Ruby's Weight Loss and Recovery Journey

Facing Food Addiction: 'Healing Every Part of Me'

Ruby Gettinger used to weigh 716 pounds. In 2008, at 500 pounds, she launched a show on The Style Network to chronicle her journey to lose the weight, save her health, and achieve her dreams of love and happiness. Now, in the show’s third season, Ruby is about to cross the 350-pound mark, well on her way toward her goal weight.

It’s a long, tough climb, from the physical difficulty of finding ways to exercise and eat right in a food-obsessed world to the emotional distress of trying to recover lost childhood memories to the spiritual pain of feeling unable to pray for help with the one problem that haunts her most. Step by step, she’s passing milestones like driving a car, buckling a normal seat belt, and putting on a pair of jeans and even a bathing suit. And with the help of the 12-step program, Ruby is facing down her food addiction and letting the truth, however painful it might be, set her free.

Read on for Ruby’s inspiring story of weight loss and food addiction recovery, and get her tips for how you can start your own journey toward freedom.

“Ruby” airs Sunday nights at 8 pm et/pt on The Style Network. Visit MyStyle.com for more information. Holly Lebowitz Rossi is Beliefnet’s Health editor and the co-author of the holistic health blog Fresh Living. "Before" photo courtesy of Ruby Gettinger, all other photos of Ruby courtesy The Style Network.

My Most Symbolic Milestones

This season you put on a pair of jeans for the first time since you were 6 years old. How do milestones like that keep you motivated and inspired to push forward?

The jeans were incredible. At first, the woman was trying to get me to put them on, and I was like, “There’s no way I could fit in these jeans. There’s no way.” And I really did not believe it. And so, when they left the room, I went, “Let me just try these on, see what they feel like.” And I could not believe I could even put on a pair of jeans.

I still have problems like that, because I’ll tell somebody, “There’s no way I could fit in that.” It’s the same with chairs--when I was 700 and 500 pounds, I’d have to have a chair without arms, in the back [of a theater or church].

So then, when somebody was telling me, “You could sit there,” I was going, “No, I can’t." It took me a long time to finally go, “Okay, just sit down.” It was just weird for me, because my whole entire life, I’ve had to deal with that.

Were Your Friends Enablers?

Your friendships with your best friends, Jeff and Georgia, are so important to you. But this season you confront the possibility that both of them have acted as enablers for your eating over the years. Has that challenged or strengthened your friendships?

I know that Jeff and Georgia would never do anything intentionally to hurt me because. If they were to walk into this house and saw me shooting up with a needle, drugs, they would grab it out of my hand, they would get me to a hospital as fast as they could. But with the food addiction, you just don’t see it like you would see drugs. You don’t understand what it’s doing. People can’t see visually what it’s doing to the inner parts of you, how it’s killing you.

For the first time, I think we’re all opening our eyes and we see how deadly this is, how it was killing me.

I think it’s made us stronger, because we’re going through the 12 steps. I’m asking everyone that was ever around me [if I was addicted to food]—because I didn’t see. I think [in our last interview], I said I really didn’t eat that much, I didn’t consume a lot in one meal. But I’m finding out now that I ate a lot of snacks during the day. Georgia told me, "I’m seeing it for the first time. You are a snack eater. When you get stressed, you start eating."

Fighting 'Fat and Lazy'

Why don’t you think any of you saw the problem before?

If you look at me, or somebody that’s very extremely overweight, people judge it, but they don’t see it’s killing you like they would see a drug addict shooting up or somebody falling over because they’re drunk.

When they look at this addiction, all that they see is fat and lazy. And they don’t see that the fat and everything else is killing the person that they love. I have kids and adults writing me and telling me, “I hated my father," “I hated my mother," “I hated my sister.” “I hate her so much because she died early because she could not overcome eating.” “She’s lazy, a glutton.” When they see my story, they realize it was not like that. “They did love me. I see now that this was a problem, this was an addiction.”

Why 'I'm a Food Addict' Was So Hard

Can you talk about your journey towards saying the words “food addiction” out loud?

It was the hardest. It took everything in me to say that, because I had told myself "I’m not addicted to food." And in the first step [of the 12-step program], it says you’re powerless over--and I couldn’t say “food”. And then, finally, I put it together and realized that I’m powerless over Ruby, because Ruby has—ever since I could remember my childhood from age–fought to be strong, to overcome.

But, in a way, I hid the weak Ruby. And that’s the part I needed to find again to admit out loud, openly, “You have a food addiction.” So, I had to dig really deep inside. It was almost like a shocker. It may not be a shocker to everybody else, because they’re looking at me going, “How could you not be addicted to food?”

But sometimes your mind can be your worst enemy or your best friend. I think it was my enemy right there, thinking of every excuse why you’re overweight instead of that you could really be eating so much because you’re feeding something. And I do believe that food, drugs, alcohol are feeding something inside people that they are not getting out of life, some kind of emptiness.

Faith and the 12 Steps

What role is your faith playing in the 12 steps?

I totally believe in God. I pray to God. I talk to God if I have a broken heart or I’m praying for somebody’s healing, but I never really prayed about Him helping me in this, because I felt like it was my problem. I felt like it was my fault, that it was all in my hands.

Isn’t that weird? Somebody that believes in God, has faith, but I could not--it’s almost like it's part of the addiction. Its part of the reason you can’t beat it, because you’re not reaching out. I don’t know why we feel like this is our fault. It’s almost like we’re saying God cannot handle this. It’s almost like a punishment to ourselves.

