I asked God to heal my unhealthy relationship with food and my addiction to sugar. My inability to eat healthy foods and my fear of being overweight has destroyed a good part of my life.

I have starved myself since age 14. In high school, I never ate breakfast or lunch, then came home to eat chocolate chip cookies by the handful or whatever junk food was in the kitchen cupboards at home – and there were always cakes and cookies in those kitchen cupboards. My mom claimed to buy those sweets for ‘company’ stopping in and for my dad. We never had company drop in and my physically fit, body conscious father didn’t eat sweets. Still, each week those sweets that disappeared from our kitchen cupboards – someone was eating them – were replenished during the following Saturday morning shop at the local grocery store. I did hundreds of crunches and other exercises next to my bed each night. I ordered a needlepoint kit from Weight Watchers that had three little pigs on it and said, “NO THYSELF”. In other words, deny yourself sweets to be thin. That is what I committed to do. I would ‘NO’ myself all my life and I would always be thin.

I could never focus on anything else when I knew there were sweets in the house. When I studied in my room, those sugary treats danced in my mind. I’d have multiple study breaks, and during each break I’d tiptoe to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea and sneak a handful of biscuits, breads, cakes, pies – whatever was there to take – and retreat to my bedroom to secretly indulge my sweet tooth and soothe my academic anxieties in private. I would want to eat everything from whatever bag or box merely to finish them so I could stop thinking about them being there, taunting me. After an industrious night of trick or treating, I’d eat all of my Hallowe’en candy until it was finished. I’d eat all the good candy in a period of perhaps 3 or 4 days throwing out the things that I hated like lollipops, eager to be finished with the candy. Then I’d be tortured by the Hallowe’en candy that my sisters still had or the candy that was left over in our house after we had flicked off the porch light on our home’s final trick or treater.

At Christmas and Easter it was the same torture. I’d eat all of my Christmas and Easter chocolate just to get rid of it only to be tempted by the Christmas and Easter sweeties of my sisters. My older sister could keep sweets for ages. My younger sister, five years my junior, was oblivious to her sweets. I could pillage from her stash without worry of detection. My older sister was another story. Months would go by and her chocolate bunny remained in the fridge, standing in his floral Easter box, his hard sugary white and blue eye staring at me through his cellophane window. His ears were gone and at times, his nose, but otherwise he remained intact. Why didn’t she just eat him? I never understood.

I’d open her bunny’s box gently so as to not tear it, then quietly slide my hand into the box so as to not alert anyone to my theft. I’d break off a piece of the chocolate rabbit here and there and hope my older sister mightn’t notice, but she always noticed and screamed bloody murder when she did. My parents would chastise me and I would feel deep shame that I had eaten her chocolate and had been caught, but I literally could not help myself. This made me take my eating disorder underground. I ate in secret, and not just sweets. I never ate in front of people if I could manage it. If friends ate, I’d say I wasn’t hungry only to binge on what I craved when I was out of the sight of others.

I asked my mother not to buy sweets anymore but she persisted in saying they were for visitors and for my dad. I asked her to hide them or lock them away so I could not access them. She tried to hide them but did so in a half-hearted manner, and I always found them and ate my fill. I asked her not to buy me a box of those chocolate pecan caramel Turtles for Christmas each year as she did for each of us, and she did honour that. I was so ashamed of my lack of will power, but as an adult I learned that nutritionists advise clients to ‘skip the cookie aisle’ because no one can have cookies in the house and not eat them. That information made me feel more normal and less heinous. As an adult living on my own, that is what I would do. I skipped the cookie aisle until I couldn’t and then I’d binge. If I had a bag of cookies in the house, I had cookies for breakfast, lunch and dinner until they were all gone, and then I felt some sense of relief – mingled with remorse and disgust – that they were finished and I could eat clean again. ‘No more,’ I would tell myself. ‘Never again.’ But that never lasted.

