WHEN I was 21 I stopped eating. Not entirely, mind you, but enough to make my hair fall out, my periods stop, my face become hollow and my body shrink to bones and translucent skin. Hunger has a particular resonance in this country where an estimated one million starved to death in the Famine, and where it more recently became a political tool for a group of men led by Bobby Sands. Today, thousands of Irish people – mostly young, mostly female – are starving themselves, and the chances are they won't be registering in the history books, writes FIONA McCANN
Which is why I wanted to write this piece: because, as difficult as it is for me to identify now with the gaunt, lank-haired, big-eyed girl whose distorted image peers out at me from the few photos that turn up from that patch of my life, she is part of my history. I had an eating disorder. I know what a terrible, exhausting waste of precious time and energy it is. I know how dangerous it is. And I know too, that it can be overcome.
It wasn’t until my final year of college that I even started dieting. Up until then, I had displayed all the habits of a healthy, happy teenager with an appetite for life and always, legendarily in fact, for food. Despite my impressive eating skills, I was never overweight. My family was a loving and stable one, I had never been abused or traumatised, I had a loving and loyal boyfriend who assured me of my attractiveness, and I had never counted calories in my life. Hardly a test case for psychosis. So what went wrong?
As ever, with an eating disorder, it was infinitely more complicated than a simple desire to be thin. After all, in our cornucopian, airbrush-addled western culture, there are few women who have not at some stage either expressed or harboured a desire to lose weight. There is a difference, however, between water-cooler conversations about chunky thighs, and the steely determination with which I approached my first, and only, diet. I was in my final year at university, and suddenly aware that from there on in, it was up to me to shape my future. I started with my body.
I remember the initial thrill at seeing myself so easily shed the curves and layers that at the time were keeping me from what I saw as the ideal. In my defence – in defence, perhaps, of all dieting women – it is hardly surprising that so many strive to embody an underweight ideal. Thinness, after all, is instantly rewarded by compliments, by a greater choice in clothing, by dresses that hang on clothes-hanger collar bones and that glide rather than bunch over curves. Suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I felt there was nothing I couldn’t carry off. Friends who expressed concern at my diminishing size were ignored, at least in the early days: I really believed I was accomplishing what they all wished they could. I was gleeful, and in charge: I felt powerful.
This part was easy. People-pleasing by nature, I was merely taking this to the ultimate degree, carving my shape out to win further approval. Losing weight was a cinch: the difficulty was working out when to stop. Even I knew that there had to be a limit to this, but every pound or kilogram lost, I reasoned, would allow for the inevitable indulgence later. I just kept putting off the later part.
As I continued to deprive myself of food, I stopped thinking about anything else. Even when I fell below whatever ideal weight I had initially set for myself, I became terrified of letting go. Having made meals for so long of apples and diet yoghurts, and measured out my life in coffee spoons and diet drinks, I had lost all sense of the pleasure in food and the relationship between hunger and satiation. I was so in the habit of suppressing appetites that I lost touch with them entirely.
By nature gregarious and sociable to a fault, I became increasingly introspective. A continued and constant focus on food meant I had little left over for the people who loved me, with all my energy required to keep the spring coiled as tightly as I could.
I recall this as a time of strange clarity – never before or since has my vision been so targeted, my focus so fine-tuned. All the rest faded out as I pared down my own physical existence and devoted all my mental and emotional energy to it. My willpower and determination were turned on myself, and my body was the target. But while I was busy avoiding any confrontation on the issue, my body was busy fighting back.
A FINEdown began to appear on my arms, something I later heard named as lanugo, a telltale sign that a person has lost insulating and necessary layers of fat, and that a body is compensating by growing what is essentially a layer of fur to keep out the cold. I stopped menstruating. My thick, curly and chaotic hair became thin and lank. My face sank into itself, leaving hollowed eyes, a nose out of all proportion, and oversized, equine teeth.
