An unhealthy relationship

No posts for ages, then two come along at once –like buses, or, theoretically, men! I’ve had this ready to post for some time, and then the next followed before I’d had time to post…

Food is both my best friend and my worst enemy. I love it for its’ ability to uplift, to distract, to elicit memories and stir the senses, to nourish both body and soul. Simultaneously, I loathe it for its’ guilt-inducing properties, ability to make me even more self-conscious, and for the effect it has - expanding my waistline, hips, thighs, upper arms; obscuring my collarbones – and the knock-on effect that has on my self-confidence.

My relationship with food runs in swings and round-abouts. At times, sometimes for long periods, I can control my desires, can enforce the self-discipline requisite to eat little and exercise much. For example, from roughly September 2007 until June of 2008, food and I were friends – a little give and take here and there, but mostly on good terms. This period was inspired by the works of Mireille Giuliano – author of French Women Don’t Get Fat and coincided with one of the busiest, happiest and most successful periods of my life to date, and marked a rise in self-confidence unparalleled before or since. At other times, such as now, when I am bored and under-employed, simultaneously stressed and relaxed, when my kitchen scales are broken, my purse empty and my will-power virtually non-existent, when I am lonely and treats are all around me, the fridge is full of sweet things required by the non-existent appetite of my elderly housemate, and I spend far too much time at home, essentially by myself, without many sources of distraction, food wins the battle without even a token resistance.

I’m sure food is not supposed to be a battle of these proportions – few of my friends and colleagues seem to find it so. There are the usual “oh, I’ve been so naughty”, “oh, I mustn’t, but go on!” exclamations from the perfectly slim. There are the ones who seem to eat what they please, exercise not at all and never gain an ounce on their perfect size 10 bodies. There are the girls, and increasingly men, who seem to actually enjoy existing on salad, and there are a few who were my size once upon a time, or larger, albeit usually on much smaller frames, who suddenly, miraculously, seemed to shed their oversize skins and emerge as perfect, immaculate, societally-pleasing mannequins. None of these girls seem willing to share the story of exactly how they achieved this remarkable transformation, but their implication is always that it was easy, no big deal, that one day they just decided to stop enjoying food and start enjoying sweaty, masochistic pain I’ve been on and off diets since I was eight years old. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that it is not easy. I also know that there must be a reason why some see food as a small part of life, and others, myself included, see it as a minefield of emotions to be crossed with enormous care and trepidation.

My mother was very good about food. Three good meals a day, very limited snacking, and certain things – sugary, salty, yummy things - definitely reserved for treats. In fact, so determined was she to avoid excess sugar, colourings and preservatives, that she made our own ice-cream, muesli bars with an excess of nuts (for my taste), and homemade birthday cakes that were undoubtedly the coolest and most creative cakes around, but never, ever, had buttercream icing. Highly coloured fizzy drinks and Coca Cola were banned outright. Even lemonade or ginger ale was for special occasions only. Crisps, when we, very rarely, had them were only ever ‘lightly salted’, gum was out altogether (unladylike) and there was a very definite line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. As a young woman, she had been impossibly thin – her old seventies skirts and dresses in the dress-up trunk confirmed that – I doubt even Scarlett O’Hara’s legendary 17-inch waist would have got into one of my mother’s skirts. Certainly, I never have, in conscious memory. Photos until around 1989, well after my arrival and some time after that of my sister, still show a remarkably good figure. I remember that she went swimming and to yoga before my younger sister was born, five years after I, but I imagine that the stress of having two young daughters, a business just on the edge of taking off, an increasingly difficult husband, and the ever-decreasing metabolism of a woman in her 40’s probably contributed to the rounder figure I remember consciously and know well.

I don’t consciously remember when I started using food as an emotional crutch. I remember feeling simultaneously ‘special’ and a little self-righteous and utterly deprived by my mother’s seemingly unreasonable stance on mass-produced ice cream and butter-creamed birthday cakes (I still don’t know what that particular issue was about!), and I remember her attempts to help when classmates taunted me for being ‘fat’ – I was certainly a chubby kid, in the way many small children are, but hardly deserving of that derogatorily-toned epithet – by taking me to Weight Watchers, or sending me to school with lunches made up entirely of fresh fruit and vegetables, and cottage cheese, which I still can barely bring myself to eat, unless on Ryvita crackers with tomatoes and LOTS of salt and pepper. I remember occasional furtive forays up the step-ladder to attempt to find a ‘treat’ – more a form of mild rebellion than anything else - and the usual distressing absence of anything appealing in the ‘treats cupboard’ above the crockery cupboard, and the subsequent substitution of crumpets with butter and honey, or English muffins or cinnamon toast. I really don’t remember when it was, but I do remember the discovery that the chocolate chips were kept in a jar on the top shelf in the pantry, and that with very little mountaineering I could reach the jar and devour handfuls at a time, or pour the pieces straight into my mouth, and that they were easily replaced from the packets kept in the ingredient drawers underneath the work bench. Why it never occurred to me just to take the packets, I’ve no idea.

