Starting in London at 19, the author began binging and purging beginning a lengthy battle with bulimia and body image issues. Photo / 123rf
Academic turned comedian Sacha Jones has written a book about her battle with bulimia. In this exclusive essay for the Herald, she explores what her journey back to health has involved.
Warning: This story deals with eating disorders, anxiety and depression. Helpline information is available at the end of the story.
OPINION
On the advice of a dancer friend I met in London who told me her mother had suggested she do this to keep her weight down, I started binging and purging my food. I was in London on dance scholarships and 12kg heavier than I had been as an 18-year-old ballerina in Sydney. At the time, still not having had a period from the extreme dieting I had engaged in as a younger dancer, I scorned this strategy as the cheat’s way out of the weight battle. But this slim girl seemed so cool and sensible to me, plus her mother had approved of the strategy, that I was persuaded to take her advice and to try that method of losing weight.
Fast forward a few years, and I am no longer dancing, I am married and living in Aotearoa, studying politics at university and another 12kg heavier. I am also carrying the still heavier mental and physical burden of the bulimia “Beast” – as I came to see it – on my back, being almost entirely unable to control my urge to eat copious amounts of mostly sweet food before sticking my finger down my throat and getting rid of the thousands of sweet calories I consumed almost every day, sometimes several times a day.
The bulimia helped me lose weight to begin with but before long it started fuelling my sugar cravings that had been denied in my dancing-dieting years and became so compulsive that I couldn’t always control where I was in relation to a private toilet when they began. So, because sugar processes into fat quicker than any other food, some of the sweet calories I binged on were not eliminated. I continued to gain weight and this was despite periods of starving myself between binges.
All the while I felt deeply ashamed of myself for being so weak, as I saw it, and hated how hot I became from all the chocolate I binged on, especially in summer. Living in shared accommodation, including a shared room, in those early years in London and telling no one what I was doing, meant I had to use public toilets to avoid being caught by my flatmates. It was a constant challenge to find a private public loo to do the dirty deed in without people hearing, and sometimes, in desperation, I had to use a shared toilet facility and wait for the person in the next cubical to flush before vomiting or trying to. It was far from easy and did not always work. The depression when I couldn’t get rid of a binge fully was absolutely intense and miserable.
Every time I binged and vomited I hated myself and swore that was the last time. I must have sworn that and failed to keep my promise to myself thousands of times over the seven or eight years that followed that first episode. At university, in Auckland a few years on, I would take a packed lunch and no money or bank card to buy more food. But the urge to binge was so strong, that many days I would find a way of getting money, practically begging the bank to let me access my funds. It was pathetic and desperate and my husband, the only person who knew about it, struggled with it too. But I was in the grip of a serious compulsion and addiction and could not control it for more than two days at most, no matter how ashamed of myself I felt or even how worried about our financial situation I became; as we were not exactly flush with funds. Perhaps the shame even kept the cycle going, adding to the pressure not to binge that can backfire into doing just that.
I hated my body all the while, especially my big bust, and avoided scales entirely. I only learnt what I weighed from the eating disorder counsellor I visited when I was 23 who insisted on weighing me before any counselling began. I promptly burst into tears when she told me I weighed more than 10 stone (63kg) and, despite her attempts to convince me that my weight was “fine and healthy”. I aggressively rejected and resented that forced weigh-in and diagnosis. In fact, I was a few kilos overweight for my height at that time, according to the BMI scale I later consulted.
Then at 26, after nearly four years of trying and failing to get pregnant, I read in a medical journal that sugar can damage sperm motility and that was enough to quit my sugar binges and ditch the Beast for the time being. We conceived the first of our three children after my 10-week sugar detox.
After that I resisted the urge to binge and purge for almost 16 years, while focusing on raising my kids, getting a degree (PhD) and tutoring in politics, things that are more focused on the mind than the body. All the while I told myself that I no longer cared about my weight, even drafting an “anti-diet” book called DIEt: How not to go on one.
