Weight is a sensitive issue for many (myself included). If it’s an issue for you or now is not a good time for you to be reading about disordered eating and weight loss, I recommend skipping this article.
If you do decide to read on and find yourself feeling irked, judged or offended by anything below, I encourage you to interrogate why that might be. We have a collective habit of interpreting everything an individual woman does with her own body as reflective of women as a group. Let’s resist that strenuously. This is about my own experience of the one body I’ll ever live in. In short, it’s not about you.
Two years after deciding to lose weight and beginning the process of re-evaluating my relationship with food, I’m significantly lighter. It wasn’t just an aesthetically motivated choice. I recognised with something akin to despair that my relationship with food had become compulsive. I feel embarrassed to admit that but it’s the correct word. I did not feel in control of my compulsion to eat. If I didn’t actively enjoy a meal, I felt irrationally churlish and deprived for hours afterwards. When I did eat, I was conscious that I was consuming too much for the physical needs of a person of my stature and noticed that I found it difficult to stop eating a food that I enjoyed once I’d started.
I couldn’t overlook the fact that I was frequently eating until I felt physically uncomfortable (think of that post-Christmas dinner feeling, but regularly) and had begun to spend a significant proportion of each day thinking about food. Not in a brief, appreciative “I’m really looking forward to tonight’s dinner – it’s my favourite” and then getting on with my afternoon kind of way, but in a “when can I next eat/I feel ashamed by how much I just ate/I ate very recently but when offered something I like I’ll eat it despite not being hungry” kind of way. I was fixating on food in a manner that felt non-volitional and that I resented even as I engaged in it.
Behaviours don’t necessarily need to be recognised as a pathology for us to know that we have an issue we need to deal with. A significant element of the unhappiness I felt was in knowing this but not acting on it
Thoughts of food were obstructing my ability to focus, immerse myself in what I was doing and live my life without feeling haunted. Occasionally I would catch myself lying – denying that I had eaten something when I had, or eating something to excess by myself outside of mealtimes and then feeling ashamed. If that is not indicative of a sort of eating disorder, then it is in the very least indicative of disordered eating. Regardless, behaviours don’t necessarily need to be recognised as a pathology for us to know that we have an issue we need to deal with. A significant element of the unhappiness I felt was in knowing this but not acting on it.
Clearly, I had a problem.
My friend Emma Gunavardhana has discussed this slightly opaque corner of the disordered eating spectrum in relation to her own experience a lot on her podcast, and is worth listening to if some of the above resonates with your own experience. Emma’s account of her history with food and weight is the closest I’ve encountered to my own situation, the habits I formed, and the sense of hopelessness I felt which left me feeling desolate and trapped in a self-destructive cycle for several years. Not least because food is – obviously – essential and should be value-neutral. All around me, people seemed to be conducting a relatively healthy relationship with it while I was damaging my body and making myself increasingly unhappy.
I had slowly gained weight in the five years since my mother’s death. Everything felt hard. Food was an interest she and I had shared, and it felt easy. My mother was a wonderful baker and like so many Irish mammies, loved people around her through cooking for them. Perhaps food felt like a way of maintaining a connection to her. Perhaps it was just an easy comfort for someone who has never drunk alcohol or taken recreational drugs. An acceptable chemical means of escape.
[ Can you be addicted to food? ]
Either way, it became a crutch. Food issues are not just challenging within the privacy of home and your lowest moments. If you are over- or under-eating, it tends to show on the outside, rendering your emotional vulnerability visible to others and giving them what they often imperiously interpret as concrete insight into who you are.
Public conversation around weight makes my face hurt. Particularly in relation to women. As far as I can tell, there are two acceptable polar positions from which to discuss weight (and particularly weight loss) in the public sphere – we can either embrace a sort of evolutionary or biological determinism which reactively equates thinness with health and personal virtue, or we can embrace fatness as a radical rejection of patriarchy. Both of these positions shoehorn individuals into the role of unwitting group representative, as “for women” or against them. Both erase our ability to exist comfortably within the privacy and sovereignty of our own skin, to consider ourselves subjects rather than objects. Both interpret a person’s weight as a statement about or a judgment upon other people, namely other women. They reduce us from the fullness of individuality into a physical representation of one set of values or the other.
