Undoctored, page 12
Nowadays it’s a recognised compensatory behaviour, a well-documented attempt to undo the act of eating and its associated feelings of guilt and shame. Back then, I felt certain I was ploughing special new furrows. My masterplan was to take a mouthful of food – biscuits, nuts, chocolate, whatever – then chew it until I’d sucked all the flavour and goodness from it, before spitting it out. Another mouthful, another chew, another spit. All the delicious enjoyment of food, none of the disgusting calories. Obviously, this was not the kind of thing I could do in public, or even in the communal areas of my shared flat. So eating became something that only happened in private – either in toilet cubicles or, more usually, in the privacy of my own bedroom.
At home, crisps and sweets were easiest because I could empty the packet onto my desk before returning the contents to the bag in three or four disgusting gobfuls. Everything else involved spitting into kitchen roll then balling it up and tossing it into the wastepaper bin in my bedroom, which I did, hundreds of times a day. Every few days, I would purchase more kitchen roll and most nights, when everyone else was sleeping, I would empty the day’s collection into the big black bin outside. After a week or so of this faff, I bought my own big black bin, which would stay in my bedroom, and which I’d only have to empty every ten days or so. Obviously this meant that my bedroom was a no-go-area as far as guests were concerned. This wasn’t an issue: absolutely nobody was coming round. Within the space of a few weeks, I’d gone from a relatively normal young man who enjoyed the occasional casual lycra-clad bonk at a rowing jamboree to a wildly irrational, body-dysmorphic ‘big lad’, sharing his room with a collection of half-chewed junk food.
The problem was – it was working. Just as I might be entertaining the idea that there could be something wrong with me, someone would tell me how well I looked (‘well’ of course being code for ‘thin’) and any doubts I was having would pop like dying bubbles of logic. If I looked remarkably well – well enough to be remarked upon – then how on earth could I possibly be ill?
I’d lost roughly the weight of a toddler by now. Of course, there was no ‘roughly’ about it, I was keeping obsessive tabs and knew the magic number to within a quarter of a pound, thanks to my freshly purchased set of precision scales, accurate enough for any molecular biologist. I’d actually bought two sets of these scales so I could weigh myself on both and log the more gratifying of the results.
The gamification offered by the scales drove me to further distraction: a few ounces lost meant victory, vindication and knowing that what I was doing was worthwhile. A few ounces gained meant defeat, degradation and the sense that what I was doing was utterly pointless. On bad days, I’d spend hours either running or on the loo, trying to jog or shit myself back into my own good books. I was following a flowchart where every single path led me to behaviour that was increasingly abnormal. I cancelled so many dinners that I eventually confected a gastrointestinal condition – one that was pending investigation and rendered meals all but impossible. Openly telling someone about an issue with mucus in my bowels was a much more comfortable prospect than having anyone suspect I might have an abnormal relationship with food.
I took down the wavy IKEA mirror from my bedroom wall. Like the French author Guy de Maupassant who wrote inside the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place in Paris he couldn’t see it, I could just about cope with my body as long as I never caught its reflection.
On it went. Doubt, reassurance, shame, success, failure – a bad day would be followed by a jackpot: another unwitting enabler making the mistake of telling me how well I was looking. Down another jeans size! By now I’d stopped buying kitchen roll and was just spitting food directly into the bin in my bedroom. If I got a headache, I would forsake the paracetamol because … well, those calories were avoidable. Yet another pair of jeans! And how well I was looking! Except of course, I wasn’t. I looked bloody awful, like I had radiation sickness. A simple equation meant that in the absence of fuel, I had no energy. After a day of lectures I couldn’t focus on, I’d be tired enough to sleep for maybe fourteen hours at a stretch. My body would shut down like a laptop. But even this seemed like a good thing: fourteen hours asleep was fourteen hours without food.
My skin was deteriorating – a scaly patina of eczema, something I’d never experienced before, spread from the hollows of my eyes across my brand new cheekbones. My lips were so red and chapped that it looked like I was holding them together with Chanel Rouge. Oh, and my nails were coming off. I was basically Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, if Jeff Goldblum were suffering from a catastrophic nutrient deficiency due to self-starvation rather than turning into an arthropod. There was now no way I could be considered a big lad by potential suitors, although that was fairly academic because I hadn’t managed anything approaching an erection for weeks. Still, I’d probably be fine. As far as I was concerned, this wasn’t an eating disorder – it was just a hobby, really, this thing I did. Besides, like every single one of the billions of addicts before me, I was convinced I could stop at any moment – I just … didn’t want to, not yet.
