Dietitian’s past eating ailments shaped future

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Georgia Clark-Albert works in an office surrounded by food. Fruit, vegetables, meats, boxes of cereal and containers of ice cream. She’s not tempted to eat any of it, however, because none of it is real. Clark-Albert is a dietitian. She holds two college degrees in food science and human nutrition. She uses plastic and rubber food as tools to instruct others about healthful eating habits.

Weight control is a constant battle for clients, said Clark-Albert, who lives in an old farmhouse in Athens.

“For them, it’s not: I’ve lost the weight and I’m done,” she added. “The skills and behavior they’ve used to get there need to continue. They are fighting genetics, environment, lifestyle. It’s a lot.”

Weight is also an issue for Clark-Albert. She’s willing to talk about her experiences and feelings about obesity, but she won’t reveal how much she weighs. While it is not a quiet issue in her life – she did, after all, volunteer to talk to me – it does sometimes silence her.

Our conversation was filled with long pauses, and it wasn’t clear whether she was searching for words or searching for strength.

The weight bothers her. Talking about it can be awkward, but Clark-Albert is also candid, witty and self-examining. She fully intends to lose the extra weight she carries, but she does not see it as a taboo subject – as many people do.

During our conversation, her smile came easily and fully, which must be comforting to her clients. When she served coffee, she popped out of her chair and was back in seconds with two steaming mugs.

“I have no intention of staying where I am,” she said of her weight. “I’m progressing.”

Depending on the client, Clark-Albert sometimes shares her own history of dieting and it doesn’t begin with food. Nor does it begin with the eight years she was bulimic and made herself throw up late at night after her husband went to bed. It doesn’t even begin with her current hope to lose weight.

“Self-esteem,” she said, is where it begins. “The eating disorder is a symptom. For me, it was never having felt comfortable fitting in anywhere.”

It goes all the way back, she says, to when her parents – her father an American, her mother a Canadian – moved from Nova Scotia and settled their six children in Portland.

At the time, Clark-Albert was 10, a tender age for abrupt changes, and the move was jarring. Her new friends asked her if she spoke Eskimo and lived in igloos. She didn’t know this country’s state called Georgia, and it made her feel self-conscious about her name.

Surely none of it was intentionally cruel. At worst, the comments sprang from ignorance on the part of children. But in the mind of a younger Georgia, the words began to gather emotional strength. Where might she find comfort?

In a word, food.

“Food is such a multitalented item,” one Bangor psychologist told me recently. That very day, half of her clients mentioned food as an issue in their lives, even though she is not, strictly speaking, a therapist for eating disorders.

“Food is comfort, entertainment, social. It meets so many needs,” she said. “For an awful lot of people, it’s their best friend. It’s the first thing we experience in life: being hungry and being full, and we associate it with love.”

It’s safe to say that, as a girl, Clark-Albert was searching for that love – just not in the right place. She began to gain weight in college. In her mid-20s, she tried one of the popular weight-loss groups, but when she couldn’t lose pounds, she had a silent panic that voiced itself in the secret actions of bulimia.

“Everything around me was centering on my weight,” she said. “If I weighed more than 120 pounds, it was devastating.”

At 25, Clark-Albert married Marc Albert, a forester from Winslow. Before they exchanged vows, she told him about her habit of self-inflicted vomiting, but she didn’t involve him. He was long asleep when she carried out her ritual of bingeing and purging.

Eventually, as she began to pursue her own career in food science, she consulted a therapist. While in therapy, Clark-Albert stopped purging.

“I kept telling myself: If you’re going to eat this food, you will not purge,” she said. “As I got older, it was about getting more comfortable with myself and learning to like myself. I was living with this secret. To tell somebody was a relief. A lot of it was just growing up.”

When she left therapy, the bulimia had ended. I asked if she thought she was cured.

Clark-Albert paused before answering: “The tendency or thought is there but I could never” – and here she stopped herself – “well, I shouldn’t say never. But the thought of vomiting is disgusting to me now. I can’t imagine it happening.”

