getting to know you...

The process of getting to know your body doesn't happen all at once. Actually, if you're me, it doesn't even happen gradually. It happens in a series of bunny hops, of moments when you say to yourself, "oh, I can't believe I didn't notice that before..."

I've been in definite ED recovery for, oh, seven or eight months now. It seems like longer. I've lost weight, though not deliberately. I'm eating reasonably normally, and fairly well. I haven't binged in a long time, and I've pinpointed the one thing that still seems to trigger me.

But truthfully, my body is still a mystery to me, just as it always has been. It's just a mystery I feel much better about – a mystery I've learned not to loathe. I wouldn't say I'm all the way to love yet, but I'm definitely at acceptance.

I've also been diagnosed with PCOS in that time, and started taking metformin, which has worked miracles. I'm having a normal menstrual cycle for the first time in years. I'm getting PMS (which I've never had) and I'm pretty sure I'm ovulating, all of which is good.

And today I discovered (or, more to the point, woke up to the fact) that eating white bread at lunchtime makes me feel like shit: exhausted, headachy, generally grouchy, and desperate for a nap.

Now, understand, I don't approve of diets on principle, but I don't think that's the same thing as trying to eat to how your body is feeling. There's nothing morally wrong with white bread, and if I want to eat it, I'll eat it. But I think it's clear that I need to start paying attention to the physical results of particular foods. I've had the whole low GI thing in my head since the PCOS diagnosis, and I've been semi-following it in a relaxed sort of way. But I never really twigged to the fact that, actually, what I eat makes a difference to how I feel.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But I've been a compulsive binge eater for more than two decades – food has made me feel desperate and crazy and obsessive and miserable and angry and all kinds of other things, but I've never really noticed how it made my body feel. I've been so disassociated from my body for so long that I've never known how it feels, especially in relation to food. I binge ate because it temporarily made my emotions feel better (well, till I started excoriating myself for the eating) – I tuned out the effects on my body. Oh, I'll pick it up if I'm in pain or sick or something, and I'm not good at suffering that in silence either, but I'm not at all attuned to how environmental factors make me feel, unless they're causing me really obvious pain or discomfort.

Certainly, I never noticed before that eating a white baguette at lunchtime is a bad idea – not because it's wrong or bad, just because I feel like crap afterwards. And that might not matter so much if I had it at dinnertime, or on the weekend, but it matters when I'm at work. So this is something I'm going to try to explore over the next few months: How Things Make Me Feel. How particular food makes me feel, how exercise makes me feel, how sleep makes me feel, how the absence of any of the above makes me feel.

It's a weird sensation to discover that your body has been sending you messages all the time, but you've been lalala-ing with your head in the clouds and never noticed it.

Sorry, body.

relapse

If recovery were a hill, and I had climbed to its pinnacle by the end of last year, I've managed, in the past month, to tumble halfway back down it again. This is annoying.

I'm not all the way back to the bottom, but I've still got to climb back up to the summit.

It's like this: my mother visited. Unfortunately, that's really about all it's like. I've had work-related depression and anxiety since early in the year, but that didn't trigger my eating problems at all. No, I was doing just fine till my mother got here, and then suddenly, food ceased to be fuel or pleasure and restarted being a great smothering need which both comforted me and suffocated all the annoyance and frustration I so often feel with my mother.

My mother is actually a very lovely woman – which is part of the problem. She is a very nice, very helpful person whose feelings are very easily bruised, and in my family there is a strong "do not hurt Mum's feelings" culture, which I had partly forgotten about because I've been living on the other side of the world for eight and a half years. And because I've learned in that time to be a bit more of a hardnosed bitch, and also to forget what my mother is actually like, I wasn't as sensitive to her vulnerabilities as she expected me to be. And then, of course, there was a certain amount of drama. And I, of course, apologised because that's the game we play.

The problem is, while I was no doubt a little short with her, there's just no space in this scenario for her to believe herself wrong, or even difficult, in her behaviour. I tried to express some of my frustrations and got a list of reasons why I was completely wrong about them, how she wasn't doing anything I said she was, and how I should be kinder. She might even have been right about that.

Regardless, though, of whether she's right or I'm right or both of us are wrong, I couldn't yell at her, I couldn't tell her that she was annoying me, and, in order to keep the peace for all four people present (my husband and sister were there too), I just had to shut up.

Whereupon I started to eat up, more than I have for months, more than I needed, in secret. I didn't go on an actual binge as such – it wasn't possible, because I was around people constantly for a couple of weeks – but I certainly found the time and the food to stuff down all that resentment and irritation. And the habits have re-emerged: buying too much at lunch time because I just really want to eat a lot, sneaking extra biscuits into my drawer, stocking up on secret chocolate, eating all afternoon, all the things I was so proud of myself for avoiding so neatly during my work-related depression and anxiety.

So clearly this isn't completely resolved yet. But I'm damned if I know how to deal with it. I can certainly start doing again all the things I did last year, and that would probably get me back on top of the eating for now, while my mother is thousands of miles away.

But that isn't really enough. My mother, bless her, isn't going to vanish from my life any time soon. She's also not going to change her whole personality at the age of sixty just because I relapse when she's around, even if she knew about that, and even if she could accept it had anything to do with her, which she probably wouldn't. Somehow I've got to find a way to circumvent this entirely so I can see her, not get annoyed with her, not say anything that upsets her, not get annoyed because she's so easily upset, not get resentful because she uses her hurt feelings like a bludgeon to get her own way, not eat because I'm resentful. (You can see how well I'm circumventing it at present.)

I do love my mother very much, underneath the current annoyance. She's a good person and a loving mother, and I've got to find a way to be around her without triggering the hideous lumbering beast that is my compulsive eating. I'm just not quite sure how to do that - how to find a way to deal with the feelings that there isn't room to express without just eating them.

Mind you, this probably goes back to the same old thing I've been drumming on about for months, in various ways - there always has to be space inside ME to deal with them, regardless of whether it can be expressed outside myself or not, because if there isn't, it'll come back to bite me on the ass. Or to make me bite something else on the ass. It seems so often to be the permission to allow things to be that makes them bearable.

for better, for worse...

Here are some ways you can tell I'm getting better:

1. The desire to binge is largely gone. Until the other tonight, I hadn't thought about it in weeks. WEEKS. That was really good. But it's not completely gone, and it will come back if I don't stay vigilant about refusing conversations with myself about how I could lose weight.

2. I'm doing non-incidental exercise regularly for the first time in years. It may be "just" yoga, but it's making a difference. I'm more flexible already, and I want to sit and lie in entirely different ways because suddenly those ways are no longer comfortable.

3. I'm actually feeling hunger on a regular basis because I'm usually not eating until I get hungry, rather than just because now is the time for food.

4. The incidence of me snacking in the afternoon because of boredom has dropped significantly.

5. I no longer cringe at calling myself or being called "fat". I did cringe when my husband described himself as "grossly overweight" after a visit to the doctor (don't know if that was their word or his own), but I think that's because "grossly" implies a world of disapproval and loathing which I find really distasteful.


Here are some ways you can tell I'm still getting better:

1. Over the past few days, the diet talk has been sneaking into my brain again, mostly around, "my friend is getting married in a bit under a year, if I do X, Y and Z, I bet I could be a size 20 by then...". The result? Had a bit of an unreasonable incursion into the ice cream the other night. And it wasn't the normal "I just want a little more ice cream" kind. Alas, I know the difference only too well. I think the problem is that I've been doing so well that I started to think that having conversations with myself about how "I could be looking in X time if I would only do Y" wouldn't be destructive. I was wrong. It is. There's not a genuine difference between me being able to look at size 20 bodies and think "I want one of those because mine isn't good enough as it is" and between doing the same thing with a size 6 body. It's not okay for me to idealise a smaller body, even if that smaller body doesn't seem as unrealistic as a size 6. And it's not okay because as far as I've come - and I have - I am still recovering from an eating disorder, and "recovering" doesn't mean "cured". Recovering means that when you start having conversations with yourself about how doing X, Y and Z will make you even a little thinner, it isn't very long before you've eaten all the ice cream and feel terrible because you've eaten all the ice cream and are still fat.

And there's the other aspect, which is that when I start thinking like this, I stop exercising again. I'm well aware that there's more than a little Mary Quite Contrary going on here, but that's the way it works for me. If I think I'm exercising to lose weight, I stop doing it. And I am really proud of how far I've come in terms of moving my body. The last thing I want is to lose that ground because I've taken it for granted.

2. I still have to consciously stop myself mid-thought about losing weight in any capacity whether it's because I'm getting more exercise or eating in a less crazy way or what. I still have to say "stop" and force myself to turn around. It's working, I think - hence the reduction in binge eating - but the neural pathways are still there and still run automatically if I'm not careful.

3. I haven't yet learned to deal with feeling full. Some months ago, I saw a post in which a fat activist was decrying Paul McKenna's "I Can Make You Thin". In my newbie innocence, I slightly defended as being pretty close to intuitive eating (which, actually, it is in a lot of ways, though there's a fundamental assumption that thinner is inherently better which isn't good, and McKenna never clarifies that people may just find that their natural weight is higher than they think it should be). She wasn't terribly impressed with the defence because it included the notion of eating consciously, and she considered that an unreasonable expectation. I get what she was saying. Maybe it is, if the "full" sign pops up in your head in a normal way.

But you see, I've never really learned to stop eating. I stop when there's nothing left. And the consciousness is important because if I'm reading or watching TV or whatever, I'm not paying attention to what my body is saying, and I breeze past it. Not to mention, reading or watching TV or whatever is how I have always, always disguised binges - from myself, I mean, not from others. I don't binge in company, generally speaking. But paying close attention to other things has always meant that I haven't had to pay attention to the actual process of eating. And while I've come a very long way in relation to binge eating, I still treat my meals with this same attitude, that they're something to hide, to just tuck out of the way and pretend didn't happen.

Turning off all the distractions and paying attention to my food and what my body is saying in response to it...well, I'm not there yet, but I think this part is going to be as important as breaking the connection between exercise and weight loss. It is hard.

4. I will still eat food at any time if it's there. See point 3. I am no longer going to look for food as a distraction (mostly), but that won't stop me from eating whatever is in my drawer.

5. I have stopped worrying so much about being fat (well, had, till I let the "I could be X by Y" thing get off the ground again), but I have instead started to worry about how I'm going to look if, with all this progress and exercise, I lose weight and my stomach deflates like a beach ball.


So there we go. This is a hard process, and I have to keep working at it constantly. And then I have to keep reminding myself that I'm working at it constantly so that I don't just start giving myself a hard time because I'm fat or because I'm failing.

Of course, the biggest problem at times is that I don't know if I'm going to have to keep working at it constantly for the rest of my life. And I get tired.

kneejerk

I have a confession to make.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was not "that's an appalling load of bollocks". That was the third thought.

The first thought was: "I'll bet I'd qualify for that. I didn't realise you could get it on the NHS. I wonder if I should ask my doctor..."

The second thought was: "Jesus H. Christ, what the hell am I even thinking?"

Then we got the one about the bollocks.

But it's amazing, really, how I can be thinking about recovery consciously so much of the time these days, and yet I see something like that and my kneejerk reaction is "OMG RLY?" Really? You could fix me? You could just cut me open and mess around and I'd be thinner?

If I thought it would really be that easy, I'm ashamed to say, I'd probably do it. That's hardly fat accepting, but, as I've mentioned before, I'm not all the way there yet. Intellectually, I'm sold. Emotionally, it's still a hard slog.

the story of me

This isn't actually the story of me, because that is long and not very exciting. This, rather, is a look at how powerful The Story Of Me is in maintaining my eating problems.

Okay, it's going to start with a bit of the story of me. Here it is: I discovered Geneen Roth over a decade ago. Until that time, I really had no awareness of myself as a person with an eating disorder. I just thought I was fat and greedy and lazy and had no self control. And then I read When Food Is Love, and I spent the whole book thinking "THIS IS THE STORY OF ME!"

And that changed a lot of things. I stopped doing diets most of the time. I still bought the books, still planned to eat less, but I gave myself permission to eat, mostly. It helped a bit, though not enough.

But since that time, The Story of Me has had a significant plotline which is "The Story Of How I Have An Eating Disorder". It's a fairly confessional storyline - I tell people about it with the air of confiding a secret, though I don't know why. It's also a story I tell to myself a lot, mostly under the subtitle of "The Story Of Why I'm So Fat".

I have other plotlines, of course: there's "The Story Of Being A Recovering Christian", "The Story Of Suffering Two Major Depressions", "The Story Of Finally Meeting Someone Who Fancies Me" (there's a subplot of this story in which it turns out a number of people fancied me, but I was too dense and too insecure to notice it), and "The Story Of How I Write Books But Never Send Them To Anyone". The Story Of Me is pretty big and complicated, and has many twists and turns, but it does tend to keep coming back to "The Story Of How I Have An Eating Disorder".

And lately, with my ways of dealing with that eating disorder changing, and the subsequent mysterious backlash, I'm wondering a bit how much really trying to recover is setting itself up opposite The Story Of Me. By which I mean, how is recovery affecting my identity? And how is my identity, my self-told story, wrestling against my recovery, because it changes the whole damn story?

I've been telling this story for a really long time, both to myself and to others. I extend it far back in time to being a barely adolescent girl with enormous breasts and a mother who didn't understand that bodies are different. I've been flinging it out ahead of myself into the future. I have an eating disorder, I have had it, I will have it...

But for how long? And what happens if my recovery goes from recovery to recovered?

Now, truth be told, I am both navel-gazer and self-sabotager extraordinaire, so I manage to combine self-awareness with total failure to let myself get anywhere on a fairly regular basis. So I wonder if part of this weirdly conscious little relapse I'm having at the moment, where, having noticed actual progress, I'm having to make double the effort to stay conscious that I was before, is to do with the fact that The Story Of Me, at least the version I've been reading, hasn't ever toyed with a chapter which explores "The Story Of How I Got Better". Or "The Story Of How I Do Not Binge Eat Any More But Am Still Fat". That's quite a scary story for a person with an eating disorder - the whole of my story of eating problems revolves around "The Story Of How I Do Not Want To Be Fat". I'm working on changing that one, but the edits are far from finished.

But yesterday, for example, my acupuncturist was suggesting that I needed to avoid certain foods to help strengthen my spleen because that is causing some pretty enormous menstrual problems. (I don't know what that all means, but it works pretty well, so who am I to argue?) And I said, yes, that sounds fine, but just so you know, restricting my eating is an issue for me, because I Have An Eating Disorder.

Now, on one level, there's nothing wrong with that - she's suggesting dietary changes, I'm pointing out that it isn't that simple for me, which it isn't, and that although I will be aware of this and do what I can, I'm not promising anything.

But at the same time, she's not suggesting dietary changes so that I lose weight. This is the Chinese medicine version of saying telling me I'm allergic to wheat or I'm diabetic. There are dietary restrictions which are necessary to a person's ongoing survival and physical comfort that might or might not result in weight loss, but for which that weight loss is a totally irrelevant side effect. And you would think, actually, that mostly avoiding cheese and sugar and eating thick vegetable soups would be a relatively small price to pay to stop having five week long periods, especially since I like vegetable soup. And it would be, except that this is "The Story Of How I Have An Eating Disorder", and in this story, our heroine is incapable of taking any action at all that might hypothetically under certain circumstances possibly lead to weight loss even if they don't start out being for that purpose without eating everything in town. So she doesn't do that, and that leads to a certain level of control, and that's fine. (Sort of. This is the same story that led to me stopping doing an exercise activity which was definitely changing the amount of energy I had because I was also noticing a little weight loss. This is a powerfully confusing and contradictory story.)

But it's ignoring "The Story Of How I Have Menstrual Problems", and the advice of someone who has treated me for a number of things over a long period of time and knows pretty well what she's talking about. But part of my own story is that I hear "less dairy and sweets", and I don't think "normal menstrual cycle and more energy". I think "Jesus H Christ, what if I lose weight?" and then I freak out because that is both too wonderful (according to "The Story Of How I Don't Want To Be Fat") and too terrifying to be believed in.

I really am totally fucking bugnuts, aren't I?

I think I need to start working on a different story, really. Maybe it's called "The Story Of How I Used To Have An Eating Disorder". Or maybe it doesn't mention the eating disorder at all. Maybe it's "The Story Of How I Am Healthy And Don't Overdo The Dairy Products Because They Cause Problems".

As always in this blog, I don't have any great answers. I'm just realising that my recovery isn't just going to be about consciousness (though that's great) or feelings (though they're great too). It's not just going to be about having no limits, or about managing things. It's going to involve a change of identity as well, and a new story to tell myself and others about who I am. In the same way that going from from having a constant internal struggle with my religious beliefs to not believing any of those things completely changed my life, my view of myself and the view of the world, the transition from the eating-disordered story to the recovered story is, I think, going to shake things up a lot.

Occasionally, I really just think all this psychological stuff is just waaaaay too much hard work. But I am hopeful that this new story is going to be a kickass good one.

anatomy of a conscious binge

Forgive me, folks, for I have backslidden. Backslid?

Except I haven't, really, because this is different.

For some reason, today as I was walking home from work, I felt the strong desire to stock up, go home and eat till I puked. This is the sneakiness of the beast. I'm doing all well and happy, lalala, and boom! I wish to binge.

So I went looking for whatever feeling it was I was trying to displace with food.

Nothing there, apparently. That's the weirdness. I'm not upset, I'm fairly happy right now – I don't want to die rather than go to work, our court case is finished, things are quite good. So why the need (and I say "need" deliberately) for the binge?

So I kept looking, and found only the monstrous dark shape of the binge urge itself, and that kept running off.

I chased. Finally, I collared it, and it swung around and turned out to be less of a dark monster and more of a teenage girl in a hoodie. (I know, this is all getting a bit surreal, just go with me.)

"What's going on?" I said. "Why are you bothering me? I was doing so well."

She pulled some of those faces teenagers pull when they're being asked how their day was, and finally came out with something along the lines of "it's just time, you're due."

Now, part of my entire plan at the moment is that I don't try to force myself not to binge if I really want to, because that results in worse bingeing, so I went to the shop and bought a bunch of stuff, and pondered this question of why and how I could be "due" for a binge.

Prior to today (which we'll get back to in a minute), I haven't had a binge in a couple of weeks. That is pretty amazing going. I've usually not even thought about it, and that really is amazing going. So what is this sudden need that comes from nowhere and nothingness and just says, it's time? Am I that regulated by bingeing? Is this just some kind of maintenance strategy? I need to binge just because I haven't for awhile? Seriously? What the hell??

So anyway, I stocked up. I decided that I could eat as much as I wanted, but I had to pay attention to it while I was doing it, because bingeing and distraction are like peas in a pod for me – you can only have the former wrapped up nicely inside the latter. I had some beef jerky. It was okay, but didn't taste that great, certainly not as good as it tasted in my head. I had a Turkish Delight, which has long been one of my favourite treats, and that was okay, but didn't taste quite right either. And all the time, the hoodie-wearing teenage altar ego of my binge kept muttering, "seriously, you need a book or something, this isn't not working for me."

She was right, it wasn't at all. But I gave it a game old try, and had some crisps. They actually were really nice, but there also seemed to be a lot of them.

And then I had three raspberry liquorice laces. Out of a whole packet, I had three. And now I have completely run out of steam. I still have a bag full of crap, and I just don't even care. I'm also very fascinated by what has just unfolded, so much so I'm not even feeling bad about having a kind of demi-binge. It was educational.

And now I'm sitting here typing this and pondering the question of why I cannot binge consciously.

The truth is, I rarely even eat consciously, but bingeing, dear God, how impossible is it to eat ridiculously large amounts of food when your mind is actually on it? Well, I don't know about you, but for me, it doesn't work. Actually, I think it's the same kind of process as sitting with my emotions. Actually sitting with my crazy sneaky teenage girl of a binge and saying "go right ahead then" resulted in her looking at me askance and sidling off, muttering "well, I didn't really want to do that anyway..."

So what is it about consciousness that changes the way things unfold? What is it about attention that does it? Why do my emotions start tapping their feet and looking at their watches when I give them my full attention? Why does my previously desperate desire to binge huff off when I don't allow myself to immerse my brain in something while I shovel food down my throat? Is it that my attention is that boring, or that all these emotions are kind of like cockroaches who want to scatter when you turn the light on them? I don't know.

I don't really understand this process. I mean, I'm pleased with it – half a binge is not so bad, especially when it ends the way this one has – but I'm confused by it at the same time. Stay tuned to see if I have any epiphanies about it.

feeling and healing

I am doing well. It's funny to say that. It's rare to say that, mostly because I am extremely pedantic about the truth, and tend to assess every possible thing that could come under the heading of "well" and conclude that, actually, I'm not doing that well. I'm "okay", or "bleh", or, if we're really lucky, "fine".

But with specific reference to my eating disorder, I'm doing well. Actually well. This is radical news. I pointed this out to my husband last night and he said, "yes, I didn't like to say anything, but you have been."

Like this: I actually do not remember the last time I had a binge. Oh, I've eaten a couple of big meals, I suppose, but they've just been meals, and I'm becoming much more conscious of when my body is saying "enough food" and actually stopping at that point. There's been no compulsion (apart from the compulsion to clean my plate, but that's another issue), and no desperation. I just don't remember the last time I wanted to eat like that. Well, I suppose it was probably when I wrote this entry. And that was only the desire – it didn't result in any action. Actually, I'm planning a bit of a greedy lunch, but for the first time in possibly ever, I am just going to tell my husband what I had for lunch instead of hiding the evidence.

Like this: the other day, I was violently nervous about something that was happening in the afternoon, and yet I felt no desire to eat.

Like this: yesterday, I was extremely bored in the afternoon, and yet I felt no desire to eat. I had a cup of tea. A cup of TEA, people. I didn't even think about going to the canteen. I mean, sure, I'd had a late and fairly big lunch, but being full doesn't usually stop me.

Like this: I've been very distressed and stressed about certain family situations in the past couple of weeks, and yet I haven't felt the need to binge.

To be honest, this is pretty weird and confusing. I am so used to a particular, if painful and depressing, way of dealing with things that when I notice that I'm not doing it, I'm startled.

I have to put it down, mostly, to the fact that I have changed (am still in the process of changing) my habits in relation to dealing with my feelings. Instead of trying to remedy my bad feelings by stuffing them full of chocolate till they shut up, I've just been sitting down, saying "it's okay for you to be here" to whatever feeling it is, and letting it run. So sometimes I cry a bit, and that's okay. And it's okay for me to want to stab things or people (note: as long as I do not carry out this desire). It's even okay for me to feel really bad about myself and my body, as long as I just sit there quietly with it and feel whatever it is.

And here's the cool part: the feelings go away. Amazingly, when I give my full attention to feelings that I normally run from, they seem to lose momentum really quickly. I have no idea why this is.

The thing I've been realising is that I have invested a hell of a lot of time and energy over the years in trying not to feel things I don't like, and yet not one single thing I've ever done to avoid feeling bad has ever worked. Every time I've felt bad, I have been in a mad scramble to get back to this state of mind I call "normal", to just not feel off-kilter, and yet that scramble always seemed to make things worse, and to spark eating habits that weren't healthy and made me feel desperate and crazy.

And more than eating like a fairly normal human person, I feel...different, about my body, about myself. I'm up and down on most things in my life – I still don't like my job, or the town we live in, and there's always crap. But I feel...taller. Does that sound crazy? But I do. It's not like I'm waltzing around singing "I love me, I love me...", but I feel both more and less bound up in my body. I feel more connected to it, more aware of how it's feeling, but less concerned about its appearance or what people, including myself, are thinking about it.

