Leith, William (31 page)

Of course, I hoped, I really hoped, that my parents didn't know how bad I felt. And yet, I couldn't stand the idea that my parents didn't know how bad I felt.

That Sublime Experience

Shelley Bovey's book The Forbidden Body, written when the author was forty, is all about the pain of being fat, the Psychological agony. It gives the impression that being fat is a life sentence, that the best a fat person can hope for is to be fat in a kinder world, a world of fat-acceptance. It tells you that, when you're fat, your biggest problem is other people. Other people hate you because you're different.

Other people hate you because you remind them what they Would be like if they lost control.

Other people hate you because you're wearing your misery On your body, like an anti-fashion statement.

Bovey's solution: get these other people to change. 'Fat Women are not masochists they hurt,' she wrote. 'If they

could "do something about it", wouldn't they? Wouldn't

we?'

But when, at last, I met Shelley Bovey, in her countrified cottage overlooking the market town of Glastonbury, she was not the 260-lb fat-acceptance warrior she used to be; she'd lost weight. Now fifty-six, she was closing in on her `ideal'weight somewhere between 160 and 170. Just as thin people were unkind to her when she was fat, the world of fat-acceptance has been unkind to her now she's lost weight.

Of the fat-acceptance movement, Bovey wrote, 'I actually know from within the movement that most people who are overweight are really unhappy.' Members of the movement felt 'abandoned', 'insulted', and 'betrayed'. One woman wrote on a website, 'If she honestly felt that people who were fat were that unhappy, I have to question why she bothered to support size acceptance in the first place.'

I said to Bovey, `So there's a way out? You didn't think so in The Forbidden Body.'

I didn't think so at the time. I'd been on so many diets. I was forty-ish when I wrote that. And I thought if I hadn't managed to crack it in thirty-odd years, what's going to be different?'

`And what was different?'

`Well ... I went on being unhappy. And I got to the age of fifty, approaching fifty. I saw fifty as quite a turning-point. This is the last segment of my life. I've suffered for forty years, and I'm still suffering. A lot of assumptions were made about me being somehow in charge of myself, having risen above it all, but inside I was actually, if anything, more unhappy, and I had put on more weight. I was 273 lbs. And it was only me

280who knew how I was feeling inside. And so I thought, "I can't diet, I know it doesn't work." And I took about two years thinking about this. And what emerged was this often-quoted statistic, that 95 per cent of diets don't work. And I thought, what is it about the 5 per cent? And I couldn't find the answer. But I knew that it existed.'

`What was the answer?'

`It was very simple. Working out very roughly what my intake was, and cutting it by a tiny amount, so I was taking just that little bit less energy in. And it worked. And I didn't suffer because it was such a tiny amount. It took about two years, and I've maintained it. I have to work at it. That's the other thing. There's no finishing.'

Still, she hasn't yet lost her fat personality. 'I know that when I was overweight as a child, and as a teenager particularly, that I wasn't thought of as being as good as everyone else. And so I did a lot to compensate. I was too much of a nice person. Too much of a clown. Making people laugh. Getting into trouble. All those things, instead of just allowing the person that I might have been develop. I've never been able to lose that thing of being nice to people in case they don't like me. That's stayed, and I guess always will.'

We talked all afternoon about the pain of being fat, about how difficult it is to stop being fat, about the sinister, brain-sucking power of the thin world, making us anxious, making us hungry.

And then I asked her the million-dollar question. Why did she get fat in the first place?

`Since I've lost weight,' she said, 'I've gone back and thought more deeply about all of that and I realized that I

was brought up in a pub by parents who didn't know what they were taking on, and who worked constantly, rushed off their feet, had no help, and had no time for me. And I really, really felt it. I really suffered. They weren't ever available. They were physically there, but that's almost worse, because they weren't available, and I can remember before I put on weight, at about eight or nine, I can remember being at primary school and feeling this immense hunger. And I don't know if that was physical hunger. I would guess probably not. But I can remember feeling intense hunger and intense cold, all the time. And I think those things were psychological. And they were so intense gnawing, bitter feelings. And it must have been around the age of ten that I started to voice these feelings of loneliness to my mother, who did feel, I know, very guilty.'

