Peanut Butter
by Cara Forbes
Peanut butter. Peanut butter everywhere. In my hair, crusted on my face. Splotches of it on my shirt, smears on my pillow. I sit up in bed and look around. What the hell? Within a second the drunken memory of the night before comes hurtling back to me, and, along with it, the crushing guilt, like an overwhelming blow to my chest. Another binge. And it wasn’t even my damn peanut butter.
❈ ❈ ❈
I hold a clear snapshot in my head of my mom in an orange swimsuit. I must have been 7 or 8. We were in Wisconsin Dells at a wilderness themed resort, cartoonishly thick cylinders of wood making up the structures of the bed frames and stair banisters, made to look crude and rugged, as if someone had chopped down trees straight from the Wisconsin wilderness and lugged them to the commercialization locus of the Midwest to handbuild a waterpark resort. I can still feel the matte texture of the wood beneath my fingertips, smooth and unblurred from any blemishes that would surely be present if it really had been brought over raw, fresh from the lumberjack’s ax. My mom stood in front of the mirror in her orange bathing suit. It was a two-piece tankini, varying shades of orange blended together to give the effect of a blazing beach sunset, dark silhouettes of palm trees dotted throughout.We were getting ready to go down to the pool, and my brother and sister and I were aching to run around and jump and splash in the water, bursting with energy after the four-hour car ride. What the hell was taking so long? Can’t we go down already? My mom was doing a jig of sorts in front of the mirror. Turn 90 degrees to the left, crane the neck, inspect. Now back to the front, adjust the swimsuit, inspect. 90 degrees to the right, pivot the hips, inspect. Now to the left! To the right! Pivot those hips! And twist and twist! And swing your partner round and round! If I’d known this was how the vacation was going to go I’d have traded my swimsuit in for some damn dancin’ shoes. Meanwhile she’s croning a lovely tune: “Are you sure it looks okay? Do I look fat? I don’t want to go down, you guys go down without me. I look so fat.” My dad, always on cue, comes in with the chorus, “You look fine. It looks fine. C’mon you look great.” (His timing was always good, but his delivery a little under-enthusiastic. I give his entire performance a 6/10). Of course my mom hits back with the infamous bridge, “You’re not even looking at me! You’re just saying that to shut me up!” (This she delivers with a fiery passion). I myself became quite well-versed in this song throughout the next few years of my life, taking both my dad’s place as the one mind-numbingly reassuring my mom she looked fine, and my mom’s place as the one in the mirror screeching that that’s a lie. By age 9 I could perfectly execute the verse and the chorus, as well as the two step jig that went along with it.
In my memory she stands in front of that damn mirror for ages, but it’s probably just running together with all the other times she stood in front of a mirror critiquing every inch of her body. I know we eventually head down to the pool because I got put in timeout almost immediately, before I could even step foot in the sweetly burning cleanse of chlorinated water. I can’t remember what I did to deserve my punishment, but I do remember laying there pissed off and brooding, watching my brother and sister run around and jump and splash in the water while the thick vinyl bands of the pool chair dug into the fleshy bit of my stomach.
My mom’s dad used to call her Big Bertha as a child. Yes, really. My mom’s sister, Aunt Nic to me, has always had that naturally skinny body type. Long and lean and never seems to put on any weight. My grandpa used to call her Skinny Mini. My mom had more of an average build. Still slim, but with soft edges and a curving grace. Her contrast against her sister is the only reason she was ever befitted the name Big Bertha. Otherwise, it was completely out of place, for my mom has never in her life been “big” (not that any child, regardless of size, would ever be deserving of such a nickname as Big Bertha). My mom says he would only say it in jest, that he meant no real harm by it, but I’m not sure how the words “here comes Big Bertha,” can come out of your mouth in reference to your young daughter without you seeing the harm in it. In high school my mom was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. She still remembers the breakfast she ate everyday before school—half an apple, half a cup of rice cereal, and half a cup of skim milk, measured out to a T every morning.