When I say that I would ‘binge’, it wasn’t like I ate a dozen cakes in one sitting. It was a more precise and sadistic venture than that. As I starved myself to be skinny, I naturally craved certain foods. These were foods fed to me by my mother in childhood. When we signed out of school to go to the dentist, my mother always took us to MacDonald’s afterwards. I’d order a Big Mac meal and eat it with a half frozen mouth. I couldn’t taste or enjoy the food, and I bit the inside of cheek still numb from the dentist’s needles, trying to make my way through the Big Mac. My mother used us as her excuse to go to McDonald’s because it was she who wanted to go there. It was never about anyone but her. After Mass on a Sunday, she’d get my dad to stop and buy a dozen donuts at Country Style Donuts, and I’d have three or four from the box. When I starved myself thin as an adult, it was these foods that I craved. I kept a running record of all those foods and told myself once I was at my goal weight of 115 pounds, I’d treat myself by having them. Typically, after such a ‘fast’, my list consisted of a Big Mac meal with an apple pie and a Coca-Cola, Nibs black licorice, a Mars bar, a Fruit and Nut bar, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, KFC, spaghetti and meatballs, several Tim Horton’s donuts, and on and on. Once I was at my goal weight, I got those foods that I loved and I ate them. If something wasn’t quite right, like my Big Mac was cold, I knew that I would have that particular meal again until all was perfect – the Big Mac and fries had to be fresh and hot, the fries had to be pale and not too brown and crispy, and the Coca-Cola needed to be ice-cold, sweet and bubbly. Only then could I be satisfied. That next attempt at getting the perfect meal occurred only after I starved myself again for a day or two until I was back at my goal weight. The scale, and that magic number of 115, was my compass. My entire life revolved around it. I even avoided socializing to stay 115 pounds.

How did I determine that 115 was my magic number? I would look up the height and weight of actresses from television soap operas that I thought had nice bodies. At 5 feet, 5.5 inches, I was much taller than my mother and two sisters. An actress from the Young and the Restless that I thought was perfectly skinny was 5’6″ and she weighed 118 pounds according to Soap Opera Digest. As I was a half inch shorter than she, I shaved three pounds from her weight to decipher that 115 pounds is where I should be. I knew that the camera added ten pounds, which meant she likely looked to be 128 pounds, but I still wanted to be her weight to be picture ready myself instead of evading cameras as one would evade an ex while having a bad hair day.

The tragic thing is that I weighed 120-125 pounds in high school. I was already the perfect weight for my height, but I didn’t see then that I had a lovely figure as a teenager. At age 16, I had slender, long legs for my height, which is the tall side of average. I wore a 36C bra. I had a slender waist and small hips. I looked great in jeans, but always thought I was fat. I wore support panty hose under my jeans instead of sweet, young, teenage girl panties. Throughout my life, I had watched my mother squeeze herself into a girdle, grimacing as she stuffed her rolls of fat into her rubber corset. In my mind, I needed to wear support wear too, though I didn’t. I looked great in a bikini, but only wore an old lady one piece bathing suit, and I never went to the beach with friends. I banned myself from the beach because I thought I looked fat in a bathing suit though I didn’t.

When I was twelve, I had that awkward body shape that prepubescent girls typically have. I always think 12-year-old girls look like Weebles from ‘Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down’ fame. Their torsos look a bit oval. At age 12, I went with my mother to shop for a new swimsuit for me. I wanted a blue Speedo. While dressed in a light blue Speedo with navy blue and white stripes cascading across the nylon fabric like crashing waves, the salesgirl barged into the change room uninvited, looked me up and down and said to my mother, ‘She’s a bit chunky, isn’t she?’ My blue eyes immediately filled with tears as the sting of what this stranger said pierced the tender flesh of my innocent heart. My mother howled with laughter though I stood next to my mother in the fitting room, sobbing. My mother repeated that story over the years to anyone and everyone who would listen, deepening the wound of my body shame and body dysmorphia. I never understood why my mother did that? It was as though she was jealous of her own daughter and took pleasure in my pain. She seemed to hope that her beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, spirited, athletic daughter was going to be fat like her.

