Print
Share
CommentClick on a link below to share this article with your favourite link sharing site
How To Handle... Food Obsession
While counselling a client about a relationship issue, psychotherapist Elizabeth Meakins finds that the real problem is an eating disorder.
An issue with food wasn’t what brought Nicky to therapy and, for some time, I was unaware that this was a problem. In her mid-thirties and with a size 10 figure, she was keen to focus on the problems in her current relationship. However, like so many women with a hidden eating disorder, the telltale signs began to give her secret away. While talking to her about her relationship, I picked up an edginess around the subject of food and noted that she frequently berated herself about her body size. After a few months, I noticed she had gained weight.
One day Nicky herself broached the subject and confessed to the secret problem that had been draining her for years. ‘I obsess about food daily,’ she told me. ‘I try and get away with managing on as little as possible without anyone noticing, which makes me feel high. But stress, or sometimes drink, makes me lose control and then I eat too much and hate myself. That makes me eat more for a few weeks or months, and I gain weight. Somewhere along the line self-control kicks in again and I lost it and feel great. I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life’.
Because she has neither the skeletal body of the severe anorexic or the overburdened frame of a compulsive eater, Nicky, like so many women, manages to keep her food issue hidden. Obsessing about what she has eaten is, like weighing herself too often, so much a part of the wider norm that she sometimes tries to persuade herself that it’s OK. Everyone does it, she tells me. ‘Thin’ is beautiful. Thin is what men want. Her own mum, she reveals, was always on a diet, eating different meals to the rest of the family. And she looked great. And Nicky’s own friends are always fretting about their size.
But at root Nicky knows that her attitude to weight has become addictive and destructive. She is exhausted with the battle, and a healthy part of her longs to get shot of it.
So what are Nicky’s choices? Is it possible to shed an unhealthy relationship to food? At root, as with all kinds of addictive behaviours, there is only one treatment that really works: Nicky has to want to give up her need for obsessing about food. And for that to happen, she has to understand what triggered the need.
There is rarely a simple cause hidden behind a symptom, and for Nicky there were many: as well as the copious role models in the media, amongst friends and with her mother, she hit the self conscious teenage years with a body that felt big and ungainly. Uncomfortably aware that she was heavier than her very pretty best friend, Nicky has a clear memory of deciding one day to skip a meal. The decision left her feeling good about herself and in control of her world. And so her unhealthy relationship to food kicked into life.
Armed with some understanding about why she developed the need, Nicky’s next task is choosing to change. For women in the grip of a longstanding hidden eating disorder this is the hardest step. What nudged Nicky into desiring change was the scary thought that if she didn’t get a handle on it now she would grow into middle age still obsessing about body size.
Having decided to battle it, Nicky fought hard. At times she was frightened by just how tightly the food thoughts had her in their grip. ‘I always like to think I’m in control of my life, but if I’m to be honest, I’ve realised just how much ‘it’ controls me.’ Sometimes she lost the fight, and obsessive calorie counting and meal skipping returned with a vengeance. But she carried on battling. One session she arrived to tell me she had chucked out the bathroom scales. Another time she said she’d found that if she ate foods she loved that were very healthy for her, like cashew nuts and avocados, rather than ‘diet’ foods such as low-calorie drinks and ready-made meals, she felt less bothered about the quantity she ate. Although there was still a degree of obsessiveness about the way she rigidly stuck to her new eating plan, it at least meant that she was eating regularly.
Gradually there was a noticeable change. Nicky’s weight stabilised and she seemed more comfortably seated in herself, and freer in her thoughts. ‘I don’t feel a slave to the whole eating issue any more. There’s space in my head for other things.’ With less free-floating anxiety, there was more sense of enjoying her life, and taking risks with it. ‘You know’ she told me recently with a sense of triumph, ‘I went out with friends last night and had a fantastic time in a new restaurant. And I actually really enjoyed it.’
Thursday 26 January 2006
Rate this ...
-
Next Article
Barbara Clark Read more...
-
Last Article
Melissa Upreti Read more...
Have your say ...
Add your own comment
hi it just sounds like me ,always thinging about food it really does control me ,how can i get off this merry-go-round .my mother is 78 and she is still like it .am 50 and i want to learn can you help .glennis
Comment by glennis on March 27 07:20