Nil by mouth

Gary said, of my last blog “why do you always write about such misery?” I tried to think of the happy things I could write about, and despite my apparently miserable content, there are many, many happy things I could write about, but there is also a lot to offload too. And since he’s not my target audience, let’s go for a bit of anger instead then.

Allen Carr (no not the comedian with the big teeth, but Allen Carr of “the easy way to stop smoking”) says of drinkers “you don’t drink for the reasons you shouldn’t”. Allen Carr was the first author who moved me to tears with his understanding of my predicament, of me, of my human-ness, the first person in who’s company I acknowledged my darkest most shameful secrets to myself as I read his books, and I faced my reality about my drinking, and about me. You don’t drink for the reasons you shouldn’t. It’s a very subtle and clever line and it works in so many situations. You may know alcohol is killing you. You may know tobacco is killing you. But you don’t continue to drink in order to kill yourself. You don’t continue to smoke in order to kill yourself. This was the first time anyone acknowledged that knowing something isn’t good for you isn’t necessarily compelling enough to make you stop. That it is more complicated than just that are you are some weak-willed lily-livered wash-out just because you couldn’t, or chose not to, stop. Knowing that you are systematically destroying your health, your life and your sanity, doesn’t make it any easier to stop. In fact, it only adds to the reasons why you want to continue. Oh, and you don’t overeat because you want to be fat. Oh Eureka! Someone who doesn’t say “have a piece of fruit instead” when you complain about your weight. These smug bastards who observe your weaknesses and trot out common sense platitudes expecting you to smack your forehead, if only I’d known that before you say, dancing away, fully healed. 

Let me make this very clear. I don’t diet to make my life difficult. I don’t sit about dreaming up the most paltry food list I can think of (dust, as Gary calls it, rubble as my French friend Astrid translates) in order to make myself the most deprived person in the world. I don’t concoct the most miserly food regime that will almost certainly prevent me from ever socialising again just because I want to be that awkward tedious twat  at the table humming and haw’ing about what’s in the food and how it’s cooked. I don’t sit around scheming ways to make myself more and more miserable, through my diet, through my suffering , through my pain, for fun.

I don’t diet because I want to be miserable.

I don’t believe I deserve to be miserable.

Or do I?

To my horror, both my lovely sister Stella, and my mentor Annie, have gingerly implied that maybe, just maybe, there’s a bit of truth in that. I can’t get angry at Annie, she’s not my sister, but I admit to feeling livid at Stella. How dare she I raged inwardly. Bingo. I’ve been poking around enough at my ego to recognise the signs that she may just have touched a nerve. And where there’s a nerve there’s some unfinished business to bring to light.

Only I’m fed up with going over and over my diet. Truly, utterly, completely, gut-wrenchingly weary of  my diet. Just eat normally say people. What the fuck is normal? Eat intuitively, they say. Intuitively I would eat until I popped. That’s not going to work is it? This is one of those situations where I want to scream at people. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. The fact that you even said that means you don’t have any frigging idea what it’s like to be hungry all the time. What it’s like to be obsessed with food from the moment you wake up. That you only ever feel satisfied when you’ve eaten 3 times more than whatever anyone else eats, and in 20 mins you could probably eat it again. That you have to stop eating because your tummy hurts but your brain is still sending you hunger messages. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. Inside every fat person is a fucking furious one.

Gary is one of these people who drifts gracefully around food, he doesn’t have any urge to overeat, he doesn’t eat rubbish, but he does eat what he wants, when he wants. He’s only been on a diet twice since I met him, either to smugly “lose a few pounds” or, even more piously, to be “more healthy”. On both occasions, whilst he can be completely sensible about food, sickeningly so, put him on a restrictive diet and he won’t last more than 24 hours. He shows no compulsion or obsession about food, but as soon as he CAN’T eat what he wants, he gives it up. So if sensible, balanced, no-eating-disorder-in-sight, self-satisfied smug bastard Gary can’t manage it for 24 hours, when I can master months, years of restrictive, authoritarian, diet regimes, I know I am neither weak willed nor lily-livered. I know I have iron-clad control around eating. Until I don’t and then it goes to pot spectacularly.

I have tried every method in existence. Well most. I couldn’t face making myself hurl for very long after I’d popped a few veins in my eyes, (hard to explain away) and my body did start to reject my attempts to vomit. It was too hard. I didn’t manage laxatives either, it just felt too high a price to pay. But in terms of what I put in my mouth, or rather, not put in my mouth, I’ve tried a version of most of them. Some work, most don’t, all fail eventually. I’ve done the original very low calorie diet (450 KCals a day) for months, and I did lose a lot of weight. I also learned that it isn’t JUST hunger that makes you eat. I’ve done intermittent fasting, living again on 500KCals a day for 2 days a week. I’ve been most successful on keto – high fat, medium protein and no carbs, and learned that I can eat a lot more calories on this regime. And this suits me. I love meat, I love fat. I love dairy. Unfortunately some other regime made me give up artificial sweeteners, and now keto holds no appeal at all without the promise of a little bit of sweetness occasionally. It’s like every diet is a compromise between being healthy and being thin. Stay thin and poison yourself with artificial sweeteners. Or eat completely healthy food and put on weight. On a diet that includes fruit and nuts, even avoiding grains and other carbs, I will still put on weight. As my awareness has grown I have looked at my emotions around food but I haven’t really come to any conclusion other than I want to eat because I feel I deserve to eat. If I am a child of the Universe, and the Universe loves me, what can’t I eat what I want? What can’t I at least eat SOME of what I want?