I never felt comfortable in a swimsuit after that day and continued to feel great anxiety if ever I had to swim with people. I now live in Scotland. Women my age and older swim in the sea together and they post videos to Facebook of themselves walking to the sea in their swimming costumes. Their bodies are marked with the milestones of their lives like having babies and celebrating living with food and community. They embrace their age with joy. I wonder if I will ever allow myself to truly live and join them in the sea, especially now that my body is that of a 59-year-old woman. If I ever do, I’ll know I will have healed that part of my psyche and spirit that has imprisoned my body and soul for five decades.

When I was 14, I had to return two pairs of jeans that my mother had bought for me for Christmas and get them four sizes smaller. I went from a 28-inch waist to a 24-inch waist overnight. It just happened as if by magic. POOF! I was skinny and sexy. When I went back to school after the Christmas break, boys looked at me differently. One boy – an older Portuguese classmate with whom I always fought and with whom I had been sent to the principal’s office on more than one occasion – looked me up and down, smiled lasciviously and said, “You have rejuvenated.” He was not very bright, and even if he didn’t know what he meant, I did. Suddenly, I had a long, lean, slender figure, and the boys approved.

At age 16, a friend in high school told me that I had a good size chest for how ‘tiny I was’. Those words were like vinegar in her mouth, and she spat them at me. I had taken her with me to buy a pair of jeans and when I came out of the dressing room to show her and ask her opinion I said, “Do they make me look fat?” This was the question we all asked one another when buying any sort of trousers and modeling them for one another pre-purchase. I was no different than they, but that question spilling from my lips was unwelcome amongst my female peers who were a bit plump or out-and-out obese. They thought I obviously knew that I wasn’t fat, but like every teenage girl, I feared that I was, especially because my mother was fat. The friend who came jeans shopping with me was short, a bit round, splay footed and had a huge hook nose. She had small breasts and an alarming amount of cellulite, which she didn’t let stop her from working as a lifeguard each summer. When anyone commented on the beauty of my eyes she said, “What’s wrong with my eyes? Are they two piss holes in the sand or something?” Her eyes were not special, nor were her lips or hair. She was ordinary. I excelled in school and she was average in that respect too. In fact, I helped her with her school work. I’m sure she thought I was putting on an act the day I took her with me to buy those jeans and I’m certain that she thought I was fishing for a compliment when I asked her if those jeans made me look fat, but I was deeply insecure about my body, hair and face.

When I look at pictures of myself taken then, I see that I was beautiful and thin, but I never knew that I was. My friend, for all of her physical imperfections and shortcomings, always had a handsome, athletic boyfriend on her arm. She was never single; I was perpetually single. She went to prom; I was not invited to prom. She was confident in who she was and had a big laugh and an even bigger personality; I never was confident in who I was. I was quiet and when I laughed I emitted no sound. She teased me when I laughed and said, ‘Here comes the earthquake,’ because I merely shook with laughter without making any audible noise. There’s something wrong with a person who doesn’t let her laugh escape through her open mouth, don’t you think? I spent most of high school pining for my high school sweetheart who dumped me after six months of bliss (for me). I refused to give other boys who pursued me in high school and even in university a chance. I didn’t possess the resilience to bounce back from rejection, heartbreak and grief. My friend had a mother who built her up; I had a mother who daily tore me down. That made all the difference.

My mother was perpetually overweight and I feared being fat like her. Following an afterschool sweets binge, I was forced to sit down to a traditional Scottish meat and potatoes meal like mince and tatties or stew and potatoes. My dad only ate red meat. Salad? What was that? Crisp vegetables as a side? Huh? My mother would die before she’d make a salad or a vegetable that hadn’t been boiled lifeless. For my mother, life was all about saving money. Buying cheap, dense foods that were filling to feed her three daughters made the most sense to her. An English friend of my mother’s, who had three daughters the same age as each of us, always served up salad. Her three girls had beautiful skin and looked healthy.

