Five Years

Five years ago, I got as fat as I've ever been and then proceeded to get fatter: bingeing at my sister's wedding, gorging myself on lobster spaghetti and arroncini at Tom and Katie's wedding, and finally, eating so much chocolate and drinking so much wine at Thanksgiving dinner in Rome that I could not crawl out of bed for hours the next day.

I arrived back in London on the Sunday in time to meet a friend in from the US for lunch at Ottolenghi, where I may in fact have not eaten a thing. I remember that even though it was a Sunday and I may well have binged at breakfast or at least, eaten poorly, I started my diet as soon as I landed back in London.

That was five years ago today.

Since then I lost a job and a grandmother and survived both an abusive relationship with a very damaged man and having so little money there were days I could not afford even to take the bus. I left a city I loved and a life that felt like it finally was falling into place for a job I ended up hating more than anything else I've ever done and a city in my home country, that, although packed with more people per square inch than almost any, can make you feel curiously alone and apart.

I left the horrible job and fled back across the Atlantic for a few weeks, where I proceeded to binge without stopping, huge scary embarrassing binges of the kind that make you fear you will not – simply cannot – ever stop. The kind where things that fit at the beginning of the day don't fit at the end, and where all you can think about it getting more and yet what you're going to do if you can't stop and getting more and how awful it is that you can't stop and more please more. And you're exhausted and ready to jump out of your own skin and ready to do anything tells you to do just to stop – but oh first let me just have another Ben's Cookie. Or three.

And life shrinks as you get bigger. Mine does, anyway. As I have said before, no physical exercise exhausts me as much as constant bingeing, and that lethargy from being too full. And then feeling like I need to hide because I have stacked on so much weight.

And somehow I string together a couple of days of not bingeing and I think maybe maybe I'm going to be OK and then I fall headlong again, like one of those nightmares where I'm falling – a huge, long fall and there's nothing to grab on the way down to stop myself.

But somehow I do. And I string together enough days of eating and something approaching sanity that if they were pearls, I'd have enough for a necklace.

Or, um, something like that. Maybe I should say something, um, less crazy-sounding than that.

And life is tiny and I feel like a bath bomb of resentment exploding and fizzing everywhere. Why can't I just eat this? Why can't I just eat that? Why can't I just be normal already?

And the feeling passes.

And I do a lot of spinning and running and very occasionally, some yoga. And I eat a lot of Kashi Go Lean and Fage Greek yogurt and whole wheat tortillas stuffed with veggie omelets and cheese, and also blintzes and squares of dark chocolate and very occasionally, biscuits of the American variety.

And slowly I can wear things that are not the one maxidress I survived most of the summer in.

I don't know what I weigh right now – I don't weigh myself at the moment – but I can wear most of my clothes.

And I cannot believe it's been five years since I weighed nearly 250 lbs.

Thanks for reading.