Monday 6 August 2007

Snapshot

I started so many posts about my food this week, but I haven’t been able to finish them. I guess it’s because – not quite six months after I finished my therapy for binge-eating, and a little over eight months into This Thing I’m Doing – I can’t say anything that feels like there should be a period at the end of it, only an ellipsis or a dash. Or maybe it would just end abruptly in the middle of a thought. You get the idea.

On Tuesday I didn’t finish my Magnum, Wednesday I ate my first fresh peach in 11 years, and several times during the week I struggled with this unreasonable anger when the server at Wasabi didn’t fill up my lunchtime container of rice to the tippy top (and anger again yesterday when my friend was served twice as much cheese as I was with our ploughmans at the pub). Call it a snapshot of my ever-evolving relationship with food.

First, the Magnum.

Few things say "summer in England" to me quite so much as a Magnum bar. I don’t crave them much when it’s cold out, but I could – and during certain weeks of summers past, did – eat them every day.

It’s been a cool, wet summer in England, but my thoughts have turned to Magnums anyway. I remember having a conversation with the Fig about them, for starters. And lately I keep seeing them – they are everywhere, in every newsagent on every corner – and telling myself: "When it’s warm, I’ll have one." (I should say for the record that my rule on foods like Magnums and Ben’s Cookies is that if I think about them enough, I go and have one.)

Tuesday was the first day in recent memory that there was no rain. It was warm and sunny, and despite my best efforts, I’d been hungry all day. Which made me even edgier and more binge-prone than I already was.

I got off the bus a few stops early, planning to buy plums for dessert. (I’d eaten my sushi on the bus – I was that hungry.) But the plums looked unappealing. That’s when I spied the Magnum freezer, and thought: "Oh, why not?"

As I walked home, I ate my Magnum in my usual style – first eating off the chocolate coating, then moving on to the vanilla ice cream. Which tasted, I realized, like creamy whipped chemicals. (This is what I have been dreaming about?)

I kept taking more bites, thinking: "Let me just try again, and maybe then it will taste like the delicious I-must-have-you-every-day Magnum of my memory."

The bar half gone, and still I kept eating, you know, because that’s what I do with food – I finish it.

My head spun the way it did when I binged – the self-loathing still intact enough for me to be furious with myself for continuing to eat the bar, and panicked because I couldn’t stop.

I paused. I realized I couldn’t throw the bar out because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t – of what I might buy and eat otherwise.

I threw the remaining third of the bar away without difficulty and went home to think about it. The only times I’ve ever stopped eating anything like ice cream have been either because I was post-binge full, or in mid-binge, putting the ice cream down to eat something else instead – something that deep down somewhere I am convinced is going to fill whatever empty hole I was trying to fill. (In all those years, I never did find the magic food, of course. I just kept bingeing.)

I feared that evening I might feel cheated and angry – the way I felt as a child when my mother promised dessert but then didn’t end up serving it. But then I thought: I’m 32 years old, and if I decided I want something – and, per rule above, I think about it enough – I will go and have it.

Now, the peach and the rice (and cheese).

It seemed somehow fitting the day after the Magnum revelations to go and eat a fresh peach. I haven’t eaten one since 1996, aka the Summer of 1,000 peaches, when over a period of weeks I whittled my calories from 1,200 down to three peaches a day. I’d run for an hour every day, and I’d go to bed with my fist pressed against my stomach, sickeningly pleased with how hungry I was.

Why peaches? Because of my obsessive tendencies I try not to look at calorie charts any more, so I can’t say this for sure, but… if I recall correctly, peaches were chosen over nectarines because they are approximately the same size but have half the calories. Yes, that is the state of mind I was in at the time. (It’s a state of mind that every once in a while – at my heaviest – I would rue that I couldn’t return to.)

As for the rice and cheese: I’m still working on understanding this unreasonable anger I feel when I’m given not quite a full portion of something, or not as much as someone else. I think part of it is a holdover from when I was child and I knew that one portion was all I was getting; my mother wouldn’t let me have seconds because of my weight. As for my feelings when my portion is smaller than someone else’s – I think that must be partly fear and embarrassment. I worry that I’ll still be hungry, and whether it would be OK to have more even if the other person doesn’t, because surely I can’t point out that my portion was smaller. I worry that I’ll finish much more quickly and be embarrassed about my empty plate – or that I’ll sit there and eat things I shouldn’t just because I’m still sitting at the table.

I worry, therefore I am.

2 comments:

  1. Sadly, I hear you about the portion rage... I remember about 8 years ago (and how sick it is that I remember) a work colleague and I both ordering singapore noodles (including prawns which I love)in a restaurant for lunch. They must have cooked both servings together and when the meals came somehow she ended up with every single damn prawn and I had none. She then didn´t eat the prawns as she didn´t like them and I was left staring at a pile of some 20 prawns on her plate. I was wordlessly upset and hearing your rice thoughts brought it all back! LOL. Luckily, I´m over it now...

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  2. I used to dish up meals for myself and my husband and would make sure they were as even as poss even though I knew he would leave food and I would end up finishng off his. If I had a choice of plates, I would always take the largest unless it was too obvious and the other contender was a bloke!! Silly games we play in our heads when most people are not even aware that it's going on eh?

    Can't imagine throwing away part of a Magnum but, then again, a couple of weeks ago, I threw away most of the bun and 1/3 of a bratwurst even though I had enjoyed what I ate. I just didn't want the rest of it - that's progress for me!!

    Keep it up.

    Lesley x

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