When she ended therapy, the decisions and behaviors around eating were hers to choose without consultation or guidance.

“I felt I had gone as far as I could go with the therapist,” said Clark-Albert, who said her three sisters are overweight, though her two brothers are not. “Unfortunately, as a result, I had dealt with the purging but not the bingeing. The bingeing continued. That was a problem. I started to gain weight and gain weight and gain weight. One morning, I woke up and said: Who is that person in the mirror? I had lost control.”

That’s the point at which people sometimes consult their doctors. Or when doctors confront their patients.

One doctor told me that her best results have come from questioning patients about choices: portions, types of food, meal times, exercise routines. Sometimes she asks them to chart their intake.

“We try for small changes and see how it goes,” the family practitioner said. “It takes real consistency. Most people are successful if they can stay with a plan for more than a week or two. But when they lose it slowly, it’s discouraging.”

Clark-Albert does not seem discouraged. She isn’t on a diet right now, but she wants to be. She would like to fit back into her original wedding rings, which had to be cut off because they were so tight.

Clark-Albert was pensive when asked if she had considered returning to counseling.

“No, no,” she said quietly. “I know what I need to do. It’s putting the effort into doing it. As for the why behind it, I don’t think I’m ever going to know the why. Sometimes I use food as comfort. That’s pretty basic. I don’t need to go any deeper than that.”

Not long ago, Clark-Albert, accompanied by her husband, Marc, who lovingly replaced her original rings with an attractive gold band decorated with a delicate strip of diamonds, visited a surgeon to discuss gastric bypass surgery.

Each felt the surgery was not right for Clark-Albert, who grinned when she explained that the thought of eating less or even the risks of the surgery did not bother her as much as learning that gastric bypass patients may only sip water. The thought of not being able to gulp down an icy glass of water on a hot day was unbearable to Clark-Albert.

After that meeting, her own anger spurred her toward better habits. She began walking with her dog each day and keeping a journal about her intake. She dropped 30 pounds.

Then came winter. Not just the holidays but the cold, the tendency toward hibernation and the temptation to be sedentary. Everyone I spoke to for this story brought up Maine winters as a significant factor. For Clark-Albert, it meant gaining weight.

When I told her I knew a woman who always claimed to be comfortable with her weight, that it made others more uncomfortable than it did her, Clark-Albert was quick to respond.

“That’s not true for me,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s really true for anyone.”

But if it is, I said, then why bother to lose weight?

Katherine Musgrave, a food science and nutrition professor emerita at the University of Maine, named several reasons: diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia.

“Thinness is not perfect,” said Musgrave. “It’s just that obesity puts one at risk.”

For Clark-Albert, who knows all of the medical reasons for losing weight, the answer was more cosmetic and personal.

“For the want of a thinner body,” she said. “And there are things that would be easier. This is a tough thing to say, but when you get on an airplane, you wouldn’t have to say: Is the seat belt going to fit? I make sure all the chairs in this office don’t have arms. If you haven’t been an overweight person, you don’t know these things are an issue.”

When her own weight comes up in conversations with clients – and it does – Clark-Albert is open to discussion. Some find her size comforting; others find it contradictory.

When I called Clark-Albert a week after we met, I asked if she was comfortable telling me how much she would like to lose. She responded: “I would rather not get into numbers. I would like to get away from the whole numbers thing. Sometimes you look at somebody and you don’t realize how much they weigh and they look wonderful. Until I get to a more comfortable number, I don’t want to get into numbers.”

I remembered something she had told me that first day, something that seemed relevant to so many women I know, as well as indicative of Clark-Albert’s own journey.

“At 120 pounds, I still thought I was fat,” she said. “The difference now is that I really like me. I know I am a good person. I’d rather be at the weight I am now and not be bulimic. I’d love to be a size 5 again, and I haven’t given up on that.”