Eventually and inevitably, the comments changed. For every person telling me how well I looked, there was another who recoiled slightly, enquired with concern after my health or made a typical medic bad-taste joke about wasting diseases or Michael Stipe. This was the wake-up call I needed. Not about my behaviour, but about a number of toxic friendships I’d clearly been enduring for far too long – I couldn’t afford to have jealous, spiteful people like that in my orbit. Meantime, I started wearing baggier clothes, just to keep a lid on the downtalking. Luckily, I already had a wardrobe full of baggy clothes.
I was, in short, a mess. Never previously in danger of winning the ‘Most Gregarious Student’ rosette, I had moved to another level of solitude: avoiding close to all human contact, cut off from my small circle of friends. I’d successfully extricated myself from all of my commitments, bar one: the annual Music Society weekend away. Three days of constant communal eating and drinking, plus the occasional honk into a trombone. There was no way to get through it without having to eat food with other people – and if I did that, everything I’d been slaving over for months would be ruined. I’d get onto the coach a haunted weirdo with missing fingernails but I’d come back a born-again big lad, my features encased in a squidgy pillow of fat. There was no question of me going. I told them I was unwell. To be fair, you only had to look at me. None of it would wash with them – who were they going to get to play second trombone at such short notice? Trying to weasel out of it was beginning to raise too many eyebrows, my isolationism making it clear that something was wrong. So I agreed to go.
The countdown was excruciatingly stressful. All the delicious control I’d managed to create around food was about to evaporate. Every morning for two weeks beforehand, I went for a long run, just to buy myself some wiggle room. The calories I burned running would be set against anything I ingested if the worst came to the worst and I absolutely had to swallow something.
In the end, somehow, thanks to sleight of hand at buffets and a combination of hankie-spitting, pocket-filling, and hiding it under cutlery at restaurants, I seemed to get away with it. Pretty much. There was one moment when a dorm-mate spotted the weighing scales I’d taken with me – the very thought of not knowing my weight for three days under such trying circumstances was enough to bring on a panic attack.
There was a slight pause when he asked me why I had them, before I said, ‘Luggage. I always carry a set of scales with me so that I can weigh my luggage before I leave for the airport. Must still be in there from when I last flew somewhere. Lanzarote – that was it.’ He bought my cover story with an uninterested shrug. Thinking about it now, it would have crumbled under the slightest scrutiny.* But convincing or not, I lied more about food in those nine months than I’d cumulatively lied in my whole life ever before. And I kept getting away with it! I must have been fucking good.
I wasn’t. When I got back to the flat after the weekend away, Groot was waiting for me by the front door. He was wondering if we could just have a little chat. His tone of voice alone made clear that this was more than a cleaning rota infraction. In my absence, Groot had had to reset the router in my bedroom and, while he was in there, he saw it: an eighty-litre plastic bin three-quarters full of half-chewed food, studded with packets of crisps and Fruit Pastilles. Tadaaaa!
Things began to fall into place for him. Why I never ate in the kitchen any more, why I hadn’t been to the pub in a year and why I’d lost a third of my physical presence. My bedroom door was still open and the aroma of my lifestyle choices filtered out through the flat. Faced with the talisman of my deceit, I felt my life crumble all around me. I must have told my flatmates 200 separate, food-related lies and all of them were exposed at once. The times I was ill with some vague intestinal complaint – worse, the sympathy they’d shown me for it. The times I couldn’t eat because I’d grabbed something on my way home or because I was fasting before my impending colonoscopy or one of that year’s multiple Yom Kippurs.
Now the chewed-up Wotsits were out of the bag. They knew for sure: I was a fucking loon. I might have tried to convince myself that my behaviour was harmless, just symptomatic of a more creative approach to life – but there’s nothing like thirty kilos of fetid gob-mush to bring you down to earth. I was bang to rights. Policemen must constantly experience the desperate flailing of the totally guilty – swag over their shoulder, blood under their fingernails, yet still they flail. As did I.
‘How dare you go into my room!’ I thundered. Followed by an abject denial of any knowledge of the bin. Followed by a more pathetic ‘You couldn’t possibly understand.’ And finally begging him not to tell anyone what he’d seen. He promised his silence on the condition that I got the help I needed. I gave him my word. My word was my bond. My bond, however, was nothing – a cardboard sword in a zombie apocalypse; a panini up against a wolf.
