by Sarah Linney
“I was sick over Christmas,” she says, and a look of sympathy crosses my face: what an awful way to spend the holiday.
“But on the bright side, at least I didn’t put any weight on!”
And suddenly, she isn’t a few feet, but a whole universe away from me.
I look at her across the gulf between two separate worlds: the one where it’s okay to eat, and the one where it isn’t, quite. A world where being ill might be a good thing, because it keeps you thin. The memory of that world had faded a little, but it comes back, now, because I used to live there.
I say nothing. A second later, the conversation is over. And yet in that split second I have revisited fourteen years: the fourteen years I spent as a disordered eater.
Christmas and New Year are ever thus. Months of being deluged with encouragement to overindulge, followed by an onslaught of diet adverts, and exercise regimes, and new year, new you, because the old one wasn’t good enough. Vegan food and salads on promotion in the shops instead of pigs in blankets and brandy butter, because lots of food was good yesterday, but it’s bad now. Easter chocolate’s on sale too, just to confuse you, because yes you should be salady and pure, but you also know you’re going to fall off the wagon and if you do, you may as well do it with a creme egg.
It washes over me now. I don’t care. I couldn’t afford to care, even if I wanted to.
But it leaves behind a certain sadness, like flotsam deposited by the tide. Because not all diets lead to eating disorders, but all disordered eating starts with a diet. Mine did, at least.
I was 18. A short, thin child turned tall, thin teenager, I had just finished school and went to live in France for six months. It was my first taste of freedom – literally. I was a kid in a candy, cheese, croissant, éclair, pain au chocolat and gateau store.
That sentence should help to dispel one of the enduring myths about disordered eaters – that we don’t like our food. In my experience, very often we love our food – it’s ourselves we don’t like. And that’s where the problems start, as food becomes the way you manage the awful reality of spending all day, every day being ashamed of who you are. Overeating helps: it offers comfort from the harsh real world. Undereating helps: when you feel plain and awkward, it confers on you the highest level of attractiveness a woman can have in modern society: thinness. Self-deprivation assuages your feelings of guilt and unworthiness; it makes you feel successful and strong-willed. I loved my food; but it was also something I could rely on to manage my negative emotions in a frightening and confusing world where nothing worked as it was supposed to.
And so these are the facts, which I state impartially. I was never fat. When I came back to England, I was at the lower end of the healthy weight range for my height. But the stone I had gained in six months sat uneasily with me, always enviably super-thin, and with my clothes. The wrong things were said, which didn’t help and I wish they had not been, but without them the same thing would probably have happened anyway; the real roots of this problem had been laid down years earlier.
So I went on a diet, stuck to it and had lost the stone by the time I went to university in the autumn. Once there, without scales to keep me on the straight and narrow (literally), I decided to err on the safe side and continue being careful – portions were larger than they were at home. I was happy to have lost a couple more pounds when I went home at Christmas.
At any point, I could have turned back, but if you’ve ever been on a slide, you’ll know it’s exhilarating.
It’s also hard to know at what point you have a problem, set against the backdrop of a society where worrying about food and weight is normal. Based on a quick assessment of my female friends and acquaintances, ten per cent have been diagnosed with an eating disorder or had experience of it in their close family; a further third have, at least from my observations, aspects to their relationship with food and weight which are not healthy. It would be obvious to most people that those in the former group were suffering – but that makes the existence of the latter group more worrying, because they’re the ones whose attitudes to diet and self-image are normalised. Attitudes like:
“I worry all the time about my weight, even now. It’s really sad, I really wish I could stop”
“I was always the fat friend”
“I don’t have an eating disorder, but I don’t like living at home because I worry about putting on weight”
“I weigh myself every day, sometimes more than once”
These are all things normal women, with normal, healthy bodies, have said to me, three of them within the last three months. Normal women of all ages, all cultural backgrounds, all nationalities, all social classes say and think these things, diet when they have a healthy BMI, refer to “being good” and “being naughty” around food as if they are five years old. And normal men, with normal, healthy bodies, fall victim to this too – the Priory Group estimates that a quarter of all eating disorder sufferers are male.
How, in such a context, do you know that your own eating habits are out of control? Outside my family, to whose concerns I was ill disposed to listen for a variety of reasons, no one apart from my schoolfriend Kelly ever said anything to me that I can recall. In fact the reverse was true. For most of my twenties, I weighed well below the threshold at which someone would normally be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. Yet even at this weight, people would remark frequently on how they envied my lovely thin figure, and my on-off boyfriend in my early twenties would praise my slimness. Even doctors rarely said anything apart from “you’re very thin,” despite the fact that I must have been at risk of weakened bones and other health issues.