I was 21, the age at which you’re meant to enjoy the figure you get to look back on wistfully when gravity later takes over. Yet far from revelling in my youthful body, I was hiding it from view, abetted by a total loss in my budding libido. Even I knew by then that I was too thin, but I couldn’t relinquish control, as the very thing I thought I was in command of had begun to command me. All I could think about was food: not just what I ate myself, either, but what other people were eating. I even went to elaborate lengths to prepare food for loved ones that I wouldn’t eat myself, in a kind of delirious asceticism.
I saw myself as being fiercely in control, and that was how I wanted it. My study notes, customarily cobbled together on flyaway foolscap pads, became a picture of neatly filed, organisational obsession. My bedroom, traditionally chaotic with exploding drawers and trails of tights and paper, was suddenly, scarily pristine. My financial affairs were not only uncharacteristically in order, but I had developed a control over my limited purse strings that was only matched by that over my caloric intake.
My family, my friends, my boyfriend – all were naturally concerned, but I fobbed them off with talk of exams, feeling no small sense of accomplishment in doing so. I even managed to fool, or so I thought, the doctors they begged me to visit, and then, with a determination that brooked no alternative, I left the country. Being anorexic abroad, specifically in Japan, where I went as soon as my first job came through, was a compounded kind of odd. Even the legendarily petite Japanese students I taught were alarmed at my frame. Osoi – the word for thin – was one of the first I learned. News of my illness travelled fast, and soon I was called in for a rare private audience with my new boss, as he inquired over what was wrong with me. My faltering explanation wasn’t enough for a non-English speaker, and he bade me write the name of my illness down so he could have someone look it up. In my distress in so publicly naming my disease, I spelled it wrong.
All that afternoon an anxious employee could be seen flitting through the university campus where I was teaching, waving a piece of paper with the word “annorexia” written on it, as he asked all comers to help him decipher the meaning of this mysterious disease. My secret, it appeared, was out.
AS IF ANOREXIAcan ever really be a secret. I recall with embarrassing clarity the moment I confided to one of my new friends abroad that I had – whisper it – an eating disorder. It was a confession I'd worked up to weeks in advance, and I expected surprise, concern, anything but the affectionate laugh that accompanied his reply of: "No shit, Fiona!" No shit, and yet as clear as my problems were to everyone else, they were still hidden from me. The slowly dawning awareness that I was caught in something that had to be changed is hard to track now. I can only say that it was part of a subtle and complex process of self-discovery, and that a will to live somehow overcame the death wish that had led me there. Ultimately, the wish to partake in and be wholly present for the adventures and opportunities that were available to me in this unique moment of my life won out over the alternative. Somewhere during that year in Japan, I started loosening my grip.
Recovering was the hardest part. Once I did start to eat, my starving body, so-long deprived, refused to be sidetracked any longer and took over in binges of alarming speed and intensity. From eating next to nothing on a daily basis, I went to consuming fridgefuls of food, gorging myself with an abandon I was unable to fight as some reflex kicked in and forced any self-control out of the picture. In those hazy, insatiable moments, I ate almost everything I could lay my hands on. Thankfully, I found that I couldn’t vomit on command. This precluded any slide into bulimia, anorexia’s stealthily invisible sister. Yet, swinging between starvation and stuffing my face, and fed by a vigilante landlady who took advantage of my Irish politeness to present me with meals and snacks whenever she could, I began to look normal again.
Yet despite my outward appearance, I was far from cured. It turned out that my self-imposed starvation had been helping me to distance myself from what I didn’t want to feel or examine. The slow uncoiling made a space for all the repressed emotion to come rushing to the surface and it was hell.
To add to it all, I was embarrassed. I didn’t see the logic in my body’s behaviour: that binge eating was a natural defence mechanism kicking in to shore up calories before the next inevitable deprivation. I was ashamed of my lack of control, ashamed of the pain I was causing my family, ashamed of my own chaotic emotions and ashamed of this banal, middle-class, repulsive illness that seemed at once superficial and frivolous, while remaining darkly taboo. Those were my darkest days, and at times I wanted to die, convinced I could never conquer an illness that had taken such a strong hold on me.
