HOPING FOR RAIN
Diary of an Anorexic
“You save yourself or you remain unsaved” Alice Sebold
“And never again but every time” Cheb Khaled
Dear Reader
The beginning of this story could be that of just about every girl or woman I have ever met who thinks that once they lose a few pounds, life will be better. When I tell people I was once anorexic, almost all of them instantly say, “Oh I’m so sorry to hear that,” followed by a detailed account of their own body insecurities, and how they should lose a bit of weight from their thighs. Maybe they’re looking for advice from someone who proved to the extreme that you can lose weight if you try, but mainly I think that women feel guilty about feeling guilty; they’re embarrassed to admit that they struggle to love themselves the way they are. Women of all shapes and sizes tell you this, and often the most stunning ladies, ones that most other people would envy, seem to be the most critical of their forms. Almost as though there is something wrong with being able to say, I Like My Body. I Don’t Want To Change Anything.
But it is rare to meet anyone who has attained the same degree of self loathing I did in the months leading up to my “diet,” a loathing which would later drive me harder, faster, forcing me to carry on marching and clamping my jaw shut like a pit-bull in case I accidentally swallowed a fly (not so much because it’s gross but because I didn’t know how many calories were in it) when given my physical state, I should have been strapped to a bed being fed through a tube.
At first I bitterly regretted my anorexia, seeing it as such a waste of my fifteenth year: while my friends were going out, meeting boys, having fun and worrying about exams, I was busy punishing myself nearly to death in the warped belief I was going to be BETTER than everyone; and a blight on the seven years which followed, where although I was physically normal (apart from my weight seesawing alarmingly in the first couple of years), the slanging match between anorexia and my fun loving self would rage on, gradually becoming less ferocious over time. But I realise now that it taught me so much, and if you’ve picked up this book, I hope my story will be able to help the person you are concerned about, whether it is yourself or someone you know.
There are so many things I wish I had done differently and so could have avoided putting my family and friends through such a nightmare. Anorexia is distressing for the sufferer, but those close to the patient who watch helplessly as their loved one shrivels away, disappearing both physically and mentally, suffer just as much as they are powerless to do anything. Anorexia is a very selfish illness, although the sufferers are often altruistic and crave love and acceptance, and are either unaware of the distress they are causing to their family or unable to try and change their behavior in order to spare those who care about them. My reaction was, just leave me alone and don’t worry about me. I’m fine.
I hope that, by sharing my story with you, I’ll be able to stop someone from making the same mistakes I did, and to reassure families and friends of anorexia sufferers that there is hope of getting your loved one back; that their mind has been taken over by an illness that can be cured, and that there is life after anorexia.
Introduction
I never really got to the bottom of why I developed anorexia, but I guess it was brewing for a while. I was a sensitive only child with a vivid imagination who lived in her own little world most of the time. We moved house seven times before I was eighteen, I attended five different schools. I always felt like the new girl, even in schools I’d been in for a long time. I was an eccentric child, often finding it difficult to make friends at first and getting picked on when I was new to a place, which went unchecked by teachers in three schools. Children are cruel to one another. Some hit back, others ignore it and find safety in numbers.
I believed what people said and hated myself for it.
My first memory of being bullied is from my second day after starting my new primary school aged four. A nasty little girl called Suzanne who I’d never spoken to was in charge of handing out bits of paper. When she turned to me, her little piggy eyes narrowed and she said spitefully, “I’ll do you last.” It made me cry. It’s strange what sticks in out minds.
My primary school teachers always wrote on my reports, Catherine Could Try Harder. Unless I felt loved and appreciated, I didn’t make any effort, and never cared about being the best. It was only in my last year of junior school that we began to do creative writing and art, and I finally got the praise I still need to this day to spread my wings and make an effort. I began to write poems which were read out in class by my astonished teacher who’d previously berated me for being lazy, and I now realize that this recognition of what I did well made me thoroughly happy. Even as an anorexic years later, I never wanted to be the best. Good Enough was good enough for me. My degree in France was delivered with a merit that translated as “Quite Good.” I was thrilled.
I suffered from various OCDs throughout my junior school years which started when I was about five years old, which I generally got tired of before they drove me completely crazy, and talked myself out of. They mainly involved rituals which got more and more elaborate, I suppose just like my exercise routine would years later, pushing them further and further until I felt as though they were taking over my life. For example, I would have to perform a “goodnight” ritual every night before bed; touching things in a certain order and chanting certain words a certain number of times. I was afraid that if I didn’t do this, my house would burn down. I managed to make these rituals subside before they completely took over my days and stopped me from sleeping at night, and my parents never knew about these little obsessions of mine. I learnt at a very early age that I have an obsessive personality; I always have something to fixate upon, be it a person (which is manageable) or an activity (which can become dangerous).
Later, aged seven, I had a particularly nasty babysitter who would encourage her two daughters (both of whom were older) to bully me. She’d tell me how much better at pretty much everything her daughter was compared to me and that I’d go to Hell because I didn’t go to church. I developed a severe OCD, where I’d constantly feel that I had to urinate. I was unable to get to sleep at night, for as soon as I lay down to sleep, I’d desperately need the bathroom even though I’d been a couple of minutes before. I started to sleep in the bathroom, shivering under a towel, and got to the point where I begged my dad to lock me in my room so that I’d know I couldn’t go to pee, and hopefully get to sleep that way. During the day, this affliction got me in trouble at school; I’d ask to go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes, and the teachers just thought I was being difficult.
