Last Friday I was meant to go out to dinner at 7.30pm. At 7.29pm, my boyfriend was waiting in the living room, while I was still hopping round the bedroom, wielding my hair straighteners like an inept swordsman, wearing a single sock. The following exchange then took place. Him: ‘How long will you be?’. Me: ‘I dunno, about half a stone?’ Him: (Deafening, judgmental silence).
Because I am on a diet. And it is eating my brain.
If you ever see me on a train, and I’m looking out of the window with my mouth in a pensive moue, you can bet your sweet bippy I’m thinking about my diet. I’m thinking about my diet 90% of the time. I’m thinking about it right now. Even when I’m not actively thinking about my diet, I’m planning diet meals, counting diet calories, weighing my diet self, and extrapolating wildly ambitious, mathematically unsound future weight losses. And when I’m not doing any of those things, I’m talking about my diet to anyone who’ll listen. And frequently to anyone who won’t.
I used to be the sort of person who respected conventional conversational boundaries. Now I’ll orate, unsolicited, about my tiny, cute, diet poos (seriously, they’re adorable), or whether breakfast is a myth (it is, except when you’re on holiday) - all the while ignoring obvious signs of disinterest, such as people’s eyes glazing over, or their no longer being physically present.
Half the time I don’t even realise I’m doing it. It’s as though I enter a fugue state and become possessed by some random, floating, disembodied diet bore. Often I’ll come to and realise I’ve been monologuing about carbs for 20 minutes.
But I wasn’t always Tedious Diet Lady. I used to be cool, y'know. I used to play in bands. I wore leather jackets; I made witty one-liners. Only I wasn’t The Fonz, like I’ve just made myself sound there. I read books. I drank beer from the bottle. People described me as ‘easygoing’, which I think is code for ‘zero fashion sense but will hold your hair back if you puke’.
I was fairly slim but I enjoyed my food, and rarely thought about dieting. I come from a family of Italian and French food-lovers who whip up industrial batches of lasagne and cake at any given opportunity - Christmas, saints’ days, Tuesdays - but then eat lightly in the intervening weeks. Apart from a brief Atkins kick when I was 20, which taught me I’m not as fond of bacon as I had previously thought, I was impervious.
Then, in my late twenties, I quit smoking, and my appetite went from how’d-you-feel-about-a-pizza-this-weekend to OH MY GOD WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME HOW DELICIOUS BREAD IS. It mutated into this lurching, insatiable thing, driving me inexorably towards man-sized portions (I’m barely 5’) of cheese.
Within 18 months I’d inflated three dress sizes, and with the swift weight gain came stomach problems, bad skin and misery. I was unable to walk down the street without girl-watching. ‘I want her figure,’ I’d think, unable to stop torturing myself. 'No, her figure. No, hers.’
I tried to lose weight, each attempt more desperate and short-lived than the last. At lunchtime I’d go to the sandwich shop thinking salad, salad, salad - then emerge cradling the shop’s most calorific panini as though it was a delicious baby. Every morning I gave up sugar, and lasted until someone in the office offered me a biscuit. I joined WeightWatchers Online, and logged in twice, and I lied outrageously to the diet apps I downloaded to keep track of my escalating eating.
Putting off almost all socialising 'until I’m thinner’, I started to work out, but my knee joints kept buckling under my new ballast, so I got frequent sprains and had to rest for weeks at a time. With each fresh injury my hopes would plummet further, and I’d limp out of the gym and straight into Greggs to drown my failure in pastry. I don’t know if you’ve ever queued for a Steak Bake while squashed into optimistically-sized gym-wear but, let me tell you, it is not a self-esteem party.
By 2012, I was mired in a miserable cycle of failure and self-loathing, so I embarked on a doctor-approved, very low calorie diet, eschewing Earth Food to consume just 600 calories a day via special shakes, soups and bars.
Of course, everyone thought I was insane. And it was No Fun At All. Friends were encouraging, but I had to watch them wolf down pints and pizzas while I sipped soda water, mentally making a bad food 'bucket list’ for when I came off the diet ('Gentlemen’s Relish because fuck you, patriarchy’, and 'NO COTTAGE CHEESE’). I once ran out of the living room in tears because Rachel Khoo made tartiflette on TV.
I passed the time I’d normally spend in the pub online, exchanging recipes with other dieters for 'cooking’ the occasionally revolting low-calorie meal replacements. I became inexplicably proud of the fact that I could fashion the banana shake into a semi-decent latte by adding hot water and instant coffee (by 'semi-decent’ I mean 'tasted a bit like meat’). I was losing weight, but mentally unravelling. I’d become socially isolated, thinking about, talking about or writing about my diet every day. I found myself staring disconsolately into my open fridge for minutes at a time, or begging my boyfriend for a single slice of ham, or blowing up over tiny things (my reaction to forgetting my computer password: 'I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE!’ and slamming a door).
But at least I’m not alone in dieting nutjobbery. My best friend Ellie famously once tried to count calories in a fried chicken shop, drunk, at 3am. Another dieting friend, Claire, often goes to bed at 7pm, 'just in case I eat everything in the kitchen’. Even my fashion editor friend Gemma admits: 'Once I was having a particularly tough day at work, and a colleague suggested a carb-laden dinner and a bottle of wine. I just broke down. I actually said the words 'But I can’t do that, food is the only thing in my life I can control right now!“
Colleagues knew something funny was going on with me, because I went from hotly debating my daily lunch choices to avoiding any snack-based chat. Some couldn’t help themselves try to top my increasingly visible weight loss, loudly holding forth about their avoidance of carbs or some elaborate planned juice detox. Some attempted sabotage - a girl from the sales team kept leaving Snickers bars on my desk. Others weirdly objectified me. One female colleague I didn’t know well berated me for cutting back, once loudly referring to me as 'a girl with boobs and a bum’ - out of the blue and in the middle of a meeting. I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
Some people, though - including thin people I barely know - sought me out to inform me that diets are rubbish and I should just go to the gym (thanks! What was your name again?) or that they had never had to diet a single day in their lives! (Seriously, what is that supposed to be? Advice?).
