Stuffing My Belly: A Tug-of-War Between Wanting to Feel Full?—?and Dreading It

I used to have a boyfriend who liked to stick his finger into my navel — poke! There was an accompanying sound effect, too: “Booop!” Every once in a while, when I felt bloated after a meal and reclined with my big white belly pulled out of my pants, he’d try it. And I’d flinch and instinctively push his hands away.

“God, don’t do that!” I panicked. “You might pop me!”

The first time I said this, he threw his head back and cackled. “What? What do you mean, pop you?”

I heard a story once about a man who was so fat that his stomach burst open without warning, unraveling from his bellybutton. It probably isn’t true. Nevertheless, I’ve never forgotten it.

“Where did you hear that?” Ray sounded skeptical, and still deeply amused.

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “On a…like a…documentary or something. Just don’t do it, okay? I don’t want to take any chances.”

From that moment on, he abandoned the sound effect. Instead, whenever he poked my navel, he’d exclaim (tunefully),“Don’t pop meee!”

Years of unsuccessful diets only served to magnify the early appeal of food as an emotional blotter.

Food became a merciless torturer. It was a mirage in the Sahara. It was a temptress who crumbled to dust at first touch.

Food whispered absurd promises, flashed neon pink and blue like Vegas, hummed with the solemnity of religion.

It was the husk of a dead therapist, taxidermized and set upright behind glass. It winked like a loose school girl. But it’s a dolt who solves nothing.

I was used to overstuffing myself. To the point where my belly was so full, it seemed to rise into the space of my lungs and I found myself sighing again and again, trying to force sufficient oxygen down my pipes. To the point where the skin around my belly was so distended, it started to pinch and I feared my sides would split. Like two clean, neat incisions traveling rapidly in opposite directions from their opening point. Like a run in a pair of pantyhose.

These were unpleasant sensations. The pressure of all that food inside me switched on my anxiety button, because it made me imagine all the awful things that might be going wrong inside my body; things that might result in sickness or disease. I feared illness, and hospitals, and the thought of long, shiny instruments invading the untouched purity of my insides.

My therapist encouraged me to explore the motivation behind my overstuffing. “Clearly, it’s uncomfortable for you,” she noted.

“It is!” I affirmed. “It’s scary when I get like that. Breathing feels like work. I’m afraid I’m going to have a heart attack before I even have a chance to poop all that food out of me. And I’m afraid that my bellybutton will start to unrav — well, yes, it’s very uncomfortable.”

“So if you do it anyway, the overstuffing must be serving you in some way. What’s the payoff?”

The payoff. Gee, I never thought of it that way — that if I was repeatedly getting myself into this uncomfortable mess, I must also be getting something out of it. But I couldn’t find anything positive in the situation. What was wrong with me? Why did I keep signing up for this?

I imagined myself in that tumescent state, sunk low into the sofa cushions, belly released from the confines of my clothing and bared to the cool air. I saw its swollen whiteness riding high under my breasts, as though I was carrying a girl. Or twin girls. Firm as a basketball. How was this serving me?

When my belly is that full, it feels like I’m being hugged — from the inside. Like someone is putting their arms around me and squeezing like they mean it.

And when I’m that full, it feels like someone or something else is “with” me. A presence, a separate entity. I have company.

And being that full makes me feel anchored and substantial, like things that are designed to resist blowing over in hurricanes. A dumpster, maybe. I’m tethered to the earth. I’m no longer vulnerable, nor so easily shifted from one place to another.

Every occasion of overstuffing myself has been a subconscious tug-of-war between wanting to feel that full — and dreading it.

My belly is an old friend. It’s been with me since early adolescence.

My belly never dismissed my fears and concerns with ridicule in front of my younger siblings, who’d then sing my troubles, quirks and insecurities back to me in cruel nursery rhymes.

My belly has stuck to me through thick and thin. It is always close and warm.

