Anorexia has a dramatic image. Rightly so. It is a quiet proclamation of rage and despair, for most of its users. They are living fiercely.

But my illness had its roots in much more prosaic behaviours. It grew from the simple discrepancy between the amount I ate and the amount I exercised. My calorie expenditure started to edge ahead of my intake. That’s all.

When Jo decided we were to live more healthily, and my eating became more restrained, the running was enough to cause my weight to fall slightly[1]. Then it continued to creep downwards, because I’d developed the habit and the formula. I knew how to do it.

Running already provided me with a comforting sense of success, however small, and it turned out I needed that. When I’d completed a run, I felt like I’d got something done. It felt like a solution to something.

 Now losing weight by exercise and healthy eating became my thing, became the way I lived. I couldn’t just abandon it when I hit a target weight. That would feel like failure and would leave me without purpose. The idea felt threatening, for some reason[2].

But the continued success of my endeavours demanded continued and progressive weight-loss. I had a long grace period when, presumably, I was living off my own internal fat reserves. But these aren’t infinite. When I allowed myself to do the calculations, I was amazed at how long I’d continued to function on fewer calories than I was using. On each successive day, I knew I was defrauding my future self of his health by adding to the calorie debt I’d inherited from my past self. And, ultimately, one day, one of my future selves would be called upon to pay back the debt, probably by dropping dead. Like Karen Carpenter.[3]

But who cared about dropping dead in future? Future me wasn’t me. He was some other vaguely conjectured dude. It was present me that was having all the trouble.

• Footnotes

[1] Notice the confusion, right from the start, of what was healthy and what was dangerous, what was wise and what was just crazy. It’s all a question of degree…

[2] An over-active amygdala, Abi suggests, the part of the brain that regulates stress hormones. After all, I’d already experienced one major endocrine malfunction: Grave’s Disease. See also Carrie Arnold’s Decoding Anorexia 2013 Hove: Routledge, p26

 

[3] I’ve adapted this idea from Yanis Varoufakis’s explanation of financial debt in Talking to my Daughter about the Economy, 2018, London: Vintage (I think)

Ah, yes: “distance run…”

I’ve been a runner (a slow shambler) for years. I can’t remember when I started. I know I was already running when I taught English in a developing country, 23 years ago[1]. I guess this suggests a deep-seated dissatisfaction with myself that pre-dates the eating disorder by many years: I ran to improve myself, or my situation.

Now my drive to be effective was easily channelled into taking exercise. Running is a purposeful activity. It could fill in the gaps between more meaningful undertakings. It could compensate for idleness and lack of ambition, because it satisfied, and exhausted, a need to be dynamic and effortful.

Its immediate goals provided a substitute sense of achievement. And success could be easily measured in progressively lower weight and the urgent hunger it brought out. Its difficulty pre-occupied and absorbed, so I could avoid confronting the vast yet insubstantial terrors of existence.[2]

I think running has always been, for me, just very impatient walking. Since I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I’ve been afflicted by the sense that I needed to get on with it, that I was procrastinating. I didn’t have time to waste strolling around, taking the air! Exercise needed to get done as quickly as possible, so the urgency has always been there, too.

It helped that running is not a pleasurable experience. It’s bloody hard work. It is an ordeal. I force myself out the door every morning and the first ten minutes are awful. I spend it cursing myself for being such a fool. This makes it ideal to act as a penance and a useful chore. Of course, working hard runs absolutely against the grain of my natural inclinations, so overcoming that, day after day, proved my grit and determination.

 After a while, though, you get into a meditative rhythm. Running has a concrete simplicity to it. Your goal is clear and specific: you need to complete the run – a time or a distance. The benefits of this activity are also clearly defined and easy to understand: aerobic, bodily health; mental health, and, of course, weight loss. You can lose yourself, burrow into a comforting, limited and achievable activity, just as you could with your eating project.

I suppose it’s really a self-calming technique. You feel anxious: you go for a run. The sheer effort makes you focus on a simple, rhythmical, achievable task, which demands controlled breathing and releases endorphins, and you feel much calmer. This makes it feel like running is the answer to the problem. In fact, it’s a simple, bio-chemical correlation.[3]

• Footnotes

[1] More than half the population still relied, at least partially, on some sort of subsistence farming to make ends meet. For them, thinness was a sign of defeat – it meant you couldn’t find enough food, day to day. Corpulence was a sign of success and importance. These people would never run for health or pleasure. They got quite enough exercise just surviving.  When I met someone, in the early morning, they would look wildly behind me, to see what I was running away from – packs of wild dogs, wolves or the police, all three of which roamed the country, were utterly savage, and would hunt you down.

