Like a lot of people, I have been locked into a battle with my body for as long as I can remember. I was about six the first time it was pointed out to me that my thighs were fat, which I knew, even at that age, was supposedly the very worst thing you could be. I don’t remember the exact origins of this conviction and I sense it probably wasn’t any one thing, but more simply, the blizzard of fat-phobic messaging we were living with in the 1990s.
eroin chic was a thing, as was the Special K diet. Every woman in my life seemed despairing of their perfectly ordinary, lovely bodies. Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the cabbage soup diet, the Atkins diet and the Dukan diet all got more conversational airtime than the far more important and more interesting things that were happening.
When I reflect on growing up, I think of every event, good or bad, through the lens of my failure to be thin. I remember first kisses as happening in spite of my failed body. Cruel, unwanted groping as happening because of my failed body. Achievements were less because it was the not-thin me achieving them.
Here I must pause to note that I am also an unreliable narrator when it comes to my body. My perception has been corrupted by the homogeneous presentations of women that have always ruled our culture. Also, my body is not a static entity. It has shrunk, stretched and morphed over the course of my lifetime. But I hold an enormous privilege; I have never suffered because of my body size.
Still, like so many of us, I have spent decades on a boring, exhausting crusade to be thinner. Over the last 20 years, there have been times when my relationship with food has been tipped into dark territory. Times when, even as I was going about my days doing mundane activities, I was engaged in private games of denial. Games I felt ashamed of. Games like no breakfast, no lunch. Games that, given the mortality rate of eating disorders and their insidious nature, were not games at all. I subsisted on Diet Coke and coffee. I put strict caps on calories. I felt safest when I was assiduously tracking my food.
During the pandemic, like many, I took refuge in controlling my food — one of the few things that I could control. I started eating keto style and now, a year-and-a-half later, I credit it with being the best diet I’ve ever done, but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking. Keto has been around for ages and, boiled down to its essentials, it is basically a high-fat diet with intense restrictions on carbs. Not only are obvious carbs like bread and pasta and rice off the table, this extreme framework allows for little to no fruit and hardly any vegetables and should, if you ask me, come with a health warning the same as the ones on cigarettes.
I did keto for about six months and during that time, I believe my eating was the most disordered it’s ever been. I don’t want to offer too much detail here as it could be harmful, but suffice it to say it was bananas (not a banana was consumed in that time).
My whole life, so much mental real estate had always been given over to dieting but during keto, the obsession kicked up a level and became like a parasite. It all began to feel grimly familiar, too. My keto life began to remind me of my old alcoholic life; joyless and secretive. But, ironically, I am grateful to keto because it was one day when I was breaking up the six raspberries that I was “allowed” over a bowl of yoghurt that the absurdity of what I was doing hit me. My eating had become so warped and restricted that even fruit and vegetables were charged with guilt.
It was a wake-up call. I needed to find a way to be at peace with feeding myself. I found when I decided to try and give up dieting, I was completely lost; my eating instinct had been completely corrupted by two decades of living in diet culture. I have been seeing a dietician and it has been a challenge. I think recovery from alcoholism is more straightforward than recovery from disordered eating. Food is not like alcohol, as abstinence is not an option — if only it could be that simple.
But now, every time I enjoy a lovely big bowl of salad — not to mention all the other lovely delicious things — I feel so grateful to keto for showing me just how bonkers my relationship to food had got. And grateful to those who are helping me break the cycle.
For information on eating disorders and body image resources, see bodywhys.ie