Getting through an eating disorder is particularly difficult, given that you have to come face-to-face with the source of your problems every single day. An alcoholic or drug addict can at least remove the source of their addiction from their everyday life. For a person with an eating disorder it’s a thrice-daily showdown at mealtimes. I remember being hit hard by articles about people who battled with eating disorders all their lives, and despaired at ever finding a way out. Would I also have to fight this all my life?
The answer is no, and that makes me lucky and is what I want anyone reading this who is suffering in some similar way to take from this personal exposé. Recovery might be difficult, but it is certainly not impossible, and the sooner it is begun, the better. Get help, seek counselling, talk to eating-disorder specialists and do it as soon as you can, because you will and can get over this and you should do it before causing yourself permanent physical and psychological damage. And take heart: recovering from an eating disorder may even leave you better equipped than your “normal” peers to avoid the psychological pitfalls of body-consciousness that plague the society we live in.
WHAT DIDI do? I came home. I went to meetings. I sought help. I spoke to a therapist. I read. And this is what helped most in the end: I read my way out of trouble. I read whatever I could find about eating disorders, and this brought me to a book called Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (Arrow Books, £9.99), and this brought me to feminism, and for this I am grateful. I read strong women writers, I found angry, intelligent voices, I girded myself with their logic and passion, and I got better.
Fourteen years on, I can even say I am relieved that my emotional disturbances had such a physical manifestation that they had to be addressed, but I still have one regret: dieting.
When I think of all the energy, the willpower, the attention and the youth I put into something so wasteful, so unworthy of my precious time, it makes me angry. Now, when I meet beautiful, charming and healthy young women – and increasingly, young men – clearly doing the same thing, to varying degrees, I am tempted to shake them. “Are you crazy?” I want to ask them. “Are you stupid?” But I know the answer. They’re not crazy and they’re not stupid.
Many people with eating disorders – and they are everywhere, believe me, in all shapes and sizes – are, after all, only responding to a prevalent social soundtrack telling them that to be thin is to be valued. Others use food or abstention from it as a way to dull emotions or battle other demons. But they’re fighting the wrong battle. I wish I could call on all that strength, that steel, harness that willpower and personal commitment and direct it against the warped logic that keeps so many people ill and unhappy. Because that force, the fight of all those who are currently battling themselves daily, could really change the world.
- On Tuesday in Healthplus Sheila Wayman looks at how parents can help children with eating disorders
EATING DISORDERS GETTING HELP
An estimated 200,000 peoplein Ireland are affected by an eating disorder. The most common eating disorders are:
- Anorexia:characterised by a deliberate refusal to eat enough to maintain normal body weight
- Bulimia nervosa:characterised by repeated episodes of binge-eating followed by fasting, self-induced vomiting, the use of laxatives and diuretics or appetite suppressants, and/or excessive exercising
- Binge eating:characterised by periods of compulsive binge eating or overeating
Signs that a person may be affected by an eating disorder include:
- weight loss or gain
- evidence of low self-image
- a pre-occupation with food and weight
- excessive exercising
- withdrawal from regular activities or social situations
For more detailed informationon the physical, psychological and social signs and symptoms of specific eating disorders, visit bodywhys.ie.
Bodywhys,The Eating Disorders Association of Ireland. Helpline: 1890-200444. www.bodywhys.ie.
The Eating Disorder Resource Centre of Ireland, Blackhorse Lodge, Blackhorse, Drinagh, Co Wexford. Telephone: 053-9130506 or 087-2056560. www.eatingdisorders.ie.
Shandon Therapy Centre,Shandon Street, Easons Hill, Cork. Telephone: 021-4518091 (Monday, 7pm to 8.30pm). www.shandontherapycentre.ie