We need to talk about weight, don’t we, in light of my previous words? It’s there, a leaden presence in my thoughts about skin, hair and image, so it needs unpacking.
Before anyone chimes in with the usual ‘take in fewer calories than you burn’ as a panacea for a lifetime’s struggle with the scales, let me tell you this. I’m not an idiot. I know how it works. But what you don’t know is how fat is fused into my soul. It always has been, for as long as I can remember. I am not here to make excuses; I am here to explain how my mind works in relation to the size of my body.
I can give you a list of all the diets I’ve tried. The diets themselves are entirely zeitgeisty. Remember cabbage soup in the 80s? Slimfast in the 90s? Atkins in the 2000s? I have aged with a diet by my side. Today, in the 2020s, I drink Huel. It’s my latest beau. We are in the honeymoon phase of our relationship. I know that I will come to contend with commitment issues, as I have done with every diet.
A school nurse made me write down everything I ate, when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. I queued for food with another large child, our food intake monitored while we were at school. Other kids hated seeing the nurse because she was the Nit Nurse. I hated seeing the nurse because I was ashamed, because by eating, I was doing something very wrong. The brain of a child does not comprehend food restriction: mine didn’t - it just made me squirrel food away in shame. I wasn’t even that big, but growing and standing out. My classmates were whippet-thin. I wanted to be like them, but the sensation of food and the comfort of curling into a corner with a book was my blessed relief from feeling so faulty.
Everything was thrown at the problem. Everything except teaching me how to love food without being in an abusive relationship with it. I didn’t need to hula hoop for hours to whittle my waist; I needed to know how to recognise being full, to know which foods gave me energy.
Advice on diets was limited to ‘don’t eat crisps and chocolate’. I lived in an Asian household, where we ate curry and rotlis. We ate bhajia and lime pickle, puris and gulab jamun. How does a child navigate food and moderation when the model is meat and two veg?
Truth be told, fat treatment was a shambles. Warnings of having a heart attack petrified me but didn’t fix the part of my brain that liked to eat. No one talked about diabetes (and we will come to that later). It was fad after fad.
The result was making myself small in other ways. I disappeared into books where I could be (as far as possible as a fat Asian girl from Leicester) someone else. I tucked myself tightly into chairs, not allowing myself to touch anyone for fear that they would attribute the contact to being fat, and not just conviviality or carelessness. I hid behind clothes that were either too small or too big - disguise was not an exact art. I excelled at school. I abandoned the scales. If I didn’t know, then I didn’t have to feel guilty. I ate secretly.
I can list countless occasions when people were cruel, particularly my peers. Taunting about fat was acceptable - and it seems that hasn’t ever really changed.
The first meal I ate at university was a can of sweetcorn, in a shared kitchen. I stood in a corner and ate the contents of a can with a fork. Everyone else was cooking and seemed happy to do so. I didn’t trust food. Food was the enemy. To avoid grappling with it, I developed a uniform of food to hide behind. Pasta and sauce wasn’t just a cost-saving exercise during my degree, it was a safety blanket. I didn’t have to choose. That was what I ate publicly. Privately, I gorged on everything was was forbidden.
Added to the familial predisposition to diabetes, the possible Polycystic Ovaries, I was a ticking time bomb. I still am.
At my heaviest I weighed 21 stone. I was pre-diabetic. I had high-blood pressure. My body was telling me in not so many words that I had to be different. But I couldn’t. Even with the threat of early death, I continued to eat. An accident of circumstance - yes, the aforementioned divorce led to sudden weight loss. For the first time, I had lost weight; inevitably there is a But. It was precipitated by shock. It wasn’t due to a fundamental rewiring of my maladjusted brain. It was a happy side-effect of being traumatised.
I have kept off the four stone I lost back in 2012 and every day I get on the treadmill. Not an actual treadmill, because that would be awesome and logical, but no. The treadmill of how food will go today. Will I be a good girl?
Food is not just the enemy, but also my drug of choice. I am now Type 2 Diabetic and constantly battle with carbs. We are locked in a death spiral.
I lost a significant amount of weight when I started the Cambridge Weight Plan. 800 calories a day meant that my blood sugar stabilised and I was wearing thin-people clothes. But there was no actual food in that plan. I stopped. I couldn’t maintain my life like that. I vowed to keep to the principle. Spoiler alert, I didn’t. I was prescribed Ozempic recently. I lost weight, my blood sugar went down. But that may have been because I was violently sick and had diarrhoea regularly. I had to stop. My diabetic nurse was sympathetic in the way someone is when they disapprove of me not taking a wonder drug. I still feel the embarrassment of not being able to take it.
Some days are good and some days are bad, and they are usually measured by how I have consumed food. I have given myself small targets, one of which is to stop eating when I am full. That sounds overly simple, but I assure you, it is the crux of the issue. Historically, I haven’t stopped at full, to the point of discomfort, mindlessly chewing. There’s a wonderful Japanese word that resonates: kuchisabishii - and it translates to ‘my mouth is lonely’. It resonates because that’s why I eat; not for energy, not for fullness, but because I am filling a gap I don’t know the location of.
I do look in mirrors now. I have learned to keep my deep shame at bay and to try to assess my own form without cruelty. If I don’t, then I am drawn into a dysmorphic wonderland in which I am, within days, seeing my body grow like Alice at the rate of knots. It doesn’t actually matter that I am the same size. My brain thinks differently, and it never thinks me thinner, always bigger, always disproportionate.
When I named this series of writing, I took the title from Derek Walcott’s Love After Love. I want to live by this:
And maybe one day I will get there.
This was so beautifully written - thank you. So much resonates x
I've always loved this Walcott poem, Bennie - and from this point onwards it will remind me of you and these incredible pieces of writing. I hope that producing them has been a positive experience for you, and a constructive way of processing your reflections about your life. It's a great example of honest, courageous sharing which I'm sure will resonate with many of your readers. J x