[2] I think runners are often considered to be displaying will-power. In fact, we’re probably all cowardly deserters from the mind’s battlefields. Running is just the haystack we’re hiding in. (How about that for a confused image?)

[3] Jamie, the therapist at Ascot House first pointed out this alternative. Thank you Jamie! It seems obvious, now, but it had never occurred to me to view it this way.

My essence was distilled ‘Useless Git’ – “a tube for turning good food into shite” – so I had to enacted my self-worth by doing useful things: the spontaneous creation of value from nothing; the alchemist’s goal:  gold from lead (blood from a stone). I had to be working or writing or cleaning or cooking all the time, because any lapse in activity was a return to worthlessness.

Hence the disparity between the oafish, private interior, and the active, public exterior. The life I’d found myself in was so unfamiliar that it was best to be on guard, proceed with caution, not rely on others, and I was a charlatan because I was maintaining a façade of industriousness, always on the point of being unmasked, having my grubby interior revealed[1].

Even now, urgency builds up in me throughout any day. It’s the waste product of difficult human transactions; it’s a pressure that needs release through activity, to resist the opposite pressure of my own exhaustion.

I always seem to be on the edge of a precipice. I want to collapse, but awful consequences await such a surrender. It’s as if my own petty anxieties have somehow got mixed up with much vaster, more deadly catastrophes. Perhaps I’m experiencing interference from the collective unconscious, a fear of climate disaster, or something. (I tend to catastrophize!)

So why did I, why do I, find myself standing about doing nothing, not even day-dreaming, a restless spirit trapped in an idle vessel?  I needed to apply myself; muster my strength; drive myself forward; stay vigilant for signs of weakening resolve.

But I couldn’t think of ways to make myself effective, and I was in my 40s. My brain was becoming degraded, like all aging brains. I just couldn’t imagine being equal to any arduous or imaginative or remotely ambitious project. I was running out of synapses.

And time.

I needed to, how does Kipling, unhelpfully put it? “fill the unforgiving minute with 60 second worth of distance run”: an unrelenting standard.

• Footnotes

[1] like a teenager’s bedroom when their mum throws open the curtains: “AAAARGH!!! How long has this plate been here?!!!”

                                                     Entering the age of the unfamiliar

A dog stood on its hind legs and talked to him.

The flowers had the faces of old men. The paths

he took returned him to the places he’d just been to

the places he’d just been, and when he wrote

he found he’d written backwards or the pen

had eaten up the words already there and left him

silent. The great words that he felt had dwelt within him

came out as other words – mean spirited and small.

The friend he turned to turned into a bolster;

the others turned against him. His home

was not his own; his keys were in the fridge

and suddenly the kitchen had no door.

He knew they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Sorry about the delay in posting. I’m working on a long essay about the Black Lives Matter protests. There isn’t really anything to say about the American ones, other than to voice full throated support. The British edition of these protests seems slightly more problematic, though.

Of course, I support BLM and condemn the inequality they seek to draw attention to but I’m uncomfortable with the level of aggression and antagonism over issues that seem, in Britain, to be endemic and caused more by a history of inequality than by individuals intentionally pursuing a racist agenda. Somebody’s got up a petition on Facebook condemning the history department in the school I work in for teaching colonialist history. This seems unfair, and the History teachers, already mildly hysterical from over-work, are upset. I think these activists should remember that they are not just attempting to tear down old institutions, they are attacking harassed and over-worked teachers who liked them and worked hard to provide them with an education.

I understand the desire to harness the energy generated by the furious outrage and disgust at the killing of George Floyd. Using the same name for a British civil rights organisation, though, serves to highlight the differences in the circumstances of BAME citizens in the two countries. British people need to point out that Black Lives Matter because BAME Brits experience discrimination and insult every day; Americans need to point out that Black Lives Matter because unarmed Black Americans keep being openly murdered in cold blood by their own police force. The comparison is unhelpful. Rather than emphasising how outrageous the treatment of Black people can be in Britain, it allows “patriotic” white Britons to congratulate themselves for not being as bad as the Americans.

They will also say that our complaints are groundless. Conflict between British police and the black community is nowhere near the catastrophic levels of the USA. So why, they will ask, are we jumping on their band-wagon? We’re just impressionable followers of American trends. It’s just a fad. (To be honest, it does seem like another example of American Cultural Imperialism, transmitted through social media. Why can’t we have our own name, to reflect our own, long-standing independent civil rights movements?)

