GUEST POST: Food addiction

I’m feeling a bit battle weary from the controversy stirred up in the media by a couple handful of very vocal people on this post who seem intent on misrepresenting my position on body image. I can’t begin to understand why except to perhaps further their own agenda.

Oh, and check this out. I wish we’d seen more of it (heck, ANY of it, at fashion week last week).

However I had scheduled this guest post from Kerri Sackville today and I’m going to go ahead and publish it.

Kerri writes….

“It hasn’t happened in a while, but it happened last night. I was in the kitchen, knife in hand, ready to make the school lunches for the next day. But instead of buttering bread, I found myself standing at the freezer, picking every single chocolate coated peanut out of a tub of Rocky Road ice cream.

Now, there’s nothing particularly strange about me eating chocolate late at night. As many of you know, Nutella is like a religion to me. The thing is, though, I don’t like Rocky Road ice cream, nor do I especially like chocolate coated peanuts. What’s more, I was full from a big dinner, I didn’t feel like sweets at all, and I wasn’t enjoying the food. And yet I simply couldn’t stop.

So what on earth was I doing?

The reason, of course, was that I was feeling upset about something that had occurred that day, and I was medicating myself with food. And it worked, brilliantly, not by soothing my upset, but by making me feel so sick and pissed off with myself that I temporarily forgot what I was upset about. That’s how binge eating works.

Now, I very rarely binge eat these days, and when I do, it’s not in huge quantities. In my twenties I struggled with weight issues, but happily I’ve never had an eating disorder, I’ve been a healthy weight for the past decade, and I’m comfortable with my body. I haven’t even been on a diet in about 15 years. However, I can understand the complex relationship most women have with food, because clearly I still have one myself.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about food and how we use it. I was greatly disturbed by Mia’s recent post on Gainers – not, I will stress, by her comments, but by the Gainers themselves – women and men who deliberately strive to become morbidly obese. I am intensely distressed by any eating disorder, and these people clearly have eating disorders; on the opposite end of the spectrum to bulimia or anorexia, but definitely on the same scale. Because when we start using food as a weapon of self- destruction – to disable instead of nurture ourselves (and being unable to walk or breathe surely falls in the category of ‘disabled’) then something has gone terribly wrong.

I know people argue that everyone has choices, and if this is how people want to express themselves, then so be it. But we wouldn’t let someone starve themselves to death without intervention; likewise, we shouldn’t allow someone to feed themselves to death without trying to save their lives.

I’ve watched someone very close to me struggle with anorexia and it is hideously painful and terrifying to watch. I’ve never watched anyone feed themselves to death, but I imagine it would be similarly horrifying for their loved ones. They must feel that same frustration and anger. that same helplessness, that same incomprehension that someone they care for could turn against themselves.

Food (or the withholding of food) can definitely be an addiction. We all know that. Many of us have experienced food addictions to a greater or lesser degree, whether it’s binge eating when we’re depressed, being unable to stop eating a cake till the last crumb is gone, or needing to dive into the Nutella every afternoon.

But, whereas other addictions (drugs, alcohol, gambling) can be treated by going cold turkey, and cutting the substances out of our lives altogether, no-one can live without food. We all need to eat to survive. And yet it’s incredibly hard for all of us to moderate our food consumption. Ideally, food should nourish us, help us to survive, and make us as healthy as possible. Ideally we should be eat when we’re hungry, eat what we enjoy (so that we can nurture our spirits as well as our bodies) and stop when we’re full. But that’s so incredibly hard to do. For many of us, eating has moved so far away from that ideal, from that pure concept, that it’s virtually impossible for  us even to recognise the signs of hunger, or to understand when we’ve had enough. And so we abuse food. And abuse ourselves in the process.

There’s been so much attention focussed recently on healthy body image and the need to modify the portrayal of women in the media. This, the idea goes, is the way to help women to stop starving themselves to be thin and gorgeous, quests which can end in anorexia, or, for the majority of women, the diet/binge cycles that lead to further weight gain and frustration. But perhaps it’s time to shift focus a little. Perhaps it’s not just all about external factors, but also about learning how to eat, how to manage our relationships with food.

Because, whilst most of us aren’t going to get to 453 kilos, or whittle ourselves down to nothing, chances are we’re going to find ourselves in front of the freezer after dinner, getting stuck into a litre of ice cream we don’t even want.

Surely there has to be a better way.

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You can read Kerri’s blog here or follow her on Twitter here. Well worth it I say.