My toilet OCD ended when my parents took me away from that evil woman. One day she didn’t come and meet me from school, presumably because she couldn’t be bothered and I was scared and confused, I thought I’d done something wrong and walked towards her house (about a mile away), terrified she was going to punish me. Luckily my dad had finished work early that day, and came across me wandering down the street in floods of tears. He drove straight to Evil Babysitter’s place and let me stay in the car, as he saw how terrified I was. She sweetly denied all knowledge of why I was alone, saying that I must have run off as I wasn’t there when she’d come to collect me. He told her she was fired and that was the end of that, and my nights soon became peaceful again.
The only time I can remember thinking about my body then was when Sarah called me fat, I must have been ten years old, and I cried, and then forgot all about it.
France
My dad was a book rep, and his job meant that we had to move house every few years. Then when I was eleven years old, we upped sticks and moved to the South of France. For my parents it was the beginning of a new chapter, a crazy mid-life fresh start, and they imagined themselves teaching English or translating, and sipping chilled rosé in the balmy summer evenings. I blame Peter Mayall’s A Year In Provence, which they seemed to consider as gospel at the time. At first I didn’t think they’d actually go through with it, packing everything in just because we’d had a couple of nice holidays there…we had a nice house in England with a huge terraced garden that you could stand on top of and catapult slugs onto the main road, my parents both had jobs; I had my hamster and cats and bunch of friends at school, we were a comfortable little family. But in June 1994 we had sold most of out possessions, sold the house, given away my hamster Buttons, my parents had quit their jobs, and we all piled into a clapped out Leyland Daf van bought on the cheap (which incidentally gave up on us halfway down France, in the middle of nowhere), and set off for a new life. I was seriously pissed off, and sulked all the way from Bradford to Béziers.
On arrival I was sent to summer camp to help me learn French before starting school in September, and instead of mixing with the other kids, spent most of my time scowling in a corner there. I wanted to be at home with my parents, or better still, back in England. I couldn’t speak to anyone, and didn’t want to anyway.
To make things better from me, Mum and Dad agreed to buy me a dog, and we settled on Pastis, a wriggly little spaniel and failed hunter who had been left at the French RSPCA on account of his complete disinterest for hunting. We became inseparable, and spent the rest of the summer happily roaming the forest around our house, me dreaming up scenarios where wild pigs held golden keys to secret worlds, whose doorways lay hidden in the ancient gnarled chestnut trunks.
Then September came and I was sent to secondary school.
I suppose you could say it was a traumatic time for me, being sent to a huge comprehensive school where people spoke a language I didn’t understand, and kids don’t try and work you out, they just throw things at you.
Meanwhile, while I was toughing it out at the Lycée, my parents couldn’t find jobs; they hadn’t anticipated the impenetrable brick walls of French “beaurocracy” they came up against, which meant that you couldn’t get a residence permit unless you had a job, but you couldn’t get a job unless you had a residence permit. We became increasingly poor, our house was in the middle of a forest with no gas, electricity or running water, and when it rained water dripped through the roof and mudslides meant that we couldn’t leave the house for days. When the weather was dry, I’d wake up in the middle of the night with piles of sawdust on my face, and lie listening as the termites munched their way through the old oak beams. When you tapped on the beams, the munching would stop, and I imagined all these little critters holding their breath, waiting for me to go back to sleep.
My parent’s woes were vey real, but I was eleven and had school to deal with.
Although it was extremely tough in the beginning and I’d drag my heels every morning, hiding under the stairs to try and delay another miserable day of school, within three months I’d managed to master enough French to follow in class, and after six months, I had higher grades in most subjects than the French students. The kids who initially taunted me and threw things at me in class realized I had become one of them, would insult them back using cruder words than they had, and by the start of my second year in French school, the Anglaise had become cool! I had a little bunch of friends, we were a group of misfits who bonded and got into trouble together: Arab, Malaysian and Spanish immigrants, tomboys, geeks and me; we formed a tightly knit little pack and suddenly none of us felt left out. The snobs, sports nuts, goody two shoes and rich kids could stay where they were; they didn’t bother us anymore and sometimes even wanted to join in with our adventures.
One of my fondest memories of our little group was one morning when our sports teacher didn’t turn up for our swimming class, and we decided to go swimming anyway, in the murky river across the road from school. Saïd hadn’t told us he couldn’t swim, and we all dived in, laughing hysterically at our naughtiness, and watched, stunned, as Saïd started to get swept away. Together with Samuel we managed to head him off by tearing along the riverbank, tripping over tree roots, and diving in to catch him. It took him a long time to live that one down, and we all laughed until our bellies hurt as we dragged him spluttering and giggling onto a sandbank.
We ate things that grew in the surrounding forest, washed in and got water from the mountain stream in the winter, and when the source dried up in the summer, we carried huge barrels of water up the hill in a wheelbarrow from the fountain in the village.