❈ ❈ ❈
My three months studying abroad in Costa Rica marked the peak of my disordered eating. This was the beginning of 2020, right before the whole world went to Hell in a handbasket (though we were on our way there long before then). All of my weekends in Costa Rica are spent on a beach somewhere. The self-induced pressure to look “good” in my bathing suit for Instagram pictures and for the cute boys in my class is high. I don’t eat breakfast. During the week, my first class is at 8 am everyday, and that’s “too early” to eat. The class is four hours long. If I can make it through the whole class without eating, I was “good.” If I fold and buy a snack during our thirty-minute break, I failed, I was “bad.” At noon I’ll eat a small bowl of gallo pinto and half a banana, then crash into bed for a 3-hour nap because my body can’t support itself anymore. I wonder how many friendships were forged, how much of the city was explored by my classmates while I depression-napped in my windowless room every day. I’ll wake up several times to the stupid dog yapping outside my door. I hated that dog. I’ll wake up and eat a granola bar or an orange, hoping I can hold out until dinner where my host mom, Mama Tica, will serve me an egg or two, some rice and veggies, and maybe some fried plantains if I’m lucky. Oh and I sure won’t forget to go to the gym for two hours, run a couple miles and lift some heavy objects, even though my body is running on crumbs.
It’s no wonder that nights would bring eating binges, emerging out of the darkness as inevitably as the moon and stars themselves. My body was literally in starvation mode. It thought I was stranded out in the wilderness with no food source, and wondered why the hell does she keep doing HIIT workouts when we’re stranded out here in the wilderness?
I could hear my mom’s voice echoing in my head everytime I would drag my sorry, exhausted ass to the gym in Costa Rica. “Running will thin you out,” and “well, if you don’t like your stomach, do some sit ups.” My mom has been obsessive about working out my whole life. She spent my toddler and preschool years running aerobic VHS tapes on our television, standing in front of it on a wooden step-up board that my great-grandpa handmade for her. He even made a mini step-up board for me and my siblings to use, since we wanted to be like mommy and copycat everything she did. We bicep-curled cans of soup to mirror the little purple five-pound weights she used. Some of those workout videos exist more clearly in my mind than the countless reruns of Dora I watched as a child. A treadmill stands leering like a specter in the corner of the basement in all of my childhood memories, “not to be used as a toy,” but I can still feel the cheese grating of my knees when we weren’t able to pull the neon orange safety pin out fast enough before falling and getting ricocheted 10 miles-per-hour into the wall.
Working out is how my mom and I have always connected. I used to wake up with her at 5 AM in high school to go to a group weightlifting class, a mama and her mini reflected back in the fitness room mirrors, except now our step-up boards were the same size. I’ll never forget the pride that surged through me when she told me after class one day that I was looking particularly slim. In her language, that was the highest form of compliment. In Costa Rica, I would sit on the gym floor, still lightheaded and seeing stars, and send her the workout video I just finished, telling her she had to try this one. To this day, our idea of hanging out is going to the gym together or running hills at a park near our house, seeing who can sprint up faster (it’s her). For better or worse, I get my stubbornness and grit from her. In all my years growing up and watching her work out, I’ve never once seen her give up, or do an exercise half-assed. That woman goes hard at the gym, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad that that rubbed off on me. But my inability to rest also comes from my mom. My all-consuming anxiety at missing a workout comes from her. My abnormally long two-hour sessions at the gym come from her. My obsession with changing my body, with always wishing I could look just slightly different, comes from her, for better or worse.
❈ ❈ ❈
My family went on a vacation to Myrtle Beach the summer after I was in third grade. So I would have been age 9. We were walking around a SuperWalmart buying beach toys and food to keep in our hotel room. I was wearing a peach-colored floral tank top with thick square straps and a smocked elastic band going around the chest. I was fretting over the straps and pulling up the elastic the whole time we were there. I can clearly see waxy brown floors, a wall of yogurt beaming beneath fluorescent lighting, and the image of my armpit fat popping out of the top of my tank top. I would repeatedly tuck the little chunk of skin back under the elastic and wiggle the strap over to secure it in, but every few steps it would just slip right out again.
A few days into the vacation my sister wanted to wake up early to catch the sunrise on the beach. My dad and brother opted to sleep in, so it was just me, my sister, and my mom going down for Nature’s daily art show. My sister put on her bathing suit, ready for a morning ocean swim. Much like my Aunt Nic, my sister was a scrawny little thing as a child. Like a stretched out string bean, all gangly limbs and straight edges. Surely I had been in my bathing suit in the days previous, but that morning the thought of standing in a bathing suit on the beach next to my sister, also in a bathing suit, the comparison between our bodies having nowhere to hide with no one else around, was too much for me. “Aren’t you going to put your swimsuit on?” my sister asked me. “No. I don’t feel like swimming,” I replied with an upturned nose and as much scorn as I could muster. We walked down to the beach. My mom and I stood on the shoreline, our feet wading in the water as we watched my sister swim around in the ocean, me wishing the whole time that I could join her. There’s a picture of my sister and I standing on the beach that morning, her gangly arms stuck out proud on her hips in a sort of superhero position, my own gangly limbs peering out from a blue tank top and denim shorts, a stream of sand grains spilling through my fingertips, forever frozen in midair.
