An Apple a Day (24 page)

        
•
  
Low-fat yogurts and fruit do not count as meals.

        
•
  
Steamed broccoli and a roll does not count as dinner.

        
•
  
There must be no buying of “low-fat” items: those items are for people on a diet.

        
•
  
No resumption of running (but remember the best gym in London).

        
•
  
All of this starts now.

I believe that after six weeks of a new diet your body will be much healthier, the sense of well-being and happiness will pass into your subconscious, and your body will send messages to your brain that “this is good” and “I rather like this.” Until you were nineteen you never had difficulties with food: you enjoyed it! By being systematic, never cutting out a meal, and never pretending that certain food counts when it blatantly doesn't, these six weeks can provide the jolt that is required. Don't think about anorexia. Those attitudes have to go in your personal trash can. Just follow the program and see what happens. It's like watering a neglected plant, remember?

I hate to be so forthright, but really this is it. Everything that can come from this is positive. I believe that we should do
this together: how else is a child made? And I promise you a new writing desk, if you want to move in properly and commit to living together. Remember sitting by the river in Dresden, last summer, discussing the future? Imagine, we can sit by the Thames before
The Cherry Orchard
at the end of July and things could be so different. You can do this xx

Chapter 12

An Inconvenient Truth

T
hree weeks on, it's June, and I've been making limited progress with Tom's action plan. It should be so simple: “just follow the program and see what happens”; “let the system take the strain and thought process out of it.” It sounds logical—appealingly, deceptively easy. But if it were that simple to take the thinking out of eating, anorexia wouldn't exist. Without wanting to minimize Tom's generous, thoughtful attempts to help, all his patience and support, I nonetheless know he'll never have an anorexic mindset. He's trying to understand what I'm going through and find a solution, but he's not trapped inside it. It's at times like this, confronted with a simple “action plan,” that I realize how powerless anorexia makes me. If you've seen someone with anorexia confronted with food, you'll know. Tom knows. It's humiliating.

I know this explanation is no explanation at all; this is at the heart of the struggle, because it's so hard to untangle, because an eating disorder really doesn't make sense. It's not that I can't see the beauty of a six-week action plan; it's not that I don't want to recover, enjoy nice meals, and improve my health. So why not just follow the plan? This is the mental illness itself. This is what anorexia is.

But I'm trying so hard. I've been gradually weaning myself back onto whole-wheat bread and rolls (although not at every meal). I have issues with hot food—especially at lunchtime—and
I prefer to stick to cold food throughout the day. I'm still avoiding cheese, although I remember that when I had to gain weight after Oxford daily cheese sandwiches were a useful building block, and I'm frustrated that my cheese phobia has returned. Chocolate doesn't bother me quite as much; why should one fattening food be more acceptable than another, I wonder—what constitutes a “fear food”? I know anorexics who would struggle to put a piece of chocolate in their mouths. For others it's bread, or pasta, or any carbohydrates at all; for me it's cheese (and butter and margarine).

All the while, I have to not think about gaining weight or acknowledge this physical process. I try not to register the reality of what is happening to me. I throw out tight jeans, telling myself not to mind (although of course I do). I rejoice in the resurgence of my breasts but wince at the size of my thighs if I catch an unfortunate glimpse in the mirror. There is still no sign of my periods, and this is starting to really get me down. Not menstruating for all those years never made me feel like less of a woman, but it's starting to now. My face has a few spots—
Is this a good sign
, I wonder,
are my hormones finally waking up?

(
Stop thinking about it; stop analyzing every spot and twinge and mood . . . Just carry on, eat the goddamn Kit Kat, ignore the voice, keep eating
.)

This may sound exaggerated but for me the whole of June has felt like a white-knuckle ride: I am gritting my teeth, steeling myself for the expansion of my body that I know has to happen. I am a sky diver willing myself to be brave; I am a rock climber, clinging on by my fingernails.