I learned how to use a saw and chopped firewood from the dead chestnut trees on our land, and the local poachers brought us delicious wild boar meat in exchange for our silence about their illegal hunting activities; hunks of gamey steak so huge that we marinated them in the bath with cheap red wine and garlic, and, just occasionally, grated black truffles or ceps found in the forest.
I built dens and tree houses, had salamander races in the riverbed and learnt how to identify every mushroom in the South of France. I stole fruit from the orchards, taught our dog to open hazelnuts with his teeth and spent my days hiking through the forest, exploring, collecting food and sabotaging the cruel traps the hunters set on our land, which could snap off a dog’s leg if he wandered into it.
For those sixteen months, we lived an extremely unconventional life, and when I think about it now, it must have been difficult for my mum and dad, going from respectable, nine-to-five jobs, living in a nice house with a nice garden in a nice neighbourhood, to an almost Robinson Crusoe situation. I, on the other hand, thought it was magical; doing my drawings by candle light and making the most of the spectacular thunderstorms typical to the South West to have a proper shower…we’d take it in turns to go out on the patio and soap ourselves down under the hot summer rain, and you’d just have to hope the rain didn’t stop before you got all the shampoo off! I was skinny, athletic and untamed, and food was always something to look forward to, especially as we’d often gathered it ourselves…I learned how to cultivate oyster mushrooms, and after we heard that the beautiful rows of plump corn cobs down in the valley were destined to be fed to pigs, we helped ourselves to as much as we liked, and I discovered a patch of wild cucumbers next to the fields where I went to play with my friends. I’d come home with my jumper stuffed full of vegetables, and often had wild leeks sticking out of my pockets.
Then just when I really started getting settled into school there, my parents decided we would have to go back as they had run out of money, I was taken out of my school and we returned to our life back in England; more than a year had gone by, and I returned to find that everything had changed. I had expected my old friends to evolve in parallel with me, and to just be able to pick up where we left off, but I was dismayed to see that everyone had moved on without me, and realized that rather than miss me, my friends had simply moved on.
Maybe this experience was where the seeds for my anorexia were sown. I suppose some people would blame my illness on the upheaval, but I remember that year and a half in rural Southern France as being full of great memories as well as hardships, one of the most colorful episodes of my life. But years later I think that this failure (that is how my parents saw it) was the beginning of the tensions that made it hard for our little family to be happy together, where resentments hatched that would grow under the surface, only to spring out into the open much later. I think the pressure rocked my parent’s marriage and their relationship began to deteriorate from there.
Back to the UK
Gathering food was one of my main pastimes when we lived in France; there was an illicit thrill in stealing peaches and asparagus from the nearby orchards and it made them taste all the better, but eating was just another pleasure in my life and not something I ever stopped to think about. Our school lunches were fantastic; I didn’t eat when I wasn’t hungry, and I got exercise without thinking about it by hiking through the woods and climbing trees.
Moving back to England, I was heartbroken at the thought of leaving my magical little world behind but I at least expected to hook up with my old classmates and effortlessly rekindle our friendships, which, as far as I was concerned, had just been put on hold while I was away. They had written to me throughout the time I was in France, saying how much they missed me, telling me about actors they liked, shopping trips into town where they had TEN POUNDS to spend, what they bought (what’s a body scrub or a face pack? Weren’t they for housewives?), and what they’d been doing at school.
I had passed my eleven plus entry exam before we moved to France, and I still had my place at the local grammar school. After a couple of phone calls to the headmaster, Mum secured my place there and I started in November, while Mum and I were living in a bed and breakfast and Dad had got a job down in London driving taxis, trying to get some money together.
I think my dad was very naïve, assuming we could just go back to our old life. We never really got on our feet again, but again, I was twelve, and my concern was school and fitting in; let the grown-ups worry about the rest.
The school was very different from the one I’d just left. Back in my big secondary school in France, most of the pupil’s parents were farmers or worked in the local bakeries, and my classmates shared my passion for collecting wild carrots and would occasionally set free a viper or tarantula in class as a joke, relishing the look of disgust on the good girl’s faces. Most of the kids there knew how to catch a snake or a poisonous spider without batting an eyelid.
The teachers wore jeans and shaved about once a week, and were genuinely impressed when I brought a particularly large mushroom or a bird trap I’d dismantled in to show them. Needless to say, my behavior was the same in my posh English grammar school, and it didn’t go down too well.
I was the new girl, and was weird to boot. I had unkempt boyish hair, didn’t wear designer clothes, my parents weren’t doctors and I spent my breaks examining the toadstools growing in the school grounds, and selecting a few to take home and cook.
I didn’t recognize my old friends; Jenny and Alice, my best buddies from junior school no longer cared about animals and the Beano; now they talked about boys, makeup, something (maybe a magazine?) called Boys Own (which I later found out was Boyzone), clothes and shopping. They read teenage magazines, so I quickly did my research to try and get up to speed. But the truth is I couldn’t care less about boys, makeup or groups of girly looking men singing about their feelings. I wasn’t one of them. Before long the bullying started, and instead of standing up for me, my old friends just laughed along to the taunts and avoided my gaze.