My sister used to eat peanut butter by the spoonful. The idea of eating peanut butter on its own did not even exist as a concept in my mind until she introduced it to me. And she probably could have eaten gallons of peanut butter and never gained a pound. My whole life I ruthlessly compared my body to my sister’s. I can’t count how many times I threw a complete tantrum, screaming at her for wearing my clothes without asking, not because I was a teenager and fighting over clothes is what teenage sisters do, but because the thought of seeing her in my clothes, looking better in them than I did, was sickening to me. It felt unfair. Finding clothes that I felt comfortable in was near to impossible for me. I would go shopping and try on piles and piles of clothes, inspecting how they looked on my body using the little song and dance my mom taught me, and I’d come out of the dressing room empty-handed because I hated how everything looked. Meanwhile my sister didn’t even try on her clothes. She saw something on a hanger, liked it, and bought it, never questioning whether or not it would look good on her slender frame. It was an emotional chore for me to find clothes that didn’t make me hate myself more than I already did, so the thought of her infiltrating my so carefully-crafted wardrobe when she had the whole world of clothes at her fingertips felt like a mighty injustice, like she was somehow tainting my clothes. Like I would never see them the same way on my own body after seeing how they looked on hers. Of course I could never explain that to her and risk fracture of my carefully-crafted facade that I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of me. So I screamed and cried and threw tantrums instead.
I confided in my mom about my insecurity and jealousy towards my sister. My mom understood. She always said that my sister was built just like Aunt Nic, slim and slender, “and you’re built like me. You have big boobs and curves.” I always felt a spark of camaraderie and pride that I was like my mom, the same spark that I feel today when I sense her grit pushing me through my workouts. We were in a special club and my sister was the outsider. Then she would remind me, “I mean I’ve told you, my dad used to call Nic Skinny Mini and me Big Bertha!”
❈ ❈ ❈
My worst binges in Costa Rica always came after a night of drinking, when I’d come home drunk, sad, and starving and would plow my way through any food I could get my hands on, such as was the case on that fateful night I’ve since deemed PeanutButterGate, the one that left me waking up with peanut butter crusties all over myself and my general vicinity.
I’d come home from the bar, and like an inebriated thief in the night I slithered into the kitchen of my host family and spotted a jar of peanut butter on the top shelf, innocently peering down at me, surrounded by a golden halo whilst singing devour me in angelic tones. How could one resist? I yanked it smugly off the shelf and tiptoed back to my room, cradling my crowned jewel like the miser I was. With what little dignity I had left, I made myself a nice peanut butter sandwich (with my own bread, thank you). Then I made myself another sandwich. Now, who needs sandwiches, just stuff the bread into your mouth. More bread please. Bread’s gone. Peanut butter. Lick it off the knife. Another knife-ful please. Now. Hurry. Another one. More. More. More! That peanut butter and I did an intimate dance, a toxic push and pull, as I repeatedly shoved my knife into the stolen jar and consumed its creamy contents, every bite bringing the sick taste of pleasure and guilt.
I wish I could properly describe how it feels to be in the binging headspace. It’s on a different plane, completely locked and shut-off from this reality. It’s like entering a tunnel, my vision goes black. I’m not seeing anything, I’m not here at all. It’s a primal state, I am an animal, seeking cover in the forest as I devour the first prey I’ve captured in weeks, teeth ripping ruthlessly through bloody carcass, spine prickling, eyes alert as I frantically scan the trees for predators. I’m a monster. My self as I know her to be does not exist here. I try to call out for her, begging her to get me the hell out of here, and stat, but she can’t hear me. She is on the other side of an impenetrable wall and I’m fist deep in a jar of peanut butter.