In the midst of all that, there I was, unable to halt my roast potato consumption at three or four. Feeling a sense of failure at falling short of conventional markers of attractiveness on one end, and at failing to feel actualised and delighted by the fact that my body felt cumbersome to carry up the stairs on the other
I can’t be arsed with any of that. The only reasonable way forward is to reject the scale upon which those two poles sit. This sort of nonsense is why people finger-wag at one individual for what their body “signals” to other women, or to girls. It is the basis upon which insufferable semi-professional online misogyny bros feel justified in dismissing a woman’s value and questioning her integrity for gaining weight and the same basis upon which over-zealous feminists accuse other women of gender treason and setting a bad example for losing it. Both make public property of women’s bodies. In the midst of all that, there I was, unable to halt my roast potato consumption at three or four. Feeling a sense of failure at falling short of conventional markers of attractiveness on one end, and at failing to feel actualised and delighted by the fact that my body felt cumbersome to carry up the stairs on the other.
So, I lost weight. Usually, that’s the part people have the most questions about but it’s also the part I’m wholly unqualified to discuss. I meant it when I wrote that a person’s body is their own. Mine is the only one I have expertise in. Besides, when people lean forward in their chairs to ask how you did it after weight loss, their eyes bloom with hope for an answer which doesn’t involve acting against their impulses and wishes for months on end until those impulses and wishes change.
But that’s what was involved. For a while, I fought against myself minute by minute to create new habits. It involved a lot of self-pity, frustration, self-disgust and sadness but sticking with those habits until I started to feel better helped me associate them with feeling better, and then it became easier. I acted different until I became different. Until what I wanted to be was in line with what I was actually doing, and I no longer had to tolerate the sense of despair created by the dissonance between the two. The price of that was intense and lasting discomfort, but even in the midst of it, I knew it was very slightly less difficult than the way I’d felt when my life was not one of my choosing.
A lot has changed as a result. How I move physically through the world. The precious space inside my mind that I lost for a while. Other things haven’t changed, or haven’t been touched by losing weight even though I hoped or expected they might be.
I suppose that’s the thing about food issues, at least for me. There’s no fixed solution. You just keep managing them. It’s not easy, but two years later I do recognise myself again, and that has nothing to do with what I look like.
This essay was first published on Laura Kennedy’s substack Peak Notions. If you’ve been affected by anything raised in this article, contact Bodywhys Eating Disorders Helpline (01-2107906) or www.bodywhys.ie
When is disordered eating an eating disorder?
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19.01.2024
Weight is a sensitive issue for many (myself included). If it’s an issue for you or now is not a good time for you to be reading about disordered eating and weight loss, I recommend skipping this article.
If you do decide to read on and find yourself feeling irked, judged or offended by anything below, I encourage you to interrogate why that might be. We have a collective habit of interpreting everything an individual woman does with her own body as reflective of women as a group. Let’s resist that strenuously. This is about my own experience of the one body I’ll ever live in. In short, it’s not about you.
Two years after deciding to lose weight and beginning the process of re-evaluating my relationship with food, I’m significantly lighter. It wasn’t just an aesthetically motivated choice. I recognised with something akin to despair that my relationship with food had become compulsive. I feel embarrassed to admit that but it’s the correct word. I did not feel in control of my compulsion to eat. If I didn’t actively enjoy a meal, I felt irrationally churlish and deprived for hours afterwards. When I did eat, I was conscious that I was consuming too much for the physical needs of a person of my stature and noticed that I found it difficult to stop eating a food that I enjoyed once I’d started.
I couldn’t overlook the fact that I was frequently eating until I felt physically uncomfortable (think of that post-Christmas dinner feeling, but regularly) and had begun to spend a significant proportion of each day thinking about food. Not in a brief, appreciative “I’m really looking forward to tonight’s dinner – it’s my favourite” and then getting on with my afternoon kind of way, but in a “when can I next eat/I feel ashamed by how much I just ate/I ate very recently but when offered something I like I’ll eat it despite not being hungry” kind of way. I was fixating on food in a manner that felt non-volitional and that I resented even as I engaged in it.
Behaviours don’t necessarily need to be recognised as a pathology for us to know that we have an issue we need to deal with. A significant element of the unhappiness I........
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