I started to doubt myself. I’d at least had the excuse that I was a foreigner in France so I knew why people bullied me: I didn’t look or sound like them so they had a reason to pick on me, but being made to feel like a stranger in your own country, well, that’s a whole lot more distressing. I realized that I’d spent so long begrudging being in France and idolizing my old life in England, and yet here I was in a room fill of people who seemed completely alien to me, making witty jokes about members of Boys Own and talking earnestly about the pros and cons of something called White Musk and Dewsbury body spray (who’d want to smell like Dewsbury?), I desperately wanted to go back to my forest. Plus, we’d had to leave our cats to someone in the village and Pastis, my partner in crime, my best friend, was in quarantine for six months, and I missed him horribly.
Since coming back to England I had developed a healthy crop of spots, I disliked most of the lessons we had, especially maths lessons where I would daydream about being back in the forest or in the deep mountain gorge where we used to spend our weekends and where you could drink the water and visit ancient caves where people had lived in prehistoric times.
I hastily bought some teenage magazines to hopefully bring myself up to speed with the way I should be as an English thirteen year-old, and was dismayed to see it confirmed on their glossy pages: I was way, way off course.
I was in my first teenaged year which meant I should have started buying lip balm and tea tree products a year ago and should currently be wearing makeup, using skin and hair products, going to teen parties and know how to make a boy fancy me just by wearing the exact amount of lip-gloss. I was way behind, and thoroughly miserable. No wonder I got bullied; I just wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t buying clothes from Top Shop, wasn’t watching Top of the Pops, drinking Alcopops or having Teenaged Strops.
I began to notice my weight, the way I dressed. When I was a kid, one of my favorite a tricks whenever we went to my grandparent’s was climbing through their cat flap. The font door would be locked and they couldn’t understand how I’d suddenly appear in the garden, standing waving on the lawn. Then I’d disappear again and be back in the kitchen, giggling about my magic trick. Then one day I got stuck, nearly dislocating my shoulder as I tried to wriggle free. I was too fat to get through the cat flap. I laughed it off as everyone called me a clown but secretly I was desperate to be able to be able to pull off my trick again, and the cat flap was solid proof that I was definitely getting bigger. Only a year ago I had been so proud of my body. I’d watched in awe as it had shed its puppy fat, grown longer and leaner and I had been able to see the muscles ripple in my forearms as I wiggled my fingers. I remembered looking at my face in the bathroom in France, it’s angles softly lit by the oil lamp flickering in the corner. I wasn’t at all vain, but I objectively thought I was a beautiful eleven year old in a wild sort of way, and I liked looking at myself, liked my muscly little brown legs in their sawn off denim shorts, my unkempt think blonde hair and weird green-grey eyes that changed with my moods.
Why didn’t I look like that a year later? My changing body used to fascinate me but now when I looked in the mirror I felt as though the space between my shoulders and my knees didn’t belong to me. It was unfamiliar and lumpy, and I didn’t think it looked nice. At first I could just cover it up with clothes and it’d go away, but I began to think about all this unchartered territory sitting under my school uniform.
I began to wonder whether I was pretty, why boys didn’t like me and why I preferred climbing trees to going shopping. I made an assessment: I didn’t have Pod or Kickers shoes (the only acceptable brands). I didn’t have a sports jacket, a perm, a cool bag or a collection of fruit flavoured Bodyshop lipsalves, and I actually wore my knee length school skirt. I just wasn’t a rebel. Girls at school laughed at me whenever I got on the bus, and I often sat alone at the front, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. People used to jeer that I was “shagging” the bus driver, although I didn’t know what that meant. When you move away for a year, even the language changes, and I didn’t speak any of the jargon anymore.
When I got home from school, I didn’t want to go and climb trees any more in case anyone spotted me so I stayed instead in the house and I suddenly remembered how comforting I used to find it as a child, to sit in front of the television with a chocolate marshmallow jammy biscuit while I waited for my parents to come home from work. Yes, I thought, those were happy days.
I went into the kitchen and looked in the cupboard, and saw a tin of chocolate biscuits someone had bought me for my birthday.
Mmm, chocolate shortbreads, one of my favourites.
As I sat in front of the telly savoring the biscuits, I suddenly felt better about everything. By the time my mum had got home, all the biscuits were gone and she mock scalded me, calling me greedy with an affectionate laugh. Mum loved me the way I was, I told myself, and didn’t feel bad for eating the biscuits.
As the weeks passed and the bullying continued, I found comfort in chocolate, buttery toast and whole tins of tapioca pudding. It was my little secret, my private moment that I looked forward to when I got home from school and before Mum got home from work, an hour watching Neighbours and the Simpsons with some junk food. I’d get off the bus outside the petrol station down the road, and buy sweets that I’d loved when I was younger: sherbet dips and big bags of penny sweets, little sugar eggs filed with chocolate, plus the things I hadn’t been allowed as a child – king sized packets of prawn cocktail crisps and whole bars of chocolate coated Turkish Delight, and devour them in the living room. I soon began to hide the evidence of my feasts, as Mum’s remarks about me being a greedy pig when she saw all the wrappers strewn on the floor started to grate; I knew I shouldn’t be eating all these sweets every day but they made me feel good. If no one knew about it, it didn’t matter.
