The Fatslayer Chronicles

Yesterday I got taught a valuable and humbling lesson – broken eating habits aren’t easily fixed.

After 9 solid months of eating healthily, exercising self-discipline in my food choices and portion sizes, and religiously keeping within 1500 (honest and healthy) calories a day, yesterday it all went to pot.

It’s not so much the fact that I made poor choices and ate loads of crap – it’s HOW I ate the crap that concerns me.

I was sneaky, gluttonous, and utterly uncontrolled – and I’m ashamed of myself!

At work, the worktop surfaces in our little beverage bay were groaning under the weight of Christmas goodies. Mince pies, plain Thornton’s chocolates, Green & Blacks organic chocolates, buttered scones, Christmas cake, peanuts, Pringles, doughnuts, cookies, Bendicks bitter mints…that was just the stuff I remember!

Now, I could have avoided the beverage bay and gone to the water fountain instead, but I was pitifully lacking in self-restraint.

It was as if some circuit in my brain had fried, and I couldn’t help myself. The first time I made a cup of coffee, I ate a chocolate whilst the kettle was boiling, then openly walked back to my office with a buttered scone, and ate it in full view of my colleagues like any normal person would do.

OK, so a chocolate and scone aren’t fabulously healthy choices, but they’re not a hanging offence, right?

The food kept up its siren song, though, and before many minutes had passed I was back in the kitchen washing up my mug (yeah, right), and two more chocolates had somehow vanished down my gullet.

One thing I’ve learned in the past 9 months is that I like to savour the taste of good, rich, dark chocolate. I’m a nibbler, biting off tiny pieces and letting them melt slowly on my tongue. I can make one square of plain chocolate last half an hour, and I’d rather eat that one square of high quality bitter chocolate than a whole bar of crappy milk chocolate.

But, because I didn’t want anyone to know I was eating chocolates, I just wolfed them down, and missed out on all the sensory pleasure of the experience. They were just empty calories, because I hardly tasted them at all. I wasted them!

And because I’d wasted them, I still wasn’t satisfied. Over the course of the day, I had another 5 or 6 chocolates and another scone, getting more and more furtive in my gorging. I was swallowing without chewing as fast as I could, so that if anyone had come unexpectedly into the kitchen and taken a close look at my throat it would have resembled the body of a boa constrictor that had just swallowed an ostrich egg.

This is self-destructive and pathetic behaviour. It’s the sort of behaviour I’ve been working so hard to modify for the past 9 months – and patently I’ve not really learned anything.

Nothing is fixed.

I was trying to think what my behaviour was like, and the closest analogy I can come up with is the behaviour of a seriously contrite paedophile.

One of my friends counsels and rehabilitates sex offenders, and she was telling me about the last conversation she had with one of her clients before he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. He was an earnest, moral, sensitive man, whose whole life was blighted by the sexual urges he felt towards little girls. He fought very very hard to control the urge (he’d requested chemical castration, and was in the counselling programme voluntarily), but whatever he did to suppress it, the urge was always lurking just below the surface.

He told her that he’d been watching children skating at the open-air ice rink in the city centre. The rink was surrounded by adults six deep watching their children skating, and he felt that, unlike him, those other adults were experiencing an enjoyment that was unadulterated and pure. They had no hang-ups or hidden agendas, and could therefore be unconstrained and open in their responses and actions. He, on the other hand, felt corrupt and dirty, and sensed his behaviour was furtive and underhand. Although he was doing something he knew he shouldn’t be doing (watching the children), he was taking no real pleasure in the experience because of the guilt and feeling of wrongdoing. Yet he still couldn’t simply walk away.

When my friend related this story, it struck a really strong chord in me. The feelings of having a dysfunctional and warped attitude towards the desired object (in his case children, in my case food) are similar. I know the enormity of the dysfunction is different, and obviously his plight is (was) worse than mine – but some of the feelings of shame and perplexity are the same.

As a rational, intelligent human being, I should be able to control my desires. After all, it’s what separates and elevates us above the level of savages.

But no matter how hard I try, that urge to just run riot and eat everything in sight is never suppressed fully. It’s always just below the surface, and it only takes one small break in routine or one acceptable excuse (it’s Christmas!) to allow it to burst forth.

I want to be cured, and it’s depressing that I’ve still got so far to go. I’m beginning to think it’s an incurable condition!

Dammit, I’ll have to try harder!