About 2 years ago I found Bright Line Eating and allowed Susan Peirce Thompson to change my life. She really did. I finally found a reasonable compromise. Dr Peirce knows what it’s like to be a victim to food, and tells us that it has been scientifically proven that sugar is more addictive than cocaine and explains why some people are more susceptible than others, and that the addiction is REAL and your body is going haywire. So it’s not greed, I’m fighting every fibre in my body that is telling me to EAT, baby, EAT, EAT, EAT. Determined to be the best at everything, I weigh in at a 10 out of 10 in her susceptibility scale. That’s an indication of how likely any deviation is to send me spiralling into oblivion. Her regime is rigid, oh so rigid, but I could live with it. I was still hungry but I began to stop obsessing about food, and the weight started to fall away. And it worked perfectly, I lost some of the weight, I would have liked to lose more, but I was OK with where I was. I really want to be a skinny bitch, I love tall willowy women, and whilst I may never be tall and graceful, I am surprisingly slim built underneath my padding and baggy clothes. Everything, including lettuce, is weighed. There is nothing outside mealtimes, not even milk in coffee. There is no sugar, no flour, basically no artificial or processed ANYTHING, fixed portions, fixed meals, no snacks, no leeway, no excuses, no judgement, no thinking (hence the Bright Lines – lines you don’t cross. Lines you don’t have to think about. Lines that become automatic instead of relying on willpower). Hard, blatant, militant rules, but it worked. She promises freedom from food, and It worked. For the first time in my life I would forget about food. Not completely, but I was genuinely letting go of thinking about food between meals. At target weight you get to add in a bit more food, and that’s what I was doing, a few months later, not because I was at target but mostly because I was hungry more than I was desperate to be willowy. Gradually I added a bit more in, food-wise, and each time I marvelled at the fact I wasn’t putting on weight. Nothing outside the rules, just gradually increasing the portions as I would if I were at target. I didn’t put the weight on. A bit more food would creep in. I didn’t allow myself to think about it, so I didn’t and the weight didn’t reappear. However I was suffering from digestive issues that seemed to have started when I started her regime (ironic given how it is a completely whole food diet), and no matter what I gave up I just couldn’t isolate what was causing the problems, it was really random. I suspect it was nuts and dried fruit, but now confident in my diet I was NOT prepared to give them up as my sole “treat” foods. Actually, I would give them up for a few days and my digestions would improve, and then not. I was completely flummoxed and began to get annoyed. Here I was, following all the rules, finally having found a regime that worked, but SOMETHING was sabotaging it. Meanwhile, I added a pint of milk with a banana, a banana milkshake mid-afternoon as bananas didn’t seem to bother me, but other fruit did.

Then as I live and breathe I can contest that the Law of Attraction gave me absolute and complete evidence of its existence. I do know that in theory in order to be thin and gorgeous, I have to think of myself as thin and gorgeous. Feel, luxuriate in the knowing that I am thin and gorgeous. Which is why when you are motivated in a diet, it works, when you lose motivation, it doesn’t. It’s so much more than what you put in your mouth. So, if it doesn’t come easily to you to feel thin and gorgeous, at least try not to think about it at all, and I was doing a decent job of that until suddenly, it all just broke. Fed up with my bad stomach and bewildered by what was causing it, desperate not to give up my nuts and dates, I raged about how unfair it all was. I gave in to all the anger and disappointment, the unfairness, oh the unfairness of it all. How hard I try, how I sacrifice, how I suffer (bit of a theme here you think?) Then the bargaining. If fruit was giving me a bad stomach, maybe I should eat honey instead, but I wasn’t allowed honey. I wasn’t allowed stevia. I didn’t want to face a life without any sweetness at all, how these diets had robbed me of any joy in my life, how at last I was happy eating what I was eating now, but my stomach wasn’t and anyway I was BOUND to put on weight. It all began crashing down on me. I MUST be putting on weight, I yelled. And literally, in the space of 2 or 3 days of deciding I was putting on weight, I had put on nearly half a stone. Non-dieters think that can’t happen. Anyone who has dieted like me knows that looking at pasta can put on 3-4 pounds. It was as it had all been holding off: fat, swirling round in my vortex, just ready to manifest at the moment I lost faith, and believed I was putting on weight. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t stop it. I had lost the faith. I had dropped the ball. I had succumbed to the worst version of myself. My fat self. My greedy self. My wanton, feckless, slovenly self showed up, and manifested.

To be continued….

If you want to hear more about food and dieting and all that goes with it, join Julie and I on Making Light, Two Humans Being – The Food Minefield.