I could also take comfort in legitimate food consumption, as I come from a family who love to eat. I’d rejoice in huge curries on Saturdays (chicken balti with pilau rice and all the trimmings: pakoras, bhajis, samosas and seekh kebabs) and delicious Sunday roasts (make sure you give me two Yorkshire puddings and extra potatoes!!) followed by whole cheesecakes, all of it put down to me being “a growing lass” by my parents, and any feelings of guilt I had were initially quashed by the pleasure my “healthy appetite” gave my parents. Mum would cook extra to accommodate my greed…she knew at the end of a meal that I’d dash into the kitchen when she said, “There’s more if you want it!!” She is a brilliant cook, and while Dad was away in London we ate hearty comforting meals, cosy in front of the tv, mum laughing off my beginning to say that I felt fat, after my clothes began to feel tight, saying that I was a “strapping lass” who needed her food.
I soon went from a size twelve to a size fourteen, which Mum said was fine but which the magazines and my classmates shrieked was FAT, and the more miserable about it I got, the more weight I put on. Friends tried to console me by saying I wasn’t fat but “stocky.” I felt self conscious and didn’t want to go out anymore, and so I began to try and skip meals, but by four o clock I’d be flinging myself on six slices of toast whose thickness I doubled up in butter and marmite, kidding myself that it didn’t matter, that the huge binge I’d just finished would just replace the lunch I’d skipped. I also tried to exercise. One day I had skipped lunch and walked to the top of the hill behind our house, up through the woods. I ran all the way back home, and got such a hideous migraine that I decided I just wasn’t made to do exercise, that I was simply doomed to get fat and that there was nothing I could do about it. It was constantly on my mind, I despised myself and sometimes deliberately punished myself by bingeing and then looking in the mirror, calling myself a fat bitch. Mum knew I thought I was fat but she thought it was just a silly phase, and if I ever protested feebly about some garlic bread she’d put on my plate, she’d just roll her eyes and say, “Oh for God’s sake get it down you,” and I did. Dutiful daughter.
Warning signs
In the September before I fell sick, Mum took me to Ireland for a holiday. I desperately wanted to lose some weight before I went back to school. For the past few months I’d begged Mum for us to go to Weightwatchers together and she’d agreed, but I knew she’d never stick to it and wasn’t showing any sign of signing up. I was sure she was just saying yes to placate me and to get me to join her in another tuna mayonnaise sandwich.
I felt helpless, as I didn’t know how to go about things myself and sensed that Mum would disapprove if I tried to do something without her; in any case, I was sure I needed an adult to accompany me to Weight Watchers. Plus, I’d seen Mum try Slimfast and other diets when I was younger, and she always told me they didn’t work. I despaired. I just didn’t know how to slim, didn’t know about calories, and didn’t know that to lose weight you still need to eat; I’d tried starving myself and it just made me launch myself onto a chocolate muffin.
I was pretty miserable on holiday in Ireland even though the setting was beautiful and we were in the middle of the countryside near the coast; instead of being outside in the garden I spent a lot of time examining my reflection in the bathroom mirror, and all I could think about was not eating, so much so that it made me hungrier than ever and unfortunately, Mum saw the holiday as an opportunity to sample the local food: garlic butter stuffed mussels, soda bread, steak and Guinness pie, and I again felt helpless, as though I didn’t have a choice and dutifully ate everything that was put in front of me, feeling bad about not sharing her glee and forcing out a few Mmm’s to show her I was enjoying the food. I loved the taste but loathed every bite I took; I imagined the food being fast-tracked straight to my thighs, which I covered with big baggy jumpers. We hired bikes and I hated the thought of my huge bottom spilling over the bike seat; I imagined motorists having a good laugh as they drove up behind me and imagined them deliberately trying to hit the fat girl on the bike because she was so hideous to behold.
My whining about being fat got on Mum’s nerves after a while. At first she laughed it off, but soon she got angry and realized that I didn’t want to upset her, so all she had to do to make me eat something was to raise her voice and tell me I was being ungrateful. I began to resent food, and even though I still binged, I now did it to deepen my self hatred. Go on you fat bitch, I’d say to myself, eat it all up. You’re too weak to resist, you’re pathetic. You can’t possibly lose weight; you’re just a fat cow. Go on thunder thighs, eat some more chocolate.
When Mum saw me crying about my appearance one day, she said it was pathetic that I should be so self obsessed, and said all I had to do was cut out sweets and get off my lazy arse and take the dog for a walk every evening, which would also stop me from being so spotty; but it didn’t feel drastic enough to me, I didn’t believe it’d work.
It had to be all or nothing, so I didn’t budge.
Looking back, that single comment had a tremendous impact. In couple of months time, I would be “getting off my arse” and take years to sit back down again.
Months later when I was in the grips of full-blown anorexia, how I wished I had just eaten a little less and taken a bit more exercise, just like Mum had said. But harsh as it may sound, at the time I looked at Mum (who was more than a little overweight), and was convinced she was trying to make me like her. I figured that as long as I did what she advised, ate what she gave me to eat, I would surely end up exactly the same. She kept saying, if you cut out the chocolate and eat what I eat, you won’t put on weight. But I was starting to understand what was fattening and what wasn’t, and I saw the huge sandwiches she ate with cheese and butter on them, the morning toast slathered with butter and Marmite, the huge portions of our evening meals and felt trapped…I had to stop eating the same things she ate but didn’t dare tell her how wrong she was about her diet, and was scared of her disapproval. So with a heavy heart I ate my tuna mayonnaise sandwiches as well and felt like sobbing.
