Susan Dimitman

Previously on the Consults blog, Dr. Kathryn Zerbe, professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, took readers’ questions on a binge eating, anorexia and other eating disorders. Here, Dr. Zerbe responds to a man who wrote that his former wife, who suffered from bulimia, was trying to “keep me fat.”

Q.

Back 40 years ago I was married to a woman who secretly threw up after almost every dinner. (I didn’t know to call it bulimia back then, but I knew about it.) Oddly, she insisted that I eat heaping meals with her even though I was not bulimic.

The result was, of course, that I gained weight — a lot of weight. So I was eating almost to compensate for my wife’s eating disorder. I was resentful but saw no way out until we divorced. Then I lost 50 pounds in the next year and have kept it off through exercise and careful eating. It helped that I was highly motivated to lose weight.

But the curious thing was, back then, that while my wife was trying to get or stay thin by vomiting, she was trying to keep me fat. As she would tell me, “Don’t worry about your weight. I’ve got it under control.” That was the issue. Erik

A.

Dr. Zerbe responds:

Like all persons in an intimate relationship, the person with an eating disorder may unconsciously or consciously want his or her partner to “play a certain role.” Projecting what one does not want to be into another person can temporarily but spuriously solve psychological problems.

In your case, I imagine that your wife wanted to be the thin one in the relationship and disavow any chance of becoming overweight. You were indeed compensating for your wife’s unconscious wishes to eat and yet stay thin at the same time by being the one who ate. In comparison to you, she could feel even better about herself for being the “thin one.”

This is just an educated guess, though. A therapist could figure this out only in an in-depth couples or individual therapy process.

For more on eating disorders, see The Times Health Guide: Bulimia, and Dr. Zerbe’s earlier responses: