Tonight:
5°c
Life tastes better than skinny feels
Laurie Penny24 Feb 2010
I can't remember the precise moment when I became addicted to avoiding food. At 16, I was unhappy at school, my parents were getting divorced, and I was sickened by the urgency of the desires I felt, not just for food but for love, sex, work, excitement — normal human needs that I had learned were dangerous and wicked.
I decided that it would be simpler to train myself not to want anything at all. At first, I cut out chocolate and treats; then it was carbohydrates and dairy, then breakfast, lunch and dinner.
As my adolescent puppy fat began to pour away, friends and family complimented my new figure, reinforcing the message that good girls don't eat. I felt light, pure and virtuous. It felt good; I wanted more. I started to spend hours doing strenuous exercise to burn off extra calories after school, and kept the supermodels' motto “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” scratched into my hand to remind me that giving in to the terrible hunger pangs I felt was a sign of weakness. By the time I was 17, I was in hospital, so malnourished that I weighed less than a four-year-old.
Because eating disorders are associated with the fashion industry, it's easy to believe that anorexia is a glamorous illness, a lifestyle choice made by rich or famous women whose only concern is to be thin enough to fit into next season's tiny frocks. But for those who suffer from the disease, most of whom are ordinary young people, there's nothing glamorous about spending every waking second so hungry that you can barely stand. At no point, in the depths of my illness, did I crouch over a service station toilet bowl with two fingers down my throat, forcing myself to vomit up slimy lumps of the cracker I'd eaten for dinner and think, hey — I'm living the dream.
The reality of life with anorexia is very far from a catwalk. The daily squelch and grind of an eating disorder is not only disgusting — it's also deeply boring. My little sister, who was 12 at the time, told me: “You were no fun at all when you were ill. You were always talking about food, and even when you didn't it was obvious you were thinking about it. It was just miserable to be in the same room as you, to be totally honest. You just weren't you.”
When you are anorexic, your world shrinks to the size of a dinner plate. You withdraw from your friends and family, you can't concentrate on anything except where your next meal isn't coming from. You tell yourself that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but by the time you've made yourself “skinny”, you've lost the ability to feel anything at all.
Hospital was terrifying: the unfamiliar ward, the endless medical tests, the locks on the doors. The girl in the room next door, Lianne, was once a promising chemist; she used to spend her days cutting out pictures of fashion models for her scrapbook with an intravenous drip hooked to her wrist.
At the end of my first week in hospital, Lianne ripped the feeding tube out of her wrist and ran away from the ward, determined to end her life. She was so weak that she collapsed on the bus into town. As I watched the ambulance pull up underneath my window, returning Lianne to hospital, I realised that I had a choice: I could either choose to stay ill and become like Lianne, living out a withered, damaged half-life of hospital stays and self-starvation, or I could dare to contemplate the possibility of a different life. That night, I ate my first proper meal in more than two years.
Starting to eat again is difficult when a part of you believes that you deserve to starve. It's even more difficult when you're surrounded by images of women who look just as scrawny and miserable as you do and told that this is the ideal to which you should aspire.
The softer and curvier my body became, the more outsized I felt; compared to the perfect models on the cover of every magazine, my new body disgusted me. But somehow, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I clung on. No matter how repulsed I felt, I kept on eating my meals with the joyless efficiency of a robot. I had decided to try to find something that tasted better than skinny felt.
When I finally reached a healthy weight, I was bombarded with compliments. The few friends I hadn't managed to alienate through years of self-starvation rushed to reassure me that I was more attractive as a size eight than I had been as a size zero. I went to bed with men who told me that they “loved my curves”, thinking that this was what I wanted to hear. I tried desperately hard to “love my curves”, too — but the real breakthrough came when I stopped defining myself merely by my dress size. Once I started to believe that my worth as a person had nothing to do with how my body looked to other people, I began to give myself permission to take up the space I needed.
Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult to measure, because it involves so much more than putting on weight: you have to will yourself to believe that you deserve your place in the world. Even when you hate your normal-sized body so much that you want to tear chunks out of it, you have to get up, eat your meals and get on with your day. You have to learn to say those two, terrifying little words: I'm hungry.
Now I'm always hungry — sometimes for a sandwich, sometimes for sex, or work, or travel, or a change; sometimes I just want someone to say I'm fine. I've learned that it's OK not to be a good little girl, that it's OK to break the rules, even when you are told that you ought to take up as little space as possible. I refuse to shrink myself to fit into the narrow coffin that society lays out for young women.
From time to time, I still miss anorexia — the sense of control that comes when avoiding food is your highest ambition. But today, after three years of recovery, I have a degree, a career, great friends and a huge appetite for adventure.
Staying well is hard work, and society's obsession with female beauty doesn't make it any easier. When you are surrounded by images of impossibly slender, airbrushed models, it's difficult to carry on believing that you are normal.
That's why I'm involved with Real Women, a campaign led by the Liberal Democrats that aims to get advertisers to make it clear when they have airbrushed models. On 8 March, I'll be speaking at the campaign's launch in Parliament.
I don't want to waste any more time living a small, thin life. I keep a list of things that turned out to taste better than skinny feels: things such as earning a living, the thrill of rewarding work, fun and having the energy to dance all night. I look at that list whenever I feel powerless. Real life is full of all sorts of flavours, some bitter, some sweet. And I want to taste them all.
Laurie Penny is writing a book on feminist issues. For more information, contact jpickering@apwatt.co.uk
Reader views (13)
Danderino: you are certainly right to imply that not eating food is 'something you do to yourself'. However, you are appallingly wrong in thinking that that is all anorexia means.
It is a mental disease of which the thing you 'do to yourself' is an outward symptom. It's hardly a rational decision to restrict your food intake when you are grotesquely underweight, or to hate yourself when you start eating more and feel your body getting stronger.
Laurie, I am a recovered anorexic and this article resonates so much with what I remember of the experience and how I relate to food now. Thank you.
- Siritorn, London, 30/11/2011 12:17
Report abuse
I find myself baffled by British women's approach to body image and food. A mental disorder like anoxeria is one thing - decadent and self-indulgent, I'd say - but on a wider scale, this mawkish victim culture, as if the right to bite your thumb at biology by sitting on your arse cramming sugary saturated fat down your gullet was some hard-fought right which required people to lay down their lives for in order to win, which is now being assailed by the nefarious Orwellian forces of the fashion and advertising industries.
If you consistently exercise three times a week for half an hour - swimming, jogging, bodyweight exercies, pilates, whatever - and eat junk sparingly, you'll look fine. It is as simple as that.
- JohnM, Shanghai, China, 14/09/2011 05:42
Report abuse
Beautifully written! I recovered from anorexia about a year ago. I recognize the feeling of wanting to tear chunks out of your new, healthy body, but then I think of how unhappy I was when I was too thin and realise that loosing that much weight again will never be the solution. I refuse to make myself and the people around me miserable again, so I keep going, and fortunately it keeps getting easier 
I hope you get to taste plenty more adventures!
- A, Belgium, 31/05/2011 13:42
Report abuse
Danderino: you are quite wrong: anorexia is not a merely a "mental health issue" but a serious mental illness. It has the highest death rate of all mental illnesses including depression, bipolar & schizophrenia.
- Alex, London, 01/03/2010 17:21
Report abuse
A wonderful article but I'd like to point out- size 6 IS healthy if you are naturally a size 6. Some people are naturally slim. It isn't fair to shame naturally slim women for their bodies, as much as it isn't fair to shame women who are naturally, or unnaturally, a size 16. The point is nobody has a right to make you feel ashamed of your body, because your body, your weight, etc, has nothing to do with who you are as a person.
- Seaneen, London, 26/02/2010 21:22
Report abuse
Just a quick point, like Justareader, why that photo of Winslet? There are almost no curves in that picture!