Consider: this morning, I passed a couple of men in my workplace and walked up the stairs. As I did, I heard them laughing. In the past, I would assume they were laughing at my fat bum, which may be ridiculously self-involved, but is representative of the kind of paranoia I have felt about this, and felt depressed. (And yes, of course, this is an entirely internally generated issue – neither today nor at any other time did I have any real basis for the assumption that I was the object of the laughter.) Today, I thought "they could be laughing at my bum", and then I thought, "oh well, whatever makes them happy, why should I care?"

It's funny, actually, because I haven't really been noticing this as it's been going on. I've been thinking, hm, must update the blog, but wasn't really sure what to talk about. And then I realised, well, that's because things are changing.

This has only been going on for a couple of weeks, to be sure. But you have to realise that, in twenty two goddamn years, this hasn't happened. I don't recall a time in twenty two years in which this wasn't a constant, every-day battle, when every shop I passed wasn't calling my name, where every thought of food brought guilt and shame and yet a desperate desire that I couldn't control.

So here's what I've learned which is helping me a huge amount, both in relation to my eating disorder and other aspects of my life:

1. It is okay to feel how you feel. It's okay to be sad. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to feel desperate and out of control and full of the compulsion to shovel food into your mouth to temporarily numb the desperation.

2. There are no bad feelings, there are just feelings. Some of them feel better than others, sure, but there aren't any morally superior ones. You are not a bad person because you feel however you feel, and you don't have to feel bad about feeling what you feel. Pretending you don't feel it will not make you a better person, and it certainly won't make you a happier person.

3. Avoiding your feelings doesn't make them go away. Even if you fill them up with KFC and chocolate, they will still be there, and if you refuse to recognise them as yourself, they will come back as an alien intruder. (Thank you again, Stephen Cope.) You're way better off giving yourself permission to be where you are. I'm not saying that you should wallow, or talk endlessly about it. You probably aren't feeling it properly if you're telling the story about how miserable you are. But just, when you can, take a few minutes to sit quietly and feel it, only feeling, no talking and no action.

4. Bad feelings are almost certainly not as bad as you fear. Seriously, I know some bad feelings. I have a lot of them, and really facing them is not easy. But for me at least, I've been astonished by how hard it is to hold onto misery when you're really giving yourself permission to be as intensely miserable as you can.

Now, of course, the issues are not gone. I still look in the mirror and want to be thinner. I am still worried about my health. I still am in the habit of eating more than I actually need because I'm not attuned to when I've had enough. I don't know what tomorrow will hold in terms of my desire to be thin, and I don't know how I will deal with it. That's okay too.

A lot has happened, really, in just a couple of weeks.

(Note: This has been completely helpful for me, and I'd strongly recommend it as well worth a go, but I don't know your emotional states or if you're suffering from any other emotional disorders, so I can't guarantee that it'll work for you like it has for me, especially if you're suffering from depression or something similar.)

fat acceptance and compulsive eating

I got some great comments from people on yesterday's post, and one basically triggered another post, so thank you, lovely people, for being encouraging and smart.

Here is the comment that resulted in the following mass of words:

The compulsive eating behavior has absolutely nothing to do with being fat. You could be thin or average weight with compulsive eating, and your feelings and reactions to it would still be the same. Being fat and being a compulsive eater are two separate things.

This is true. And then again, it's not really the whole picture, especially in the FA community.

I understand why fat acceptance activists, who are usually trying to disrupt the stereotyping of fat people, harp on about health at every size and how fat people don't eat more than thin people and all the rest of it.

The thing is, though, if you have a person who, like myself, is inclined by nature to be less thin than other people (if not fat), and who then goes on to eat compulsively for twenty years, you'll get yourself a fat person, who probably got fat by trying to not BE fat. And although I love to hear that being fat is not the end of the world, that it isn't the end of your health, that the stereotypes don't hold up, etc etc etc, I am still a fat person who got fat, primarily, by eating too much. And there is a strong tendency amongst FA activists to reject that as a reason for a fat person to be fat. It doesn't have to be the reason they are fat. It doesn't have to be the reason most fat people are fat - as I say, even if I wasn't this fat, I still wouldn't be exactly thin. But it is a reason that some of us are fat, and pretending that we're not part of the fat spectrum kind of hurts.

It's kind of like if you got a bunch of gay activists together, and one of the things they wanted to do was bust the stereotypes of gay men as "effeminate", and so they spent a lot of time proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that that you can be gay without being effeminate, that gay men are, on average, no more effeminate than your average straight man, and that there's nothing wrong with being a non-effeminate gay man (replace "effeminate" with "unhealthy" and "gay man" with "fat person", and you'll see what I'm saying). Those things may all be true, but you can imagine the feelings of gay men who actually are camp.

And that's without considering the feelings of any effeminate man who isn't actually gay (who would be the thin compulsive eater). I'm not, by the way, trying to draw comparisons between anti-gay and anti-fat prejudice, to engage in comparative suffering, nor to imply that there's anything wrong or self-destructive with being a camp gay man, because obviously it's an entirely different thing from having an eating disorder. I'm just trying to highlight that any group exists on a spectrum, which includes real life realisations of identifiable stereotypes, even if those stereotypes are representative of only a small proportion of that community, and other members of the community would prefer that people did not assume that everyone in the community is the same way. Fat people are not a homogenous whole, and, just as there is a section of the gay community which is identifiable as being stereotypical, there is a section of the fat community that is that way as well.

Fat people who got fat by compulsive eating are not necessarily naturally fat, and are certainly not healthily fat. But we're still fat. And a lot of us got that way by behaviours which our culture identifies as "fat person" behaviours, i.e. eating too much, regardless of the mental illness which drove us to develop those behaviours. And yet the only place we can come to which tells us it's okay to be fat still emphasises the notion of having the habits we recognise as "thin person" habits (even if that's not true) and which we know we don't have.

Now, I get it. If you're a fat person who lives a very healthy life, it must be frustrating and depressing to feel like the compulsive eaters at the other end of the spectrum are dragging down your public image. And I understand that healthy fat people would love to stop being stereotyped and suffering from prejudice because of those stereotypes, and that part of doing that is educating themselves and others about the fact that fat =/= unhealthy and/or greedy.

But becoming fat accepting is, in my experience at least, a vital part of recovering from an eating disorder, because we can't really release this problem without accepting that our bodies are going to end up where they end up, and that getting better may not equal getting thinner (this is not easy when you're obsessed with that notion). And yet being immersed in the "we are healthy fat people" culture in the FA community can actually be just as freaking depressing and alienating as reading a magazine with five articles on how to lose weight, and two photo spreads on how Posh Spice and Lindsay Lohan are too skinny.

The thing is, of course, that those of us who got fat via an eating disorder aren't REALLY stereotypical. We're not "just" gluttonous – we have a mental illness. But it looks exactly the same from the outside. That guy watching me eat my donut at lunch isn't thinking "well, I bet she spent an hour thinking about that before she ate it, and I bet she'll be agonising over the decision for the rest of the day, and that must be very hard". He's thinking, "wow, no wonder she's so fat". And you know, part of me, even while I'm acknowledging my issues, is thinking the same thing.

And more importantly than that, we're people who already have a tendency to beat ourselves mercilessly with our supposed moral failure to control our eating. So sometimes, being surrounded by fat people who have exemplary eating behaviours and an agenda to demonstrate that you can be fat and yet completely "good" (even while they decry the moralisation of food, as they should) results less in feeling better about being fat and more in feeling worse about being such a bad example of a fat person.

Please understand, I am absolutely on board the FA train in theory. There are a lot of really important messages that everyone needs to hear about what constitutes actual health, and how thinness is not the only or even main goal of health, and I don't want the train stopped at all, not least because the external pressure to lose weight would be significantly reduced if people would stop going "OMG U R OBESE U WILL DIIIIIIIIE".

