A new book by Lotta Dann explores the dangers of the diet industry and how it lures many into a helpless cycle of binging and starving. In this extract she recounts her spectacular fall from a prolonged period of discipline and thinness into out-of-control eating.
EXTRACT: Slowly, the effectiveness of pre-planning my daily meals starts to fade. The forbidden foods keep presenting themselves thick and fast. Temptations are everywhere. From a son suggesting we get ice creams for pudding on the way home from sports practice, to a friend creating a delicious-looking charcuterie board when I go over to her house. I’m constantly crumbling. Weak moment after weak moment heads my way and before I know it I’m devouring a Choc Bar (ice cream dipped in chocolate... yum) or eating half a dozen crackers spread with blue cheese and fig jam followed by a lemon macaron. I enjoy the foods, of course, but instantly hate myself for eating them. My internal dialogue becomes ever more fraught. Should I eat that? I shouldn’t eat that. I’m going to eat that. I can’t believe I ate that. Why did I eat that? I shouldn’t have eaten that.
It’s madness – and eerily similar to when I was at the end of my boozing days and stuck in this awful place of ‘I want to drink’ versus ‘I don’t want to drink’. Here I was again, making a choice and then beating myself up for making that choice. Awfully miserable on the inside with a raging inner dialogue about what I should and shouldn’t bedoing. Craving, crumbling... beating myself up, vowing to never do it again. Craving, crumbling... beating myself up, vowing to never do it again. Craving, crumbling... over and over and over. Day after day after day. It’s so depressing and soul-destroying, a living hell – made even worse because I have the awful memory of wrestling internally with myself just like this around my alcohol intake for years and years before I managed to get sober.
It’s torture, a steady drip, drip of shame, regret, frustration and self-loathing that slowly erodes any sense of inner strength I might have. It feels dysfunctional. I feel dysfunctional, just like when I was having a push–pull with booze. Now I’m having the exact same push–pull with food. Although this time, the problem isn’t just with my inner dialogue and the awful truth that I can’t control myself and limit my intake, it’s also with my outward appearance and the shame associated with that. This is not a hidden dysfunction; it’s on full display to everyone around me, all the people who’ve been making non-stop comments about my thin body.
As I desperately try to get back to an easeful place with my guru’s food plan, the number on the scale is steadily inching up. My slimline wardrobe is starting to feel a bit snug, and there’s no denying that my body is layering on fat. It’s awful. So I step up my efforts again and pile on more techniques to try to get back to following my strict food rules, grasping desperately at anything that might help give me extra strength.
At the back of the notebook I’m using nightly to plan my meals for the next day, I start tracking my weight on a line graph. I figure if I can visualise clearly when the line is inching up, it will help me resist temptation when forbidden foods present themselves. On the left, vertical axis of my line graph I put my weight; along the bottom, horizontal axis I put the date. Every morning after I have stepped on the scales (a moment becoming more and more dreaded as the weeks go by), I plot a little circle on the graph and join the dots. At first I watch the line go down (every new tool works for a short while), but then it starts tracking up again. Temptation comes, I succumb to temptation (why can’t I resist temptation?!) and the number on the scale starts climbing again. That scale has so much influence over my day. If the number is down a little or has stayed the same, I feel OK and the day is OK. If the number has climbed I feel like utter shit, a weak, pathetic failure. Day ruined.
The next technique I try is to give myself a short, fixed timeframe within which I need to stick to the rules. I print a one-month calendar off the internet and write ‘100% month’ at the top, deciding to give myself a tick for every day that I succeed. Tick, tick, tick. I manage eight ticks in a row – eight glorious days when I resist all temptations – before the crosses start coming, dammit. Cross, cross, cross – three bad days in a row; then tick, cross, tick, tick, cross. I give up after nineteen days (seven of which were not 100%). My 100% month goal is unfulfilled. And still the number on the scale creeps up, the internal dialogue of negative self-judgement and blame increases, and the shame mounts.
Next technique: I start drawing little checkboxes next to my nightly meal plan that I can tick the next day if I make it to each meal without having snacked in between. I write, ‘Made it to lunch without snacking Yes/No’ and tick what I managed to do. This notebook is ruling my life. Attempting to stick to my guru’s food rules (once so easy) is ruling my life. The tick-box technique works for a few weeks – thinking about how much I want to be able to tick the ‘Yes’ box helps me resist eating between meals even if I’m hungry. But then, like all the other techniques, it stops working. My small meals leave me hungry and I find myself eating something before my next ‘official’ meal. After a while there are too many ‘No’ boxes ticked, so I give up.
