The Tentacles of Anorexia

 How did I transition from being a starving teenager ready to eat anything in sight to imposing a strict diet on myself, being famished and not allowing any food to cross my lips? I´m not sure. But I do know that it happened sometime when I was 17 or 18 years old. Although it probably wasn’t a single event that served as the catalyst for the decision I took to starve myself. It was more like a process, a process that evolved around my need for control. I wanted more control over my life and yet it was the diet that came to control me, to terrify me, because I did not know how to escape it.

Anorexia is a mindset in which the tentacles of the condition gradually tighten their control over your intake of food, and from there it metastasises on to your whole life, or at least that is the way it was for me. If there was a moment that signalled the onset of the condition, it could have been the day when my civil service colleague, Kay, spoke with a sense of achievement about the success of her new diet. In the previous month she had lost six kilos and was aiming to lose at least this much in the current month. I looked at her waistline and from there to her face. Kay looked a bit thin. If she regarded herself as in need of weight loss, then what must she think of me? I wasn’t sure whether I was thin or average because I hadn’t given it any thought, but from that moment onward, I knew that I too wanted to control my weight.

Counting calories seemed to be the best way of doing this. Within a short time, I had a diet chart and familiarised myself with the number of calories contained in the items of food that I most regularly ate. Above all, I learned that if I wanted to limit my calorie intake to 800 daily then I could not eat Mars bars or suchlike any longer. Neither could I eat sandwiches, pies, tarts or cream cakes for lunch if I was restricting my intake of calories per day, especially given that I was expected to eat dinner with my sister and parents after work.

The pressure was on to stay away from carbohydrates if I was serious about losing weight. This meant I had to review what I ate and how I lived in order to restrict my calorie intake to the target a maximum of 800 every day. To do this I would lie in bed longer in the mornings, rising at 6.15 instead of 6.00, meaning that I would be too late to stop and have breakfast. After a 40-minute bus journey, I had a 10-minute walk to my office, but that walk took me past a shop that sold bacon sandwiches, hot pies and a vast range of sweets and chocolates. Walking past it and not going in when I was famished required some willpower, but I knew that if I gave in to my hunger pangs, I would hate myself. I aimed to be stoic and iron-willed. If I yielded and bought breakfast, that controlling part of me would make my life hell for the rest of the day.

By lunchtime, I would be ravenous and triumphant at the same time if I had managed to succeed in eating nothing all morning. This meant that if I’d achieved my goal of eating nothing from 6 pm to 12 mid-day, I would have met my target of 18-hours without eating. I was enervated but hugely successful in my own eyes. If I could do that  every day then I might be able to realistically lower my  of a daily maximum of 800 calories to 700. But I never got that far because I found it impossible to exceed my target, so it remained fixed and was never lowered. I acknowledged this ongoing defeat with a strong sense of self-loathing. That belly of mine would always protrude over the top of my jeans and my thighs refused to be slimmed down. As for my dream of being a size 8, not a 10, that went out of the window.

Lack of willpower was only one factor responsible for my perceived failure. Another was the obligation to eat an evening meal with my family. Daily, the four of us sat down at the table around 6:00 and everyone was expected to eat what was in front of them; nothing could be left on the plate to be thrown away. It had been this way ever since I was a small child and the rule had not changed since then; I’d exhausted every argument and withstood any number of my stepmother’s slaps in my endeavour to eat less or, as now, eat nothing at all. There was no way out and I raged silently during and after each meal as I inwardly counted the number of calories I’d been forced to eat. On those days I hated my stepmother intensely and, in my rage, I determined to defeat her and stay on course for my 800-calorie target... somehow or other.

That was when I heard about bulimia. The word was new to me and I had to deduce its meaning from the context of the article featuring it in the tabloid newspaper that my father bought every day. Bulimia, I discovered, is binge eating and then vomiting. Binge eating had no place in my life, but I felt that if I could vomit the meal I had just eaten, then I would be able to meet my daily calorie target, in spite of my stepmother, so I tried it one evening. I ate at the table, washed up as usual, and then went to the bathroom, leaned over the toilet and heaved.

Initially, very little came up, but I tried again and again, each time striving to bring up more and within a few minutes I’d managed to regurgitate around half my meal. I was overjoyed, barely able to believe how easy it was to vomit at will. Most evenings after that, I went to the bathroom to regurgitate my meal as stealthily as I could, taking care to leave no traces behind in the toilet bowl. Somehow or other my parents discovered what I was up to and forbade me to enter the bathroom for an hour after I’d eaten. On those evenings, I’d cycle up to my friend Anna’s house and use her bathroom; plus, this had the added advantage of using up extra calories through exercise on the bike.

Even though I restricted my calories and regurgitated my food to be slimmer, I was never satisfied with my bodily image. My stomach and my thighs were the problem areas because they always appeared to be fat. Many times I could not look at myself in the mirror; my own body form – with layer upon layer of fat – repulsed me. When I left home to study at university, I took my weight issues with me to the students’ residence and so the ugly cycle of unhappiness and self-loathing continued for years. Once, a representative of the students’ union came to my room to express concerns about my weight, evoking the fear that I’d been found out.

Deep down, I knew that I was trapped by my obsession with thinness and was aware of how unhappy it was making me. At least one other student in my year also had anorexia and it was really obvious in her case because she was almost skeletal in appearance. The university had threatened to withdraw her from the course if her weight dropped again. And it did. She was gone. But I didn’t consider myself to be ill at all , or certainly not as ill as her. Nevertheless, the sight of this girl in the dining room, her eyes fixed on the selection of food, food that she would never taste, was unnerving and somewhere deep inside me felt very dark. 

After I graduated, I stayed with some friends in a rented house. There were four of us and only one bathroom, so this made it very difficult for me to proceed with my routine of eating and then vomiting. It was just too noisy because no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t silence the retches. That’s when I hid a bowl in my room to vomit in while I had music playing. Despite my attempts to cover up I suspected that everyone in the house knew what I was up to, but I couldn’t stop. No matter how ashamed I felt, I just couldn’t stop. I despaired that I would ever again have a healthy attitude to food.

This could have continued ad infinitum or until I starved myself to death, but then I was offered a teaching position in Spain. It was a job I’d applied for in a rush because my life was going nowhere. Once there, I very quickly learned that food is at the centre of Spanish life and opting out was not possible if I wanted to integrate, and I did, I had to eat. I learned that the Mediterranean cuisine is one of the healthiest in the world and that while Spaniards eat in abundance, very few are overweight. Salads, vegetables and grilled fish or meat are not packed with carbohydrates and sugar but they are high in vitamins, minerals, and protein; they are nutritious and that is the most important factor. It was a revelation to me that I could have breakfast plus two other meals a day and not become overweight. Besides, I didn’t want the people I lived with to know what I was up to. I was ashamed, deeply ashamed of myself.

My lifestyle in Spain meant I was able to walk away from anorexia with a more or less healthy attitude toward food. I lost the will to vomit because I was ashamed of it… wasting food when there was widespread starvation in the world. The upshot is that while I’m no longer anorexic, the enamel on my teeth is wearing thin because of the acid content of the food I vomited for years. I also suffer from chronic constipation because my digestive system was interrupted in its natural course; for so long very little food reached the bowels and hence they almost forgot how to function. For seven years my body was traumatised by vomiting and starvation and now I have no choice but to continue to pay the price. That is the legacy of the years trapped in the grip of anorexia.