But. That doesn't mean that I'm unaffected by the fact that the people I look to for a reminder that my being fat doesn't equal hideous, worthless and on death's door usually defend fatness with the (perfectly true on average) weapons of "fat doesn't mean being unhealthy" and "fat people are not greedy".

As for the thin compulsive eaters, yes, absolutely, we share an illness and I have no doubt that it is as destructive for them as it is for me. But, as is often discussed in FA circles, thin people with terrible eating habits are not subject to the same scrutiny as fat people, because thin and healthy are so equated that no one pays any attention to the five donuts being devoured by the 95lb girl at the next table. She may be eating a lot of donuts, but it can't possibly habitual, because, hey, 95lbs. (This is probably a bad thing, actually, because it means that compulsive eating disorder is harder to identify amongst the thin, because it's culturally okay for thin people to eat like horses as long as they don't gain any weight, and less support is likely to be available, because eating too much, even in a crazy way, doesn't seem that abnormal as long as you don't end up fat.)

But you see, thin people with compulsive eating disorder are unlikely to seek out fat acceptance, because they're thin. They don't need it. They certainly will need some of its principles, IMO, if they're going to recover, because they'll need to learn to accept and love their bodies whatever weight they turn out, but they don't need to learn to personally accept bodies that are culturally unacceptable. I'm not saying that they are at a particular advantage in that by any means - I'm sure there's a whole other bundle of troubles for the thin compulsive eater - but they don't need to seek out an environment where people will say "there is nothing wrong with your body", because most people will say that of a thin person – even if the eating disordered person doesn't believe it. Those of us who are fat, on the other hand, often find comfort in FA blogs and communities because here, at last, are people who are telling us that it is really okay to be fat, which we, in the midst of our war with our bodies, really need to hear.

It's just that sometimes (I do note significant exceptions to this, such as Meowser's excellent post about mental health counting as part of Health At Every Size) the framework for it being okay to be fat is that it's okay to be fat as long as you're healthy, and you defy greedy, unhealthy fat person stereotypes. And, you know, I just don't.

Of course, the thing about any movement is that there's always a need to raise public awareness, and change public perceptions which are based on harmful stereotypes. I even agree that that's a need. Activism and individualism are an uneasy mixture at best, because any activism is about a group of people who are disenfranchised in some way, and, outside of the one thing disenfranchising those people, they may have little in common. What we fat people have in common is that we're fat. Some of us lead healthy lives, some of us don't. At the moment, in an effort to try to have our existence legitimised, a lot of FA supporters are emphasising the fact that you can be both fat and healthy, and that's fine, because it reverses a lot of assumptions held by society at large.

I suppose just, as a minority within a minority, I occasionally want to put my hand up and point out that the unhealthy amongst us are still people. Occasionally crazy, self destructive people, sure, but we're probably trying really hard, even if we're failing.

So yes. Two different things, fatness and compulsive eating, but when you're a fat compulsive eater, quite often you have to deal with them as part of the same package. For me at least, I'm this fat because of the way I have eating for decades. I need, badly, to know it's okay to be fat, because it's only when I stop warring on my body that I stop eating like this. And maybe that'll result in me being less fat and maybe it won't. But I also need to know it's okay for getting better to take awhile and for me to not be able to be "healthy" at the moment, because the last thing I need is another weapon against myself.

a portrait of compulsion from earlier today

I don't know much about blog entries being triggering myself – I can't say I've ever read anything that has triggered me – but I suppose it's possible that this could be one. So be aware.

I want to eat.

I really, really want to eat.

I'm not hungry, I had a perfectly good lunch a couple of hours ago. I just want to stuff food into my mouth until it crushes down all the things that I'm feeling because they're just unbearable.

I'm conscious of the fact that if I do that, I will then feel guilty and ashamed, like I do every time I eat in public, even if it's not crazy eating. At the moment, I don't care. I feel like the Hungry Tiger in the later Wizard of Oz books, whose hunger was never satisfied. Even when he was eating, he was never satisfied.

I just want to fill my mouth and throat and stomach and just keep on filling until my jaw aches and my stomach aches as though filling every hole in my insides will crowd out all the things I just don't want to feel.

It's almost as unbearable as the feelings I want to bury in it.

And this, I suppose, is the time when all that talking about feeling my feelings comes into play, and it would, except that I can't sit down and have a good cry right now, because I'm up to my elbows in work that I loathe.

I wonder what would happen if I just did that. I don't know that I want to find out. It's the kind of thing I could write a story about, one of those very modern short stories that doesn't really go anywhere, is like a snapshot of an event. Woman in office cries, and refuses to explain herself.

This is interesting, though, because usually I don't have this conversation with myself. I usually just zone out as much as possible and go looking for the nearest thing with which to stuff my face.

This is the part that non-compulsive eaters don't understand, and usually mock, and non-eating disordered fatties outright reject as fat person behaviour. I understand why they do that. This is pitiful and contemptible and, while from the inside it's just as painful as the desire to starve yourself until you don't feel anything any more, from the outside it just looks gluttonous, as though it has something to do with whatever you're eating, as though it was the same kind of luxurious, enthusiastic consumption of food that you see, for example, when my six year old niece is faced with a plate of pancakes, syrup and berries. I wish I could eat like her. I wish it was as adorable for me to eat like that as it is for her. I wish it had anything to do with what I was eating.

I remember years ago watching The Nutty Professor with Eddie Murphy, and at one point there's a supposedly hilarious scene of Sherman crying and pouring M&Ms into his mouth. I've never quite gotten over that scene, because everyone else in the cinema was laughing their heads off, and I was sobbing, because, oh God, it isn't funny. We don't do it because it's fun. Christ, I wish it was fun. I wish people understood that gluttony may be fun, but compulsion really isn't.

It isn't funny that this feeling, this desperate desire to consume, resembles most closely the urge I had years ago during a deep depression to take razors and slice up my arms. It wasn't even a desire for death, just the urge to make cuts because that was me making them, that was me taking what control I could in a situation where I felt there was no control.

So what's the difference if it's food, instead of a razor, if it amounts to a destructive physical urge to distract myself from something I just can't cope with? The difference is only that people pity the girl with the razor cuts on her arm (unless they think she's doing it for attention), and despise the woman with the bag full of Mars Bars.

One thing is that I'm writing, and while I'm writing, I'm not eating, and while I'm writing how I'm feeling, both the feeling and the urge to eat have died down a bit, if not completely.

I suppose this is what I was talking about in my previous posts, really. While I reject whatever I'm feeling – and I do that a lot – there is a need to manage that somehow, even if it's destructive.

This may not look like progress, but I assure you that it is.

feeling my feelings

I've been listening to Stephen Cope's "Yoga for Emotional Flow" today, and my mind, she is blown. To be honest, I've been listening to, reading and meditating on a number of things for some time which have related to this, but this just drew it all together and suddenly things seem...well, clear.

The nutshell of what really struck me is the radical notion of actually feeling your feelings. Whatever they are, however they feel, just be with them. Don't try to change them, or make them go away. Just let them be and be with them. And particularly of interest is the fact that he says that this is the point of yoga - to bring you to feeling what you're feeling as you do it. Not losing weight, not being physically stretchier, none of the things that most people seem to put into yoga. It's to help you feel what you feel.

This is incredibly difficult for me. I don't do anger, for example - I repress, I intellectualise, I push it far away and try to smooth it out because part of me is convinced that my anger could destroy the world. I don't feel my feelings about eating either - I dive into the food, always with some distraction to prevent me from feeling it or thinking about it.

There's a whole bunch of psychological stuff I could go on about, which I'm not going to get into, but I have had a frustrating, boring and stressful day, and at the end of the day, I just wanted to eat. I left work thinking "I want to go buy Mars Bars and chicken nuggets and just STUFF MY FUCKING FACE".

But since I was listening to this CD, I thought, "well, till I get to the shops, I'll just feel this desire. I won't fight it, I won't try to repress it. I won't ignore it. I'll just feel it.