Inevitably, there are good days and bad. I have moments when I'm full of energy, when I know I can do this, strong and determined. My hair looks shinier, even my fingernails are stronger. I try not to panic about getting fat; I try not to despair about my
chances of getting pregnant. Always, always, there's the constant concern about the extra pounds.

* * *

“But where will it go?” I repeat, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. My big sister and I had planned to go and visit an art gallery but we're curled up on her sofa instead. “Five whole kilograms—that's over ten pounds—where will it go?”

I can see Katie's trying to keep a straight face and I know how ridiculous I sound. “That's the same as five bags of sugar—just imagine, saddlebags of fat hanging off my thighs and backside . . . I'm sorry, but that's a lot of lard to be hauling around on my bum!” We're laughing so hard now that Katie swallows a mouthful of doughnut the wrong way—quite impressive given that she's also breast-feeding her baby and balancing a mug of tea in her free hand. I can't tell whether it's the idea of my expanding bum or if she's really choking, but it feels good to laugh.

“But where will it go?” This is a major preoccupation for a recovering anorexic and something I used to ask my psychiatrist all the time. Fortunately Dr. Robinson had the patience of a saint. He was used to the anorexic's endless need for reassurance in the face of body confusion. He would explain again, “The weight will go on all over. I can't pretend it's going to be uniformly even, but you won't gain ten pounds just on your thighs. Weight gain is made up of fluid, bone, and muscle; there's just slightly more of you. Everything weighs more, your liver, kidney, even your brain.” I find this oddly reassuring: I like the idea of my brain and internal organs getting larger. (Say what you like, but no woman wants an extra ten pounds of fat on her bottom.)

Anyone who thinks gaining weight will cure anorexia is wrong, wrong, wrong. The body confusion continues.

* * *

It's now early July and my editor at
The Times
asked me to “update the readers” on my weight. I hate weighing myself and I don't own a scale. In the column I have been purposefully vague about weight gain, because it doesn't help me and I know it won't help other sufferers (anorexics are great ones for comparison: who is lighter than they are, who eats less, who looks skinnier, who wears smaller-size jeans). And, just like a photograph, printing your exact weight is guaranteed to elicit one of two reactions, especially from other women: “Oh my God, she's still way too thin,” or “So what's the big deal—I weigh less than that—why is she calling herself anorexic?”

But if it's what my editor wants, I can hardly refuse. This is the point of the column after all. I'm aware that I am on trial, in some very public way (a trial perhaps of my own making, but uncomfortable nonetheless). I'm aware that I need to show physical, as well as psychological, progress. I understand that I've entered into a pact with readers—they follow my story and I try my best to provide the happy ending.

So this morning I force myself to climb onto the scale in Tom's bathroom and unscrew my eyes to stare at the digital display . . . 114, 113; it flashes and sticks on 114. OMG—114 pounds.

Tom steps out of the shower and sees me standing on the scale. Fortunately he's blind as a bat without his glasses, so he can't see the numbers. “All OK, Em?” he says, cautiously, reaching past me for a towel. Well, what else can he say? He knows that if my weight goes down I'll be depressed and if it goes up I'll panic.

But now the scale tells me the truth: at some point in the past few summer months I have tipped over and above the magic weight of 110 pounds. Say it:
I weigh nearly 115 pounds
. So I'm past the danger point, over the barbed wire, through the psychological
barrier of 110 pounds. Of course this is the point of my personal challenge—this is the point of all the chocolate and bread rolls and Brazil nuts—but it's frightening progress. Do I feel relieved? No, I feel huge. This is the highest weight I've been since I was nineteen years old; my BMI is now at the low end of “normal.” It's a shock, after so many years of being in the “underweight” zone on the BMI charts, to be leaving that behind.

You may be thinking, 110 pounds sounds fine. You could weigh even less than I do and be perfectly healthy—fertile and menstruating. But I've wasted years telling myself that my weight was fine for my height, and it's not: the body doesn't lie. And I'm still not cured. I may be heavier, but I'm no less screwed-up about food.

