Excluding my Mom’s boyfriend, everyone in my life was in poverty or along its periphery. My aunt Shawn’s home in Philadelphia was a rowhouse that looked like a set from the series “Shameless,” with a dozen formerly stray dogs holding court from the doorknobs down. But there was food: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, green beans, sweet potatoes and pie. I was awash in gratitude, happy to be with people who liked holidays and were willing to spend money they didn’t have to celebrate them.
The meal itself was short. Shawn and her partner wanted to get back to the football game on TV; the only other adults had a newborn to attend to, and the younger cousins were eager to go off and play. Left to my own devices, I went into the kitchen.
Despite feeding eight or so people, the 25-pound turkey seemed to me hardly touched. I pulled a stool over to the counter, sat down, and ate the meat straight from the tray. I ripped and devoured the flesh until a section was bone — and even then a bone has cartilage at the ends and mushy marrow in the middle. I ate everything that humans can digest, breathing infrequently, until the neural itch to swallow made me fear that I might choke. Undeterred by the prospect of an ignominious death in my aunt’s kitchen, I continued to eat until my stomach was distended and I could feel my lungs pressed against my heart. After a while, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be hungry. In fact, I couldn’t imagine feeling hungry ever again.
Bingeing is more effective with a strategy to override the body’s signals to stop eating. For someone who rarely cooked, Mom was fixated on diets and weight loss, and I was able to subvert her advice for my own purposes when I knew food would be abundant.
“It takes 20 minutes for your brain to register that you’re full,” she would say, so I’d eat as much as I could in the first 20 minutes. “Liquids take up space in the stomach” — so I wouldn’t drink anything save for a sip or two to aid in the act of swallowing. “Sugar ruins your appetite by tricking you into thinking you’re full, but you’ll be hungry again soon after” — so I avoided sugar to gorge upon fat and protein. These became the reliable strategies, though I did experiment with others.
When I was 12, I twice tried to eat a large meal in secret and then quietly vomit up a portion of it before the next meal began. To my chagrin, purging did nothing to lengthen the amount of time that I felt free of hunger. I tried fasting in the lead-up to a free meal, but I learned what competitive eaters already know: starving makes you feel full faster. Takeru Kobayashi, the six-time champion of the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, came to prominence when I was 13, and I gleaned from his interviews that competitive eaters “expanded” their stomachs by ingesting large volumes of food or fluid the day before competition. Fluids are cheap, so I added this to my list of tactics.