Bovey went on, 'And we had a little village bakery that made their own doughnuts. And she'd buy them for me. And I can remember I can remember the comfort. It didn't do the trick. But I can remember that feeling. I can remember the brown paper bag, with the greasy marks from the doughnuts inside, and that aah, that ... sublime experience of eating them.'

OK, OK

So, is therapy the solution? Can therapy stop you bingeing? It's too early to tell, of course. I've only done seventy or eighty hours of it. But I'm beginning to see how the mechanism in my brain that caused me to binge might work.

I began putting the facts together, arranging them, looking at what they might mean. I was always late. I was always lounging around for ages and ages, and then rushing to get things done at the last moment. I preferred the limbo stage of any project or relationship. I hated being lonely. I had a string of mostly difficult relationships. My girlfriends were often compulsive in some way. Some were depressed. Some were drinkers, smokers, takers of drugs. One was a compulsive shopper. All the women I stayed with for any length of time had had bad childhoods, mostly worse than mine. And, when I talked about my childhood, I kept hearing the same thing, over and over: `Oh, not this again.'

I remembered how one woman had said, 'When you tell me about your bad childhood, how do you think that makes me feel? It's like a man with a broken leg coming up to somebody in a wheelchair and saying, "I feel terrible. I've got a sore l
eg.
" Now, how do you think that person in the wheelchair would feel?'

`OK, OK.'

And I realized that this 'OK, OK' was the 'OK, OK' I'd been saying to my parents, particularly my mother, throughout my childhood. I was saying it still! It was the 'OK, OK' of not being angry, of not allowing myself to feel anything, because if I felt something, it would be too much; my rage would be boundless. It was the 'OK, OK' of pretending everything was fine, that everything was just facts. It was the 'OK, OK' of procrastination, of hypochondria, of bingeing, of all the things that kept me busy, that took my mind off how I really felt, but how I desperately didn't want to feel. It was the 'OK, OK' of boozing, and snorting coke, and eating

endless slices of toast, just as it had been the 'OK, OK' of pouring a jar of coffee creamer into my mouth, or bingeing on my grandmother's apple pie, and, a quarter of a century later, on the same grandmother's morphine supply. I would sneak into her room, the room she lived in at my parents' house after her accident, after she'd been knocked down by a car and had metal pins put in her legs, and I'd see the small bottle, and look away. And then, click.

I kept remembering things people said to me, and realizing they were the same things, over and over.

`How do you think that person in the wheelchair would feel?' And: 'Don't say that in front of your father'

And: 'Don't say that in front of your mother.'

And: 'It would crush your father.'

And: 'I don't want you causing a fuss.'

And: 'You're exaggerating again.'

And: 'I think you're over-dramatizing.'

And: 'It can't have been that bad.'

And: 'Can't you move on?'

`OK, OK.'

It's the same 'OK, OK' that made me chase oblivion all my life, the 'OK, OK' of having one drink, and then another, and finding yourself in a different world, the 'OK, OK' of sleeping with strangers, mostly strangers who smoked and drank, or had a weakness for drugs, or had been anorexic or bulimic, or suffered from a shopping compulsion.

I once lived with a girl who had a shopping compulsion a shopaholic. A lot of people laugh at shopaholism, and I suppose that's an appropriate response. But actually, the belief that material goods, beyond a certain point, will make

you feel better about yourself, is the modern disease. It's what all those doomy sociologists are talking about. It's what Juliet Schor, in her book The Overspent American, means when she says that 27 per cent of Americans making more than $100,000 a year feel unable to buy 'everything they really need'. It's what Kasser and Ryan were talking about when they said that money-minded individuals feel less happy than people who were not money-minded, and that, importantly, money doesn't make them happier. It's what Barry Schwartz meant when he coined the phrase 'the paradox of choice', and set out to demonstrate that, if you go to the supermarket, and see 85 varieties of crackers, 80 different types of painkiller, 61 varieties of suntan oil and sunblock, 150 types of lipstick, 90 kinds of nail polish, and 116 types of skin cream, and you see these things every day, day in day out, for years, eventually you might go nuts.

