Anorexia

I wasn’t going to write about this, because I think that I’ve whined about it to rather a lot of people already.

But I saw something in the news that got me riled up about it again. So here goes . . .
There was an article in my online news stream about a woman who now works as a plus size model, but who was previously told that she was too fat to work despite having previously dropped to a size zero as a result of anorexia. The story is probably not an original one, but it angered me anyway. The woman detailed how she would live on one apple a day and described how she became very thin and very depressed, to the degree where she hated herself completely.

And this woman’s story really got to me because I just thought, with genuine sympathy: “Ooh, this must have been hard!” Because, unless you’ve actually tried it, I don’t think you’ll necessarily realize just how physically painful starving yourself is. I know what that’s like, because I have done it. I have been anorexic. In fact I have suffered from all manner of eating disorders at various points in my life – it just depends what I’ve convinced myself of at any particular time – and I still don’t have a particularly normal attitude to food even now. I struggle with it and it stays with me no matter what I do. And it is actually a problem.

But the biggest problem, I suppose is that I hate my body whether it is fat or thin.

When I was at my most skinny I was relatively pleased with being able to fit into child-sized clothes, but that was all the enjoyment I got out of it. I could never really enjoy being thinner and lighter than I had been before because I was always so obsessed with not putting on weight again. I used to tell myself, in quite a commanding, fear-inspiring voice, that I couldn’t eat a particular thing because it would make me fat and that would be like the worst thing in the world (worse than death). Sometimes it would just be specific foods and then, when it got really bad, I was telling myself, literally, to stop eating. I really didn’t eat much of anything for several years during my twenties and I think I was, at one point, living on boiled carrots and apples . . . oh, and beetroot. (Don’t ask!) But at that point I was also suicidal, either because I wasn’t eating properly or because I couldn’t bring myself to, or just because life was really bad at that time, and the starvation was no longer just about being thin but actually killing myself.

I did a real number on myself basically. It started as a self-improvement thing and then it just became a great big downward spiral into self-destruction. By the end I really wanted to die and starvation seemed to be the quickest and easiest route – I was already halfway there anyway and I was used to the pain. Slitting my wrists would hurt more because it would be new pain that I would not be used to. That was my logic. But I reached breaking point and my body just wouldn’t let me do it to myself any more.

As I said though, the anorexia was only one phase of my eating disorders; I have also had phases of binge eating (this followed directly on from the anorexia I think – I would eat breakfast cereal by the box load when I was first “recovering”, it wasn’t pretty) bulimia (which interspersed the anorexia and, I think, carried over when I started the bingeing), crazy diets that involve eating only one kind of food, drastic exercise regimes that saw me vacuuming the whole house and moving out all the furniture before I would allow myself a tin of peaches and some apple juice for breakfast, and so on and so on.

I have been on some kind of diet since I was a teenager and I have been made to feel self-conscious about my weight since way before that. I don’t want to blame my mother entirely, because there were a lot of other people who contributed to this. But I think it started with her because she fed me all the junk food in the world to make up for all the insecurities I had as a child (of which there were many) and I suppose she thought, in the immediate stage, that this would make me feel better. The problem with this was that she then contradicted the act of giving me the junk food by complaining that I was getting too fat and then rapidly removing it and forcing me to live on salad. I ate what she gave me but she was always telling me I was eating the wrong thing and that this was somehow my fault and not hers. So I got a complex. I became confused about food – what was right and wrong, what should I eat or not eat, whose opinion should I listen to? Because I was never told to follow my own instincts or listen to my own body, I was always led to assume that it was up to other people to dictate to me what I should eat but, crucially, if they got it wrong and I ended up getting fat or sick, I could not blame them because it was my body and my choice.

So then, later, I got a complex about my weight because my mother told me I was too fat and the other kids at school told me I was too fat, and I started to get the message that this was unacceptable. All through my life, really, I have been given that same message, that the main reason I was so unacceptable to other people was because I was fat, and that my life would be so much better if I just got thinner and fitted in with all the other normal-sized, pretty people.

I’m not going to lie, there was a certain logic to this. Confidence does a lot for you and being thin to the point where you finally believe you look like everyone else gives you a lot of confidence. The trouble was that, in order for me to do this, I had to become very very abnormal in the way I ate and the way I behaved. Eating disorders are really quite antisocial things to have because you can’t eat most of the food that other people eat in public and, if you do, you usually have some totally abnormal and really quite disgusting way of doing it. The bingeing thing is probably the most common one that you will see in public; people who stuff themselves full of food at the table and then excuse themselves and run to the bathroom to throw up, or worse. But, I mean, I went through some pretty horrendous phases with mine; eating vegetables in great raw lumps, like a savage when I was starving – usually in front of a mirror so that I could verbally abuse myself while I did it – and then taking laxatives to get rid of it all a.s.a.p. It’s mad! And it’s not something that you can do with people around because they would easily, and rightly, call you mad and think you were some disgusting freak.