* * *

In addition to the recent surges of anger, I've been experiencing powerful waves of another long-lost sensation: hunger. This is the inconvenient truth: the more you eat, the hungrier you get. After years of perfecting the art of emptiness, now that I've started to eat, I find I'm hungry all the time. I don't mean peckish, the way you might feel if you missed lunch—I mean ravenous. Sometimes I feel so hungry I think I'll burst into tears or go mad. I've been trying to read but I can barely concentrate on the words in front of me. I keep wondering whether I should just give in and eat.

It's not just my body that's hungry, it's like my mind has gone haywire—I never felt this nuts when I was starving myself properly. I really am off the scale. This isn't like “I could polish off an entire package of cookies,” or “I could murder a pizza with all the toppings” . . . My new appetite is bottomless; it's like I could eat the whole world. I feel as though I could suddenly spin out of control. Having lived for so long with one simple rule—don't eat—it's frightening to break that rule. This is the closest I can get
to explaining the fear that all anorexics feel: fear of change, fear of losing control, fear of recovering and finding that real life can't be governed by one simple rule. And anyway, what if I start eating whenever I'm hungry and then I find I can't stop?

None of that matters. All that fear is just me finding excuses to dodge food, and ruin a brilliant relationship, and hide behind
what ifs
, and waste my thirties the same way I wasted my twenties. I've always known that putting anorexia behind me would be the hardest thing I've ever done—and so it is. All I can do is hold on tight. For too long I've been waiting for something to happen, something to kick-start my eating, but nothing's going to happen if I don't make it. For now I am holding my nerve.

So here I sit on a midsummer morning in London, calm in my corner of the British Library, writing about recovery and knowing that I'm finally on the road. Yes, I'm gaining weight. But the constant hunger unsettles me. Why, three hours after the self-inflicted breakfast chocolate, do I need to eat again? Is this normal? How often does hunger strike? I leave the library and wander five minutes down the road to the shiny new St. Pancras station. Crowds of tourists mill around, talking, laughing, and eating. I skulk around Marks & Spencer, bewildered by the raging hunger inside me.

Food makes almost zero sense to me. Everything seems so complicated. I stare at the shelves and try to focus on what I'm hungry for.
Listen to your body
, isn't that what they say? But what could possibly assuage this ravenousness: an egg and watercress sandwich, a jar of pesto, a packet of salt and vinegar potato chips? I feel like a mass murderer, stalking the aisles, greedy, restless. I don't eat chips, obviously. Pasta salad?

I end up in the fruit and vegetable section, my old familiar hunting ground. I buy an apple for lunch, and grapes for a snack later, and leave the shop with my grumbling stomach. Maybe I should
have bought the sandwich, but eggs have been problematic for me for years (surely they're just unfertilized chicks and therefore not really vegetarian). And anyway, every sandwich or salad I've inspected seems to be drowning in mayonnaise—and possibly butter too. What is this yawning gulf inside me?

I'm aware of the contradictions here, of course. I say my stomach has shrunk and that's why I get uncomfortably full, and yet I'm claiming to have an insatiable hunger? This is the paradox of anorexia: the emaciated body, the fat mind, and the greedy, empty stomach. I can't promise to give you a coherent narrative; I can only promise that it's authentic. Everything is mixed up, and something as simple—some might say pleasurable—as food becomes fraught with danger. Meals are a time of intense mental conflict for me.

A few months ago, while writing an article on mothers with anorexia and its effect on their babies, I came across a research study from the seventies. “It has been argued that people with eating disorders have particular difficulty in distinguishing somatic sensations, such as hunger, from emotional feelings such as affection and anger” (Bruch, Hilde,
Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within
, 1973, Basic Books: New York). At the moment, this is honestly how it feels—my hunger is unsettling and upsetting. Before I could just ignore it (I can handle the fiercest of empty-stomach pains), but now I'm supposed to respond to it. So I prowl my kitchen at night, opening and closing the fridge and cupboards; I haunt the supermarkets—unable to put my finger on what it is I need to eat.