ANOREXIA and Bulimia: a psychological Path from Horror to Hope
By Colleen Swan
Why do anorexia and bulimia shorten the lives and result in the deaths of an increasing number of people each year? Once the deadly spark is ignited, fuelled by anxiety, depression and panic, these disorders often end in internal self-immolation. While there are, as yet, no definitive answers, an historical overview may prove fruitful in unearthing some basic sources.
During my early years, Marilyn Monroe was the icon of beauty, glamour, allure, whom every female understood she should do her utmost to emulate. At that time, her name and image morphed in my mind with that of Elizabeth Taylor, Zaza Gabor, Lana Turner, and other vague cinematic ideals.
Then, on the first of my father’s birthdays I can recall, he joked that he was sweet thirty-two and had never been kissed by Marilyn Monroe. Enjoying his quip, he repeated it several times, thereby entrenching her name in my mind, as unique from those others.
A few years later, one morning at summer camp, the news filtered through that Marilyn Monroe had died, an apparent suicide. I remember a sense of shock and dismay. This woman, though little more than a name in my world, had become irreplaceable in a small way to me, and in a larger sense, to the silver screen and this earth. Thus, nearly forty years after her death, she continues to be adored, idolised, even by those who had yet to be born at the time of her passing.
Still, Ms Monroe, by today’s standards, would be deemed somewhat overweight. When, then, did this transition take place? How gradual was the evolution from the ideal of voluptuous softness to all but skeletal emaciation?
During the 1960s, not long after Ms Monroe’s demise, the tornado of Beatle mania deluged much of the world, centring upon Great Britain and the United States. In the USA, all things British, rendered supreme, were beckoned, invited, all but inhaled. Liverpool, barely heard of before, became a watchword for delight, excitement.
Then, in the mid-1960’s, due to increasing awareness of the value of exercise and healthier dietary habits, people began to question the worth of the American /British diet. Was their evening meal, comprised of red meat, potatoes first slathered in butter, then doused with salt, accompanied by a smattering of fresh or tinned vegetables abundantly salted and buttered, accompanied by a beverage of full-fat milk, followed by a chocolaty, creamy, crusty dessert, the optimal avenue towards nutrition?
As the Beatle craze first crested, reached its plateau, then began its decline, the stick-like form of the model, Twiggy, became the transatlantic prototype of a new, offbeat elegance. While not convinced I wished to be quite so thin, I began to consider the thought of dieting, an idea wholly alien up to that time.
“Skim milk is only for poor kids,” my maternal grandmother, “Nana”, would scoff, in response to any discussion of calories. Although, at the time, I found this myopic, in hindsight, her conviction made absolute sense.
Nana’s father, my great-grandfather, drudged as a blacksmith in Birmingham England, while his wife, my great-grandmother, strove in their home to raise their eight children on his sparse income. Food was too often in short supply; opportunities for betterment ranged from negligible to non-existent. When their youngest child died, at eleven months old, of rickets, my great-grandparents vowed to leave England in quest of a finer horizon elsewhere. Two years later, having set aside all they could through agonising economies, they managed to hoard enough money to pay for themselves and their children to sail, in steerage, to the United States of America.
Once in America, having bought a small home, my great-grandfather maintained his family, to the extent he could, by what ever he managed to earn as a blacksmith. In terms of commerce, his efforts could not have been more ill-timed. The blacksmithing trade was being eroded, and, ultimately destroyed by locomotion, begun by the availability of railway travel.
My great-grandparents settled in an expanding town outside Boston Massachusetts. Some few hundred miles away, in Atlanta Georgia, its city authorities decided that “… the city would never truly sully itself with the dust of the loom or the fire of the smelter. No, its destiny rode the rails…”
Not long thereafter, Atlanta’s Pierce Arrow dealer flaunted the end of the need for the horse-and-buggy era by setting aflame twenty-five horse-drawn vehicles. (1. Oney, And The Dead Shall Rise, 2003.)
Given this progress, those living near first a city and then an increasing number of towns could access first train and soon bus service. Not long thereafter, the automobile, once affordable only to the wealthy, could be owned by any adult able to put down a deposit and sustain monthly payments.
My Nana arrived in America when she was eight years old. Blue-eyed, Round-cheeked with dimples, bubbling with vim, she quickly ceased feeling homesick for England, as she began to find joy through new friends. (I will always cherish a small vase she was awarded, containing a now much-worn slip of paper, commending her and another girl for having won a three-legged race.)