I think I blamed Mum for my lack of willpower, as it’s always easier to blame someone else. And I wonder whether me wanting to lose weight made her face her own weight problems; I think she didn’t want to lose control over what I ate because it reassured her to have someone else who finished everything on their plate and asked for more, but I only began to understand the intricacies of mother/ daughter relationships much later, when I tried to find out my reasons for becoming anorexic.
When I look back to when I was fifteen, I was a young girl with a woman’s body and not ready to wear this adult suit, so I hated it and wanted to punish it, hoping it would go away and I could get back to looking like the young girl who I was inside. I was 5 foot 7, with long blonde hair and weighing around eleven stone, with large thighs, an ample chest, and a tiny waist.
All the beautiful teenaged girls around me were still small and svelte, and I felt awkward both on the outside and on the inside. Friends reassured me that I wasn’t fat, that I had a gorgeous figure, that I looked like a young Marilyn Monroe; but everyone knows friends just say things like that to be nice. All I saw when I looked in the mirror was my cellulite and saddle bags, and red stretch marks from having put on weight quickly. I scrutinized my body every day, catching sight of myself in shop windows and bus shelters, grabbing pounds of flesh in the bathroom mirror and watching disgustedly as the fat dimpled in my fist, wondering how I could get rid of it, and I was sure I was getting a double chin. I wished I could get a saw and just chop it off… there wasn’t that much to lop off, just the sides of my hips and my saggy bum, and I fantasized about being able to shear off my flab like you see kebab sellers shearing off meat from the spit roast with one of those little electric saws.
Just before the Christmas holidays, we had our school Christmas dance, and I was dreading the part where the boys have to pick a partner…I knew no one would pick me, so when the moment came I turned my back on everyone and pretended to be looking at the buffet. A cool hand tapped me on the shoulder, and as I turned round, I nearly fainted: it was Mr. Kumar my form teacher, asking me to dance. It was my first chance to get close to him and I was so bloody awkward I gingerly held his elbow and couldn’t think of anything witty to say, horribly aware that my hand was freezing cold and dripping with sweat in his. The boy next to us said, “Oy Sir you’re supposed to change partners!!” and he replied, “Nah, I’m keeping mine.” We danced for maybe fifteen minutes, and he told me I was looking very smart. When the dance was over, he sat out for the rest of the evening, turning down offers from other students, and I didn’t take my eyes off him all night. I was in a kind of daze really and just hoped he didn’t find my arms too flabby or my thighs too wobbly.
Looking back at that evening, I think I looked about twenty and statuesque in a long green satin dress. And I also remember just how preoccupied with food I was. I had eaten some chocolate biscuits in the afternoon and they sat on my conscience all evening; but I reasoned with myself that it was Christmas and that everyone else was having some, so why shouldn’t I? In the weeks leading up to my diet, I felt constantly guilty about food, and the more I told myself I’d have to stop eating and that I was fat, the more I binged, kidding myself that once more wouldn’t matter, and that I’d definitely start the next day.
Chapter 1
January 1998
The Christmas holidays were over, and the snow had begun to melt as we piled off the school bus and down past the tennis courts, flicking grey sludge at each other as we hurried towards registration.
I had had a great time over the holidays; sledging when possible before the sparse snow turned to pulp on the sloping fields above the back of our house and sloshing around Halifax’s shops a lot with Aisha, gazing at things we could never afford with our pocket money, and of course, family meals.
Christmas dinner was the usual joyous, heartburn inducing affair, and dad had stocked up on the antacid tablets the week before: prawn cocktail in delicious pink sauce, a huge roast turkey with all the trimmings then Christmas pudding (extra brandy butter for me!), Christmas cake and mince pies. I slapped down my usual feelings of guilt, which crawled like spiders up from the pit of my stomach, by telling myself it was okay on Christmas day. I didn’t even think about trying to refuse potatoes or pudding, as I didn’t want to start an argument. So I dutifully polished off several helpings of everything, and then went up into my room and examined my body. I looked lumpy…things sagged, there were bumps in places that should have been smooth, I had stretch marks…when did my body suddenly transform into this unrecognizable blob? I quickly put my stretchy trousers on again, and my long baggy jumper that covered up my thighs. It was my thighs and bum that I hated the most, and I had a healthy batch of cellulite even though I was only fifteen.
Boxing Day came, and we drove over to Liverpool to join my grandparents and cousins, and we all went out for lunch. Again, I wore my baggy jumper and stretch trousers. I thought I looked ok with my jumper, as things only really started to get lumpy further up my mid-thigh. Although I was thrilled to see my grandparents and cousins, all the while I was aware of feeling so sluggish and self conscious, thinking about how I looked huge and was going to have to eat again, and tried to sit in a way that made my thighs look smaller.