I accept that there absolutely is a problem in Britain, but if we appear incendiary, those most in need of listening will just be further alienated and pushed to the right. The far right will use it as ammunition against us. If people are listening, then they are basically already on our side and don’t need to be yelled at. I love you guys; I’m aware of my white privilege, and I’m sorry about all of this. I support you.

I know that if we don’t shout loudly, everything will just carry on as normal, but we have made a lot of progress in my lifetime, and, unless we’re intending to stage a military coup and put them all up against a wall and shoot them, we’re never going to win an outright victory. We’ll need to learn to live with these people.

The majority of British people adore Churchill for his wartime achievements. They’re never going to give him up as an icon, so we’re going to have to introduce his less attractive qualities more tactfully or they’ll just reject our position wholesale. Similarly, taking down statues of Peel and other more dubious figures from our past could be read as an act of cowardice. We are trying to wash our hands of our own history, to dodge our responsibility to face up to who we are.

Even if your ancestors were trafficked into this country, every benefit you gain from membership of our community, from working traffic lights and road repairs, to (at least partially) funded education and healthcare, to relative political stability, to at least occasionally functional legal and security forces has been underwritten, in part, by the funding and engagement of people some of whom did, said and believed some pretty unpleasant things.

Even if you are BAME, if you attend a university that was endowed at some point in its history by (invariably) a man who made his money from the Empire, then the continued prosperity, or at least survival, of that institution is reliant on that historical endowment. You are benefitting from his crimes.

You could drop out, but I’d advise staying in and using the bastard’s legacy for a good end – get yourself educated and use your education to fight the good fight.

Similarly, don’t pull down the statues – put them in museums, perhaps, or put up a plaque that explains their true legacy. Or better still, commission another statue, alongside it, to give the post-colonial perspective on their grandeur. That’d give support to modern, struggling sculptors and help maintain civic culture. (Though god knows where the money would come from!)

To recap: I felt called upon to provide a level of service that I feared was beyond me. I was expected to be effective as a father, a husband, (and a son, a brother, a friend, I guess). I wanted to be effective as a writer; I needed to be effective as a worker, and as a climate-change and civil-rights political activist, because our species is cruel, and the universe itself is scrupulously pitiless – without either bias or compassion. If we don’t work tirelessly for our own protection, we will be exterminated. “If you don’t work you die.”[1]

The consequences of failure were enormous, especially the lasting damage I could do to my kids, but I felt wholly inadequate to all these tasks. I didn’t even know where to start. Confronted with any job, I’d quail. I’d gaze up at its monumental and unscalable cliffs and I become overwhelmed by a hopeless sense of exhaustion.

Years ago, I’d felt defeated by Lulu. I lost the argument, so, despite her resistance, I made myself her captive. I tried to become what she would admire and love. From then on, the only quality I cultivated was a sort of gloomy and passive endurance, an acceptance of other people’s decisions.

Now, parenting, LSA-ing and pursuing writing as a profession (as distinct from just sitting down and off-loading like this) all demand improvisation and decisions, but it wasn’t clear how I should occupy myself. what to do? I didn’t seem to be of much consequence, and I’ve never had the imagination or the confidence or the resilience to make my own opportunities.

I didn’t know what to do with my writing, how to find an outlet for it or get feedback. I still have no idea if anything I write is remotely engaging or well-crafted.[2] At work, the role of the LSA is curiously undetermined. You have to be reactive and flexible, responding to challenges as they occur. You have to come up with your own ways of making yourself useful. I just wasn’t resourceful or quick-witted enough to carve out my own niche. Parenting is famous for being made up as you go along. When you have a second child you realise you still don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

So, you see, I spent my life feeling at a loss.

I knew the first thing you were expected to give was commitment and effort, so I tried to put my head down and charge at it, especially the parent-husband bit, because that was where I felt most immediate responsibility.

With the unflagging Jo as my example, I made a conscious decision to be constantly active, always looking around for some task that needed doing. A secret, internal, unwholesomeness could be balanced by a superficial utility. If I wasn’t a valuable person, at least I could be a useful actor in some small way. In ill-fitting uniforms, I could still help. I adopted a wholly unnatural mania to resist my natural laziness. I was like the old woman who swallowed a fly: I’d swallowed a spider to catch the fly. Neither should have been wriggling and jiggling and tickling inside me.