From there, it escalated. Food was an escape, a distraction – something essential to a little girl with a ludicrously high IQ, whose day-to-day school life left her totally unstimulated, despite the efforts of individual teachers, my mother and a raft of child psychologists. A rather lonely little girl, whose family was disintegrating around her, with a father becoming more irrational, violent, and unpredictable by the day, and a mother who was away overseas for several months of the year. Don’t get me wrong – she was right to go away, and I’m quite sure that being a stay-at-home mother would have been deeply unhealthy for both her and us. I understand the need to get out of a terrifyingly small and narrow-minded society – after all, I started trying to find a way out when I was barely in my teens, and moved halfway around the world two months after my nineteenth birthday. Every time I’ve been back – three times in eight years – the insidious claustrophobia begins to get me even as I touch down in the self-important, grotty, provincial airport. Nonetheless, as a seven, or ten or twelve year old, feeling abandoned to the untender mercies of a wrathful father and a string of more-or-less spineless and incompetent nannies, it felt like desertion. Food filled that gap. Food was comforting and increasingly easy to get – increased imports of American and European foods – things I’d tried on our travels – increasing influence over the contents of the supermarket trolley, culminating in my teens when I actually did the household grocery shopping, sparing my mother one of her most detested tasks and fundamentally changing the contents of our cupboards, and easier access to money – pocket money, bank accounts, small change filched from my parents’ dressing table – all meant that my food intake was no longer regulated by my mother’s rules. Being forbidden fruit, naturally all the ‘bad’ foods were the most appealing, and ‘bad’ foods consumed in private, furtively, with the thrill of possible discovery, were the best of all.

To the public eye, even in my worst food phases, I eat normally, well even, with restraint and appreciation. What the public doesn’t see is the bingeing – whether an all-out emotional binge – of which there hasn’t been a major episode in several years – or the more normal consistent day-to-day bingeing – eating too much of something, or a treat, or several, every day, even when my better, rational self is shouting “NO”, even when the motivations that should give me will power to resist are so visible and when I know that my aspirations, my hopes and dreams are not well-served by this behaviour.

Food replaces so many things in my life – friendship, comfort, intellectual stimulation, love – I don’t know how to begin to eliminate the excess from my life. I feel I am fighting so many battles at the moment, that this is one battle too many, yet it is one I must start fighting, and I must win. I’m tall and solidly built, so the fat doesn’t show on me as it would on a smaller person. Nonetheless, it has to go. For my long-term health, for my self-esteem, for my sanity, for my hope of some sexual contact with someone at some point in the future. Unfortunately, I think that the fat has become a defence – that in some way, my mind hangs onto it, and enhances it, because it is a barrier between me and the things I consciously desire most – a successful career, a loving, physical relationship – and subconsciously fear. Somehow I have to convince my brain to let go. In reality, I’m not even sure if it’s the fat keeping me safe, or me keeping the fat safe – how messed up is that!?

Logically, I know that there are people far larger than me with successful careers in my field, and millions around the globe who have full, satisfying romantic and sexual lives. Instinctively though, I do not believe that I can have either while I am still overweight. Why I should be afraid of either is a mystery, and I don’t really think I am afraid of career success – especially right now, I’d welcome it. Sex, on the other hand, and intimacy with a male even more, poses a few terrors, mostly I am sure, related to my very difficult relationship with my father. Although in the last few years things have improved somewhat in that sphere, at a subconscious level, it seems I’m still a little girl, terrified that the man who is supposed to love her unconditionally is really going to lose his temper this time, and petrified of the consequences. It’s pretty easy to see how that sort of fear might spill over to inhibit any possible romantic attachments. Love equals fear. Fat equals a safety blanket.

Like I said, not a healthy relationship.