Eating Myself by Candida Crewe

Author:Candida Crewe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2006-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Tea

I returned none the wiser, just bitter and furious that misplaced optimism and hope meant I had missed the big day of one of my best friends. It was a special wedding by all accounts, but my desperation had not been able to wait, apparently, and I had gone into treatment just a few days before it. And for what? In order for the solace and recovery I so craved to elude me still at an establishment, in my view, manifestly wanting. My outlook was not so bleak that the fact I had frittered away six precious weeks of life there passed me by. I resented the loss of every single day. When I got home, clutching at straws, desperately trying to cobble together some kind of system of eating to deflect instant relapse, I tried to abide by its prescriptive rules for a while. I continued to cut out white flour and sugar and attended a handful of Overeaters Anonymous meetings in cold and flaky church halls. But I was less than half-hearted. I soon gave up and for a few more months carried on exactly where I had left off before I ever went.

In the end I was lucky. I managed to kick the bulimia habit without any therapist or programme or any other kind of – in my case – less than helpful help. Three factors enabled me finally to get over it.

First, I grew up. I reached the age of twenty-eight; my friends were progressing in all directions and I was not. I became increasingly of the opinion that it was no longer appropriate to be labouring under the burden of an essentially teenage disorder. It lacked dignity, I felt, still to be distorting the stomach and assaulting the saliva glands with Caramacs and Milky Bars whilst the biological clock was ticking ever further towards its witching hour. You are past the age, I told myself, move on.

Second, I grew just too bored of bulimia (and myself) for it any longer to be tenable as a way to live. On and on it had banged. It had become like a friend who gradually appears more and more irksome and disenchanting till you recognise at last and in a flash that the disadvantages of the friendship outweigh the advantages, and the moment has come to part company. At the beginning, that capricious yet steadfast new friend had not been all bad, despite a few unsavoury habits and vexing ways. She had after all accommodated whim, indulged self-pity, taught one that there were (mainly edible) consolations to be surrendered from the slough of loneliness and – not least – sanctioned the sly delights of gorging on foods that, away from her malign influence, were totally disallowed. No-go pork pies the size of babies’ hats, tubs of cookie-dough ice cream and vanilla custard and family packs of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut were just the ticket in her book, the more the merrier; milk-chocolate digestives galore, jammy doughnuts sticky with intent and toast and butter piled like the mattresses in ‘The Princess and the Pea’.

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