Diet

I have been dieting, and my feelings about this are (at best) ambivalent. I am glad that my clothes fit me properly again, and I know that my eating habits had been getting out of control. But I also feel ashamed of having “let myself go”, of having lost control so badly in the first place. At the same time I am embarrassed at the vanity of wanting to be slimmer, of the fantasy that that will somehow make me more acceptable. I am ashamed of myself in every conceivable way, and apart from my immediate family, who can see what I do and don’t eat, the only person to whom I have “admitted” that I am on a diet is my therapist. And this is not because anyone is likely to actually disapprove of, or make fun of me for dieting. Dieting, or at least monitoring very carefully what one eats, is so normal for so many women, that in reality the most likely response from my colleagues would be interest in what kind of diet I am pursuing, and how much weight I have lost so far. The shame I feel is not because dieting is socially unacceptable, far from it, but because I feel it is an admission of failure on my part to live up to my own expectations. I want to be able to maintain a healthy weight by eating good food, and by listening to my body about when and how much of this food I need, and somehow that hasn’t been working.

To try and understand better what has been going on I have unearthed an old familiar: Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, or FIFI. I read this many years ago, when I first became conscious that my relationship to food is not a happy one, and I have retained a feeling of things falling into place as I read the book then. The underlying principle that disordered eating is a response to a wide range of emotional difficulties was a revelation to me at the time, and so was the idea that fat itself can be a tool (albeit usually not an effective one) for communicating feelings and desires. I particularly liked the idea that if only we can stop projecting all kinds of other needs onto food, we will be able to stop overeating and find our “natural” weight which we will then maintain without any more obsessions over “virtuous” and “naughty” foods. The clear feminist message of the book, namely that women’s relationships to food, to their bodies and to others are conditioned by a society which limits their choices, was something I liked, but also rather took for granted. It seems to me that this idea sounds more radical and shocking now than it did then – but perhaps that another post.

What I had not remembered very clearly was Orbach’s take on mother/daughter relationships, and that has now taken on huge significance for me. Orbach argues that our relationship to food is formed by the ways in which our mothers fed us. In turn, their attitude to food and to their role as carers is influenced by the constraints placed on them as women by society, and by their response to those constraints. Women are expected to take on the role of carer for their families, and to put the needs of their husbands and children before their own. Feeding the family is a significant part of this caring and it may be the most visible one, but it isn’t the only one. Women who feel that they have had to sacrifice their own aims in life, their ambitions and desires, for their families are often not able to express, or even acknowledge, the anger and resentment they feel at this. These negative feelings about their own identity as women, and towards their families, then interfere with, or inform, their feelings for their daughters. Rather than encouraging her in her own independence, the mother will feel that she has to prepare her daughter for a life much like hers: of giving to others and going without herself. She may give more, and the best bits, of meals to father and brothers, extending to her daughter her own inferior role within the family. She may also feel that she has to teach her daughter early to “diet”, to deprive herself in order to stay (or become) slim, to make herself attractive. At the same time, her unacknowledged and unexpressed anger about her own lost possibilities may cause her to “punish” her child, to withhold from her the nurturing she needs. She may feed her daughter instead of loving her. Food becomes a stand-in for mother’s care and attention.

As I am dealing with the fact that my parents have not been responding to my recent attempts to talk about what happened 40 years ago in a way that makes me feel cared about, I am also trying to understand what food means to me, and what I am saying to the world by being fat. In my childhood I certainly never had to go hungry. Both my parents grew up during and after the war with never enough food to go around, and “wasting” food by not finishing what was on your plate, or refusing food because you simply didn’t like it, were major offences. I remember the horrible tension at mealtimes especially on Sundays, choking on boiled potatoes and trying to quietly remove bits of gristle while my father got angrier and angrier at my ingratitude. After I had been assaulted, neither of my parents spoke to me about what had happened, and it was clear that I was supposed to “forget” about it, that there was no help or support there for me. Instead there was chocolate – my mother brought home my favourite Ritter Sport bar from her shopping trips on a regular basis. There was food, a roof over the head and clothes to wear, but no room for emotions. I was well fed, but not cared for.

My weight has gone up and down throughout my life, and I’m not sure if there are any simple patterns to that. I have lost weight without any special effort when I’ve had to settle into new environments with different kinds of food available, and at other times I’ve struggled greatly to shift even a few pounds. I seemed to be able to maintain a weight that was acceptable to me for quite a while, but then didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from steadily gaining it. What I do know is that this latest weight gain has come at a very difficult time, where not feeling cared for has often been overwhelming. Not-feeling-cared-for is a feeling of desolation and despair that is extremely difficult to admit – because it seems like nobody cares. And, to me at least, that always seemed entirely normal – why would anyone care about me and my feelings? And even: why should anyone care – I always felt that I should just be able to cope on my own, that asking for help was an unreasonable request, was a failure on my part. I have been too ashamed to admit even to my therapist how much I long for him to care about me. The shame has made me try to find silent, coded ways of expressing my distress. Eating too much is one of many ways in which I try to do that, to make it visible that I am not ok, that there is something I need and am not getting, that I have to resort to eating food I don’t really want in order to try (always in vain) to fill the emptiness inside. At the same time I have an urge to punish myself for my weakness, for my failure to cope. Depriving myself of the food I want, eating horrible “diet” food instead, is a way of doing that. It is a socially sanctioned form of self harm, but I know that I am treating my body with the contempt I feel I deserve. And now I am sick of doing this, although I worry that my desperation will simply find another manifestation.

Yesterday I had my last session with my therapist before facing a three-week break, and I am glad that I managed to talk about some of those feelings to him. Over the last few weeks I have been more conscious of my deeply ingrained expectation of not-being-cared-about, of my constant need for reassurance and my inability to ask for it, or to trust it when it is given. I now feel in a slightly better position to manage those anxieties. When (as happens all the time) I start worrying that my therapist is angry with me, I can make an effort to imagine instead that he is simply waiting to hear from me, at our next session, or if necessary before that. In the past I have not been able to do that at all, so that as soon as I left his room I felt completely alone and abandoned. Now I manage to get from one week to the next, and I feel that I can reach out to him in between if I need to. Whether I can get through three weeks I don’t know, but I know I do not want to use food anymore to help me cope if it beomes too much of a struggle.