The Food Issue

I have this recurring dream, and in it I like food. I enjoy eating, whether it's alone or with company. I like to cook, and I do it well. I eat healthy foods, three or four times a day. I feel generally comfortable with the whole process of taking in nourishment, and even eat some things for pleasure. I don't feel self-conscious when I'm eating in front of people, and I don't feel guilty for having the occasional treat.

In my dream I'm comfortable in my body, and happy that food provides the fuel for it, and the nutrients that keep it looking and feeling healthy. As I eat, I slowly but steadily lose weight until I'm at my optimum. From that point on, every bite that crosses my lips makes my body hotter and my features more beautiful for a short time. After a sandwich I look cute and sexy, and after a three-course meal at Chiquitos, I glow with an inner fire to rival that of any ancient goddess.

The reality of my life is very different. To put it politely, I have issues about weight, both in that I'm overweight, and in my perception of what I should be.

I never admit to having an eating disorder. I never let my food issues go that far, because I know that I need to eat to survive, and I have the medical background and the statistics to know how far I can push it before I put my health at serious risk. By which I in no way intend to imply that what I do and don't do is healthy; I'm merely trying to explain why I don't consider myself a serious enough case to have the eating disorder label.

Finding the energy and the will - and sometimes the money - to eat well has been a constant battle for the last ten years, but the problems started a long time before that. I went on my first diet a week or two after my fifth birthday, and I've been on one or another ever since. Although months, or even years, would sometimes go by when I refused to adhere to a weight-loss plan, there was always that feeling in my mind that any food other than plain vegetables was an indulgence rather than a necessity. Most of the time I did my best to ignore it, because I just wanted to be normal like all my friends. But it was always there.

It didn't help that I developed early. As a toddler I was chubby and cute, and taller than the rest of my friends. At five and six, I was the classic golden girl: blonde hair, blue eyes, skin that easily turned gold in the sun, long slender limbs - and tall enough to wear clothes for ten and eleven-year-olds. I was always hungry at that age, and I assumed it was mental - it never occurred to me that it was because I was growing. At six I returned from Spain to England, and the combination of pre-packed food and weather that caused a heap of health problems and didn't allow for daily exercise made me put on a lot of weight. At nine I got my periods and my breasts, and the latter just kept growing - on my tenth birthday I wore a 28B; by the time I was eleven and a half I was a 32C. Sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds were asking me out, thinking I was their age, before I started secondary school.

Looking back, I think the biggest problem I had with food, growing up, was that nothing was ever stable. The rules about what I could and couldn't eat changed so frequently that I never learned what was good and what was bad. My mom would put me on a diet - and then reward me with a candy bar and a bowl of ice cream. When I visited my Dad he would take me to restaurants and shower me with food, insisting that I should eat a bit more, but at home my Mom often mentioned how my father told her that he was very worried about my weight and my atrocious table manners. One month I'd get chastised for eating too much, the next month people would be concerned about me not eating enough. Sometimes my chubbiness seemed to be a source of concern for my parents, and then other times they'd insist that it was just puppy fat, and would go in time. So I got used to living on a pendulum, and started to swing myself. I'd have periods of a couple months when I begged to be allowed to eat hamburgers and chocolate and crisps, the way all my friends did, and then a couple months when Mom would give me my lunch money and every day I'd eat a plate of lettuce and half a bread roll, with occasional bits of cottage cheese. None of it made me thin.

I don't want you to think that my parents starved me or anything, because that certainly wasn't the case. It wasn't that I was forbidden from eating things - it was more that when I DID eat them, a little nugget of guilt was added to an ever-growing pile. I still haven't worked out exactly where that guilt came from. What I do know is that whether I was in an ignoring or a succumbing phase, there was always the underlying knowledge that food was both the temptation and the enemy.

I did eat pretty well all through high school, though - even the months when I skipped breakfast and ate salad for lunch, I got a hot meal in the evenings - and while I was constantly battling with my weight, I figured that eventually I'd get the right blend of food and exercise that would give me the body I wanted.