But, it’s the strangest thing to me. I never reached out to God or reached out to a friend to say, “Help me now.” And now, I’m learning to do that.

Every morning I'll pray to God. I say, “God, please help me today, make it through the day. When I crave something, if I’m in pain, no matter what, do not let me go to the food, let me go to You. Let me go to the friend that You choose for me." That’s what my prayers are now, and which I really believe is helping me.

3 Ways to Get Support

What support do you recommend that people get to set themselves up for weight loss success?

First of all, I would tell everyone, you are not alone. The biggest thing I’ve found out through this whole journey, we are not alone. There are so many people going through this with us.

I also tell everyone to get checked by their doctor--there are clinics out there that are free. If I hadn’t been pushed by my mother to get checked, I would not be here today. I would’ve been dead, because I had no idea that I had diabetes, and it will kill you.

Finally, there’s Overeaters Anonymous. And if you don’t want to go to the meetings, you can have a meeting online with somebody, and they’re there to talk back to you. And one thing about Overeaters Anonymous, you know, if you say “I’m having a bad day. I’m eating. I want to eat," they don’t sit there and beat you up and say “Don’t eat it." They just let you talk. And that's amazing to me. You know, they hear you.

Redefining Happiness

We live in a “food makes you happy” culture. Have you had to redefine your idea of happiness?

My friend Georgia will tell you in a second she loves cooking, and she says, “I love it because it makes everybody happy. And when everybody’s happy, it makes me happy.”

I do believe that food numbs pain. And food makes people happy, the taste of food, the smell. I mean, think about how it affects all senses. Your nose smells it. Your eyes see every advertisement. It sees the food. It hears about the food. You taste the food. I mean, it affects everything, and it's there 24/7.

But I’ve gotten to the point where I’m like, “Oh, it’s not worth it." It’s not worth the repercussions. I never want to get back to where I was, ever. I want to be healthy the rest of my life.

The weight weighs you down in more ways than one. It weighs you down spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally. As a child, food is the first thing we can get our hands on to medicate. Food is something everybody can get their hands on to medicate themselves. But you need to be facing the problem, because the problem is not going to go away. It’s not. We’re just burying it, and we’re making more problems for ourselves.

Staying Strong Through Grief

You have experienced a lot of grief recently, with the losses of your father and your sweet dog Lucy. How has grief affected your weight loss?

At first I didn’t have an appetite, so I found myself eating protein bars. I didn’t go to chips. I didn’t go back to candy. But, instead of eating meals, I was living on protein bars. I’m talking eating probably, like, three or four protein bars a day, and that’s all that I was eating—without even looking at the pack and seeing that one protein bar is 500 calories. I was sitting there eating it, not even realizing I’m taking in 2,000, 2,500 calories just with protein bars alone. It's like I went back to snacking, and I stayed away from meals.

The old Ruby would’ve said, "Oh, I've blown it anyway. I’m just going to forget it," and I probably wouldn’t have got back on track for another year or two, or five years. But now, if I find out I’m making a mistake, or if I’m not losing weight that week, I just start over that second. I don’t wait until tomorrow, because tomorrow will never, ever come, and that’s one thing I’ve realized. You have to start over today. No matter what the mistake is, what you’ve done, you’ve got to start over today. Don’t wait until tomorrow.

The Long Journey Toward Healing

Your journey is not over, and you’re looking at a long road. It’s already been a long road. How do you stay inspired, knowing how big the project is and how your progress is steady, but it’s not magic or overnight?

I think that with therapy, and the 12-steps, you’re almost having to look at yourself in a mirror and see yourself for the first time. And does it take a while? Yes.

But, this is a battle. Even though I’m working on the mental, the psychological, even though I’m dieting, even though I’m exercising, I’m going to have to do all three of those for the rest of my life to be successful. So, it’s a journey for life. It’s not going to stop ever.

But I’m opening places in my heart that I’ve never opened, ever, and I think that is the key, getting the help, the psychological help. I’ve lost over 400 pounds now, and I have kept it off. That’s amazing enough, and I’ve not gone back.

The fact is, I’m healing every part of me, and I really believe, by healing every part of us, we win.

How to Get Started: Reach Out

For people who are going to be hearing these ideas for the first time and maybe seeing a sliver of themselves in what you’re going through, what’s the first thing that they should do right now?

The first thing for them to do is go to mystyle.com and look at the 12 steps. Read them, each and every one of them. If they need help or if they need to understand more, or just somebody to talk to, please click on Shades of Hope and e-mail them, and they will be there in a second for you.

And remember, it’s going to be painful, but there is freedom in knowing the truth. It can’t hurt us. The truth can only heal us. I think we fear the truth because we think it’s going to hurt us, that somehow it’s going to hurt us, but it doesn’t. It frees us.

A lot of people keep things secret. They don’t tell people things that are happening to them because they have this fear that, if somebody knows this about me, they’ll think bad of me, or somebody will look at me differently, or I’ll get in trouble or something like that.

But, the fact is by keeping it a secret, you're making the beast bigger. You’re making the problem bigger. But, by speaking out, reaching out, it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.

What Are the 12 Steps?

Ruby has found healing and hope through the 12 Step program. Here, courtesy of MyStyle.com, are the 12 steps as Ruby practices them:

1. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction-- that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.