I used to watch my shopaholic girlfriend as she shopped. Her favourite things to buy, and also the things that disturbed her the most, were clothes and shoes. At home, she had around a hundred pairs of shoes, seventy dresses, an entire chest of drawers full of underwear. The more stuff she bought, the less she thought she had. She would often say, `I can't go out. I don't have the right shoes.'

`What about these?'

`The heel is too low.'

`The heel is not too low it's fine.'

`Look, I should know. They're my shoes.'

`Well, what about these?'

`Much too high. With this dress, they make me look like a slut.'

`But they're only a tiny bit higher than these.'

`Don't you know anything? Look at the shape of the toe, dummy!'

In the store, the sequence of events was the same. She would agonize over different purchases. She would rack her brains. She would try the clothes on. And then she'd make a decision to buy something. This would always be a great moment. But only a moment. From then on, it was all downhill, an opera of regret. This was the logic of the market, played out to its absurd endgame; the thing you value is the thing you do not possess. The thing you possess is worthless. You are full, yet empty. You are sated, but hungry.

We would wait in line to pay for the item. The waiting was torture. Payment itself was an aria of discomfort; carrying the item out of the store in a bag a burden to be borne. And then the bitterness, the recriminations.

`Why didn't you tell me not to buy it?'

`I thought you wanted it.'

`Don't you know anything about me?'

One day, we were passing a store she'd recently bought a coat in.

`I'm just popping in here for a moment.'

`What do you want to look at?'

`The coats.'

`But you just bought a coat in there.'

`I know.'

`But you don't need another coat.'

`I'm not going to buy one.'

We went into the store. She was walking faster than me.

When I caught up with her, she was looking at her coat or rather, not her coat, but a coat identical to hers.

`How do you think it looks?'

Fine.'

`No, you don't.'

`It's fine.'

`I can see it in your eyes. You don't like it.'

Here she was, harming herself and returning to the scene of self-harm, like a killer who revisits the bodies of his victims. Later, she said she hated the coat, and never wore it.

Dr Robert Lefever, of the Promis Centre, told me he thought that ten or fifteen per cent of the population were susceptible to compulsive behaviour, and that, since they were attracted to each other, the genes keep replicating. But he also says that if you have an addictive tendency, you'll always have an addictive tendency, and that if you don't, you don't, both of which I don't believe.

What I learned from seventy or eighty hours of therapy is that I'm frightened of certain emotions, and that I do compulsive stuff in order to stop myself from feeling these emotions. In fact, I've got so good at doing the compulsive stuff that mostly I don't even feel the emotions. The emotions, by the way, are responses to the rage and loneliness I felt as a kid.

But I'll tell you this. If you're a compulsive eater, or drinker, or whatever, you've probably been running away from emotions for most of your life. And these are emotions You felt as a kid, when you were at your most vulnerable and powerless. As an adult, you're not so vulnerable, not so Powerless. My advice: sit still, and allow the emotions to wash over you; they're probably less scary than you've

always believed them to be. It took me a while to realize it, but sometimes I feel furious, absolutely furious, with my mother. But is this any more appropriate than blaming Ray Kroc, or J. R. Simphot, or David Wallerstein, or the mum with the large pasty face who tastes the fries in the McCain factory? I don't suppose so. As for my father he wasn't around much when I was growing up, and it's still difficult for me to summon up any strong feelings about this.

I don't want to sleep with my mother and kill my father. I just want to rage at my mother and, at worst, not worry about my father an Oedipus-complex lite. It doesn't seem like much, does it? And maybe it isn't. But the chemistry of the brain, as the psychopharmacologist William Potter memorably said, is 'like a weather system'. A butterfly flapping its wings in childhood, as it were, might be the cause of terrible storms in the years to come. To me, these seem like relevant thoughts. It's possible, of course, that these are merely the thoughts I'm having in order to avoid other, more painful ones.