Our secret histories of food

I’ve written a book about a 550-pound man who eats compulsively and never leaves his home.

It may surprise you to hear this, but I am not a 550-pound-man. I don’t compulsively overeat. And I leave my home a lot.

This has led to my frequently being asked the following questions: “How did you choose your main character?” “Why didn’t you write about a woman?” “How did you know what it would be like to compulsively overeat?”

The first and second are easy to answer. The third is hard.

Everyone has a history of food. Many can rattle off their highest weight as an adult and their lowest weight. Many have public histories of food, what they discuss when they’re with friends, casually, semi-confessionally, sometimes jokingly—and another history, a secret history, a history that seems too shameful to reveal. I am no exception to this rule.

As far back as I can remember, I was aware of my weight.

I was never obese, but in high school I walked a careful line between being “big” and being fat. At 5’10’’, I towered over all of the girls in my classes, and most of the boys. I felt aware of my body at all times. Each day, toward the end of school, I began to daydream about everything there was to eat at home. And after school I came back and ate whatever I had been dreaming of - all of it and more - in one frenzied sitting. My parents worked late. I had the house to myself. I hid the evidence. I hated myself actively.

Change

I tried to change. Sometimes I avoided coming home after school. When I had nothing else to do I came home and straight to my bedroom and jumped onto my bed as if it were a life raft, telling myself that I’d stay there until dinner. I’ll be OK, I thought, if I can just stay out of the kitchen. But my compulsiveness was a more powerful force than my will.

This is what it feels like to compulsively overeat: drowning, or suffocating; a disconnect between the body and the brain; great pleasure and also deep and abiding shame after the fact.

I was a good student but it didn’t matter to me. I was kind, most of the time, but it didn’t matter. I had a pretty singing voice but who cared? In my own eyes, I could be good at nothing so long as I was terrible at the one thing that I was supposed to be good at, as a girl: thinness.
 
When I was 18, I weighed more than I had ever weighed. I arrived at college in New York City, profoundly uncomfortable in my body, but away, for the first time, from any stocked kitchen cabinets. In sophomore year I canceled my meal plan and moved into an apartment five blocks from campus, and realised, suddenly, that I was responsible for feeding myself. Next I realised that this meant that I could keep whatever I wanted in my cabinet and fridge. And what I wanted, that year, and for several years afterward, was nothing.

My sophomore year of college, I lost all of the weight I had to lose. Then I lost some more. I went to bed hungry thinking that the next morning I’d be a little bit thinner, like waiting for the tooth fairy as a child.

I still, to this day, do not know what the point was. I took no pleasure in the increased attention I got from the opposite sex, for I hated anyone who noticed me who never had before. I deemed them shallow. There was an anger about me in those years, I remember, and a feeling of triumph, and a feeling of revenge. But there was no happiness. No sense that I had accomplished anything that I should be proud of.

I went home for Christmas one year and my mother picked me up in Boston. I must have looked especially breakable—pale from the winter, tired from studying, gaunt from not eating. My mother watched me as I got into her car. “I think you should see a nutritionist,” she said, before hello.

So I did. The first time, she told me to write down everything I ate for a week. At our next meeting, I showed her my worksheet. She looked at it. She looked at me. “A can of soup is not dinner,” she told me, and I never went back.

I carried on like this for the rest of college, and, for a time, after college. And then, just as subtly as it started, it ended—there was no dramatic moment of realisation, but eventually I noticed that I never weighed myself anymore, and that I ate three meals a day that were not soup. Despite the fears I had when I was in college, allowing myself to eat when I wanted to didn’t result in massive weight gain, or a return to the frenzied bingeing. I feel superstitious saying it, but these days I feel calmer, when it comes to food, and weight. I feel safe.
In this way I am lucky. Many are not. I was never in danger of death, or illness. I was never obese, and probably not anorexic, according to the medical definition. My story isn’t extraordinary. But its mundanity is what disturbs and interests me: the fact that so many of the people I know have their own version of this story, their own secret narrative of weight gain, and weight loss, and obsession, and sadness, and fear of food.

When I am asked how I know what it’s like to be a 550-pound man who eats compulsively and never leaves his house, I give one of two answers. The first is that I don’t - but as a writer of fiction it is my job to imagine. The second is the more honest: that my protagonist is, despite our differences in physicality and situation, the character I identify with most out of any I have ever written. That putting on his costume let me be honest in a way that felt like emptying rocks from my pockets—releasing the burden of all that unarticulated history. I know the feeling of being in the deep end, when it comes to food, and weight, and eating.

Maybe you do, too. This is what I want to tell you: that letting it out can feel revolutionary, like taking a deep breath. Like beginning again.
 

Heft by Liz Moore is published by Hutchinson.