When the binge-monster finally leaves I’m left cowering within a shell of myself. Empty. Sometimes I extend the binges as long as I can because it’s better to feel the force of that primal animal raging through me than to feel so hollow, like the monster ripped open the fabric of my soul when it left and now everything is getting sucked through like a blackhole. Well, my soul might feel empty, but my stomach’s so full it feels like it might bust open like a can of biscuits. I force myself to go to bed as soon as possible to hide from my self-loathing and sleep off the shame, which never actually works. I’m a slave to an endless cycle. Binge like a maniac in the night, wake up and feel immediate, soul-crushing guilt. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it’s the first thought that crosses my mind when I wake up after a binge. Immediate embarrassment, disappointment, disgust. Then comes the punishment, as if the complete and utter hatred for myself and my body wasn’t enough. I’ll stand and pull my shirt up to inspect my belly in the mirror, critiquing every angle. I’ll vow to eat “healthy” today. Starving myself again till noon, maybe stay a little longer at the gym. And repeat and repeat. My next binging escapade will consist of sneaking slices of my Mama Tica’s birthday cake from the fridge at 3 am.
❈ ❈ ❈
My first word was ‘more.’ I would say I wish I was joking, but I actually find it hilarious (and too good of an anecdote for an essayist writing about binge-eating to pass up). The image of 12-month-old me in a high chair, fingers and face sticky with syrupy popsicle juice as I reach my hands out for yet another Fla-Vor-Ice—the red ones, my mom tells me. I imagine my eyes go wide, robotic-like, zoning in on that sweet plastic tube of high-fructose corn syrup, the puzzle pieces of my infantile brain slowly clicking into place as I calculate how to call my desires into being, my autonomous-self emerging into form for the sole purpose of acquiring more popsicles. I can’t help but find it oddly prophetic, the natural commencement for a life filled with, yes, loving food, but also a life never quite satisfied, always seeking something different, yearning for something more—though maybe that’s just everyone’s life. My mom tells me it came out like a question, tentative. “More…?” I like to think I was hesitant about unlocking that insatiable appetite of human nature, like I couldn’t quite believe this was the life of endless desire God destined me for. In reality I think I was just imitating my mom’s voice, asking me after every bite of popsicle if I wanted “more?”
My grandma is always on a diet. I go to her house and it’s loaded with goodies: chocolate-covered raisins, Zebra popcorn (my favorite), and leftover pies or cookies or German chocolate sheet cake from whatever holiday has most recently passed. She always tells me, “D’oh take that stuff home with you! I can’t eat that anymore, I’m on a diet!” I tell her I don’t want it either—I’m also always on a diet, though I refuse to actually call it a diet, as if calling it by its name will cement it into reality—, but I bely my words and take it out of the cupboards anyway. We race to see who can eat more Zebra popcorn, partners in a crime of self-loathing. My mom is in the background inhaling Scotcheroos (she’s also on a diet).
Binge-eating is a seemingly endless, self perpetuating cycle—binge, restrict, binge, restrict, binge, restrict—, but the cycle didn’t begin with me. My mom remembers when she was a child and her grandma, my great-grandma, was always on Weight-Watchers. I imagine my great-grandma, decades before I even existed, cementing my future as she measures out servings of cottage cheese and pineapple chunks, making sure it fits into her daily Weight-Watchers points. Weight-Watchers was founded in the 1960s, and I always assumed this was when diet culture began—the picture-perfect housewife of that era expected not only to keep a perfect home and cook perfect meals, but to have a perfect body as well. Turns out diet culture actually started a century earlier in 1862 when some guy named William Banding wanted to shed a few pounds. He published a pamphlet detailing his diet, and the pamphlet, along with scales, started flying off the shelves (O’Hare). Or maybe it started centuries before that during the Renaissance, when Luigi Carnaro published a book about how he lost weight by eating only 12 ounces a day, or centuries before that in the Middle Ages when early Christians viewed the physical body as “an enemy of the soul,” and would starve themselves in an effort to become closer to Christ (Espi Forcen). Well, my lifelong war with my body has certainly been the enemy of my soul, but I can’t say I feel any closer to Christ because of it. Who knows how far the vine of this war creeps up my own family tree. Did my great-grandma watch her grandma do the two-step jig in the mirror? Is there another version of me centuries back in my genealogy, one who wears poofy dresses and tosses her waste out the window onto cobblestoned streets, who also stuffs her face with peanut butter till she’s fit to burst? If my life is just the echo of everyone who came before me, how do I close off the echo chamber from the kin that come after me, or at least change the tune?
