eight minutes on beditation, the practice of meditating in a relaxed position in bed. I then use the other two minutes to give thanks for my blessings for the day ahead. None of these tools work if I put off the practice of daily self-care. That means letting go of behaviors that are not loving or healthy, like people-pleasing, having healthy boundaries, stop placing your needs last on the list, getting proper rest, finding healthy alternatives to trigger foods, and letting go of self-destructive habits. Someone once told me that people are happiest when they give from their overflow.
My ACES do not define me today, instead they allow me to measure my childhood trauma, without feeling sorry for myself or making excuses for others. By taking the ACES test I was able to truly understand that I no longer needed to normalize things that were unacceptable in my childhood. My goal today is to help others learn their scores and to understand how brave and worthy we are to live fully, joyfully. That the real journey is healing from the inside, so that our whole lives can reflect that shift on the outside.
This is not a perfect science but it is starting point. My daily relationship to food informs me of my current emotional state and reminds me to do an emotional self-check. That will lead me to pick up my tools, write, call a friend, step away from the food until my emotions are right sized instead of dieting.