In childhood, when I came home to Scotland for a holiday and even as a young adult when I attended teacher’s college in Scotland for a year, I ate all of my favorite Scottish sweeties like Fruit Pastelles, Fruitellas, Fry’s Chocolate Creams, Curly Wurlys, and lemon ice cream slices in a wafer shell from the ice cream van. During teacher’s college, I’d buy a box of chocolates a few times a week and eat them all myself. As a child, I was out all day running and exploring. That love of sweeties made no visible impact on me. In teacher’s college in Glasgow, I walked a lot and took public transport each day, but I still gained weight that I had to lose upon returning to Canada. I was twenty-five at that time, and was able to run it off as long as I did other exercises compulsively. Each day after school, I ran for one hour, did my 90-minute Jane Fonda exercise tape and worked out with weights; I exercised for three hours every day. I accompanied those extreme workouts with a restrictive diet of no more than 500 calories a day, which consisted of a Slimfast in the morning, a Slimfast at lunch and a small piece of sole and green beans for dinner. Eventually my weight dropped to 110 pounds, which was scary skinny for me. My husband, though we had agreed to separate by the end of the school year, lustfully begged me to let him, ‘put his arms around that body’. That’s when I knew that he never loved me either. I was just a body and face to him as I had been for any other male I’d ever let into my life and heart.

During Covid, I was living and working in a remote, isolated community three and a half hours outside of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The Northwest Territories is a desperate place to live. In the winter, which lasts from October to May, the temperature is typically -35 degrees Celsius, but it can drop to below -55 degrees Celsius on occasion and does so quite regularly. In the summer, the bugs are biblical. From May to October, I never left the house without my Australian Mozzie Hat and bug jacket. Then the temperature dropped in October, and the snow fell again. I continued to walk five miles every day despite those terrible weather conditions, huge flying insects and despite the fact that I could have been attacked by a bear, bison, moose, or wildcat on my daily five-mile hike in the wilds of Canada’s north. I did not use living there as an excuse to stop walking five miles each day. In the Northwest Territories, I was living with Indigenous people. Despite my best efforts to befriend them, show them the respect that they demand and feel entitled to, and despite the displays of gratitude I regularly demonstrated to individuals within the community for living and working on their land, they never fully embraced me. They fear, distrust and resent all non-Indigenous people. It was a stressful, lonely few years in the Northwest Territories and, as I always do, I turned to food as a salve. I gained weight again. The same 25-30 pounds that I have gained and lost throughout my life.

I planned a trip to Scotland before Covid, but didn’t get to take that trip until the summer of 2022. To prepare for Scotland, I went on a fast. I ate nothing, and I dropped 25 pounds in three weeks. Once at my goal weight, my neurotic relationship with food continued. I started eating unhealthy foods again after which I’d starve myself for a day or two until the number on the scale was where I wanted it to be. This time my magic number was between 120-125 pounds. Progress.

When I was in Scotland that summer, I ate my favorite Scottish treats, but I fasted the following day to maintain my weight. It worked…until it didn’t. Last year, I started to experience problems with my feet and facial skin. After fasting for a day or two, once I ate again, my face puffed up so badly I looked like Rocky after Apollo Creed had finished with him. My eyes were practically swollen shut and watered continuously. Other times, I looked like a character from The Simpsons. My mouth puffed out like a duck’s bill. I experienced great pain in my feet; I could barely walk. I went to a physiotherapist about my feet and he told me that my suffering was caused by inflammation. I knew what was causing that inflammation. It was my unhealthy eating patterns. Still, I didn’t want to gain back all that weight by suddenly eating well. Stubbornly, I refused to stop my lethal dance with food. I still fasted and binged and fasted and binged as I have done since high school. Then, I started to develop a skin condition on my face. I had a few spots at the right side of my mouth for which I was prescribed a steroid cream. One should not use a steroid cream on one’s face – it thins the skin – but I used it on my face for over a year. Each night I put the cream on the spots next to the right corner of my mouth and on any red splotches that appeared under my lower lip or next to the left side my mouth. The doctor told me to use it every second day, but if I missed a day, I had a flare up.

