Three Rings

How I escaped the worst roller coaster of my life

Let me tell you about my three wedding rings.

This is a story about strength. It’s also a story about weakness. It’s a story about how sometimes one of these can look like the other.

But let me tell you about my first wedding ring.

My first wedding ring is a simple metallic band. I can’t for the life of me remember what it’s made from. Tungsten? Titanium? Some other alloy that is somehow supposed to embody the virtues of masculinity by being… I don’t know, really strong but kind of dull?

The thing’s chemical composition matters less to me than its history. My wife gave me this ring when we got married back in 2013, a date that my calendar says was only 12 years ago but my bones assure me is centuries past. We were married in California, so even though our wedding was in October, I remember the day being bright and warm, the air crisp in a way it only gets around that time in the fall. Maybe that’s nostalgia coloring my memories of that day. Memory has a funny way of shifting like the sand on our famous beaches.

I weighed 147 pounds that day.

I know this with certainty because for as long as I remember, I’ve been haunted by all the ways my body was not good enough; how, via the transitive property, I was not good enough. Where most people step on a scale and see just a number, I see disappointment, or triumph, or auguries of certain doom, or confirmation of what an unlovable sack of shame I am. So yeah, I may not know with absolute certainty what the weather was like on my wedding day, but I can tell you how much I weighed within a few pounds.

The words “body dysmorphia” readily spring to mind, a condition whose sufferers never feel pleased with their physical selves. You’re too fat, they tell themselves. Not muscular enough. Too hairy in some places, not hairy enough in others. They obsess over their weak (or so they’re told) jawline, their eyebrow situation, their skin. In extreme cases, body dysmorphia can lead to serious self harm.

I don’t know if I had or have body dysmorphia. It wasn’t so much about my body, but the weaknesses of my character that found their physical manifestation through my body, or so I thought. A kind of soul dysmorphia.

But let me tell you about my second wedding ring.

My second wedding ring is heavy. It’s not just wider, but also much thicker than my first wedding band. This ring means business. My wife gave it to me some years after our son was born. At that point it had been ages since I’d stepped into a gym or gone for a bike ride or taken a yoga class. We were new parents and I had a demanding job. You’d have to be a special kind of jerk to blame someone in that position for putting on a few pounds. So this ring is made for a larger hand, belonging to a larger man. 

The ring has an inscription that reads “I love you even when you’re fat.” I weighed 200 pounds.

The mind is never just one thing, at least mine isn’t. There’s a committee that oversees my thoughts, and they’re about as chaotic as your typical city council meeting. The committee is rarely in agreement. One council member believes I’m a rambling bore, another is convinced that I will be unmasked as a talentless hack any day now, and during the public comment section there’s always that one weirdo who insists on using his allotted time to rattle off a list of embarrassing things I did in the ‘90s in high school.

The rational part of my mind has always been very good at finding rational explanations for why I kept gaining and losing all this weight. But the part of me that looks inward, less clever, perhaps, but more sincere, has always seen those rationalizations for what they truly were. It’s not a pleasant feeling when different parts of your mind are at odds with each other.

But let me tell you about my third wedding ring.

My third wedding ring glows in the dark, and I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to. It’s made of metal and wood and meteorite, encased in some kind of unfuckwithable epoxy. It’s a wonderful piece of art, given to me by my wife for Christmas of 2023.

That Christmas almost ended our marriage.

Well, actually, it’s more accurate to say that’s when my mental health reached its nadir, and that failure to take care of my own health is what nearly foundered the most important relationship in my life. The best way I have to describe my mental state back then is that I was a ghost, haunting my own life. I existed in a state of permanent psychological and physical exhaustion. Because of all the weight I’d gained I couldn’t sleep on my back; if I did, I’d keep my wife up all night with a snore so powerful no earplugs in the world could stop it even from rooms away, and I’d wake in the morning with debilitating neck aches. I had to wear a special backpack at night with some kind of pillow inside that prevented me from rolling onto my back.