But I had no goal for this and no real concept of success. I was manic in intention but sluggish in behaviour[3]. I was expecting, at any moment, to be ambushed by my natural indolence, so I felt driven to a permanent state of alertness as I tried maintain the fictions I’d constructed. I needed to maintain the charade of decency, of normality. I knew I was a complete charlatan and I feared exposure. Not only would I be shamed and dismissed, I’d also have to confront my self, admit what I truly was. Perhaps it would prove I didn’t care for anyone, even my own family, that I was some sort of lonely and despicable psychopath. to avoid

I had to step warily across any threshold: waking in the morning, walking through the entrance at work, encountering another person, because I mustn’t ever betray myself. That, in itself, was exhausting. It would be safer never to go out, never to meet anyone.

• Footnotes

[1] Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of hard work. This is from the poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, first published in The Sunday Pictorial (26/10/1919)

[2] The couple of times somebody has said they’re following my blog, I try to return the favour, but I literally don’t know how to. I’m really sorry, guys. I’ve tried. Isn’t there just a button you can click on? (I’m such a dolt!)

[3] Nowadays I have so many writing projects on the go, theoretically, that I can’t possibly finish any of them. This displays the same commitment to mania, in principle, but complete inactivity in practice.

I never skipped tea entirely or reduced it to a tokenistic scrap. Tea was my daily goal. Anticipating it was what kept me staggering through the day. The satisfaction of it. But I did make sure it was always a little less than I needed. I disguised the diminutive size of my portions by specialising in stews and curries and veggie-heavy stir fries (and salads) – various meats or pulses or tofu in sauces, that people usually eat with a separate portion of carbs: rice or potatoes or bread. A good, well-seasoned and spiced sauce allowed me to dramatically reduce the amount of proteins and fats I was using without anyone noticing, partly because I’d serve Jo what little substance there was and leave myself with only sauce.

My curries and stews were alright, although a little watery because I couldn’t ever thicken them. Flour is an utter bitch, calorie-wise, as you know. With such messy meals, I could make my plate look misleadingly substantial because I learned how to bulk it up with vegetables. Nearly any curry will benefit from spinach wilted in at the end.

We’d supplement this with bread, which also helped Jo stay nourished, because she could give herself as much as she needed. Bread was the one carb I never abandoned, either. I think the apparent austerity of dry bread beguiled my anorexia into assuming it was less sustaining than it was. Still, I specialised in unsliced loaves. After a couple of days, I could slice them so thinly you could glaze your windows with them.

Though thin, this bread is what kept me alive. My relationship with it was remarkably uncomplicated for an anorexic: I hungered for it. All the time. I suspect most of my thoughts were about buying bread, baking bread or eating bread, of the different types that could be bought or made: pumpernickel, rosemary and apple, fennel and raisin rye, seeded wholemeal sourdough…

It was lunches that I really cut back on, to enhance the appetite for tea, the big pay-off. I was at work, most days, and so could avoid the scrutiny of my family. I’d keep pushing it down and pushing it down. It was another trial of strength to try and convince myself that I had strength. Once it had occurred to me to chuck away half my sandwich, I’d come back and back to that thought, dithering and dithering, knowing I should resist the urge to resist the urge to eat it, until I’d suddenly, impulsively, chuck it in the bin. Then I’d feel an exhilarating liberation from the dreadful indecision, a sense of empowerment…

I always maintained a vestigial stump of lunch, though: 100 calories or so, for form’s sake.

I can’t remember the point when meals first flipped over into being weird Martian salads that would suit no human taste-buds. Perhaps, when you are ill, your body craves very specific minerals and food groups and will combine them in whatever way you can, whenever you allow yourself to eat. I used to be obsessed with roll-mops until I become aware of how much I liked them. Then I made myself stop, as a trial of strength. Now I have no particular desire for them. Was that craving the body’s recognition of some lack?

Poor Jo! Luckily I always gave her the lion’s share of the meal. The difference in our portion sizes, artfully disguised, was my strange way of demonstrating to myself how I was supporting the family by accepting, abjectly, my subordinate status. It was a perverted form of FHB (the fabled cry of parents when guests come round unexpectedly and there’s not quite enough food: “Family Hold Back”.) Mine was DHB: “Dad Hold Back” even though the lack was intentionally created by me. Or perhaps it was a FOMNO: Fear Of NOT Missing Out, when I was the one who least deserved to be rewarded with food.