More importantly, thanks Laurie for a sensitive and well-written article that should be available to all girls. Thank you especially for making the point that it's not just about the fashion/beauty industry, and that it's not just about seeing curves as beautiful but stepping away from the *need* to see ourselves primarily in terms of our bodies. I don't have an eating disorder but I still struggle with that every day.
- Harriet, Oxford, UK, 25/02/2010 20:19
Report abuse
Sorry I don't just blame the fashion world, media, or men for young girls obsessions with looks and weight these days. Do they have no brains to think for themselves. Models have always been thin and have always been gorgeous. I partly blame those girls self obsessed, botoxed, youth crazed, materialistic mothers! What sells today, what are most people interested in. MONEY!!LOOKS!!SEX!!HOW TO BAG A MILLIONARE!!HOW TO STAY YOUNG!!WHO OWNS OR HAS WHAT!! etc, etc, etc. Just listen to what people say about Victoria Beckham, because the girl has done so well for herself. We learn most things from our parents, family and peers! And girls learn a lot from their mothers. My own mother would have been able to tell if I had ever had any obsession with anything as a youth. As I would with my own daughter. But obsession with other girls/women's appearences, and materialism was never instilled in me when I was growing up. And I hope to raise my child the same way.
- Ashleysmithson, st albans, 25/02/2010 11:56
Report abuse
Why specifically post a pic of Kate Winslet after she dropped all the weight as the "famous curves" pic? she is a size 6, how is that healthy?!
- Justareader, London, 25/02/2010 08:49
Report abuse
This is one of the most realistic, accurate and non-triggering articles I have ever read about anorexia, told with truth, honesty, raw insight and hope. I was so grateful for Laurie's words and for the publication of this by the Evening Standard. Thank you.
- Sarah, Holloway, London, 24/02/2010 23:38
Report abuse
Anorexia is NOT a "disease". A disease is something that happens to you - anorexia is something you do to yourself. Anorexia may be a mental health issue but it is not a disease in the true meaning of the term.
- Danderino, London, UK, 24/02/2010 15:58
Report abuse
Wonderfully put into perspective what 'Anorexia' is about, but it is not just the image portrayed on the catwalk. I myself was given 6 weeks to die from this awful disease many years ago, well before we were consumed on a daily basis of stick thin models. The illness goes alot deeper than just 'wanting' to starve yourself. I was always very naturally thin, but took it to extreme measures.
I would absolutely hate to be a young girl growing up in todays society, being bombarded by such false, shallow images of women who are not real.
Looking at pictures of emaciated women (models), it is actually an insult to people who are crippled with this disease, and unless you have any understanding of anorexia, people are sublimely ignorant.
- Fleur, london, 24/02/2010 15:27
Report abuse
Beautifully written, and even though I have never been anorexic, every single day I feel I 'deserve to starve' because of my weight, and sometimes, I do.
Thank you for sharing this with us Laurie.
- M, West Sussex, UK, 24/02/2010 13:41
Report abuse
Seen the ads they're running alongside this piece?
It's London Fashion Week, modelled by airbrushed barbie-dolls and one striking catwalk shot of a truly horrifying grotesquerie from a 1980's Famine aid appeal.
The former are cute little toys, attractive fluff for unsuccessful men who fantasise significantly more than they actually interact with women. I guess it's understandable that teenage girls and grown women want that 'look' - it's sold pervasively and aggressively - but they might want to think a little harder about who, exactly, they are trying to attract. And, as you say, they might want to think whether their own self-worth is really defined by their 'attractiveness' to imaginary others, or by conformity and conspicuous consumption.
As or the latter - maybe someone could post up candid shots of adult males exposed to catwalk shots of Miss Starvation 2010. We *should* do better than conditioning teenage girls to measure themselves by their attractiveness to others, but we could do far worse than broadcasting the startled look, the physical shock and instinctive revulsion that men experience when they are suddenly confronted by an image of disease masquerading on the catwalk as an object of desire.
- Nile, Canary Wharf, 24/02/2010 12:17
Report abuse