Yes, it should have been obvious to me that there was a major problem. I weighed myself once or twice a day and would not eat dinner if I was a pound over my allotted maximum. Deciding whether or not to eat a biscuit could feel like a decision of monumental importance. I once cried when I had to buy a dress in a size 14. I can remember evenings when I wanted to throw my dinner against the wall. Yet in company, I still ate well, so no one realised, or appeared to realise, that anything was wrong. I didn’t hold others to the same standards as I held myself, of course, and vehemently believed that people should be accepted whatever their size – or thought I did. In reality there can be an ugly element of competitiveness to disordered eating – competitiveness born of insecurity, but still. However much you believe that size doesn’t matter, you still want to make sure you have the edge over everyone else.
The other myth about disordered eaters is that we all starve ourselves dramatically. I never starved myself, never went so much as a day without eating. I ate a reasonable amount of nutritious food. I just consistently didn’t eat enough. Indeed, you can be eating quite normally and still have a problem – it’s your attitude to food that matters. And towards the end, in my early thirties, I was definitely eating enough; I just ate little all day and binge-ate chocolate at night. I would probably have developed bulimia if things had carried on like this. Even seven years later, I cannot write this without shame. The shame is enormous.
The psychology here is slightly odd, in that this was an unhappy time in my life, when all my self-esteem issues had come to a head, and disordered eating had somehow become both the solution and the problem. Binge eating comforts you. It also leaves you in no doubt that you are really not well. But even that also feels like a comfort, because the unhappiness your disordered eating generates is a diversion from the underlying unhappiness and self-hatred at the core of your life. I still look back at that time and wonder how I would have gotten through without my eating problems to divert my focus. In reality, though, masking one serious problem with another just means you end up with two serious problems. Lack of proper nourishment was almost certainly affecting my brain chemistry, and I experienced a recurrence of the thoughts of hopelessness and suicide which had left me alone since I was 21. Things had to change. Perhaps, if I fixed one of my sources of unhappiness, I might also find myself able to do something about the others.
In the end, a dreadful stomach bug broke the starve-binge cycle, and I made up my mind I wouldn’t restart it. On Monday, March 18, 2013, I changed my life; I stopped being a disordered eater. I did this overnight: I started to eat properly, and I kept going. But whereas the physical changes can be made in an instant, the emotional ones cannot. The anxiety and low self-esteem did not go away. I relapsed. But the gaps between relapses got longer, and then they stopped happening. I still worried, still felt guilty about food, but gradually I thought about it less and less, and then that, too, stopped happening. In November of that year I threw away my scales. I had never lived without scales. I have not lived with them since.
The five-year relationship I started at the end of 2013 helped, not least because it meant regular meals from a good cook. When we broke up, in 2018, I vaguely wondered if I might wobble. I did not, for in those five years, I had gradually learned to like and accept myself, and this could not now be unlearned. I had never really learned to cook, and so I began to teach myself; I loved it and seem to be quite good. I realised then that it was really over. I was better. I had stopped caring. Life was too short. The price was too high.
Fourteen years of my life, given over to worrying about something that doesn’t matter; and yet I am glad that I was unwell, because it meant I got to escape. Instead of remaining trapped forever in the cycle of dieting-not dieting, of feeling happy with oneself only if the scales show a certain number, of judging one’s personal worth and moral standing by what one has eaten, I got out. I can now appreciate the extent not only to which many people’s attitudes to food are dysfunctional, but also to which they are in denial about it.
There is a bit of me that has not escaped and maybe never will. I cannot really judge portion sizes. I panic if my dinner plans are suddenly cancelled. Comments on what I am eating, or on what others are eating, why they are eating so much, why they are eating so little, can grate on me in a way that is sometimes hard to tolerate without losing my shit with whoever has made the unfortunate remark. How I would cope if I ever did become unhealthily overweight is not a question to which I really know the answer. I try not to think about it. But on the whole, I am more well than I ever thought I could be, and more well than we seem to want women to be in relation to food and weight.
So am I saying that no one should ever go on a diet, at new year or at any other time; that no one should worry about their weight or about eating healthily; no, of course not. I am saying that when fourteen years of tormenting yourself seems like a fair price to pay for escaping what otherwise is, for many women, a lifetime of anything from anxiety to wretchedness, we need to face up to how distorted our view of these matters really is. Most of us probably already realise that our collective values around weight and food are skewed; and yet between 1.25 million and 3.4 million people in the UK have an eating disorder, 64.3 per cent of adults are overweight and 26 million people were thought to have started a diet in January 2019. We not only aren’t dealing with the problem, we aren’t even close to being able to acknowledge the extent of it.
Solutions to this problem? That’s a whole other post. I wouldn’t recommend my own experiences – but I’d recommend the collective misery we remain trapped in even less.
The Loop 