An Apple a Day

All men like to feel useful: does my being 'unwell' give him a useful purpose, I wonder, saving me from myself? Maybe this enables him to reach me in a way that my cas

hose natural ups and downs, female hormones, the premenstrual moods and tears seemed to disappear completely. So when I started crying I was fearful,

touch' with my emotions: love and hate, excitement, drama and disaster. As anorexia set in, all that dried up.

still experience human emotions – regret, envy, despair – but it's all pretty insular, sort of muted. Your body goes into emergency mode: focusing on essentials only, conserving energy, keeping you alive. Just as your periods stop because you can't nurture a baby – your body can't risk getting pregnant – so any excess emotions dry up. With so little fuel going in, there's simply nothing to spare.

Well, perhaps not, but there are serious commercial players at work here, industries which make billions from convincing us, from an early age, that we need to overhaul our appearance, lose several stone, wax off every trace of body hair, consume only organic or diet foods, hide our flaws with expensive make-up, remodel and improve with surgery – spend more, more, more because we're inadequate as we are. The female body is a commodity, a consumer item; we've become perfectible – and if we don't make constant efforts to modify it, we're letting ourselves go.

Think of the psychological damage; the sadness of feeling let down by your own appearance, inwardly thin and outwardly fat, thwarted by your lack of self-control, sabotaged by your greed and fleshiness, so ashamed that you eat in secret, or binge and then purge, or pretend you're not hungry when you are. Look at the tyranny of the diet industry, the impossible size zero culture and the celebrity-obsessed media, the disconnect between the way we ought to look and the way we are. Isn't it time we took this seriously, when the majority of us are living with constant hunger, wasting hours at the gym, detesting our bodies every morning, feeling guilty with every mouthful, putting our lives on hold until we've lost those hateful ten pounds?
Imagine not caring about your so-called flaws or comparing your shape to that of others, imagine never getting depressed by perfect women in advertisements or on television. Imagine eating in response to your hunger cues and not to your emotions, imagine never going on a diet, never using food as a reward or a punishment. Imagine never weighing yourself or even wanting to lose weight. Imagine not having forbidden foods, not ordering a salad when you really want fish and chips, imagine not minding what your friends eat or what size they are.

It's an addiction and a compulsion, a brain disorder and a crutch, your best friend and worst enemy, a fight between body and soul. Anorexia is an illness which takes on a life of its own, feeding on itself as you starve. It's a voice in your head which never, ever shuts up.
Just to clarify: I'm not sicksick any more.

the less you eat, the more scared you are of eating; the longer you starve, the more addicted you become to hunger, that clean, empty high.
What does anorexia give me, what is this high? It fills me with endorphins, adrenaline; it gives me a pure, healthy feeling, a buzz, a sense of achievement, a sense of control. The hunger is

Being a woman is messy: being a woman involves blood and fat. Anorexia seems very pure and I like that

the anorexia (even more than thinness) satisfies a yearning for something clean and empty.