February 13, 2003

• One last brownie binge

  
  

  This happened in ’77.  I had lost what would eventually turn out to have been my last job working for someone else….

  
  

  That job was more tolerable than most. Working in a warehouse was something I found preferable to the recent string of office and public contact jobs.  The hourly wage was nothing to shout about, was peanuts compared to what the Teamsters, the union warehousemen, were making.  My job title was inventory control/recouper.  Once a shift, I had to walk the warehouse aisles and note any empty slots.  The rest of the time, I cleaned up the messes the warehousemen made. 

  
  

  Each shift had two janitors who swept the floors and picked up broken pallets or crushed cases of merchandise.  They brought the damaged stuff to me, back in one corner of the warehouse, and I picked the bent or burst cans or boxes from the ones that were intact.  The damaged goods went to the food bank (except for snack items that went to the break room), and the good stuff I boxed up for sale.  

  
  

  This was a grocery warehouse, and besides serving local supermarkets our trucks supplied all the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline construction camps. It was boom time, and the place was busy enough for two shifts a day. I talked the management into letting me work swing shift because it made life easier for me. My job was unique: no one doing that work on the other shift, so that there was always work piled up waiting for me when I got there.

  
  

  One time I got to work and found a big pallet box about half full of crushed cans of evaporated milk, burst bags of dog kibble, and jars of Tang drink mix. It was all cemented together in a single mass, and went to the dumpster that way.  One of the warehousemen liked Cheez-its.  Once or twice a week, I’d find a case of them crushed, with a big boot print on it… of course.  Hitting it with a forklift would have done too much damage to his crackers.  They reserved the forklift treatment for the really messy things.  I know the damage was not all accidental.

  
  

  The work was physically exhausting, and there was some psychological stress associated with being the only woman in the building other than a few secretaries upstairs in the offices on day shift.  I never saw them, just heard that they were there.  The Teamsters seemed to resent my presence.  Maybe they were a little hesitant to scratch their balls or tell a dirty joke with me around.  I don’t know why, but they liked to play chicken with me as I worked, zipping to within millimeters of me on their motorized pallet jacks and forklifts.

  
  

  I got the janitors to show me how to use a pallet jack, and then went to the manager and got permission to use one.  Until I did that, I always had to track down a janitor to move a pallet for me.  It was more work than just moving it myself, and it wasted the janitor’s time, but the stupid Teamsters were deathly afraid a non-union woman would take their jobs, I guess.  They had to let me do it, because management said so and nothing in union rules prohibited it.  But they saw to it that I got the pallet jack with the defective electrical system.  I made it work.

  
  

  Then I got sick. The fibromyalgia was still undiagnosed, but I had it!  I also had asthma, allergic rhinitis, hypoglycemic nausea and headaches, “arthritis” (almost certainly fibro, but who knew?) and other autoimmune symptoms.  My physician, an internist because at the time I didn’t know any better, gave me four prescriptions: one for headaches, one for nausea, an anti-inflammatory for the “arthritis”, and another pill for the asthma and hay fever.  He was trying to pick off symptoms without zeroing in on their causes.

  
  

  I went home, took my first dose of each kind of pill, and had seizures.  The aftermath of that was pure Hell.  I now recognize it as a fairly typical, although severe, fibromyalgia flareup.  My job was gone after the first few days.  There was no one else to take up the slack, so they had to replace me.

  
  

  I decided to stay away from doctors, one of the most beneficial decisions I’ve ever made.  Charley started bringing me books on natural healing.  One of them, by Adele Davis, clued me that many of my symptoms were related to hypoglycemia:  low blood sugar.  Then I got Saccharine Disease by T.L.Cleave, and Sugar Blues by William Dufty, and learned the somewhat counterintuitive fact that LOW blood sugar is caused by too much dietary sugar, and that the disorder is widespread in our society and extremely destructive.

  
  

  As long as there was sugar in the house, I’d eat it.  I tried and failed several times to eliminate just the refined carbohydrates from my diet, not yet aware of my sensitivity to all wheat/gluten.  Then, in desperation, I persuaded Charley to go on the diet with me, and we cleaned out every offending food (of which I was then aware) from the cupboards.  There weren’t many left by then.

  
  

  What there was included baking chocolate, white flour, and sugar, along with some cereals, canned fruit in syrup, etc.  I bagged it all up and asked Charley to go give the bag to a neighbor.  He took it, but he knew someone he thought needed the food more than our neighbors did–as if anyone NEEDS that junk.  He told me he gave it away, but he really just put it in the back of our car to wait for his next trip into town.

  
  

  He was gone somewhere the next day, but the car was there.  I was working in the garden when I got the scent of chocolate on the breeze.  I followed my nose to the car and found the bag of goodies.  Feeling sneaky and oh-so-clever, I took them inside and baked a batch of brownies.  By the time he got home, I’d eaten every one and cleaned up the evidence.  Then, of course, I confessed.

  
  

  The binge was a setback to my recovery, but it brought home to Charley and to me the depth of my addiction, the strength of the hold the carbs had on me.  That was more than a quarter of a century ago. Until just a few months ago, my every attempt to kick the junk food habit would fail within a few months because of the cravings.  It was not until I started treating my food addictions like any other substance addiction that I would be able to relieve the cravings that drove me to those self-destructive binges.

  
  

  If I had gone on attempting to defeat the addictions with behavioral modification and various therapeutic approaches based on the myth that it’s all in the mind, that compulsive eating comes from emotional needs, I’d probably still be bingeing.  Thank you, Dr. Gant.  As long as I can keep my catecholamine and serotonin levels stable, I think I can resist the brownies.  Yesterday, I was within a mile or so of the second-best pizza in Alaska, and I resisted.

  
  

  P.S.  Xanga’s not being good to me today, and I suppose it’s not just me.  Todd tells me the Xanga gods said it was router trouble at their ISP.  Ah, well….  I have managed, through indirection and chicanery, to post twice already, although the second one came out without any paragraphing.  This one is meant to replace that one, since xTools wouldn’t let me edit it.  Here goes nothing….

  • 6:56 pm
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