I went to Spain for six months after high school, and that was wonderful. I swam and took long walks every day, ate tons of healthy, fresh (i.e. not full of additives) food, and got to a place where I looked and felt curvy and slightly plump rather than morbidly obese.

Then I moved back to England, sans Mama, and started college. And when I started college, I stopped eating, for one simple reason: I couldn't afford to. Monday afternoon through Thursday morning, I lived with my Dad and stepmother in London. I've never been able to stomach breakfast much (although some days I tried to force down a piece of toast) and the money I was given for travel every week didn't stretch to lunch. I suppose I could have packed a lunch, and occasionally I did, but I found it embarrassing to take in sandwiches like an elementary schoolkid when the cool, streetwise Londoners wanted me to go for McDonalds, or Chinese, or Thai, or Caribbean. So I missed breakfast, had a 40p cup of coffee from the machine for lunch, and usually had a bowl of pasta and vegetables with a couple pieces of wafer-thin turkey for dinner. That's if I made it back for dinner at all, since some days I had too much homework and worked at the library right through the dinner hour.

Thursday afternoon through Monday morning I lived in St. Albans with my brother, and food there was hit-or-miss. Some weeks I'd eat like a queen, because we'd go grocery shopping and he'd tell me to get whatever I wanted, and other weeks he'd be working or off with his girlfriend or on a fishing trip, and I'd live on yoghurt and dry cereal and rice. It's become very clear to me since then that I was not old enough to be living mostly alone, trying to be responsible for myself, but at the time I was so desperate to stay in school, and convince my parents that I was grown-up, that I just kept pushing aside any voices that told me this wasn't quite how normal people ate.

I could go on and on, but the long and short of it is that I got used to eating one meal a day (and occasionally no meals) when I was in college, and somehow I never quite broke that habit. For the last ten years, my eating patterns have been totally sporadic - some days I'm starving and want to eat everything in sight, including the high-sugar, high-fat foods that I know I shouldn't have, and then other days (probably most days) food doesn't interest me much at all. It got so easy to brush aside concerns about my eating habits - after all, if I was truly malnourished I'd be getting thinner, wouldn't I? - that over the years I've come to see lack of food as normal. It's not so much that I constantly starve myself, it's just that a lot of the time I forget to eat. It doesn't occur to me that maybe I need food. If my mom didn't remind me to eat, I'm not even sure that I'd manage one normal meal a day. A lot of the time it's to do with my fibromyalgia, too. Some days I don't eat, not because I'm trying to lose weight, not because I forget, but because I simply do not have the energy to swallow.

And STILL I am overweight. I went to see a dietician a few years ago, and she put me on an average weight-loss diet - giving me roughly 1200 calories a day - for a month. In a month I gained thirty-two pounds. I went back to the dietician, and she took extensive notes about my normal eating patterns, my history with food, and my medical problems (in addition to the fibromyalgia I have polycystic ovaries, which often make it hard to lose weight). After consultations with my GP, my gynaecologist, my endocrinologist and two specialists in eating disorders, she came to the conclusion that after eighteen years of periodically starving myself, my body has gone into what they call starvation mode or survival mode, in which it slows the metabolism down almost to a stop in an effort to hang onto the little amounts of energy that it can take in. When your body is in starvation mode, you simply cannot shift the weight no matter how hard you try. I was ordered to eat a high-protein, high-complex carb, low-sugar and low-fat diet, and to eat small amounts of food every four to five hours, including protein (preferably meat) with every meal. I have different amount of success with this at different times. The last year and a half I have not had the energy nor the money to follow this, and have slowly seen any weight I lost pile back on.

These days I try to remember to eat. I average 900 calories a day, although some days it's significantly higher or lower. I try to go to the gym for a couple hours a day, although the last few months I've been unable. I wear a size 14 - a US 10 - on a good day.

I did make a promise recently to a friend, that I would at least try to start eating more regularly. What I didn't bank on is how much three meals a day, or even two meals a day, costs. If I continue to eat, I may have to take out a second bank loan.

It's a long road. I like to think that at the end of it is a life with some semblance of a normal relationship with food, but some days it's harder to keep that hope than others.

What about you? Have you ever had a problem with food? If you've suffered from an eating disorder, how did you deal with it?