The Age of Accountability

I’ve been fighting this battle as long as I can remember. Well, I don’t know if fighting is the right word, since that would imply that I have been actively opposing, and that’s not entirely true. Maybe I have been struggling, not fighting. At times I have fought, and at times I have coasted along in utter defeat. For decades I was ignorant and impoverished, therefore with excuse. I don’t blame the five-year-old who snuck into the refrigerator in the middle of the night for a slice of deli ham and a plastic wrapped, processed cheese slice. I also don’t blame the seven-year-old who ate granola bars at her Aunt Sandy’s house like they were going out of style for an entire summer. And how could I blame the fourteen-year-old, whose mother was in the county jail, whose father was in a state prison, and who was buying easy meals she knew how to prepare, on the budget provided by her step-father? Those girls were surviving.

In the Christian world, you might hear the term age of accountability. This marks the time that a young person becomes accountable to the gospel, responsible for their salvation. Although we use the term age of accountability, it is not defined by a number. There is no age listed in scripture that we can rely on to tell us when to plunge our children into the water, or carry them to an altar of repentance.  Rather, we look for signs of knowledge, understanding, and maturity to begin to hold young people accountable. 

I became aware of my weight at an early age. Adults often referred to me as chubby, usually in contrast to my older sister, who they referred to as a beanpole. It was adults who first caused me to feel uncomfortable in my body, who introduced me to shame. It was also adults who later made me feel shame over the ways they used my body.  

During my elementary years, I relied solely on my mother for food. She did all of the shopping, cooking, and she usually picked the drive thru we would eat at. Mostly, she was concerned with the cost of food, not its nutritional value. A single mom who worked the graveyard shift most of my childhood, Mom cooked mostly quick meals that came with instructions on the box. We rarely had anything fresh in our kitchen. But that made it easy to grab a snack cake and throw it in my backpack so that I had something to eat during the day if I didn’t like the free lunch offered at school.

I never stepped foot into my junior high cafeteria, save the school dance that was held there.  I skipped breakfast and lunch most days. Some might refer to what happened during my early teenage years as an eating disorder. I would refer to it more as a rebellion. In elementary school, everyone went through the same lunch line, and we were all offered the same meal. But in junior high, the cool kids ate a la carte and kids who were signed up for free lunches waited in another line. At least this is how I saw it. Rather than feel the shame of poverty, I allowed shame to rule me.

In addition to that, my mother had started cooking home made meals, using fresh ingredients. This was the result of her boyfriend. And while it was good for me, nutritionally, I felt slighted that she would cook real food for him, while she had fed me from a box for eleven years. So, the rebellion was both against shame, and against my mother. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I understood that my mother never stood on a chair in the kitchen, watching her mom cook, as I had done. She never cooked anything growing up. She spent most of her childhood in and out of Shriner’s Hospital in hopes of saving her legs. She spent her childhood eating 1960’s hospital food served on a cold, metal tray. It was never that my mother sabotaged me, or purposely fed me unhealthy foods, it was that she didn’t know how to cook until my step-father showed her how. In my young mind, I had created a narrative, formed through the lens of shame and disappointment, that was never rooted in reality.

I didn’t lose any weight by starving myself in junior high. I usually convinced my mom to run through a drive thru once school got out, or occasionally I even got her to bring me Taco Bell to my school during our lunch break. When I did eat, I would always consume too much.

After a traumatic experience as a teenager, insomnia took hold of me. I became a late-night snacker. I would stay up late, sometimes reading, sometimes writing, but always eating. Because my step-father went to work before the rest of us got up in the morning, the house was quiet by nine pm, and the kids were required to be in their rooms. This was before we had cell phones, and we didn’t have television sets in every room of the house, so food became my late-night friend, keeping me company during the quite hours.

Once I graduated high school and got a full-time job, I gained at least thirty pounds. Financial independence meant that I could eat what I wanted, when I wanted, and I no longer fasted regularly (although as a teen, I hadn’t been introduced to that word yet). I had never liked the feeling of being hungry. It reminded me of times we had little or no food in our cupboards. It reminded me of my shame. And once I had money in my bank account, I was determined to never feel that again.

I had never really learned to cook real food, so I began to buy those same foods my mom cooked for me as a child. Processed, boxed and frozen foods that had recipes on the back. I had been brainwashed by our government to believe that the food pyramid was healthy, and I always put a starch on the plate. Not only was I eating unhealthily, I was also still eating too much.

In my late twenties, pregnancy gave me a pass to eat as much as I wanted, since I was eating for two. I indulged in cheesecakes, fast food hamburgers and peanut butter and jelly until I was nearly two hundred and fifty pounds, the largest I had ever been. I gained fifty pounds while I was pregnant with my first child, and he was under nine pounds when he was born. That left me with forty pounds of baby weight that I have never fully removed – and my son just turned sixteen!