These are all good reasons to flip out when you’re a diet. And I did flip out. All the time. But why have I never seen a boy do that? My boyfriend, for instance, has a deep and abiding love of both exercise and doughnuts. If his doughnut-to-exercise ratio gets out of whack, he’ll go to the gym and pummel stuff until the doughnuts are purged from not just his system, but a five-mile radius, and probably the dictionary, too. Then he never speaks of it again. He’s like Patisserie Thor.
I once read a weight loss study that showed that the average UK woman diets for 'vanity’ and 'fashion’ reasons, while men lose weight to be healthy. Is that a thing? Is that why, in my tiny unrepresentative microcosm of Some People I Know, the women always freak out and the men (OK, man) didn’t? Because, in general, women want to lose weight as they’re self-conscious, but men just want to be able to punch sharks?
I don’t particularly want to punch a shark myself, but losing weight was never solely about vanity for me. On that diet I lost 23lbs (that’s 10.4kg if you’re reading in metric, or two Maine Coons if you’re counting in cats).
Sure, I did it because I’d rather be sleek than lumpy (and at some point I should probably stop my daily practice of asking my boyfriend whether I have camel-toe. Maybe it kills the mystique a bit?). But I also want to be healthier (although this occasionally ceased to matter if I was feeling particularly weak and there was some ham right there, within snatching distance, inside a sandwich on its way to someone else’s face). I’m not that interested in drinking beer from the bottle now (although, hello WINE), but maybe I want to start a family one day. Or at least be able to stand up without saying 'oof’.
I didn’t lose all the weight I wanted to as I had to stop when I felt my brain starting to melt, when I was still a stone or so off. After two months of space powder, eating actual meals was weird, and seemed like a terrible faff. I was also very unimpressed with how non-cute my poos were, suddenly.
But my friends were overjoyed that I was back on the normal stuff - at my first post-diet party, everyone kept handing me goldfish bowl-sized cocktails and throwing canapes at my face until I fell over.
I did worry that I might launch this newly svelte body straight into a stack of Gregg’s pies, but this didn’t happen. Partly because my stomach was roughly the dimensions of an acorn, and partly because online diet forum phrases, like "if hunger isn’t the problem, food isn’t the answer”, started to make sense. Now I could see that pizza wasn’t the logical answer to existential crises or emotional drama - pizza was the logical answer to “hey, Papa John’s have a two-for-one deal; what shall we have for dinner tonight?”
Because pizza is the tequila of carbohydrates, and we can’t have it too often, or we’ll lose respect for it.
So now I’m on the 5:2 Fast Diet (where eat 500 calories two days a week, and normally the rest of the time or whatever passes for that for me), and I’ve started a running plan. While this new diet doesn’t bring the addictive, fairytale losses of before (I swear one morning I woke up with a waist and went to bed the same night with smaller boobs), it is sustainable for the long-term.
Of course, when I started it I was on Crazy Diet Lady autopilot, immediately joining the online forum, reading three 5:2 books, watching a 5:2 documentary (twice), and following the #52diet Twitter hashtag. Then I took a breath, remembered that literally ALL I have to do is not eat over 500 calories on Mondays and Thursdays, and just let it go.
I thought about non-diet things. The new season of Dexter. Just what the hell CC cream is supposed to be. The fact that my iPod is packed with terrible Dutch techno jogging playlists instead of real music.
Progress is slow - some weeks I don’t lose any weight; some days I still monologue about carbs, but I am also learning lessons about how I handle food, and trying not to substitute biscuits for cigarettes.
And, according to Patisserie Thor I’m much more bearable: 'You still have your moments - you did literally just send me out to buy you M&Ms, even though you swore off sugar yesterday but you’re not so fixated on what you’re deprived of any more. You’re a person again, not just a diet.’
Essentially, I don’t think you can lose weight without losing your mind. At least I couldn’t. My sense of personal power was so low that I needed to live and breathe my diet for a bit, or risk losing interest, staying in my rut, and wandering straight back into Gregg’s.
But the trick is to know when to dial back the obsession. Once you’ve got the hang of your diet, there’s no need to read three diet books at once, or Google 'raspberry ketones’ at 2am.
At that point, maybe go outside for a bit. Unless it’s 2am, then probably don’t. Ask your friends how they are. Suggest going for a drink. Stop saying the word 'diet’ 20 times a day (unless you’re a dietician and, even then maybe consider synonyms like 'fare’, 'provender’, or the slightly piratical 'vittles’), and allow your non-diet interests to bloom again.
My role model is Ellie, who has come a long way from her drunk fried chicken shop days. Now she enjoys various successes on a long-term healthy eating and exercise plan, and is resolutely not sweating the small stuff. 'My diet is one part of my life, but I still go to the pub, on holiday, and OK, sometimes even to the fried chicken shop. But If I’m doing it right 80% of the time I’m happy. Otherwise I try I forget about it.’
In the last few months I’ve missed new music from my favourite artists, new books from my favourite authors, and countless new developments in my friends’ love lives - all because I’ve been too busy thinking about my vittles.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a leather jacket.
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- Feb 02, 2014