Free Thin by Grace Bowman Page A

but in the most destructive and irreparable way.
    For me, it was not such an informed decision as deciding to imitate someone else. I feel that the best explanation is that one day my view of the world changed. I suddenly had a concept of the presence of myself, and with this a raft of emotions, and I didn’t know how to handle it. What I knew, what I believed in and what I trusted was the home that I grew up in, the family I was nurtured in and the small town that cushioned me. Then, all of a sudden, I felt transplanted. It was all too much: the decisions (no longer imaginary, but real, adult ones) and the size of everything facing me. And so I disengaged from feeling. It was not conscious. It was not as if I made a choice to starve myself based on a considered self-awareness. I was just struggling to find my place, like anyone experiencing change and growth, and nothing seemed certain any more, except what I did or didn’t eat.

Addiction
    My anorexia did, on one level, start with a diet, but it quickly turned into an addiction. One minute I was counting Easter eggs and the next I was on a path to self-destruction. Something happened, something clicked when my relationship with food changed from one of routine and normality to one of denial and control, and it spiralled from there. Food, and my focus on avoiding it, was suddenly an all-consuming obsession. My immense, and often overwhelming, hunger for success, perfection and achievement was forcibly quashed by this new focus on the suppression of my appetite. The more I fought my hunger for food, the more my desire for everything else disappeared. Suddenly I was totally trapped and addicted to this new relationship with food and could not begin to understand how that was the case.
    From a physical perspective it is possible to explain how, under the effect of self-starvation, the brain becomes obsessed with food. When the body is satiated it can relax, it can sleep, whereas when the body is hungry, its response is to be awake, on the alert for potential food sources. This leads to fantasizing about food, thinking about it constantly, even dreaming about it because the body is craving. 7 I would dream of roast dinners, my mouth crammed with food, bursting with it. I would wake up, petrified that this might have been a reality, and take a huge breath of relief when I realized it was only a dream. It could be argued to some extent that this can happen even on a diet, so how did a diet, which supposedly has the focus of looking and feeling better, collapse into anorexia which has such self-destructive objectives?
    Being anorexic means being constantly fixated with food; it takes over and, crucially, it doesn’t stop. This is very different from a diet, which has an ending, which is set in a finite term: ‘Drop a dress size in two weeks.’ ‘Get a bikini body in seven days.’
    A diet comes to a close, until the next one begins, whereas anorexia is never satisfied by such a completed goal. It presents the sufferer with the feeling that ‘if only’ more weight were lost, then everything would be OK. The problem is that this resolution is rarely reached. This is why the definition of anorexia nervosa – that absence of appetite – is so misleading, because it is in fact a continual, endless and ever-present obsession and interest in food, body and weight. The appetite is there, most definitely – it is just too dangerous to let loose and so every energy is focused on stopping it.
    Most importantly, what happens at the start of an addiction to not-eating, and in my case to a restrictive eating disorder, is that it seems to act like a panacea. I felt better when I ate less. My addiction to not-eating was actually an addiction to feeling better, to feeling fixed. I also had very low self-esteem, in common with many people who develop anorexia. Beneath the layers of the achieving, accelerating Grace, there was an inner lack of self-confidence. It so happened that food