Sylvia K. Blood PhD

I lived in the nurse’s home as a trainee nurse in the early 1980’s. As in my childhood boarding school fantasies we would often group-eat together;  greasy fish and chips from Diana’s parents’ chip shop, white bread and butter to make chip butties, packets of chocolate biscuits, bags of crisps, bars of chocolate, hot buttered toast with peanut butter. Sitting around painting our nails, gossiping, laughing, shrieking. Talking about clothes, men and sex. Despairing about our always disappointing bodies and disastrous appetites for food, we spoke a common language.  Eating until we felt sick.  Later some of us would vomit.  Bulimia was not something we had heard of then. There were just those, the lucky ones we thought, who could throw up and those of us who couldn’t. For the rest of us eating up on a Sunday night was our attempt to fortify ourselves in the face of the deprivation Monday’s diet would bring. 

In my memory there was always a queue of women outside the doctor’s office, downstairs in the nurses’ home.  This was where they went to get diet pills.  Concern about weight, the worry about being fat or “overweight” was often enough to elicit the prescription pad.  A scribbled note, never written quickly enough, would at last be handed over.  Relief.  Running across to the hospital pharmacy, excited, waving that prescription aloft. This was it! The answer to our troubled relationships with food and our bodies.  My faith in the next new diet held out for a long time but eventually I joined that queue.  

Some of us were prescribed a drug called Tenuate Dospan – an amphetamine based drug used for weight loss.  In the 90’s it was withdrawn from the market due to its harmful effects; pulmonary hypertension and damage to heart valves.  I was prescribed a different appetite suppressant. The drug made me feel sick.  I ate continually throughout the day hoping the food would make me feel less nauseated.  I don’t remember finishing the pills. I never went back for more.  

Like many of my friends I was cycling through food restriction then bingeing followed by food restriction, on and on.   When we did lose weight there was no reprieve.  Success was always tainted by the fear of re-gaining the weight.  We could not trust that we could feed ourselves. We could not relax our guard.  It seemed there was no choice but to eat the way I did.  I felt miserable, trapped and impotent. Getting another filling I willed my dentist to tell me to stop eating sugar or I would lose all my teeth.  Angry, frustrated with my failure to control my eating, I told my boyfriend if he did not tell me I was beautiful I would do something about my weight.    

The camaraderie of group eating and the shared experiences of dieting and feeling unhappy with our bodies was not enough to sustain me.  My preoccupation with food dragged at me, when, what and whether or not to eat. Pictures of models I cut from Cosmopolitan magazine wallpapered my room.  Lithe, lean and energetic they were there to motivate me to eat less.   Instead those fantasies of my future self were a constant reproach.  Reminding me how far I was falling short. I believed if I could not look the way they did I could never be one of those happy, confident free-spirited girls.  

As we struggled to change the size of our bodies it dawned on me that many of us just wanted to be someone else. Jo, whom I thought had the perfect body, did not think so and wanted to look like Kate.  Kate, unhappy with her body, envied Anne’s body size and shape. Anne was always trying to lose 10 pounds. We did not know it but we wanted to be anyone except who we were. As if some other body could deliver a less troubling existence.  

We read every diet book that came on the market. “Think Yourself Thin” and other titles reinforced our belief about what was wrong with us.  We were greedy, out of control around food and lacked will-power.   In the local bookstore I noticed a new title, “Fat is a Feminist Issue” by Susie Orbach.  I didn’t know what a feminist was but I was dismissive.  I was sure I was no feminist.  Then I saw the book’s tag-line, “How to Lose Weight Permanently without Dieting.”  I left the store with the book.  

Settling in to read I felt confused.  This was not the book I needed it to be.  There was nothing  confirming my belief that thin was where it was at. Where were the directives to pull myself together, to grow up and eat like a normal person?  There was no blaming, no judgement. No harsh criticism of my messy, feverish eating. Nothing to shame my hungry self into submission.  

Instead Orbach wrote that there were good reasons why women become preoccupied with food and body size. That it made sense that many women might feel desperate to inhabit a smaller, thinner body.  She talked about social and cultural pressures for women to have our bodies look a certain way.  The “social” and the “cultural” were new concepts for me.  Orbach explained that dieting can cause physiological and psychological deprivation. This deprivation leads to bingeing and weight gain. In stopping dieting, learning to eat when we were hungry and to stop when we were satisfied our bodies would settle at their organic weight. Our organic weight and body size/shape would be different for each of us. And would depend on our, history, age, genetics and ethnicity.

Reading Orbach’s book I became hopeful and excited.   She described the world I lived in as socially constructed. The idea that there was a “made-up-ness” to things I had always believed to be true, such as women had to be thin and dieting was “natural and feminine,” was completely new to me. She pointed to racist and sexist assumptions; for example the idea there was one correct body size for women and that the ideal body must be a thin, white body.    

Whereas I felt crazed and out of control around food, Orbach suggested over-eating is something we do in an attempt to gain control.  She argued that we feel out of control before we eat compulsively.  We know we need something and turn to food in an attempt to meet that need.   

Reading Orbach’s words I felt understood.  She knew the territory of compulsive eating from her own experiences.  I felt less alone.  Less flawed.  She got what it was like to be me. She knew the pain of being desperate to lose weight yet continuing to over-eat.   Orbach was suggesting a way out.  I decided I would try her approach.  I wanted out of dieting.  I knew it didn’t work for me. But being thin was still the driving force behind my decision to give Orbach’s way a go.  In those days I believed my compulsion to eat was only a problem because it got in the way of my being thin.  I had no idea I ate because I did not know how else to cope with what I was feeling.      

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