No matter how many times my parents moved our family to yet another state — from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Louisiana to Tennessee to New York, never staying longer than three years in any one place — my belly was a constant. It was my steady companion through years of being “the new girl”, time and again. Whenever I sat alone at an otherwise empty table in a school cafeteria, agonizingly self-conscious and friendless, my belly snuggled right up against me and sat patiently in my lap.

My belly had weight, too, even in its early days. It gave me the sense of having a cannonball-like core that made it harder for my short-tempered, bullying father to pick me up by the hair and drag me across the room.

Maybe some part of me even imagined it made it more difficult to move me from one state to another.

People sometimes look at my belly and assume I’m pregnant. Total strangers approach me and press an overly familiar hand to my private abdomen and chirp, “Boy or girl?” I have a patent response for those people. I tip my head to the side, smile sweetly and confess, “It’s twin boys.” I place a hand on one side of my protruding gut — “Ben” — then resting a palm on the other side of my belly, “…and Jerry”.

Sometimes people look at my belly and assume I’m drowning in self-loathing. They assume I’ve given up on life. That I’m empty of goals, dreams, optimism, hope. To them, I am the personification of slow suicide. And they imagine they see the evidence of my self-ruinous behavior around my middle.

The fact is, I absolutely adore life. I’m downright in lust with possibility. I possess dreams and goals in abundance.

For example, I love to learn. I want to learn every language, from Dutch to Lakota. I want knit my own sweaters, repair my own car, and demonstrate Beni Hana-worthy knife skills in the kitchen. I want to know every Greek god and goddess by heart and be able to pick out little inaccuracies in any History Channel documentary, and have earned the right to that pompous tsk-tsk as I shake my head and utter “nice fact checking there, History!”.

I love to travel, too, and look forward to doing much more of it. I want to throw my head back and marvel at the pyramids of Egypt in-person, feel the ancient sun like a white-hot mask upon my face. I want to skulk through the catacombs under Paris. I want to stay in an African hotel I saw on television where giraffes roam free on the property and poke their heads into the unscreened windows of the guest rooms. I want to write lots of books, perform many anonymous kindnesses, maybe even discover the true identity of Jack the Ripper.

My belly, and all my other fat, for that matter, was not amassed in an effort to destroy myself. On the contrary, my belly was built on a child’s defiant will to survive.

Eating — overeating — saved me. It comforted me when I was at the mercy of grown-ups who didn’t know how to give what I needed.

Food was something to which I had ready access, and with it I cleverly fashioned a survival mechanism that pulled me back from the edge of insanity. — a young MacGuyver of angst and junk food. I, blessed with a genetic predisposition to anxiety, panic and depression, managed to negotiate an insecure childhood and adolescence without ever landing in jail, becoming a junkie, getting knocked up or hanging myself.

I don’t overstuff my belly the way I used to. I reached a point where what I wanted more desperately than the twisted comforts of a bloated belly was freedom from its discomforts. I wanted to avoid the alarm I felt when my belly was overly full.

I think finally becoming clear on why I’d been overstuffing myself for so many years helped me get there.

I get real hugs from people whose love is sincere. I don’t need my belly to act as a half-assed mimic, simulating an embrace with its sickening pressure around my middle. My belly is no longer burdened with the additional responsibility of being my companion. I look to my fellow humans for healthy interaction. I don’t face the same kinds of threats now that I did as a child, and I have methods at my disposal that help me feel grounded. I know better how to respond when threatened. I continue to work on finding grown-up ways to deal with life’s challenges; actions that make sense and have a very real chance of leading to genuine solutions. The old habits are deeply ingrained, and won’t be easily waved off. But neither will I.

I stand turned forward, my belly preceding me. It is swollen. It is heavy. But as long as it belongs to me, I will move ahead anyway. I’ll carry with me all that is mine until I don’t need it anymore.

Kim Brittingham is a content writer, ghostwriter, blogging instructor, authorship coach, and the author of Write That Memoir Right Now (AudioGo/Blackstone, 2013) and Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting and Live Large (Random House, 2011).