I also signalled my lower status when getting the cutlery. I always made sure that I had the cheapest, mis-matched knife and fork I could find, some plasticized crap nicked from a works canteen in the 70s and left at the back of the drawer for decades. I still do this.

Unlike many anorexics, I can never remember the science or the numbers of food and nutrition. Then starvation makes your cognition go haywire, which makes the incomprehension worse. According to Carrie Arnold[1], this is a sign of a malfunctioning insula, the part of your brain that maintains interoception. That’s the process of monitoring and integrating internal feelings, both physical and emotional. It must also, therefore, be central to the sense of self. Starvation dismantles your identity.

Sensations are remarkably hard to tease apart, especially when there’s no longer any trust in the relationship between mind and body. I no longer recognise hunger signals for what they are, among all the confusion of thought and feeling. I can’t tell the difference between the urgent and the indulgent, or an empty stomach from the desire just to taste yummy things – that tangy umami at the back of the throat.This doesn’t release you from hunger’s torment.  You feel it all the time, mixed up with doubt.

This is a classic eating disorder dilemma. We’re extraordinarily indecisive, anyway. Apparently, this is caused by further brain malfunctions, of the pre-frontal cortex and the insula.[2] In the end, though, you always opt for denial[3], because you view hunger with such suspicion, because you fear weight gain and indulgence, and because you discount your own thoughts. To combat this, I now have to eat entirely by plan, by rota. Rigidity is typical of anorexics, but in this case, it keeps me eating.

I didn’t know what I was doing right, when I started losing weight, so I worried that those encouraging, falling numbers might suddenly go into reverse. “To be on the safe side”, I cautiously, but constantly, amplified everything: a little more exercise; a little smaller portion sizes (for me).

I also felt that my value in the family came from producing beautiful, healthy, low fat food for everyone. Meals could never be complex or lean enough. Luckily, the children were still young. They ate separately and earlier, so I never compromised their diets. I was always able to maintain a clear sense of what was good for them but I didn’t apply the same rules to myself. It’s a good example of anorexic double-think, the ability we have of gravely and sincerely acknowledging the truth of a proposition and then acting in an entirely contrary manner, with no apparent motivation.

For poor Jo and I, every time I was able to produce a good meal while reducing the oils or the carbs or the protein, that level of low-fatness became the norm until there was a chance to reduce it again.

• Footnotes

[1] Decoding Anorexia (2013) Hove: Routledge, pp27-31

[2] ibid

[3] Perhaps overweight people have the same confusion and the same lack of self-belief, but opt for the opposite response, out of a defeated sense of being unable to resist.

Here’s how it happened.

I’ve told you before how, years ago, when I’d first started doing some of the cooking, Jo decided that we should eat more healthily. I’d been treated for Grave’s Disease, you’ll remember, a thyroid condition that sets your metabolism to “nuclear”, so that you burn through calories like a furnace. I could eat a meat feast and most of a New York style cheesecake every day and still stay around 8½ to 9 stone. Now, however, I’d been successfully treated and was starting to gain weight.

Jo had also put on weight keeping pace with me. She wanted to lose a bit. She sensibly didn’t rush it or binge on denial. Instead, she started requesting healthier, smaller meals and stopped having puddings or snacks. I don’t think she even mentioned her plan to me, so I was carried along, unwittingly, vaguely disappointed by the lack of chocolate, mildly alarmed by hunger pangs, which I’d never let myself feel before.

Suddenly, without knowing I was dieting, I’d lost half a stone! This was a dangerous revelation: when I was hyperthyroid, I’d felt fiercely driven by the demons of appetite. They were primal, intolerable; I’d writhed under their pangs. Now it dawned on me that hunger’s power was slight. You just resisted for a little while, not forever, went and did something important to distract yourself, exercised a bit more, and the results were highly beneficial: you achieved the weight and shape you wanted, and could still eat (smaller amounts of) yummy things.

Hunger was not only endurable, it was desirable: if you felt it, you were doing something productive: making progress; if you didn’t feel it, it showed you’d messed up, indulged yourself too much, been weak.

I wanted this sense to continue.  It was all about the direction of travel, the milestones, not the number itself. 50 kilos might as well be 60; 60 could be 70, just as long as it was always lower than before. If a malevolent genie cast a spell in the night and I woke up weighing 90 kilos, I’d be devastated, but I’d survive. It would be ok, just as long as I was 89.9 kilos the day after, and 89.8 kilos the day after that. I could still feel good about my success, my ability to control my base instincts; show restraint.