But it turned out I wasn’t as comfortable in my body as I thought I was. I was living in oversized clothing all the while and avoiding full-length mirrors and videos of myself to maintain the “body-positive” delusion. But when I saw my PhD graduation photos that delusion collapsed, as I saw someone so frumpy I hardly recognised her.
When the Beast returned after that reality check I lost weight and felt better for a while, updating my wardrobe to more fitted clothes. But then one day I found myself advising my 20-year-old daughter to get her BMI checked and it hit me that I was in no position to advise her on this subject. Indeed I didn’t know my own BMI at that point, having continued to avoid the scales.
That realisation was the breakthrough I needed to commit to getting the Beast off my back for good and to forging a healthier and happier relationship with food and fat that neither fed nor denied my sugar cravings and body insecurities. I hoped this would also be a way to mend my damaged relationship with my daughter on this issue but that hasn’t quite happened, as she continues to resent my past attempts to manage her diet and weight, even in the years (17-18) when she was underweight and I was trying to get her to eat more.
This experience of being unable to help my daughter manage her diet and weight, and her deep and enduring resentment of my attempts to try - especially my attempts to manage her weight gain - taught me how drastically we underestimate the challenge of achieving healthy eating and weight management for ourselves and our adolescent and young-adult daughters. This learning, together with extensive research of other mothers and daughters in similar difficulties, has convinced me that much more needs to be done to better understand how and why women and girls struggle in our modern age of big food and big – skinny/obese, but always “sexy” – fashion increasingly pushing and pulling girls in contradictory, confusing and unhealthy directions on the body battlefield.
It took me 50 years to break free of all the various mental and physical body-battle issues I developed in my life, many of which I passed on as “body baggage” to my daughter, all the while believing I was raising her to have a healthy relationship with food and her body. And while I reject the mother-blaming narrative that tends to be the preferred explanation for why girls develop eating and body-image issues, clearly my issues negatively impacted my daughter, as most mothers’ diet and body-image issues will affect their mothering of their daughters especially. But because all mothers have mothers and we have been blaming mothers for this stuff for some decades now, the cycle of body baggage accumulation and blame-laying will continue to be passed on through the female line if we don’t break it. How do we do that? By recognising all the other natural and cultural challenges involved in trying to raise our daughters to have a healthy and happy relationship with their diet and weight.
Prevention is, as ever, the best cure. When my sugar bulimia rendered me infertile for several years in my 20s, only a chance discovery saved me from that infertility and from the bulimia that was causing it. Without that chance discovery, and my desire to have a baby being stronger than the desire to binge and purge massive amounts of sugary food, I would likely never have broken free of the bulimia Beast and possibly never have had a child. Certainly, the fertility experts we consulted in Auckland in the early 1990s never asked me about my diet.
But when the bulimia returned in my 40s and these motivations to break free of it were no longer there, I had to hunt much harder for a reason to get healthy. Wanting to have a more honest relationship with my daughter after I suddenly realised I was being a terrible hypocrite in advising her about her diet and weight while being bulimic myself, was that reason, or at least the main one. The other motivations and strategies that helped me overcome my mid-life bulimia and keep the Beast off, apart from a few minor lapses, for the past seven to eight years, are more nuanced. But I have done my best to put them all together in my body “battle plan”, as presented in the 400 pages of my new book The Fatter Sex.
There is no easy fix, or prevention, for women and girls’ disordered eating and body-image insecurities, and it is a battle that never entirely ends. But as I have finally proven to myself and tried to show through various other successful body-battle stories in The Fatter Sex, the battle for women’s weight health and humour can be largely won by any member of the fatter sex prepared to pitch her feisty fork for the fight/feast. A little bit of humour to lighten the load for one and all also goes a long way on the body battlefield.
Australian New Zealander Sacha Jones is a former ballerina and tutor in politics with a feminist PhD who now writes tragicomic memoirs and stand-up comedy aimed at challenging sex stereotypes. She lives in Auckland with her husband, cat and (occasional) kid. Her favourite food is cake.
The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan For Women’s Weight Health And Humour, published by Umbilical Books, RRP: $45. Copies available for sale at umbilicalbooks.com
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