Everyone automatically began talking about starters, so I thought if everyone else was having one, I should too. So I got garlic bread. I didn’t think that was too fattening, followed by cannelloni. The dish was quite small but it looked fattening all the same, baked with cream and cheese, but I thought, seeing as the dish was small, then how fattening could it be? I imagined the food stuck to my thighs. Then everyone had dessert, so I did…I ordered chocolate ice-cream; the truth is I just couldn’t resist food; it comforted me and made me feel better and you only had to put a plate of hot chocolate fudge cake in front of me for me to decide I wasn’t fat after all (funny how these feelings always came back just after I’d finished the cake) I pretended to have enjoyed the meal. While the adults had coffee, my four little cousins and I went to play in the old abandoned car park near Nan’s place where some kids had build a make shift play area, and I confided in my cousin Christian that I felt fat and hideous. Family members are so nice, Christian told me I wasn’t fat but it didn’t reassure me. I felt bigger than ever.
On the first of January it was our first day back at school after the holidays and I was really looking forward to seeing Mr. Kumar my form teacher. Only nine years older than me and a bit geeky, his family came from India before he was born, and he only ever wore three shirts to school: a cornflower blue one, a white one and a light blue one, and once, just once, he wore a black shirt when he was going to meet Cherie Blair…I always preferred his cornflower blue shirt. It really suited him.
Last term, I had drawn his portrait and it had taken me ages to pluck up the courage to give it to him. He wasn’t my form teacher then, he just taught me physics and chemistry, and although I didn’t understand anything about his lessons, I looked forward to them every week, and spent them just gazing dreamily at him and trying to look as though I understood what he was saying. On the day I finally plucked up the courage to give him the drawing, I walked up to him at the end of class and handed it to him. He looked overjoyed, and told me it was his birthday! I was so chuffed, even though most of the class made fun of me. I was sure it was some kind of psychic connection, me guessing that it was his birthday. Every time he saw me after that, he’d stop to chat, and seeing him was the highlight of my day. When I started school in September I found out he was my form teacher, I hopped around the room for joy. Actually I remember when I found out; I was coming down stairs when Mum shouted up to me. I jumped on the stairs and cracked my head on the beam, which sent me rolling down to the bottom. This was the effect Mr. Kumar had on me.
So, as usual, I happily produced my homework diary which I had decorated over the holidays. Mr. Kumar signed it every week, so I did him more and more elaborate drawings as he said he looks forward to them each week. He spent a couple of minutes examining them, and I felt myself glowing with pleasure. In the afternoon we played hockey on the freezing sports field, it’s about the only sport I was good at, and I nearly knocked out Lisa’s tooth swinging for the ball.
We didn’t have that much homework on our first day back, so I made the most of the evening by drawing Indian gods in my RE workbook. I thought that if I made them good enough, our teacher would show them round the staffroom and Mr. K would realize I’m actually secretly a genius, and that he’d fall in love with my mind, as I thought my body was pretty hideous.
Chapter two.
New Year’s Day had been and gone, and I still hadn’t started my life changing diet.
Before the holidays, we’d done Cross Country, and I’d come in amongst the last few runners, sweatily half running, half walking back up the moor. My horrible sports teacher, Miss Miller had congratulated the winners and scathingly told me and a few others we were lazy sloths. To add insult to injury, that same day we had a “fitness test,” in which I thought I’d do alright, seeing as I often went climbing trees and took Pastis for a walk in the woods. But to my horror I came second to last, after Steph, who is pretty big and fat. The fitness test was carried out by a leering Miss Miller and supervised by an external sports teacher who had come in to talk to us about healthy living and exercise. She gave us a chart showing us exercises you could do to improve your fitness levels (isotonic, isokinetic…can’t remember what they mean), and how to tone up your thighs. I felt so ashamed of my shambling, unfit body, and I knew I had to do something about it. This fitness test was the confirmation of what I had already feared: I was now officially fat. The other girls who scored badly in the fitness test didn’t seem too bothered, but to me, this wasn’t good enough. I had to get fit; I couldn’t stand being called a “sloth” by the smug, jeering, stringy Miss Miller.
The lady told us that we needed to do 20 to 40 minute’s exercise a day, like jogging, swimming or cycling. She gave each of us charts, and told us that we could do something called a Pinch Test to find out whether we were too fat: you lean forwards slightly and pinch the flesh on your belly, and if it’s more than an inch thick, you’re overweight. I pinched my stomach and came away with a good inch and a half of flab, and panicked. I was fat; it was scientifically confirmed; there was no other way of putting it. Our homework was to devise an exercise plan, to go away and do it and we’d have our fitness tested again in a couple of months.
I really couldn’t face going through that again. I couldn’t face being last again. I panicked and knew I had to start doing this exercise plan soon and throw myself into it, even though I doubted it’d work.
That night when I got home from school it was already dark, so I put on my leggings and switched on the TV, and danced around the living room, kidding myself it’d make me fitter. I lay on my back and kicked my legs in the air, skipped on the spot and pretended I was boxing. I felt so disgustingly unfit. I sat down and cried, then mixed some butter, sugar, cinnamon and hot chocolate powder and spread it on four slices of toast. It was delicious but I instantly hated myself for it as soon as I’d finished.
Chapter 3
February 1998
By February, I was getting to the point where I was constantly miserable about my shape, feeling ever more self conscious and avoiding looking at my body in the mirrors around the house. Dad had dug out an old video of me from when we lived in France, where I was goofing around with a friend in the river. He filmed me climbing up onto a rock and taking a running jump into the deep pool, and I was fascinated by how lean and muscular my body was, just three years ago. I remember when I was eleven and twelve, I was so proud of the way I looked; I was tanned from living abroad and all the tree climbing and tramping through the forest in all weathers had kept me in beautiful shape. And at fifteen I just felt like a huge blob.