I will feel all the wanting for that volume of food that will choke down all my frustration and fury over being so frustrated.

I'll just be here.

I want to eat. I'm wanting to eat."

It was overwhelming. I walked down the street choking on sobs, really allowing myself to feel that wanting, that desperation and that feeling of eternal judgement on myself for having that wanting.

And then it left me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still sobbing like a baby - everything is making me cry - so there's clearly a lot of emotion that wants to be felt right now.

But that feeling, that desperate, repressed, frantic feeling that I had to eat right then, I had to binge, all the self-loathing I felt for having that feeling, it all went away. I mean, within a few minutes, it just...went.

And this is what is clear, all of a sudden, which I have understood in part before: maybe the largest part of my problems with eating have to do with not feeling what I'm feeling. It's not really about a war with my mother on the battleground of my body. It's certainly not about feeling bad about myself because I wasn't physically sufficient when I was younger. It's all a massive created problem around avoiding feeling undesirable feelings.

I grew up in a religious household where certain types of emotion weren't really considered appropriate. Things happened in my early childhood as a result of my own anger which completely shattered my world. And for all of my life, I have wanted to just sustain some kind of "okay" feeling. Any time something goes wrong, I'm just so desperate to get back to "okay" because I don't know how to sit down and be with what I'm feeling. I try to distract myself like waving a toy in front of a crying baby.

So this is a whole new and, today, painful experience, and a liberating one. I really felt my desperate wanting for food, I was overwhelmed by it, and it was okay. It was okay, and because I didn't try to push it away, it left by itself. I am, right now, genuinely hungry, but all that desperation and panic and hateful fear are gone. Because I said, okay, since you're here, let's just be here.

Suddenly...a lot of things make more sense.

You have to look close to see what this disease has done to me...

Further to my last post about the double-mindedness of eating disorders...

Something that bothers me exceedingly at times is the fact that, as much as my husband expresses his love and desire for me on a daily basis in a multitude of ways, I don't always, or even often, or even really, believe in it.

You wouldn't know this about me just by looking; in fact, I'm not sure that my husband even knows it, because I have good enough manners not to reject anything he says or tell him that I don't believe him. I smile and say thank you and I love you too.

But, oh, there's always a little catch of protest inside me.

I suppose if I were a different kind of person, I would blame him for this, as though there was something extra he could be doing to prove that he loves me. There are people of both sexes whose self esteem, like mine, is so low they can't believe in others' love for them, and some of those people play their partners like fiddles, because there's just nothing another person can do to prove to someone that they are loveable when they deeply believe that they aren't. Really, both of us are lucky that I'm not one of those people, that somewhere I learned how to accept a compliment without outward protest, so that we don't have to wrangle over some imagined failure of his to bolster up my self esteem. And I'm glad of that, because there's no way in which he fails. He is frankly amazing at expressing his feelings for me, in all kinds of ways. All the failure here is mine, because part of me just looks askance at all of it, and then wonders what kind of person actually feels these things for me – for me, for heaven's sake.

There's just something in my brain that doesn't quite cope with it when he says certain things to me. I pretend I do, but there's a little tripwire in there that just doesn't believe a word of it. It's bizarre, because I completely believe in his sincerity, I just think he's, well, wrong. Isn't that stupid? I believe that my husband's love and desire for me, physically and mentally, is wrong, because I don't believe that I am loveable or desirable.

The notion of people being attracted to me has always been shocking to me, if not downright unbelievable, and there has always been something just a little…intolerable about it. There are certain looks I've caught in people's eyes at times, including my husband's, that I just can't bear. I have this immediate reaction of shying away, because how can I bear being the object of that feeling which I don't feel I deserve, because – and really only because – I'm so fat?

It's just sick, this whole thing, which I suppose is why it's a disease. It's sick that I think my husband is wrong to adore me. It's sick that I think anyone would be wrong to have feelings for me. It's sick that, if I'm not careful, I judge my husband, and anyone else who has ever told me that they cared for me in this way, as being lesser because of their feelings for me.

All that being said, I'm incredibly grateful that I have been so lucky, that I, almost accidentally, slid in to a relationship with an amazingly generous and loving man who never gives me reason to doubt him.

I just wish that my confidence in myself was sufficient that when he says how much he loves me, I had no reaction but joy and the return of love.

c is for cookie

As a general rule, I am very conscious of food. Like, all the time. If there's food on that table over there, even if I'm not hungry, even if I'm busy, part of my mind is eyeing it and muttering.

And all my eating struggles are about the fact that eating relieves [insert objectionable emotion here] and once I start, it's very hard to stop. So stopping is something worth noting, in my book.

So having said that, let it be noted that today, I bought two freshly baked chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips at 9am. I then ate my breakfast and started work and forgot all about them, until 11.45am, when I ate one. ONE, mind you. I could've eaten the other one, but I wasn't hungry, so I just put it back in the drawer, and forgot about it AGAIN.

At about 12.30, I was talking to someone in a room where there was a large box of various fresh cookies, and she offered me one. And I didn't take one, because I'd just had one a little earlier, I didn't feel like it and I was about to have lunch.

It is now 2.45pm, and I am eating the second one.

I have never bought two of those cookies and not eaten them both at once before. In its way, this is a kind of miracle.

choices

I'm different to a lot of the fat acceptance bloggers I read, who seem to live healthy lifestyles, eat in a happy and sensible manner, enjoy exercise, all that palaver. I don't eat happily or sensibly. Sometimes I do, but mostly it's a constant tug-of-war between the part of my brain that thinks I should be on a strict diet and the part that knows that that would lead to bingeing at best, and I'm pretty consistent about eating more than I "should". Yes, "should" is problematic in and of itself. There are plenty of thin people who eat lots of crap and are still thin. But even if I was thin, the way I eat a lot of the time would not be healthy, because it isn't. (Though to be honest, the past couple of weeks have been okay. I actually attempted a binge today and completely failed because I was uncomfortably full. Which was kind of nifty.)

It's just that...for me to follow any kind of diet that puts a restriction on anything isn't psychologically healthy, and results in a diet that's way worse than the one I already have. But it makes me wonder if it's even possible for me to be "healthy at every size", because I've been consistently UNhealthy at every size. I suppose it's a question of whether that "health" includes mental health. I've been prioritising my mental health for some time now, and I'm sure that's come at a cost to my physical health; but on the other hand, if I hadn't made it my priority, I would probably be even worse off. So there's that.

I think this is what makes fat prejudice so complicated. I'm not going to get into whether it's harder or easier or more or less socially acceptable than any other form of prejudice, because that's an impossible discussion, and would no doubt leave me with my privilege showing. But prejudice against the fat is complicated, and the main reason it's complicated is this: most people believe that fat people can be thin people if only they would work harder.

Most people do not believe that women can be men (transgendered people facing a whole other set of prejudices), or that black people can be white. You can see class prejudice (or at least money prejudice) showing in the same way - there are a significant number of people who think that poor people wouldn't be poor if they weren't so darn lazy. And you can see it in some people who are homophobic - for some reason, they think that being gay is a choice, and that being the case, it's just weird or wrong or both that people would choose to be gay.

It is complicated to be part of a group of people whom the bulk of society, including ourselves, believes both can and should change. Twiggy recently said something along the lines that with all the medical knowledge about the disbenefits of being fat, there's no excuse for it. And a lot of people believe that.

So it's wrong to be fat, it's unhealthy to be fat, and yet millions upon millions of people, despite all the knowledge to the contrary, continue to be fat...apparently by choice. Because it's just so much fun to be fat.

I'm not particularly healthy in my habits, and I still don't choose to be fat. Certainly, when I was an unfat adolescent who was put on a diet, and who spent every day from that to this obsessed with her weight, I didn't choose to be fat. Even if I ate perfectly and got even more exercise than I do, I'd still probably be what society calls fat, and although I'm pretty comfortable with where I believe I'd end up (which is just as far away as actually being thin), given a choice, of course I'd still choose to be thinner, because it would just be easier.

