My Experiences
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What does fat mean to you? For me it always meant my Feelings and Thoughts.

My Individual life experience of FAT

Fat for me always represented a small word with a big meaning and it was always about my feelings and thoughts. Although I tried to hide the addiction of compulsive overeating it was always visible to my spectators through my body and I was judged and humiliated for being fat.

As far back as I can remember I have been a compulsive overeater. I ate, used and abused food and it was my drug of choice. Just as an alcoholic would use alcohol or a drug addict use drugs I would use food. I did this all through my childhood, teenage years and adult life. I have 35 years devotion and service to this compulsion so that makes me an expert but also some one in the dark. All the time I was feeding my fat (feelings and thoughts), society judged me on the person I had become due to my compulsive illness. The rejection and humiliation I was subjected to in every day life all because of my food addiction

Psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors all tried to solve the emotional dependency to food but were very limited in the insight to compulsive overeating

Dietians, doctors, diet clubs, pills, surgeon’s knives all tried to solve the physical symptoms of the illness but I came to understand there is no solution to compulsive overeating. There are quick fixes, temporary reprieves but head hunger and emotions cant be cut away with knives or sorted with magical pills.

We are the key holders to our own individual reasons, why we choose this compulsion, and only we can set it free. Our individual reasons or experience as to why we abuse food lies within us and where we may all have the same symptoms and traits of compulsive overeating, we can choose to have freedom and our own individual direction of reclaiming our lives back.

I know the lengths I have pursued to try and control and solve this disease but no amount of intellect, knowledge, magic pills, surgical procedures, magical thinking could give me the awareness and insight I required.

Every compulsive overeater is an expert in this compulsion and for 35 years when I was stumbling around looking for solutions, quick fixes and freedom from this disease. Alot of answers and choices were buried inside me.

I have also written a book entitled underneath the flesh - my life as a compulsive overeater and morbid obesity sufferer Published by Chipmunk Publishing.

Here is a poem I wrote from my Feelings and Thoughts for all the 35 years

Devoted to you

I have opened my world to let you come in and see
As maybe society’s judgementalness of fat shall be set free
My world has been protected under a mountain of food
And when things got unliveable I let the surgeons knives cut me away
hoping I would feel good
It was my head that was hungry and my body never full
This compulsion has no conditions or set rules
what my head required and my feelings and thoughts
The food dictated the show and the surgeons called the shots
The sad thing is our children are picking up this disease and the medics considering putting them under the knife
Is this why we brought them in to the world to cut away there life
Food is the first comfort we are given when we enter the human race
But all I ask of you dear reader is don’t dismiss compulsive overeating like some open and shut case
If I could turn my clock back and go back to my child
I would face this killer disease and send it packing back to the wild
I have experienced what this cunning compulsion can do
And please believe I am experienced to say all this as I have lived it and sadly it is true

Alexandria-Gallagher-Mearns