The Fat Issue

I don’t think I am fat, maybe a bit rounded in places that could do with some toning. Currently I have purchased a lateral stepper and try and give it 1000 steps or 15 minutes, followed by floor/yoga moves and 10 mins on Biker’s rowing machine. It does me, like I say I have a fairly healthy and moderate approach to food but a lazy attitude to exercise and since I am not getting any younger I have to try and take care of my body since it’s not so young and supple any more!

Whilst today I am 5ft 4.5 inches and a size 10/12, I was not always so. I had puppy fat as a teenager which kind of fell off naturally during my time as a busy London student. Then I fell out of love and he went away and I become so morose I stopped eating. Most of my friends have similar experiences of when a relationship ends so it’s fairly normal. Apart from, I didn’t stop after a few weeks, it went on for almost 1.5 years until I realised that I was doing myself more harm than good and that it was time to move on.
In those ‘wilderness’ years I survived on drinking 8 cups of coffee, white no sugar and about 3 bananas and another piece of fruit during the day at work, then maybe a pitta with low fat taramaslata or pasta boiled with vegetables – it wasn’t a lot of food and I would pride myself in going to bed feeling hungry. I would also avoid going home after work instead opting to going drinking – a lot of my calories were from vodka and red bulls, the drink everyone drank in those days! I went down from a healthy size 10 to an ill looking size 6-8, if I had carried on I may have reached a perfect size 6, although I am not sure since my bones are bigger than that! My family were worried for me, as were my friends but I couldn’t help myself, I liked being this skinny, I liked the fuss over whether I was eating or not and I liked the fact people commented on my skinniness.

Now I see it as the attention I craved. I was fresh out of a relationship, on my own after Uni, trying to make a life for myself without the comfort of familiar friends and surroundings. I liked the fact people who met me were concerned with my joint problems of not eating and drinking too much. Yes, I was a bit of an alkie at this point too – easily could have polished off a bottle of wine during a school night (sadly, I still can now).

What I had was not anorexia nor was it bulimia, it was just plain fasting apart from I didn’t stop after 40 days, I just kept on at it. Some days I would not eat anything at all apart from 2 litres of water but then some days I might have a full meal with some friends, it was an unhealthy obsession with the amount of food I ate – but I didn’t count calories or decide to snack on a carrot over a chocolate bar – I just didn’t eat it. No carrot, no chocolate no nothing, just Malboros, wine, vodka, red bull, coffee, bananas and taramaslata. Going home to my parents or eating out with friends became a nightmare as I didn’t want to seem ungrateful but I just didn’t want to eat, so if I knew I would be eating out, I would starve myself the whole day and sometimes the whole day before.

And still the ‘compliments’ came flooding in. I think one of the turning points was when one of my friends saw a picture of me of when my sister and brother had come to visit in London. She remarked, ‘Oh my god, look how skinny you are there!’. I looked at the picture again since I had seen it before but when I looked closely at it I had really pasty, pale skin. I had on a pair of 26″ Diesal jeans on which looked like a child’s pair on my skinny frame, although I have naturally quite a large sized head so that my head looked too big for my body. In fact during this time I met Biker and he commented that he used to wonder how my neck could support such a large head!

But I did look skinny, perhaps too skinny. My small boobs looked even smaller in the tiny top I was wearing but I could not get over how pale and ill I looked. I mean I know I didn’t feel ill but I looked like a scarecrow, a comical melon headed, straw-filled raggy doll that would have blown away with the wind!

Soon after this I changed my lifestyle, I had met Biker and regular meals were on the agenda again and also I moved out of my lodgings and developed a different set of friends who were perhaps all the more better for me.

And so it does pain me to hear of girls who have doing to themselves what I have done. This condition of starving yourself for attention does little more than make you paranoid of your self image and paranoid of doing something that you should enjoy – eating. It makes you think that by not eating is the answer to all your problems that if you inflict this ‘pain’ upon yourself things will get better. It doesn’t, it just makes you battle harder with your internal demons and makes your friends and families worry. It makes you mistake concern for love and mistake attention for social standing. Poeple bacome jaded with you and your constant whinings about your obsession for food, you will find that your friends start turning away from you as all you can do is talk about the food (or lack of) that you have or not eaten. You can be slim, just be sensible about it!

Today I am much healthier. I eat regulary and try and exercise on a regular basis. I try not to think about the harm I have done my body and try to think that the experience has not affected me – too much.