The problem with fatness being perceived as a choice is that people assume that all it takes is making the "right" choice. They can't comprehend why anyone would make the "wrong" one, so it must be down to a moral flaw, laziness or greed, because clearly, when the choice is so easy, what else could it be?

But it's not a choice. It doesn't really matter whether you became fat like me because your relationship with food is fucked up beyond recognition, or whether your genes just say "look, we're going to have a lot of padding, I don't care what you say", or whether your means are limited so that you can't make some of the healthier choices Twiggy gives you no excuses for not making. It's a rare person who says "yep, fat is the look I'm going for". Why would we, in this fat-obsessed culture? We're not masochists. We're not stupid. We know it would be easier for us - people wouldn't call us particular kinds of names, or suggest we lose weight. And goodness knows, compared to some of the stories I read, I suffer very little at other people's hands as a result of my weight. Why would we ever make a choice to be fat if being thin was as easy as all that?

I have friends who have lost a lot of weight, who have worked very hard to do so, and are proud of themselves for doing so. And I'm proud of them too, in a sense, because I love them and I know how hard they have worked. But, damn, they've worked hard. They've worked harder on that than on anything else in their lives. They've restricted their food intake, they've worked out for hours daily. They've had to make being thinner the focus of most of their life. It's not easy, even for people who take the trip successfully.

And for me, and others like me, it comes, if it comes at all, at a huge and unacceptable price. My ability to function in a normal way, to focus on the things that are actually important to me, to not want to kill myself because I want to eat a block of chocolate, that's too high a price to pay. Part of me wants very much to be thinner, and maybe one day I will be, if I get this disorder under control. But only then, because I can't sacrifice my mind to create a thinner body.

sneaky beast

Eating disorders are sneaky things. I've been having a fairly good week, till yesterday, when I did a bit too much grazing, thanks to an extremely frustrating and boring job.

But then this morning, I was walking through the pouring rain to work, and happened upon a Mars Bar in the street. Which is to say, it was half eaten, and lying on the filthy pavement in the aforementioned pouring rain.

And I thought, "I could totally eat that Mars Bar."

I didn't, I'm pleased to say, but it was touch and go for a moment or two, and that, let's face it, is pretty disgusting. I'm not really sure why it was touch and go. Especially for a filthy, wet, half-eaten chocolate bar, given that I'd been in a shop with plenty of clean, wrapped, brand new Mars Bars about five minutes earlier and hadn't even been tempted, and was about to be close to the work canteen, which also has plenty of clean, wrapped, brand new Mars Bars.

And after getting to work, I didn't even want one. I just ate my Special K, and had a biscuit when it was offered (wafer with white chocolate coating and chocolate cream). Hell, I actually have a clean, wrapped, brand new Toblerone with fruit and nut in my bag, and I haven't touched that.

It's baffling.

It's sneaky in other ways too. I get a fair bit of exercise, which is largely incidental because I don't drive and therefore have to walk everywhere, but I keep thinking I would like to branch out a bit. Consciously, I think this because of the thing itself. Consciously I think I would like to be more flexible, more centred, have better balance, strengthen my painful feet, stretch my painful back...There are many benefits to exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss.

But there's this niggling little voice in my head all the time, what if it doesn't work?

"Work?" I say to myself. "What do you mean, work? Dude, if I do a little yoga and/or a little Tai Chi every day, it'll work. I'll be more flexible, better balanced, stronger and probably in less pain."

"Yes," says the little voice plaintively, "but will you be thinner?"

Of course, to make matters worse, I have a feeling that, contrary being that I am, there are many kinds of exercise I've avoided doing over the years because, if I did them, I would probably have lost weight. There are things I stopped doing, for no apparent reason, while they were achieving the exact effect I allegedly wanted.

For me at least, this disorder is a sneaky, subtle and contrary beast. On the one hand, it's a rare day on which I don't feel desperate to lose weight at least part of the time, even if I'm shoving food into my mouth at that exact time. On the other, this seems to have developed in such a way as to prevent that loss. I guess I could put that down to rebellion or determination by some inner goblin to be loved for itself, not for its body, some battle for control over my body against a mother who was determined it should be different than it was.

I don't know, I really don't. It's like living with a highly erratic and completely unreliable relative who has burdened you with their presence for twenty odd years without ever explaining why the hell they can't just go live somewhere else, or contributing in any way to the running of the household.

My father, who is a psychologist, says that all behaviours originally served an important purpose. We could argue, perhaps, that my eating problems started as a kind of war for territory against my mother. He says the problem is that they often persist long past their usefulness. Assuming that my eating problems are the war for territory, yeah, this is long past any usefulness it may ever have had. It's beyond useless at this point. I'm thirty two, I'm married, and I live on the other side of the world from my mother. Furthermore, I've told her in no uncertain terms that there should be no discussion of my weight and that she shouldn't buy me clothes. So as far as my original war is concerned, it's over – I won. I'm fat as a baobab tree, and my mother does not try to influence what I eat. The territory is all mine. Whoo.

Except...not.

I keep writing these long, rather rambling posts that come to no clear conclusion lately. I don't have a conclusion yet. As much as I can look at events or people in my life and say, "hey, that's how this started", I haven't yet figured out how to make it end, even so many years after the starting points have ceased to be relevant.

I'm just so tired of being ambushed by myself, and I don't know how to get me to stop.

It's interesting, though, in the light of some of the recent Fatosphere discussion about dieting and fat acceptance, to wonder where someone like me fits into that. To be sure, I've been anti-diet longer than I've been remotely interested in fat acceptance, simply because diets make me crazy, and also fat. Actually, I suspect they make everyone crazy, but I know they make me crazy. That knowledge hasn't stopped me wanting to lose weight. Finding FA hasn't made me stop wanting to lose weight.

Fundamentally, you see, I don't believe that I really should be this fat. It would be easier to be accepting, in a sense, if I was also sure of that. And when I say "should be", I mean "my genetics may give me a predisposition to being overweight, but I don't believe that without compulsive eating, I would actually be the aforementioned baobab lady." I'd probably be on the bigger-than-curvy side – there would still be a lot of people who would call me fat. But not THIS fat.

Then again, maybe my current ideal body of size UK16, something I feel I could live with, is just as ridiculously out of range as a size 10 was in the days when I was size 16. Maybe the point of the entire thing is to learn to live with myself as I am, because it would change nothing if I was a size 16 and still felt like this about myself, or a size 10 for that matter.

No less crazy, no less ambushed by this sneaky beast which tracks me all day and all night and everywhere.

grief and contentment

I recently had a couple of assessment visits with an eating disorder clinic. I'm not terribly impressed at this stage, for various reasons, and I don't know if I'll end up getting any help from them. There are distance and time issues which make it harder. We'll see.

But what I remember vividly is the sheer power of my emotions once I got onto the subject of my relationship with my body and with food. I haven't cried like that in years, not since I was depressed and seeing a counsellor weekly. And I just realised why.

It was grief.

I don't think I understood that before.

I don't think I understood before just how much I have lost.

My sister emailed me the other day, making, to me, a completely astonishing remark:

I just live with my body type. I should absolutely do more exercise and stuff, but I'm content enough to go along with what I have!

This shouldn't be shocking to me – even by current standards, my sister is in good shape. She's a Type 1 diabetic, so her diet is pretty carefully monitored anyway, but she's not uptight about what she eats. She doesn't mind if she gains or loses weight. She just is, in her own words, content.

I wonder how that's possible, especially considering that she came between me, with compulsive eating disorder, and our youngest sister, who was anorexic in her teens (though happily fully recovered now). How did she manage to glide right by the issues with food that have plagued me for over two decades, or those which plagued our sister in her teens.

For me, you see, I can't imagine a world in which I don't imagine people judging me when I buy crisps with my lunch, in which I don't feel guilty and yet compelled whenever there's food in front of me, in which my body is a neutral thing that I can just "go along" with. At every point, I seem to be battling, feeling conflicted and ashamed, either because I'm failing to meet even the beauty standards in my head or because I'm failing to meet the moral standards I've been setting myself. Even as I begin to understand the meaning of "fat acceptance", I'm still usually overwhelmed by the feeling that it just isn't okay for me to be fat.

