Eating. Such a natural thing, right? Such an elemental, intrinsic thing, impossible to get wrong. From the moment we’re born in fact, eating forms the very skeleton of our days and our long, long nights. The code that our exhausted mothers and fathers cling to and try everything to crack. The very first question asked whenever we may cry. ‘Hungry?’ It echoes. Round and around as confusion and sleep deprivation underline its importance. Always a solution at this point. Never, a problem.
It lasts for quite a while too, that positive positioning of hunger. A toddler who is peckish can be bargained with, a child fond of sweets easy to keep quiet. ‘Eat it all up.’ Parents coo and grandparents too, merrily admiring the scraped clean plate with pride and promising fairy tale powers if vegetables are swallowed, big and strong. Even at school the plastic tray must be emptied to escape the busy table and access freedom. Gluey pasta pushed down your throat with a chaser of lumpy custard, happily. ‘I ate all of my dinner the fastest today.’ Is a sport now, for a while. Food a simple, gulped-down fuel that propels you like a rocket across the playground. Untainted and unspiked.
And then suddenly, something almost imperceptible changes. Raised eyebrows start to greet the bolting down of food, flickers of distaste. ‘Steady on.’ Those eyebrows mutter. An ugly frown where pride used to shine so bright. ‘Not too much.’ Too much? What’s too much? Too much did not exist before and yet now, too much is everywhere and not just at home. You find yourself surrounded. Vegetables are good you learn. Sugar, is bad. And out of nowhere, food has labels and not the nice kind of labels that make the beep-beep food scanner add up to less than mum thought and make her smile. These labels are bad. Bad like smelly. Boring. Uncool. The type of labels that you hide from. You never knew you had to be scared of a chocolate bar before but in a flash its once familiar weight has become alien in your book-bag. B-A-D. You spell it out slowly, confusion swirling thick because chocolate makes your tummy smile and your lips stretch wide but stretching wide is bad.
You’ve learned that too.
Scales. You step on them awkwardly, curious as to why a cold slab of plastic and metal is interesting to anyone. Numbers flicker and dance like the times-tables you’ve tried endlessly to learn and then an arrow stills. There’s an intake of breath. ‘A little on the higher end.’ Somebody mutters and though until now, jumping or climbing the highest has been the ultimate accolade you’re suddenly crushingly aware that you don’t want to be high anymore. You want to be low. Low, low, low like the worms on their bellies in the ground. Nice and shrunken. Nice and flat.
Around you, that competition starts - no longer who can kick the ball the furthest, spin in circles for the longest, now it’s who can be the smallest. Because being the big strong giant isn’t cool anymore. It’s gross. So you drift through the days, scared to touch what you want though you want it. Nailing down your lips with heavy stain and teenage derision, a raised eyebrow cutting anyone who suggests you load your plate up like you used to. ‘Don’t be gross.’ But the switching back and forth is dizzying. The messages you receive madder and more mixed even than the hormones running rampage in your body. One minute your parents are dismayed that your plate isn’t full, the next they’re shaking their heads and snorting as you cave and spoon desert into your mouth. ‘I thought you were being good?’
Good. You want to scream. Restless static pulsing as you lurch from starvation to excess over and over again, streaked with salty tears that bleed from you and taste half like hell and half like the chips you long to shove in your mouth in huge golden handfuls to bury this pain. ‘She doesn’t eat lunch, you know.’ Breathless whispers flutter. Flat pancake stomachs taut like elastic bands that ping whilst yours wobbles and rebels, swells like a balloon the more that you deny it and bursts from your jeans. ‘She can still fit in her sister’s clothes.’ Her sister is ten and you hate her. Because the only way to ‘be’ is to be thin you have learned. To be the kind of thin that means thigh gaps and collar bones that stand to attention. The kind of thin that requires long and dogged concentration, the ability to say no even when every fiber of you screams yes. To turn away. To close your mouth and yourself.
The kind of thin that will never be enough. That whittles fun and freedom away until suddenly you find yourself deep into your twenties and still obsessed day and long, long night with food. With eating. With that thing that was once so elemental.
Yes. That thing, that simple, simple thing is now the most impossible code and you don’t know how to crack it. Because you see, as teenage dreams faded into blackness you realised that grey deprivation wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and with your guard let down the joy of food slithered in through the gaps in the armor. Forbidden fruit one mouthful at a time ruined it all.
And now, you think, it’s the maddest thing, eating until you feel sick, then continuing to eat anyway, isn’t it? Eating until every part of you is so hideously full and yet still feeling empty because you realise, there’s nothing in you that ever learned to navigate this properly. It’s like an umbrella trying to hold back the force of a dam. Irrational and hopeless. A deluge of emotion that swamps you when you taste what you couldn’t taste for so long, screaming that you’ve got to have it all, right now, before somebody notices and raises that eyebrow. Tears it all away once again.
Any suggestion that you should stop takes you straight back to the child at the table with flaming cheeks. Searing hot with shame. Good and bad. Giant. Gross. God you don’t know. And so, you keep on, a piece here, a bite there, even when none of it tastes good anymore. Because slowly you’ve figured that maybe, it’s not about that anymore. That it’s actually about something deeper now. Something heavy and swollen and yet empty all at once. Something, you must chip away at one tiny crumb at a time.
Because if you do, then maybe one day it will be normal to walk into the kitchen and take exactly what you want, no corners cut or seams overstretched. Just easy. A simple desire met. Elemental, in fact. And so until then, you guess you’ll have to ride the wave and accept that if sometimes it takes a loaf when a slice should have done then you’ve got to trust the process. Trust your body. Trust the healing.
Because there’s nothing wrong with eating, really. It doesn’t have to be feast or famine. Really, it only has to stop your body crying. When it's hungry.