Moving to Scotland in 2024 has been stressful and again, I have rewarded myself after a day of teaching, with junk food. I would get through the day at school and then walk to a corner shop to buy some of my favourite Scottish sweeties that are a harder find in Canada but are available in every Scottish shop. I would eat sweeties, biscuits and cakes for dinner and then go to bed. I’d set the alarm for 5 AM to exercise, but I never got out of bed to workout. I had been a member of the now popular (thanks to Mark Wahlberg) 5 AM club for decades. In the Northwest Territories, I got up at 5 AM in -40 degrees Celsius weather to workout in the school gym for an hour each morning, but now that I was finally in Scotland and close to my dream of meeting a Scots’ Catholic husband and marrying him, I couldn’t get out of bed to exercise my body. I made no sense. I was squandering this opportunity and with it the dream I had long held in my heart.

The condition on my face worsened in May. I went to a doctor in June and he gave me a different cream and told me to stop using the steroid cream, which I did. He said, “It will get worse before it gets better.” He didn’t lie. Upon using that cream, I had a full-blown outbreak of rosacea on the lower part of my face. The doctor also told me to keep out of the sun with the cream on. I decided not to cover it with makeup to see if that might expedite the healing process. I started to wear a Covid mask to cover the lower part of my face, and taught the last part of the school year masked. I missed a staff dinner for two colleagues retiring from the English department and I opted out of the staff luncheon because I was too embarrassed to take off my face mask to eat and drink with my peers. Everyone thought I was suddenly some neurotic Canadian fearful of Covid or Scottish germs. I explained to those willing to listen that it was not a fear of germs that prompted the wearing of the mask but rather I was wearing a mask to cover rosacea that had developed on the lower part of my face. I accepted another teaching position at a different school for the fall, and would be leaving this school at the end of June. I was mortified to think that potentially I would start a new position with this skin condition.

I did cry to God and asked Him why He was doing this to me. Yet, I understood that this skin affliction was an answer to my prayers to heal me from my lifelong sugar and food addiction and body dysmorphia. As well as using the cream and wearing the mask, I immediately stopped eating all sugar and processed foods. Because of my prayer asking to be healed from my food addiction, I felt that what my willpower could never conquer, my vanity was about to. I started to buy organic produce at a seemingly extortionate cost; however, if I calculated the money that I spent each day or every other day on sweeties, biscuits and cakes, the cost of the food I am now buying that seems so astronomically priced as it is tallied at the register, costs less than what I have been spending to daily soothe my tired, lonely soul with sugary Scottish sweeties.

I also prayed the rosary each day and novenas to my Mother Mary, St. Anthony (patron saint of lost things), St. Rita (patron saint of hopeless causes), St. Bartholomew (patron saint of skin afflictions), St. Jude (also patron saint of hopeless causes) and St. Thérèse the Little Flower to whom I have a special devotion. Today is the first day after Day 9 of my novenas. When I woke and looked in the mirror my skin looked markedly better. I wept and thanked God for healing me. He is not just healing my face. He is healing my food addiction, my neurotic relationship with food, and my body dysmorphia that has kept me from participating fully in and enjoying this life He has given me.

Each day I eat oatmeal, fruit, fish and raw vegetables. I have started taking vitamins and I am drinking more water. The next step is to start exercising again. Skin is our largest organ and needs to sweat out toxins. Though I walk five miles a day, I must do something each day to elevate my heart rate and sweat toxins from my body. I need to return to working out. I know my God is healing me and preparing me for my dream to live a happy life in Scotland for the rest of my days on earth. He has the key to my prison and is unlocking it to set me free at last.

The Scottish people with whom I work are much healthier than the Canadians that I worked with in northern Canada. My Scots’ colleagues eat well. They run. They swim. They compete in marathons and triathlons. They walk the hills of Scotland. They take care of themselves. They are not overweight. This unhealthy connection I have to Scotland based on the sweeties of my childhood, is outdated and out of order. I can eat well and live a healthy life here, and I must.

I came here to fall in love. I came to fall more deeply in love with Scotland, the land of my birth and the country I have always loved more than any other. I came to Scotland to fall in love with a rugged, Catholic Scotsman who adores my spirit and not just my face and body; however, a better plan is for me to fall more deeply in love with God and by extension, myself. I’m trying.