Confessions of a Carb Queen Review Part One
I received this book last Friday, started reading it Saturday afternoon, and I’ve been riveted to it since. Every chance I get my head is stuck in this book.
The cover of this odd sized 5 x 5 paperback is bright pink with a chocolate brown border, sports a sprinkled donut with a bite taken out of it, and has a title gaily scrolled with girly fonts which suggests light “Chick Lit” style non fiction. The cover is totally misleading.
The subtitle is a telling clue into what you're about to encounter inside. "The lies you tell others. The lies you tell yourself."
This insightful and powerful memoir by Susan Blech and her sister Caroline Bock is at times shocking, explicit (both sexually and in it’s descriptions of excessive eating). And Susan, the auto-biographer, despite being in the throes of her addiction excesses, and denial during much of this book, is lovable and endearing, humorous and intelligent.
At times, her narrative conjures memories of my childhood and adulthood. Both sides of my family are plagued by overeating, obesity, and coping with emotions by drugging themselves with food. Many are still deeply enmeshed in this common yet shocking eating disorder and in the grips of the diseases it precipitates including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and mobility issues.
I had my own brief episode with binge eating after my father died when I was twenty. Shocked by his sudden death and clueless as how to deal with my grief, I was adrift without an anchor. I recall eating a whole pie in one evening as a common way of coping. At the time, I thought this was part of normal behavior because I’d witnessed it so many times. Later I got too thin. Now I’m in the middle of the spectrum, measuring most of my portions most of the time, stressing high protein and weight lifting, and eating 4 to 6 small meals a day.
But I’ve witnessed the phenomenon of binge eating and overeating repeatedly in my family, and a few friends, since my childhood. Sometimes it was a case of someone grazing on copious amounts of food over the course of a trip to the buffet. (Once six of us traveled 45 miles one way to eat at the Boomtown Buffet on the recommendation that it was "The Best Buffet In Nevada"). Often I witnessed constant snacking from morning to afternoon until late in the night on copious amounts of food. This was common, acceptable and par for the course throughout my extended family.
(My father had 14 brothers and sisters, my mother had 4. I have 88 first cousins on my dad's side alone).
When I was in my teens and quite thin (I always had been as a child) one of my siblings was struggling with obesity (rare in the 1970s). I learned to hide food before going to bed around midnight in order to have breakfast at 7 am. Our kitchen was routinely ands literally emptied out overnight. It was hide food or go without.
In adulthood, my relatives still openly eat large portions. Once offering me “some French bread, butter, and cheese,” I was given a slice of each while the relative in question ate all of the rest of a whole pound of cheese, a stick of butter, and a whole loaf of French bread. In one sitting. As a snack.
My mother, who was slim and petite until her last few years, once related to me how her sister ate two heaping plates of my homemade spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic bread. Then an hour later my aunt ate a large bowl of cereal. My mother was flabbergasted. “Where does she put all that?” she asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know then about eating beyond physical appetite, or the addiction of emotional eating, or eating to get a food or sugar high. (Carbohydrates have been shown to release brain chemicals that act like drugs).
I've known and still often witness one side of the face of overeating. The side I’ve seen all too often in the public eating habits of family, friends, and even strangers in restaurants, often flabbergasts me in much the same way my mother was flabbergasted by her sister.
I suspected hidden eating existed when I spent my younger years awakening to a stripped kitchen my slender parents always strived to keep well stocked. I know binge eating and other forms of overeating are compulsive addictions with sad consequences.
So this book should not have shocked me.
It did.
Part Two - coming soon.