***
There are four noble truths in Buddhist philosophy. These are the main tenets of the religion, probably the first thing you’ll read if you crack open a book about it. The first noble truth is that there is suffering. That’s a truth if I ever heard one. This suffering is called samsara, the cyclic nature of existence. The second noble truth is that the cause of all suffering is desire. Craving, grasping. More. In Tibetan Buddhism this truth is symbolized by the bhavacakra, or the Wheel of Life, a visual representation of samsara. The hub of the wheel shows a pig, a rooster, and a snake, representing ignorance, attachment, and aversion, respectively. These are what keep the wheel turning, the culminating forces of desire that cause the cycle of samsara to endlessly repeat. In some depictions of the wheel, the tail of each animal is in the mouth of the one before it. They spin around and around, eating each other's tails until the end of time, or until someone breaks the cycle, which is the third noble truth—to end suffering, one must extinguish desire. The animals have to stop eating each other’s tails.
Binge-eating isn’t just a desire for food. Sure the food tastes good, but if loving the taste of food was all it took to give yourself a binge-eating disorder, everyone and their mother would have one (not just me and mine). No, this is a desire to change. To look different, to feel different. To be someone different. As ironic as it sounds, this song and dance so drenched in tones of self-hatred is really, at its core, a raging desire to finally accept yourself, characterized by the delusion that altering your external appearance will allow you to do so.
I’ve had people tell me that they admire my independence in traveling and seeking adventure. My brother told me when I got home from Costa Rica that he would be too nervous to study abroad in another country all alone. My mom told me I was “so brave” for going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail as a solo woman. I wish I could tell people that it is not bravery that drives me to walk 15 miles a day in the scorching desert heat, and it’s not courage that sends me across the globe to study the same exact things I could study in Illinois. It’s fear. I’m constantly running away from myself, terrified of what will happen if I plant my feet in one place. I can’t sit still, I can’t sit with myself. To me, running away is the easy part. Chasing desire, wanting more, is what I do best, after all. Staying in place would be the scary thing. I’d need to summon a whole lot more bravery to sit with myself than I would to hop on the next plane out of here screaming “sayonara, suckers!” out the window.
I guess I’m supposed to end this telling you how everything is okay now. How I can finally eat whatever I want and never feel guilty about it. How I no longer feel a knot of anxiety in my throat threatening to choke me on the days when I feel too lazy to go to the gym. Would that I could tell you these things without lying to you. I read a book called Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. Intuitive eating is a process of healing from lifelong dieting by giving yourself full permission to eat whatever you want, to stop moralizing food as “good” or “bad,” to listen to your internal hunger cues instead of external expectations of what you should eat. I hoped that I would read this book and finally be cured, finally be happy with myself and my body, but I can see now that that hope was just another way of my mind playing a massive prank on itself, just like how I always think I’ll finally be happy once I travel to such and such country, or I’ll finally be content once I finish x amount of workouts. My happiness lives in the future. I’m always running, sprinting even, hands outstretched trying to capture it, but it’s always just out of reach. I’m the pig eating the snake’s tail, the snake eating the rooster’s tail, and the rooster eating the pig’s tail. The fourth noble truth in Buddhist philosophy is that there is a path to the cessation of desire and, therefore, suffering. There is a way to break the cycle. You have to relax into the suffering itself. Stop grasping, stop resisting. Instead of constantly swimming upstream, just relax and let the current take you.
I’m not there yet. I get glimpses of it here and there, a moment of ease, a second of peace, but, for the most part, I just can’t seem to shake my discontent. It follows me everywhere, a constant background hum in my mind telling me to strive for more, to do better, to be perfect. I don’t binge anymore, but I haven’t yet managed to drop my dieting mindset. Sure I “let” myself eat cookies now, but every bite is wrought with guilt, buried deep beneath the surface of my happy-go-lucky intuitive eating facade. I harp on my mom for refusing to eat bread or pasta because it’s “too many carbs.” I preach to her about the importance of carbs for fueling her body, how the more she mentally restricts, the more she’s going to want to binge. But it’s all fake—I’m really nothing but a fraud. Every toxic thought she has about food surely echoed throughout my head long before she said it out loud, the only difference being that I’m at least trying to silence them. And I hold all the knowledge—I know all the steps to healing, the principles of intuitive eating—, I just can’t seem to fully enact them, not yet anyway. But I can have a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter without downing half the jar, and I never would have been able to do that two years ago. Maybe that just has to be good enough for now.
Works Cited
Espi Forcen, Fernando. “Anorexia Mirabilis: The Practice of Fasting by Saint Catherine of Siena in the Late Middle Ages.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1 April 2013, https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12111457
O’Hare, Aimee. “History of Diet Culture.” Find Food Freedom, Find Food Freedom, 10 May 2020, https://find-foodfreedom.com/history-of-diet-culture/.