I’d been saying for months that I wanted to lose weight, but Mum just told me I was being boring so I eventually decided that I had to take matters into my own hands. It was such a relief when I finally started to see the pounds drop off; I never believed my body would obey me. I didn’t know my body at the time, and had no idea what a fast metabolism I have, and that everything could have been so simple.
We had all made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and do the exercise program we had designed for ourselves, and all the other girls stuck to theirs. For a total of about two weeks. I remember Jenny showing me her after school timetable and being dismayed to see that she and Frankie were doing more exercise than me, with a couple of hours in the gym every day and saunas to boot. I was gutted, plus she said she ate really healthily; and I thought, “But she’s a bit plump! If she does all that, and is still plump, how will I ever get slim?” What I didn’t know was that their health kick lasted all of three weeks before they gave up and reached for the crisps. As my classmates happily forgot about Miss Miller’s boot camp and carried on with being fifteen, I clung to my terror of being ridiculed with a vengeance, petrified of being called a failure at out next fitness test.
I started my diet the day after Valentine’s Day (on which I got three Valentine’s cards. One from Mum, one from Dad, one from the dog, in Dad’s handwriting. Nothing from Mr. Kumar). I was going to start on the Day itself, but I had a French exam, A Level, and needed what Mum called “brain food”, and I had already skipped breakfast…and the beef stew and garlic bread in the school canteen smelled soooo good. The trouble was, I always managed to find an excuse to eat more than I should. I felt depressed about it afterwards, and wondered if I would have the willpower to start my diet the next day or whether I would give in just like I did today, making excuses as to why I needed to binge again. “No,” I told myself, “I will do it: I need to change myself.”
The French exam was fine. That night, I ate dinner happily, wolfing down extra pasta and going back for more, to Mum’s delight, really pigging out, and ate a whole cheesecake for dessert as I knew that the next day would be the start of my diet, and I would be slim and healthy and everything would be just perfect. I couldn’t wait!!!!! I told myself I’d be able to wear tight clothes and look good in them, nothing too revealing but just to be able to get rid of my big baggy jumpers and stretchy trousers. I went to bed and dreamed of the New Me, a big smile plastered on my face as I fell asleep.
Chapter 4
The Diet, Day One.
When I woke up on the first day of my crusade against blubber, I felt so relieved, as though I was about to shed all the things that made people hate me. I couldn’t wait to be slim and pretty like Jess and her friends; I was sure they were so nasty to me because I was fat and spotty. I had joined the school two years before, in the second year, and had never fitted in. First of all I got bullied because I was considered foreign and liked rambling through the countryside getting covered in mud, whereas all the girls here were interested in was going to town and shopping. I’d never heard of all the various bands and stuff they were all into…on the first day this girl asked me if I liked Game On and I said, “Who’s Mon?” and I think that’s when everyone decided I wasn’t worth being friends with.
I felt like an outcast and hated the way I looked; I didn’t understand why I didn’t have Bambi eyelashes or shiny lips. I thought that if I could be prettier and slim like the others then they would like me. But there was another reason why I wanted to get in shape. I was so head over heels in love with my form teacher, Mr. Kumar, and I was sure he didn’t even know I existed. Well, he knew I liked him but I thought he must just look at me and think, “Eurgh, fat, sweaty and spotty. No thanks!” I had even spotted him talking to Miss Stevensen one day and he TOUCHED HER ARM!! Grrrr!! I casually grilled her as much as I could about her personal life and she told me she had a boyfriend but you could never be sure. I would come out in a cold sweat thinking about that…she could take him from me, and I couldn’t do anything about it because I was only fifteen. So the plan was to lose weight and grow my hair then maybe he’d notice me.
My diet plan was as follows:
Breakfast: apple or low fat yoghurt
Lunch: shredded lettuce and carrot without dressing, apple
Dinner: whatever mum cooks
Drinks: eight glasses of water a day
Exercise: half an hour’s jog after school along the canal with Pastis (my dog)
Weight: eight stone seven (I was five foot seven and eleven stone…disgusting, I thought)
The first day of my diet went perfectly. At lunch time, I was so tempted by the creamy beef lasagna and my all time favourite school dessert, apple crumble with custard, but I managed to resist…actually, as I sat eating my lovely juicy apple I felt pretty smug; all these people eating unhealthy stuff around me. It felt good! That day, I began my new exercise program after school. No more fat lazy slob in front of the TV after school, no more half hearted attempts! I pulled on my trainers, leggings and polar neck and set out along the canal, ignoring the hunger pangs. I tried to run along the canal for a full half hour but all that excess blubber must have been weighing me down. Yuck! I was sure I looked hideous in my running trousers. I just couldn’t wait to be slim. When I got home from my run I had six glasses of water in one go (you HAVE to drink eight and I’d only drunk two during the day) which kept me feeling full until dinner time; I was so hungry that I ate a huge pizza for tea but I guessed that was fine seeing as I starved all day. I was so excited to think that I’d soon be slim…like my life was about to become wonderful!
Chapter 5