An able student, her greatest hurdle in school, she said later, lurked in her tendency to ignore periods, (full stops in England), where appropriate, when asked to read aloud. (In caloric terms, she never quite learned where to place those full stops, and refused to do so.)
During her schooldays, she would later say, she had envied the well-fleshed wrists and forearms of the girl at the next desk, especially when she found that, with ease, she could encircle her own bony wrist with her thumb and forefinger.
At age nineteen, she married the bus driver who had been her “fellow” for nearly two years. After their wedding, she moved into her new husband’s small digs near the bus company where he was employed on an as/needed basis. Eleven months later, their first baby due, she felt elated when he was promoted to full-time conductorship. (As often occurs in the nature of progress, that same work which had hampered her father’s endeavour ensured the security of her self and her husband, their offspring and descendants to come. Several years ago, I boarded a plane, unimaginable in my great-grandparents’ time, to settle as an adult in England, sealing our generational journey in a full circle.)
If Nana’s childhood was shadowed by clouds, that of her spouse, my “Grandpa”, was cesspool-splattered, on both physical and psychological planes. During the time he lived in his parents’ home, he was forced to resort to an outhouse, in order to deal with his bodily needs.
When his mother insisted he must have new shoes, his father would bring their boy into town, supposedly in order to buy him a pair. Once downtown, his father would tell him to wait outside a saloon, while he would “just stop in for a quick one”. Hours later, his dad would emerge, lurching, penniless, needing to lean on his son’s scrawny frame for their sour trek homeward.
Having walked, shoeless and shirtless to school, the boy would keep his coat on, buttoned up to its top most, its collar stretched as far as it could be, nearly touching his jaw line. Then, one morning, a kindly teacher asked in a gentle way, why he never removed his jacket in school, and always stood so close to the fire. Wordlessly, he bared his neck and chest. Having done so, he skulked out of her classroom, deciding to quit school on that day. Sadly, he had, by then, reached an age when he was legally free to end his studies. Though he would have liked to have stayed in school longer, he felt he could not return, due to his shame. Rather than trek back home in defeat, he stopped at the local bus company and applied; soon, he became a conductor.
Given this framework, it was natural that, as a well-employed husband and father, he should feel the need to tell his two children, my mother the eldest, during nearly every dinnertime, that they should chew slowly, relish each bite. If one of them ate with gusto or glee, my grandpa would pounce, repeating that there was no need to gorge, since no-one was going to take their food from them.
I have devoted this amount of space to my family history based upon the belief, developed via extensive reading and interviews that their narrative is akin to an infinite number of family chronicles.
Returning to my individual past, throughout my childhood and teenaged years, until I left home, at eighteen to attend university, this grandparental pair never lived more than some few doors away. They became interwoven into our lives, omnipresent. This proved especially true when Nana, widowed shortly after I turned thirteen, sold her home and moved into ours, becoming an honorary third parent. Given this role, Nana squelched any mention of healthier eating by calling the perpetrator, most often me, an “ungrateful dunce”, her most damning epithet.
Ungrateful dunce that I was, at age fifteen, having heard that, at my boarding-school, skim milk was being served to girls whose weight had become a clinical issue, I asked if I, too, might partake. I found my request scorned, dismissed with disdain. The head housemother, whom I had asked, carped that I, being “thin enough”, had no right to expect such a level of catering. Still, as Twiggy became each month more admired, what about my softening hips, rounding buttocks? Having, throughout my childhood, been viewed as too thin, my slightest weight gain hailed with hurrahs, the idea of becoming fat seemed bizarre. Still, the question as to what “thin enough was” continued to plague me.
Then came that afternoon when I passed, after lunch, my silhouette conveyed by a full-length mirror, just outside the dining-hall door. What with enjoying large meals and desserts at school, snacking on chips and sweets with my friends, supplemented by dinners at home embellished by Nana’s gravies and pies, I had put on poundage. My anxiety began to grow as I thought, with pulsating panic, about those girls who had become deemed overweight enough to justify the added expense /aggravation of being served skim milk at each meal. None of these hefties, including the one whose girth forced her to walk sideways, even through the widest of doorways, dubbed “Porky” and her close second “Bess” by we arrogant skinnies, must have been, little more than a decade before, adorably chubby.