In my thirties, The Biggest Loser glorified rapid weight loss through diet and exercise. I remember eating my cheesecake in front of the television, rooting on my favorite cast member. The show gave me insight about calorie intake and nutrient density. Shortly after I discovered that show, I binge watched food documentaries like Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, Food Inc., and King Corn. I began to understand what was in the food I was eating. I bought all of the Biggest Loser workout DVD’s, started shopping on the outside of the grocery store, and made my first real attempt to lose weight. That was over a decade ago.

In my late thirties, the food I was eating began to take a toll on my body. First, I lost my gall bladder. I spent two years with flare ups, and the last six or so months they came multiple times a week, often leaving me curled up in the fetal position pleading with God to take the pain. I have known many people who have had a single flare up, gone to the emergency room, and had their gallbladder out that same day – including most recently my fourteen-year-old daughter. But I was never that lucky. The handful of times I did go to the hospital, they sent me home and told me to follow up with my primary care physician. Just a few months after my gallbladder was removed, auto immune disease crept in. Beginning with abdominal wall endometriosis, then a granuloma in my breast, followed by hand eczema and allergies to the medicines that we supposed to help me. My body was attacking itself, and every doctor I saw wanted to put me on a different pill. I never wanted medicine, I wanted to know why I was sick in the first place. Doctors never had the answer.

Standing in a Christian book store one afternoon, the answer came. I was at the store to buy a gift, and ended up receiving a gift instead (and my friend, Susan will tell you I don’t do that well). One of the store associates found me in the book aisle and asked if she could help me find something. I let her know that I was just browsing. She lingered for a moment and then informed me that she had two books for me. She handed me The Healthy Gut Zone by Dr. Colbert, and Forty Day Sugar Fast by Wendy Speake. I thanked her, politely, but found it a little odd that this stranger offered me these books like she knew me. Yet, I felt compelled to purchase them. While I never completed the second book, the information I found in Dr. Colbert’s book finally gave me the answers I was looking for.

So, there I was, nearly forty, and I had reached the age of accountability. I had knowledge and understanding, and I could no longer give myself excuse. Just like the time I quit drinking and smoking cold turkey, I set a date to implement the changes Dr. Colbert recommended. That was more than two years ago.

I did exactly what I was supposed to for a month, then most of what I was supposed to for four months, and the results were undeniable. For the first time in my life, my lingering childhood tic (gnawing on my tongue like a meth addict) was gone. This had been a huge source of silent shame for me for decades. It still is. I have gotten really good at hiding it, but when someone catches me, I am always mortified. Having grown up in tweaker houses most of my life, that was something I never wanted to be associated with.  After four months of cleaner eating, healing my gut, and exercising self-control over my food choices, I felt better than I ever had. I dropped twenty pounds and sometimes had to do a double take when I looked in the mirror.

But it didn’t take me long to stop swimming upstream and roll over on my back and coast awhile. In just a few months, I put the weight back on and I was back to eating foods I knew my body would reject, then suffering the consequence. The difference was, this time I felt shame. Not the kind of shame that came from overhearing an uncle say that I was pretty, if I wasn’t fat, but the kind of shame that comes from knowing I could do better, and feeling powerless to overcome. The same shame an alcoholic feels when they fall off the wagon – I know, I fell off of that wagon several times, too.

I have heard addicts say that quitting cigarettes was harder than methamphetamines or cocaine. I’ve also seen studies that say that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. On one hand, I had quit smoking, so surely I could overcome food. But on the other hand, although I chewed on my tongue like a tweaker, I’ve never tried cocaine.

Here I am, approaching my forty fourth birthday, and I have not been able to bring my body under subjection to the knowledge I have in my mind. I am like a city with no walls, like Proverbs 25:28 speaks of. I am tired of feeling the pain of the physical weight, and I’ve had enough of the mental burden that shame brings. But am I tired enough to change? I heard a preacher say once that his mother had to love Jesus more than she loved Marlboro’s. I have to want change more than I want cheese, pizza and caramel, to name three of my weaknesses.

When I quit drinking, I also stopped going to bars and hanging out with certain groups of people. But I can’t quit eating (at least not for too long), and I can’t stop hanging out with people who eat. Food is social. I also refuse to be one those people (again), who lets the whole world know that they are on a food journey every time a meal is put before them, or they are invited to a restaurant. But I know that accountability is another vital part of overcoming anything. So, here I am, telling the world without telling a soul. I am fat, sick, and tired; and tired of being fat and sick.

And I am ready to do something about it. I am well beyond the age of accountability, and I am ready to shake the shame that keeps me from looking at myself in the mirror.

I don’t know where you are today, what is keeping you from holding your eye in the mirror, but I want you to know that you’re not alone. We live in a society that wants only our perfect pose, our happy story, our best life. But the truth is, most of us are struggling with something, and mostly in silence. I want to encourage you to stop putting it off – whatever it is. Sit down for ten minutes in complete silence and have a chat with yourself about whatever monkey is on your back. Then, write down one thing you can do this week to start walking towards a resolution.

This week, I am going to clean out my kitchen. I am going to both remove the things that I know aren’t good for me, and make room for the things that I want to put into my body.

I don’t know where this journey is going to take me, but I know it is long overdue, and I am ready to begin. I hope you’ll join me.