My “fat” wedding ring no longer fit me, so my wife got me my third wedding ring. I got her nothing. I couldn’t, because I wasn’t really there. A ghost, haunting my own life.

I weighed 245 pounds.

How did I get there? The answer to that question, at least to me, is less interesting than the question of how I got out of there.

The truth is, I’ve gained and lost 100 pounds several times in my life. It never occurred to me that this wasn’t how most other people lived. In my teens I had a fat phase followed by an aggressive exercise and calorie restriction phase. In college I ran 3 miles every day and rode my bicycle everywhere. When I moved to California I gradually regained all the weight I’d lost and then some, only to lose it all again rapidly right around the time I first met Nicole. 

Never once did I stop to think why I kept gaining and losing this weight. I didn’t have to; my rationalizer was providing very rational explanations for this totally rational rollercoaster. Until that Christmas, I never had to confront this one simple truth about myself:

I am a compulsive overeater.

What that means is that my relationship with food is most likely very different from your relationship with food. I don’t eat to meet my body’s nutritional needs; I eat because I learned at a very young age that food is an effective way to quiet uncomfortable feelings. I wasn’t taught how to talk about my feelings or how to process grief, anger, disappointment, or rejection in a healthy way, so I taught myself to eat about it.

My relationship with food is about what a therapist would call maladaptive coping mechanisms, but it’s also about control. When bad things happen, there’s a twisted comfort in the idea that you had some part in why they happened, because that means on some level, you were in control of the situation. And if you were in control, that means next time you’ll be able to stop the bad thing from happening. If it was your fault on some level, if there was something else you could have done, then you had the power all along.

It’s not that life is cruel and uncaring and unpredictable; that’s a scary thought. No, it was your fault, because that’s the less scary alternative. Bad things don’t happen to good people, therefore when bad things happen, it’s because you’re bad, and all you have to do to prevent further bad things is to just be good.

Of course that’s a load of bullshit. Bad things happen to good people all the time, just like good things happen to bad people. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, that’s just the random, messy, beautiful, wild universe we exist in. The only thing we can do is not add to the randomness and carelessness by being deliberate and caring. In a world driven by uncertainty and chaos, being kind is punk as fuck.

I thought I was in control. I had convinced myself that if I carried the world on my shoulders, if I could just be everything to everyone, if I neglected my own needs just a little bit more, then I’d be good enough. In the process, I allowed myself to gradually become hollowed out by a million little acts of self-sacrifice until there was nothing left to give. Shel Silverstein fans would understand.

Nicole sat me down and laid it out for me. She knew I wasn’t who I used to be. Somehow I had changed, and not for the better. Despite her own pain, she saw that I needed help that she couldn’t give me. But she knew some people who could.

And that’s how I started going to Overeaters Anonymous.

I’m not going to go into the intricacies of being in a 12-step program. Talk to your friends; odds are someone you know is in recovery. Or maybe you are yourself, in which case you already know the deal. But I will say that OA has saved my marriage, and it’s saved my life. Being in those rooms, talking to people who are struggling with something that I thought was my very own, personalized, unique struggle, that’s opened my eyes to a whole new mode of existence. I’m eternally grateful for everything I’ve learned here about being patient with myself, accepting my flaws, letting go of the idea that I need to be perfect. Today I can look into the mirror and recognize that I am good enough, today, just as I am. Happy, joyous, and free.

When I go to my meetings, I wear my third wedding ring on my right index finger, my second ring on my right ring finger, and my original ring on my left ring finger. As of today, I am 598 days abstinent from compulsive eating behaviors. Life hasn’t always been easy; in many ways, this year has been more challenging than anything I’ve ever had to deal with. But I didn’t have to eat about it.

I am a compulsive overeater, and grateful for it.

If you or someone you know is struggling with compulsive eating behaviors, OA is here for you.