I know that these things are not normal. But, here is the problem as I see it: I can’t lose weight by eating like a normal person. I’ve tried. Every time I try to eat a healthy, balanced diet, for whatever reason, my body fights me on it every step of the way and ends up ballooning to the size of . . . well, a hot air balloon. I know nobody gives much credence to food intolerances any more, but I am convinced that my body just will not process certain kinds of food – bread, pasta, cheese, that sort of thing – and that I have to cut them out if I’m going to have a hope of keeping off all the weight.

Basically then, I ruined my relationship to food entirely when I became anorexic because I only allowed myself what I called “functional” food – stuff that I thought would do something for my body, or go through my body quickly and make me lose more weight. Most of what I did eat was pretty horrible, a lot of it was hard to eat and my digestive system did not thank me. But you will eat anything when you’re starving. Nevertheless, after a few months of doing this I just gave up and stopped eating completely.

Like I said, it was a long and complicated process. But the interesting thing about that time was how angry and embittered I became. It wasn’t just anger at myself, but anger at the world as well. Because people didn’t notice what was happening to me – well, my mum did, of course, but no one else. All the other people I knew – if they saw me at all – just told me how good I was looking, commenting on how much better I appeared to be now that I had grown up and stopped being the scowling fat freak that they used to know. I had something of a reputation as a teenager for being moody and overweight and people still remember this about me and laugh as though it’s hilariously funny. But they never thought to ask why I was like that; they never once guessed that I might just have been truly fucking miserable and feeling abject hatred for myself. And, more crucially, they just never saw that they had had a hand in this.

And this is what made me angry when I saw that article, because I know what that woman went through. I have been through it, albeit under different circumstances. And it just made me angry at the world, in general. Because people in this world, we must realize, just don’t tolerate body fat. They hate it, actually, as if it was something so horribly offensive that it should be eradicated from the planet. People have evil attitudes to fat people and will say and do evil things to the point where they can make people hate themselves and want to destroy themselves.
But why?

You could say that those people hate themselves; certainly when I was thinner and starving all the time, I became very mean towards other people. I would look at other people’s bodies and think to myself “How dare she look like that?”

If I saw an overweight woman in the street I would think smugly to myself about how good I looked in comparison, and then I would think something evil about what a fat cow I thought she was. I know how twisted this was now, but I did it because I thought, “Hey, I’m doing all this work to try to and keep myself skinny – and it’s a full time job. And if I have to do it then why shouldn’t other people be forced to do it as well?”

Equally, if I saw a skinny woman walking along the street stuffing a chocolate bar or a sandwich into her mouth I would feel rage because I couldn’t understand how such a woman could possibly dare to rub my face in her ability to eat and not get fat. I hated other people, basically – I sized them up and psychologically eviscerated them. I was seething with anger all the time and if you’d seen the things inside my head you’d have been horrified. So I think that’s why a lot of thin people, and particularly thin women and girls, hate fat people. It’s not because there’s anything actually wrong with being bigger, it’s because those thin people are probably obsessed with their own weight and can’t understand how the same rules and pressures that seem to apply to them don’t apply to other people who just eat whatever they want and then buy bigger clothes.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is just that thin people are mean. But they’re mean because they’re hungry; they’re denying themselves so many things, and they’re doing this because they think they have to. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, because those mean people destroy the happiness of other people and turn them into equally obsessive and mean individuals, and then the cycle starts again, and again.

I wish that I could go back to my school days and show those girls, the ones who called me horrendous names and humiliated me in public, what damage they did to me. I wish that I could have gone back in time in my anorexic state and shown them the bones sticking out of my arms and back, the visible tendons underneath my skin, the scary angles of my elbows, wrists and ankles, or my skeletal fingers. I used to think about them and get so angry and think that if I could just see them again then I could make them bloody sorry for all the crappy things they made me think about myself.

But then, of course, they wouldn’t feel anything in response to that, would they? Because people say things without thinking. They don’t think about what impact they’re going to have on other people’s lives; and then they just go on with their own lives and forget all about it. They don’t pay any attention when they hurt someone else because hey, someone else’s private and personal pain is their business right? All that matters in the outside world is appearance. You just have to look like you’re happy and beautiful and then everything’s ok, because really nobody cares what goes on inside you or how miserable you are, even if they caused it.

Personally, I’ve always been wary of people who tell you they like/love you because you’re beautiful. If that’s the first reason someone gives you as to why they’re with you then you should leave them immediately. Because that’s not enough. Beauty, aesthetic beauty anyway, is not a reason to like or love someone; that’s shallow and myopic. There is an infinite world of things inside each and every person and, whatever they look like on the outside, you should not write this off.

This world stinks, because of its prejudices and because it teaches us all to be so prejudicial and to turn all the hatred for ourselves outwards so that it impacts on other people. And that damages people and drives them to do crazy things to themselves just so that they can fit in and feel normal.

Why??

That’s all I want to know. WHY THE FUCK DO WE DO THAT?