My Father’s Eating Problems, and My Own
Reading Time: 6 minutesWhy I’ll Never Forget the Summer My Father and I Tried to Lose Weight, When I found crumpled junk-food wrappers in the closet, I felt personally betrayed., Eating disorders run in families: How a father’s eating affected his son.
The summer of 1988, after my freshman year of college, I stopped eating. That same summer, my dad gained enough weight to put him over the 300-pound mark. I thought I was being healthy, and he wasn’t. It was only years later, when I was in medical school, that I realized we both had problems with eating that were beyond our control—just at opposite ends of the scale.
A large part of my identity, even prior to that summer, was my thinness. As I grew up, a frequent refrain from friends and family members—in particular my zaftig aunts and portly uncles—was to opine about how they wished they were slim like me. In high school, I lettered in track (stereotypically a thin person’s sport) and wore tight running shorts with an extra-small tank top, as if to emphasize my lack of bulk. But perhaps the greatest tribute to my slight size was the inevitable comparisons people made between me and my father.
It was only after I had been a doctor for decades that I saw the full connection between our seemingly different relationships with food: My lifelong obsession with being thin was born from a dread of becoming obese like my dad.
My dad was always big. In black-and-white photos from the 1940s, he was the chunky kid looking up at my grandfather beatifically. In a picture of my dad’s fraternity, taken in 1960, he’s the large guy in the center, proudly sporting his Bucknell sweatshirt, smiling broadly. He slimmed down when he did his Army service time, which was also when he met and married my mom. Soon after though, genetics triumphed, and he regained the weight, and then some.
My dad ate a lot. He could consume two large pepperoni pizzas at a single sitting, or multiple hamburgers and hot dogs grilled over an inferno of coal, and cause our local Chinese buffet restaurant to lose money from his patronage. When holidays approached, my mom dutifully taped a scrap of paper to food in the refrigerator that admonished, ‘Joel, Don’t Eat!’ We joked—my dad included—that if my younger brother or I got sick and lethargic, one of the notes should even be affixed to our foreheads, just to be on the safe side. My dad was quick to joke about the tragedy of his size.
But it wasn’t funny. In fact, it was devastating to witness. He was Joey Chestnut wolfing down hot dogs, but without the prize at the end. When my family went to the Chinese restaurant, it felt like an eternity that we would sit in the booth, having finished our meal, as my dad went back to the buffet line for plateful after plateful of food. Though my dad was never diagnosed with a binge eating disorder, he talked about the grip that food had on him. My dad described himself as being like an alcoholic, ‘but worse. An alcoholic can stop drinking and still live. I can’t stop eating and survive. I can’t eliminate my addiction.’ This was years before options like Ozempic or Wegovy would emerge.
So I’d sit across from him in the restaurant’s booth, or at our kitchen table, helpless to intervene meaningfully. By the time I started college, I had found ways to avoid our meals together entirely; I convinced myself that if I didn’t witness my dad eating, it would somehow help him shed the pounds.
During the unfortunate era when obesity was considered a character flaw, I didn’t understand why he would endanger his own health and risk dying, abandoning us. Why wouldn’t he lose weight—as if it were a choice—despite our urging him to do so? Those same friends and family members who remarked on my thinness told me they didn’t understand why I wasn’t able to help him lose weight. His character flaw became my own.
I loved my dad. I was embarrassed by my dad. I didn’t want to be fat like my dad. But mostly, I worried about him, and prepared for him to die young. I also worried that, as we shared half of our genetics, I might die young, too.
That summer of 1988, I was flipping through some photos taken during a recent trip when one caught my eye. I was in a bathing suit and saw something protruding, ungainly, from my midriff—my first gut. I was terrified that my slide to obesity had begun.
At about the same time, my dad declared that it was time for him to go on one of his diets. He would try these every couple of years, and his closet reflected the attempts, with shirts ranging in size up to 6XL, like the racks at the Big & Tall clothing store.
When starting a diet, he always pulled out the one shirt he saved that was a size Large, held it up to show us, and declared confidently, ‘I’m going to lose enough weight to wear this again.’ Over time, numbed by his failures, we stopped believing him. Except for this time.
‘I’ll join you,’ I told him. He looked me up and down dubiously, perhaps wondering if I was joking, blind to my few pounds of overage compared to his 120.
‘Seriously, I need to ditch my freshman 15,’ I said. ‘Let’s go on a diet together and help each other stick to it.’
He agreed. We bought a book that listed the calories for hundreds of foods and planned our meals.
During the first few weeks, the pounds slipped off as we united as partners in our battle against the bulge. I was down 10 pounds after the first month and my dad had shed 20. He would emerge from the bathroom triumphant as he reported the scale’s results, and I was proud of him. He was really doing it.
But then, he stopped telling me his numbers, and only muttered about how slowly things went after you lost the ‘water weight.’ One day, I reached into a closet to grab my baseball glove and discovered a crumpled-up bag of potato chips. And a spent bag of Cheetos. And an empty bag of corn chips: the detritus of his furtive binging.
Something in my brain snapped. With my teenage sense of justice, I felt like he had betrayed me, yet again, and the pact we’d made. And if he was going to gain the weight back, I would just continue losing it for both of us.
I reduced my food intake to 1,000 calories and worked out twice per day. I only weighed myself after exercising, when I had sweat off a pound; the scale had become my judge and jury, and my happiness was entirely prisoner to its results. As my dad grew that summer, I shrank, dropping another 10 pounds, and then another 10: almost 20 percent of my body weight.
Anorexia is rare in men, who account for only 10 percent of diagnoses. And while it may sound fantastic that I didn’t recognize it at the time, a component of anorexia involves a profound lack of insight. Triggers for anorexia, it has been argued, include living with an obese family member, avoidance of conflict, and a need to be in control.
My desire for my dad to lose weight—and his inability to do so—was the conflict. My own weight was the only weight I felt like I could control.
Fall arrived and I headed back to school. With time, and with distance, I stopped regretting every morsel of food I ate and returned to consuming normal meals, gaining back some of the weight I lost that summer.
And while I never dieted like that again, decades later I still limit what I eat and exercise every day, fearing that my dad’s genetics may still make me obese, too. It’s irrational—we have completely different body types, so while I certainly can gain weight, I am not capable of achieving his proportions.
My relationship to food and to weight, though, will never be normal. Years of watching my dad struggle with eating, hide in the background of photos, and be judged to his face and behind his back based on his appearance—this man I admired most in the world—were too scarring.
I also fear slipping back into extreme food restriction. Recognizing my own capacity to obsess about weight, to this day I don’t own a scale, and won’t step on one, so it doesn’t have that power over me again.
My dad did die too young. Because of his weight, he developed high blood pressure and then diabetes, crippling arthritis, a heart attack, and then a cardiac arrest. I wish I had known during that summer of 1988, and as I grew up, that my dad hadn’t failed me, just as I hadn’t failed him. He wasn’t deliberately trying to hurt himself, or us.
Now that he’s gone, I also don’t blame him for my own issues surrounding weight. I realize now that what I really have feared all along is being judged by others the way he was.
And I wish my dad were still alive so I could tell him how much I love the whole of him.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/eating-disorders-men-parents-influence.html
Ref: slate
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