Mathematically, since weight gain was gradual, if I gained half a stone) seven pounds) every year, by age thirty, I would look much as these girls did now.
I did not become anorexic, bulimic. During the next few weeks, I lost the half stone. Since then, I have, off and on, gained back that weight, dieted/exercised it away, then gained it back, to lose and regain, in an ongoing juggle. To date, I have never been “fat, and do not believe I would ever allow myself to become so. Still, given my dietary dips, I attend a weekly weight loss programme. Its scale brooks no alibis, pretexts nor tears; numbers are objective.
Given this overview, the question becomes what factors divide those billions of people who, like me, fret about having gained half a stone from those who succumb to eating disorders. What spurs these sufferers to pursue their quest, even when within moments of death, due to self-starvation?
As stated above, there are, to date, no concrete conclusions. As Jane Fonda, a long-term bulimic, points out in her autobiography, unlike other problematic substances, such as alcohol, food must be purchased in order to maintain survival. This necessity increases the difficulty for those in the grip of this haunting disorder. (2. Fonda My Life so Far 2006) Both these disorders sometimes stem from a need to grasp an element of control, however destructive its impact might be, by those who feel they have lost nearly every other aspect of their autonomy, the right or ability to reach and/or act upon their own decisions.
Fortunately, despite having reached a near-death abyss, many victims of these eating disorders find ways of surviving. By instinct, through millennia of evolution, strong species can often prevail against odds which might overpower less evolved forms of life. Indeed, just as dogs, in the throes of death-threatening thirst, will drink from a toilet bowl, the human brainstem, sometimes dubbed “automatic pilot”, confronted with oncoming death, will gouge and claw a path back to life.
This emergency self-rescue is described by writer Marya Hornbacher in her memoir centred on eating disorders. Ms Hornbacher all but ended her life by means of her illnesses. Then, at the point when she would have die, had she continued her self-induced fast, she began to ram, barely conscious of doing so, any food she could find, into her mouth, hence reaching her digestive tract, thence her blood stream. By this means, she began a slow but consistent return to healthy eating. (3. Hornbacher Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia 2006.)
Similarly, actress Billie Piper, a sudden singer/celebrity at age sixteen, found herself living some distance from her parents’ home at a dauntingly early age. In order to deal with the anxieties imposed by the lack of parental authority coupled with her terror of loss of fame due to weight gain, Ms Piper succumbed to Anorexia. Convinced she had found an infallible remedy, she abused a sleep medication in hopes of slumbering through her food cravings. Fortunately, the flight/or/fight mechanism of her brainstem intervened, albeit by the most gruesome of methods. Thus, when she awoke from her nearly comatose state, her body alerted her that she had eaten. In fact, she had. During her sleep, she had chewed away the skin of her lower lip and cheeks. (4. Piper, Growing pains 2006.)
Both Hornbacher and Piper acknowledge that though their demons are now in control, they remain in abeyance, eager to strike at the least opportunity. These high profile cases mirror the anguish of countless other unpublicised sufferers.
A further pitfall lies in the fact that those who grapple with eating disorders frequently have a predisposition to anxiety, depression and panic attacks. A history of self-harm is often present in cases of anorexia and bulimia. In addition, deprivation of sustenance, in the form of sugar to the bloodstream, exacerbates anxiety, depression, and renders the sufferer prone to panic attacks. Thus, turmoil reverberates throughout a system already compromised by self-starvation.
Given these facts, what are the optimal solutions in conquering eating disorders? Like other illnesses, these disorders will not respond to self-diagnosis and treatment. Thus, if you believe yourself to be struggling with such a disorder, your optimal path will be to seek the advice of your physician. This doctor will then, in all probability, prescribe a combination of medication and counselling, either by an individual counsellor or via a therapeutic group in a clinical setting. As an auxiliary network, online newsgroups can frequently prove beneficial. It is vital to understand, in recovery, that the anxiety, panic and depression related to weight gain is global. So, why not seek friendship and hope via worldwide comradeship?
References
1 Oney, Steve, And The Dead Shall Rise: New York: Pantheon Books 2003.
2 Fonda, Jane My Life So Far N.Y.: Random House 2005.
3 Hornbacher, Marya, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia HarperCollins 2003.
4 Piper, Billie, Growing Pains London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.
Find more information about Anorexia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_nervosa
© Colleen Swan