What was once super easy – my lovely food plan that gave me a delightfully thin body – is now getting harder and harder. But I can’t give up, my happiness depends on the food plan working! What will happen if I no longer inhabit this lovely thin body that everyone has been admiring? It’s just too awful to contemplate.
I start writing to myself daily in my notebook: motivational lines and encouraging affirmations to try to get my stupid self to stop snacking. ‘Stick with it,’ I write, ‘Steady does it’, and ‘You’ll feel so much better’. Some days I become my own cheerleader: ‘You’ve got this!’, ‘You want this!’, ‘Remember how good it feels to be slim!’ Other days I write out what I hope are harsh truths: ‘It doesn’t even taste yummy and it certainly doesn’t make you feel good’, ‘Be the person you are, not some piggy mess’. I even resort to insults like ‘OK get your sh** together, you are weak, girl! ENOUGH’. But still the snacking between meals, the eating more than I should and the eating of forbidden foods continues.
Then it gets really bad. As the weeks and months go on with me desperately trying to cling to my food rules, trying every trick in the motivational book to will myself to do it – while constantly letting myself down – my rule-breaking descends to a new low.
I lose all control and start bingeing. And by bingeing, I mean eating myself sick on forbidden foods. Entire 250 g bags of Skittles in fifteen minutes while waiting in the car at school pick-up. Twenty crackers smeared with butter and jam while I’m cooking dinner. A bowl of cereal with about five heaped tablespoons of sugar added. An entire bowl of lemon icing eaten with a teaspoon. Yes, I do this – I make myself a mini bowl of lemon icing (icing sugar, butter, lemon juice) and eat it with a teaspoon while hiding in the bedroom.
The other hard-core binge food I eat is creamed butter and sugar, like the first step you do when you’re making cookies. I create my mini bowl of creamed butter and sugar quietly, careful not to alert anyone in the house that I’m doing it. Carefully lifting the bowl off the shelf, carefully picking the teaspoon up out of the drawer. Carefully reaching up to the cupboard to bring the bag of sugar down. Carefully carving a chunk of butter off the block in the pantry. Carefully walking down the hallway, past the glass living-room door where people might see me. Carefully tucking the bowl into my left-hand side so it’s hidden as I walk past. Carefully pulling the bedroom door closed to a point where if someone were to walk down the hallway they wouldn’t see me sitting on the bed mainlining sugar and butter out of a bowl. Carefully opening my bedside drawer ready in case someone approaches. Stirring the butter and sugar mixture together until it’s somewhat creamed. Eating it. Steadily eating it as I watch TV. Spoonful after spoonful of creamed butter and sugar going into my mouth.
Sh**! Someone is coming down the hallway to speak to me! I quickly put the bowl in my bedside drawer or hide it under the bedclothes. Hiding my naughty, gross, unhealthy, dysfunctional eating from my loved ones. But of course I can’t hide from myself. As I sit and try to casually chat to the person who has entered the room, my teenager talking to me about the shoes they want to buy online or my husband telling me about an email he just received, I’m acutely aware of the hidden bowl. I’m acutely aware that I feel ashamed and guilty. I’m acutely aware that I have only half a mind on the conversation in front of me. I’m acutely aware of how sad I feel. How sad I am. I’m a sad, gross, weak sugar-binger. It’s hard-core bingeing; I’m mainlining sugar. Not even pretending that it’s a casual snack – hence the hiding. ‘GET YOUR SH** TOGETHER!’ I write in my notebook. But I can’t.
The cravings, almost daily now, are so intense. They build and build to where I am faced internally with a non-stop wall of words, my own thoughts battling back and forth, wanting sugar and trying to resist. Ending with that ‘bugger it’ moment which puts me in the kitchen quietly creating a little bowl of lemon icing or creamed butter and sugar and sneaking down the hallway to consume it privately in the bedroom. It’s furtive and shame-filled and soul-destroying.
Extracted with permission from Mrs D is NOT on a Diet, by Lotta Dann (published by Allen & Unwin NZ). Available now.
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