It's not even coming from the outside, mostly. Oh, there are occasional comments, and occasionally I read hateful remarks that people make on FA blogs and wonder if that's what people are actually thinking that about me. But mostly, it comes from me. There's no one else who's second guessing my crisps – really, if anyone was, I'd say they were in serious need of a life. It's me.

I wish I knew how to make me shut up.

But then, maybe that's part of the problem – I don't look at the part of me that is terrified by crisps and try to understand her, ask her why that bothers her. I tend to want her to shut up and go away, because I think that if I was free of her, maybe I would be able to be happy in my body. Maybe I would lose weight. Maybe not. I think of her as a burden, as something to grieve over, and maybe she's still screaming, in the midst of all my understanding and indignation over FA issues which you would think would make me feel better, about how I'm too fat to live because she's still scared, and I still treat her like shit. I can see so clearly how my disorder works, and yet I still don't ask it what it's doing for me, what necessary function it performed once upon a time that made me cling onto it.

The other day, I was reading Geneen Roth's blog, and came across the following:

"Whether we are sailing into the New Age or facing Armageddon, our work is still the same: to look as deeply as we can into our hearts, to tell the truth, and to question our old beliefs. To be willing to have our hearts break rather than keep ourselves protected. Emotional eating is based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Wars between countries are based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Question the war inside yourself because what you find inside you is what gets reflected in the world we live. It can't be any other way, since the world is us. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. Start by asking yourself if eating cupcakes for breakfast is an act of tenderness. Question the way you treat yourself, your children, your neighbours. Become your own beloved."

It's so hard to remember to do that. It's so hard, in my grieving for the body contentment that my sister has and I, somehow, lost, to remember not to blame the part of me that has spent twenty years trying so hard to get on top of this. I'd like to separate from her, but she's still me.

It's back to the abused spouse metaphor again. I still haven't stopped treating her like shit.

Sigh. If anyone's actually reading this, I apologise for being so misery-guts-ish.

appalling

I was in a meeting recently, in which someone made the remark that nearly a third of year 6 children in the town I live in were overweight.

"It's appalling," she concluded, and went on to talk about the plan to promote healthy eating.

She's lucky that I didn't have anything sharp with me, and that I was an observer rather than an active participant in the meeting.

I sort of wish, though, that I'd pounced on her, either in the meeting or immediately afterwards, and asked her what she thought that highlighting the supposed obesity of twelve year old children would actually achieve, apart from humiliating the children and laying the groundwork for eating disorders. Hell, when I was twelve, my own shameful weight had me eating compulsively in secret and occasionally, when I had the courage, barfing it all up again.

When I was twelve, I thought I was the fattest thing in the world, and that no one would ever love me.

When I was twelve my mother told me that, at eight and a half stone (119lbs) and 5'4", I was overweight and should make sure I never got any heavier. Ironically, of course, this is at the lower end of the BMI "normal" range. Worse, when you look at photos of me with my peers throughout my teens, I look perfectly normal at every point. And yet from the age of ten or eleven, I believed that I was a huge fat thing, completely unlovable and undesirable (and since I'd also absorbed the cultural decision that women's value is largely based on our physically desirability, this was devastating).

My actual averageness isn't really the point, though. The point is that telling a child that they are not okay does not automatically make them strive to be okay. Sometimes they rebel. Sometimes you create problems far bigger than a few extra, or even a hundred extra pounds. My problem isn't actually my body – it's my mind. And if this woman had come to my school when I was a self-conscious twelve year old and told me that my body – my confusing, changing, frightening, developing body – was wrong, she would only have had the same effect that my mother's words did. I would become obsessed with being thin, but utterly fail at it for more than two decades. That wouldn't make me a more healthy eater, and it wouldn't make me thinner. It would make me miserable, and it would make me fatter.

To this day, I wonder if I would actually have gained all this weight, or spent as many hours as I spent agonising over it, if my mother hadn't decided that I was too fat when I was going through adolescence.

My mother, by the way, deeply regrets this action. She, unfortunately, was always very slender herself, and she just didn't understand that her very curvy daughter was never going to be built like her, even if she lived on celery. She wasn't bad, any more than the woman in the meeting above was bad. She just didn't understand. But it's this very lack of understanding that created the fat person I am today. If I'd just been able to go through adolescence without that pressure, would I even be fat now? If the woman with the food plan goes to a bunch of twelve year olds and says "being fat is bad, stop being as fat as you are", is she actually, in trying to make them thinner and more socially acceptable, going to create people who are fatter than they might have been if no one had ever said anything that put them in the wrong?

Oh, she might make a few of them skinnier – she might make some of them so skinny they'll die from it. But I'm pretty damn sure that she'll make a few of them fatter as well.

I do believe that I'm fatter than my body is really happy with. I completely believe there are people my weight and heavier who are the weight their body is happy with, but I am also sure I'm not one of them. In a perfect world, where I only think of food when I'm actually hungry, and eat in the way that makes my body happy, I suspect I'd be around a UK size 16. So…still fat, from one point of view, but not this fat.

Sometimes principles are difficult. I strongly believe in what I understand to be the principles of fat acceptance. I believe that I have value regardless of my size and should be treated as such. I believe, and know from painful experience, that dieting doesn't work. I know that I don't need to lose weight to be loved.

But all this knowledge and belief is still at odds, to some extent, with my gut. My gut keeps telling me this isn't good enough, that I'm failing at both fat acceptance and having the body my body wants.

This, I have to recognise, means I've got a way to go before I get where I want to be.

self control

One of the things that seems to be a tricky area in fat acceptance is that, although studies seem to show that, generally speaking, fat people do not eat more than thin people, some of us have very problematic eating behaviours which make us fatter than, perhaps, we would be if we were eating in a properly intuitive way.

By "some of us", I do mean me. I eat too much, on a regular basis, because I have compulsive eating disorder. The funny thing is that if I had the reverse of this disorder, people would pity me. If I compulsively refused to eat, they would hospitalise me and feel bad for me. As it is, they think I just have no self control and should be berated for that. They're partly right - very often, when it comes to food, I have no self control. But they're entirely wrong about what this means, and how I feel about it.

I always get the feeling when people talk about "lack of self control" that they're angry with with those of us who don't appear to have it. They certainly seem angry - if they weren't, why would they need to make such a big deal out of it? Why would the questioning of my eating behaviour be so rude and dismissive? Why would they need to make me feel ashamed, of a mental illness that, as yet, I've found no way to overcome?

I can only assume that this is because I "get" to eat like a person with no self control, that somehow this is an experientially superior position (as opposed to the supposedly morally superior position that is controlling your appetite. So because I get the supposed benefit of being able to eat without restriction (which is supposed to be all pleasurable), I have to get the supposed punishment of being fat, with all the social scorn that entails.

The bad news is, it doesn't work like that. Eating is rarely a pleasure to me. It is something I often do with compulsion, almost always with loathing of myself for being so weak and pathetic, always with guilt. I don't pay much attention to what I eat, though there's a definite bias towards things that come under the social heading of "forbidden". You can't have a carrot binge, it wouldn't soothe whatever urge it is that makes me want to eat until I puke. I hate myself when I eat too much, and yet I can't seem to stop it. I find it unbearably hard to just sit down and eat with no distractions. I hate myself for succumbing to the seduction of chocolate because I'm bored or unhappy, usually both, and I punish myself for it, both by ignoring the chocolate even as it's in my mouth, and by calling myself names for hours afterwards. So where's the benefit in my eating anything, when I never enjoy it and always feel guilty about it?

I have a plan this year, and it's pretty simple: learn to love myself. I think that will involve learning to properly appreciate food, as well as appreciating what my body is right now, regardless of any weight gain or loss which the future might hold.

You wouldn't believe how hard this is.