Warning - REALLY long post: feel free to whizz past.
Right, so among all the sad and scary thoughts about the 11 september 2001, it's made me think about where i was ten years ago (aged 27), and what's happened to my eating and my body since.
In early february 2001, i was - well... I was suicidally depressed. I won't dwell on that, but coming out of it I was finally able to apply for acting schools (the bleakness of clinical depression had made anything other than sitting on the sofa staring at the wall, too hard) and I got a place fairly quickly.
And it was like that flicked a switch in my head. I suddenly had the mental energy to do other things, like get some work, sell my flat and lose weight. I'd guess at that point I was a size 20? I did slimfast and it worked really well for me, and by the summer I was 12 stone (which is only a few pounds more than I have to be for this diet, and tbh is as thin as i'd ever want to be). I went on a long holiday staying with friends in america: NYC, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Austin TX. I looked like this:
I returned from holiday in September, about 12.5 stone, and went to acting school for a year. During that time someone knocked me off my Vespa and I had a badly broken ankle... and I began to regain weight - partly because I was older than all the other girls at my school, and they were slimmer. By the end of that year, I don't know what I weighed, but it was probably about 14 stone. I was a size eighteen.
The next autumn I had dieted and cycled down to 12.5 stone (sz16) again, was getting acting work and I met a man. We moved in together within six weeks. Now - he wasn't god's gift to relationships. He was odd. But I was 28 and I'd never had a serious relationship (I was a bit 'flighty') and I guess I thought it was time.
I went on tour playing Lady Macbeth for three months, and stayed in a lot of cheap B&Bs, eating crap from service stations. By the end of the tour I weighed about 14.5 stone. And then the work dried up, and all I had left was this really awful relationship. So i turned to food. every day when my partner went to work i'd go over the road to the tesco metro and spend 40,50, 60 quid on food, which i'd then force feed myself til i was crying in pain - then i'd wait for the pain to back down a little and i'd carry on. Rinse and repeat, for hours. It didn't start like that. It started with little treats and hiding the wrappers, but it quickly became a ritual and i bought more and more every day. I know I was 15 stone in may, and by the end of summer I was 17.5. I looked like this:
I got some psych help and the forcefeeding stopped, but the I was still unhappy and my weight crept up ever so slowly. I'd been on the dole all this time, and my food habit, plus paying half the (London) rent and bills, and holidays etc meant i was hugely in debt. By Xmas it was about £19,000. I'd had no debt at all in april of that year.
Just before xmas we split up. It was like I woke up one morning and the scales fell from my eyes. I was nearly 30. What was i doing with this bizzare man? what had i done to my body?
Eventually I moved into a studio flat, found some supply teaching and joined a Brixton-based web forum with some good links to the club scene, and I met loads and loads of amazing friends and the man who is now my husband. That website transformed my life - no question. But the eating was not transformed. I did a lot of work at stabilising my attitude to food, but I was still huge, and slowly getting bigger, and every time I tried to diet I went into a tailspin, worse each time, of abusing food, and food rituals, and force feeding. In the end my GP told me to stop dieting.
I had one period of weightloss about five years ago, and I guess I got to about 16.5 stone? A size 20, anyway. My doctor put me on fluoxetine (prozac) and it killed my appetite for a while. Then I stopped because it was messing with my libido! I tried again a couple of years later but it didn't really work, and anyway, it blunts your feelings - no lows, but no real highs either. I stopped taking it when my dad was dying. At a time like that, you want to feel things properly.
So in the last ten years I've only gained 7 stone... but if you count the weight I lost in 2006, I've gained 3 stone in the last 5 years - and I was really facing a lifetime of it. I was relatively happy with how I looked. My husband loves me and in south london a bigger girl will always be chatted up wherever she goes... But then infertility reared it's head.
I find thinking about being slim quite hard. I was slim until I was about 22, and then briefly "slim-enough" ten years ago. But for so long i've battled to make peace with myself at this weight. I didn't even try to lose weight for my wedding two years ago. I just can't imagine what the next ten years will do for me, foodwise. bodywise. I think i'm quite scared by it.
My wedding (Size 22):
