I don’t know when I started eating food out of the garbage, but one day it just happened… and it kept going for years.

My first garbage-picking memory starts out nice enough.  Every Saturday night my family would gather downstairs to watch a show or movie and mom would make pigs-in-a-blanket.  That tradition is one of my happiest childhood memories.  Unfortunately, it is also intertwined with the early stages of my eating disorder.  That is the part I will be focusing on here…

I can remember lots of obsession related to this particular group of food memories.  It would start with being fixated on when the food would be ready to eat.  I would watch the clock…

tick…tick…tick…

…get the condiments out…

tick…tick…tick…

…and the plates…

tick…tick…tick…

…and the napkins…

tick…tick…tick…

…and the drinks…

tick…tick…tick…

Truth be told, I was being TOO helpful.  It was not in my nature to be that useful.  “Selfish motives” were the thing powering me at that time.  When “the dogs” were finally taken out of the oven, I would choose the largest one, never giving a single thought to the possibility that someone else might be as hungry as I supposedly was.  Then I risked burning the roof right out of my mouth by biting into one of the steaming “pigs” while everyone else had the sense to wait for theirs to cool.  Before I knew it I was on my second one and already mourning the fact that I wanted a third but couldn’t have it for fear of looking like the thing I was eating.  All the while I ate, I was silently plotting a way to get more.

I knew that the leftover dogs would be sitting in a the pan on the stove until we were finished watching tv.  If I pretended to go to the bathroom, I could make a pit-stop in the kitchen and eat another one before I rejoined the family.  Sometimes I would wimp-out, especially if there was only one or two left, thinking that would be too obvious.  But luckily for me, I come from an Italian family where food shortages are a rarity.  Most times there were as many as four or five left, so I was easily able to convince myself that no one would notice if one more was missing.  That usually held me for a while, and then I could focus on the show and enjoy the time with my family…

Until…

…after the show it would be time to clean-up.  I would watch helplessly as my mother dumped the rest of the uneaten dogs into the trash, then I would hold my breath and wait to see if anything got thrown on top of them.  If they remained “clean” on the top, as they usually did, I knew that I had all the makings of an early morning snack.  I swear that knowing this would wake me up the next morning hours earlier than usual.

At about 5 a.m., barely allowing myself time to pee, I would silently race to the kitchen trash container and grab the room-temp dogs.  I knew that by that time the dough would be rubbery on the outside and gummy on the inside, but I didn’t care.  I didn’t even put anything on them.  That would be too messy, since I wouldn’t be using a plate.  Besides, I didn’t have time for luxuries like that!  I was in a race against time!  What if my parents heard me?!   I would gobble the dogs, one in each fist, while standing in the hallway entry so that I could keep an eye on my parents’ bedroom door.  If one of them DID wake up (and it happened!), I would dash back to the trash can and throw them back in.  I’m sure they would know what was going on, but no one ever said anything to me about it.  But not to worry…I beat myself good and hard after every time I did it.

Years passed, my disease progressed, and my gorging was completely out-of-control.  I was buying bags and boxes of stuff I swore I wouldn’t finish, but I’d ALWAYS finish them!  Finally I got desperate enough to try a new way to stop myself.  I would get rid of whatever food I had started to eat (but didn’t want to finish) by burying it at the bottom of the trash – only to dig it out hours later.  I can’t tell you the humiliation of wiping coffee grinds off a bag of smashed chips or of eating out of a container of half-melted ice cream – –  because I “had to.”  Later-on I figured-out that unless I removed whatever type of food I was sick of bingeing-on from its packaging and mixed it with the trash that was already in the can, there was always going to be that possibility of me going back-in for more.  Of course, there were the times when I would try to fool myself by not disposing of “the goods” properly, knowing full well what I planned to do later on.  I’d play the whole horrible game with myself, only to end-up eating every last bit of what I didn’t want to be eating in the first place, no matter WHERE I put it!!

To live this way, day after day, week after week, year after year,…was pure torture.  I always felt helpless, like there was no way out, and ashamed that I couldn’t stop myself.  But today my life is completely different.  All the obsession and compulsion that I had surrounding food has been removed!

The same can happen for you!

I say,…

“O-A…

IS the way!”