Free An Apple a Day by Emma Woolf Page B

actress or model, DIPE is the emphasis on her large and healthy appetite—the way the interviewer spends the first paragraph describing the huge plate of pasta or bacon sandwich she orders. In a weird inversion, after years of being ladylike and terrified of appearing greedy in public, the image of the ravenous woman wolfing down her food has now become a sexualized one. Despite wanting women to be slim, men prefer women who enjoy their food. Women on diets are such a bore. So now women have to watch their weight and yet not appear to be watching their weight. And DIPE, all this tucking into fried chicken and burgers, is code for “I’m just a normal girl—I have a really fast metabolism, a huge appetite, and a great body.” Of course it’s a calculated strategy of image-crafting, and of course it depresses real women even more, because if we ate fried chicken and burgers we’d just get fatter. As my ex informed me, a hamburger shot of a pretty actress sells around the world (Penélope Cruz eats one after every Oscars ceremony).
    No matter how secure you are, this is the world we inhabit today; for most women it’s impossible to ignore. Of course the reasons for eating disorders are more complex and individual than this, but celebrity culture, the cosmetic surgery industry, and downright sexism cannot be ignored. Why else would this be an overwhelmingly female condition? Despite the worrying rise in male sufferers—I know men with eating disorders, and I know that the 11 percent statistic matters—the other 89 percent are women.
    As a seventeen-year-old, when I first started reading about women’s liberation, sexism and female inequality, women’s bodies and hunger, work and motherhood, a whole new world opened up to me. Those feminist icons who changed my views on what it means to be a woman—Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolf, Susie Orbach—they were angry and articulate. They wrote that “the personal is political” and I liked the sound of it. It’s only now that I begin to understand it.
    How ironic, then, that for all my feminist principles and independence, growing up in a family of strong women, I should end up with anorexia, this most enfeebling of conditions.

Chapter 5
    Heartbreak and the Seeds of Anorexia
    I say I don’t know where anorexia came from, but that’s not quite correct. I know what triggered it at the age of nineteen, but what I’ll never fully understand are the underlying reasons. Why would I become anorexic, for example, when my sisters and school friends didn’t? Almost everyone has problems and preoccupations growing up; some people become addicted to alcohol, drugs, or self-harm—but most don’t. So why did I turn to starvation as a way of coping? It reminds me of that line in the 1980’s film The Breakfast Club : “What’s your poison?” Maybe I was genetically predisposed to getting an eating disorder, or maybe it’s just a matter of temperament and circumstances, who knows? Certainly I have an addictive personality—I’ve always gotten hooked on things quickly.
    I’m conscious, as I write this, of how lucky I’ve been, relatively speaking. Compared to many, my experience of anorexia has been bearable. From the outside at least I’ve lived a normal life. My weight was dangerously low for a while but I got through (and I never want to go back there again). Even though anorexia has affected every area of my life for more than ten years, I’m fortunate that it was “late-onset.” It did not rob me of my childhood oradolescence—whatever happens in the future, at least I can say that. I know a girl, Sukey, who developed anorexia and bulimia at the age of eight. She is now twenty-four and in many ways she’s still a child. She has never had a period or worn a bra, never had a boyfriend. The fear of puberty so often misattributed to anorexia