eatingdisorderself-cure

Overweight

Before I was Anorexic, I was overweight. In fact, from about the age of ten till eighteen. When I put together this eating disorder website I thought only of the ‘under’ illness, but now let’s look at the ‘over’ problem.

Firstly, whose problem is it? I know a woman who would qualify for the tag overweight. But her problem isn’t her weight, it’s other peoples judgement of her. She is fit and able, holds down a demanding job and is a great wife and mother. Her problem is external – it’s the snide jibes people make about her, and to her, and to her husband.

I remember another woman, married to a funky, artistic man, who called his wife ‘Rubenesque’ – after the celebrated painter Sir Peter Ruben, creator of many curvaceous women. Also, the European painter Botero paints women who are all curves and beautiful with it. His paintings are especially popular with the wives of successful businessmen – they see themselves reflected in his ample Eves and buxom serving maids.

However, there are other reasons to think about losing weight – I prefer to think of it as losing weight rather than ‘dieting’. Dieting has an atmosphere of artificiality about it, it’s something we do to ourselves rather than something that’s organic to us. For me – and this was the beginning of my own experience with losing weight – it’s about changing, or just establishing an experience and relationship with myself.

When I was about 13 I distinctly remember eating both a family sized bag of crisps and one of those 200g bars of chocolate. The next day I was surprised that my clothes (already on the generous side for my small frame) were even tighter. I can remember vaguely understanding by this that there was a relationship between what I put in my mouth and what my body looked like.

When I started to diet and exercise, this was the single most important and exciting fact: that I could influence my own body weight. This was important because there was up till then a total lack of relationship between what I ate and what I weighed. If I thought about it, I saw my (over) weight as something foreign, something that just was, that there was nothing I could do about it, it was something (when I was singled out and bullied) I just had to get through life with.

But when I started to monitor what I ate, when I cut out all the things I already knew weren’t ‘good’ for me, and when I started exercising, the first five, then ten pounds just dropped off. This was when other factors came into play, factors that eventually had me fifty pounds under my true weight and ill – but let’s look more at what the lessons were about losing weight (safely!).

It was to do with the relationship between my mouth, my brain, and my body. Once my brain began to have a say, began to say ‘if you eat that, you will be sorry. Not immediately, but tomorrow morning’ – then there was a new factor which hadn’t previously had a voice.

In other words, that part of losing weight is gaining awareness. Awareness that what you eat doesn’t just disappear, the body gets to work breaking it down and storing it in the fat centres. That if you eat more than the body requires, it has to find something to do with it. And conversely, that if you withhold a certain amount of potential food intake, the body does respond.

It was this that was so exciting. To realise that rather than being passive, my body was a living, active mechanism, sensitive and responsive to what I ate and did not eat. It’s not as simple as the old adage ‘a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’ – but it’s about the relationship.

One of the problems with diets is the idea of denial. That a diet is something artificial and unpleasant that we impose on our bodies, that we force ourselves to do. So that when we have lost the ten of fifteen pounds we were hoping to, we are still, psychologically, exactly in the same place as we were when we started the diet.

It’s parallel to what in Alcoholics Anonymous is called a ‘dry drunk’. In other words, someone who is refraining from drinking, but who still has the alcoholic mentality. It’s the mentality change that brings about a permanently different relationship with food, which on the individual is reflected in their size.

Everyone knows: we eat food for comfort. To reward ourselves. Eating chocolate releases the same chemical present when we make love, so eating chocolate makes us feel good about ourselves. A diet can temporarily stop us eating chocolate, but it doesn’t help us understand that there are other reasons not to eat chocolate. Like that our bodies really don’t like the artificial nature of chocolate, that our heart rate speeds up and then drops down again, lower than it was before. So that eating chocolate actually makes us feel more, not less depressed.

It’s long been understood by the profession that the true solution to overweight is a different perspective. But this is also the hardest to achieve. Food (and drinking too much) definitely fills a gap – a gap in happiness, in achievement, in social activity. Plus there are established patterns of eating in families – extra bread at dinner, always a pudding or sweet, boxes of chocolate, biscuits and cake in the larder to make up for mummy not being around (and if you’re mummy, for the absence of someone else).

So to reduce to a weight where we’re more comfortable, we have to stop using food and drink for other purposes. Rather than rewarding ourselves by over-eating or drinking, reward ourselves for being balanced and sensible. It’s not like this is such a terrible reward – I remember how easy it actually was to switch over from food being the reward to food being a sense of failure.

Now, since I’m not giving instruction in how to get an eating disorder, I’m not going to go into details here, but the basic common sense is that food doesn’t have to be our only reward – another reward can be feeling better generally about ourselves – which lasts much longer than the ten or fifteen minutes the food has given us.

On my last holiday I stayed in a hotel where buffets were the main attraction. I watched every morning as seriously overweight people piled their plates high. What was most noticeable was how little they actually got from eating through these enormous piles. Two or three courses for breakfast, a substantial lunch, and then a full attack on the supper buffet was clearly the only way they could think of getting through the day.

I remember realising: ‘I can’t eat all the food in the world’. Therefore – why not be choosy about what I do eat? Because watching these people eat, it seemed like a ritual
– as much of a ritual as some people with ‘thin’ eating disorders get into. They were eating, but not actually aware of what they were eating. It wasn’t a great culinary treat – it was fairly ordinary fare they could eat any day of the week. Eating so much seemed no different or any more enjoyable than eating just enough.

But it was poolside that the real price became apparent. While other people laid in the sun or swam lengths, the very large stayed wrapped up – even in the hot sun – swathed in dark, bulky clothes and even sweaters. That’s what I also remembered from childhood: while my peers enjoyed splashing around in the water, I had to pretend to have a cold, so I didn’t have to take my clothes off.

But now I was able to splash around like anyone else. Nobody took any notice of me. In my normal appearance, I was invisible, in a way that people who are large deeply and earnestly wish to be.

Therefore, why not try to achieve your goal? Remember that diets can be useful only if they permanently change eating patterns. Don’t be a ‘dry drunk’ dieter – be someone who has become aware of the relationship between your mouth, your mind and your body.

If this section has been helpful, please email me on matthew@eatingdisorderself-cure.com.

I need your feedback to understand what I still need to put in.

Thank you.