Of course I didn’t get any help, I was a medic. If I spoke to anyone about it, they’d probably feel obliged to break their duty of confidentiality and alert the Dean of the medical school, the GMC and the Secretary of State for Health, like if I’d confessed to a sudden and uncontrollable taste for human flesh. Even Mike Schachter, who had gently enquired after my health when he’d spotted what was left of me leaving a lecture theatre, might have somehow turned on me. Of course he wouldn’t have. And yet … what if he did? It wasn’t worth the risk.
But I did stop – at least for a while. Much as it began with other people’s opinions of me, so other people’s opinions of me ended it. Even though I was still in denial about the seriousness of it all, the fear of public exposure far outweighed whatever neuroses were driving me to do it in the first place.
Truthfully, I didn’t think I needed to speak to anyone. In my head, I wasn’t a particularly serious or interesting case. Even though I’d lost a lot of weight, I’d barely grazed the ‘underweight’ section of the BMI chart. I hadn’t been admitted to hospital and the only tube I’d been fed through said Smarties on the side. Talking about it felt almost fraudulent. After all, what had I done, really? I’d lost some weight. And wasn’t losing weight a good thing? Hadn’t I learned in my cardiology lectures that fat leads to strokes and heart attacks and all sorts of clogged-up blood vessels? Isn’t that why GPs tell at least half their patients that losing a bit of weight wouldn’t do them any harm? I’d certainly said the same thing to absolutely droves of patients. I worked in a gynaecology endocrine clinic every Tuesday morning for a year, helping women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). A large number of the consultations involved a chat about how weight loss might improve their symptoms.
‘I’ve tried everything,’ they would often say.
Not quite everything, I would think.
One clinic, a dickwad of a consultant prodded me in the stomach and asked me if I was developing a bit of PCOS myself. I laughed, then spat into the bin for a fortnight, no harm done.
When a journalist called me ‘chubby’ in a review of a show at the Edinburgh Festival it was a nifty shortcut to losing a bit of weight, no harm done. When someone on Twitter messaged me to say I’d ‘piled on the pounds’ – a couple of packs of kitchen roll, a few cancelled dinners, no harm done. I never felt cross about the comments either. Rather, I was grateful they’d let me know that I needed to get back on the programme. Fat again, thin again, fat again, thin again.*
I don’t blame ‘big lad’ for starting this off. Obviously. He couldn’t know he was unleashing an avalanche of aberrant behaviour. And if it hadn’t been him, then it would have been some other trigger at some other point. So I bear him no ill will. I do think about him occasionally, though, and while revisiting this episode, I couldn’t resist a little google, just to see what he’s up to. According to his hospital’s website, he’s now a consultant psychiatrist specialising in, among other things, treatment of addiction and eating disorders. I wish his patients the best of luck.
* * *
* I didn’t though, did I? I had my cox and ate it.
* ‘So you brought your scales to the airport?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where they weigh your luggage for you anyway?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And in your case, a good, what, kilogram of that weight is now scales?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Cool …’
* I had a brief flirtation with a drug called Orlistat, which works by fucking with an enzyme called lipase. Lipase’s day job is to hang around in your small intestine looking for any fat that you’ve just eaten, break it down into bite-sized molecules that your body can absorb and then store any excess in your waistline. No lipase means no fat absorption means no fat deposits. I ordered myself a crate of it on the internet (anonymously, obviously).
I was out at dinner and ordered French onion soup topped with enough cheese for a decent-sized fondue, followed by an Orlistat chaser to mop up all the horrible fat. I hadn’t entirely thought through the physics of it – the cheese still had to go somewhere and, in the absence of being absorbed in the traditional way, it continued heading south, using my gastrointestinal tract like a water flume. The medical term is ‘faecal urgency’. Urgency doesn’t quite cover it. Faecal panic might be closer. Followed by faecal horror, as I ran to the bathroom while 300g of emulsified cheddar slurped down my leg via my jibbering rectum.
Chapter 14
Whether you call it doing my time at the coalface, an alignment of the stars or a long-overdue recognition of my unmistakeable genius, there had been a definite shift in my writing career. I was assisted down the birth canal of success by taking a shoebox full of my diaries to Scotland and reading them out at the Edinburgh Fringe, the birthplace (and sometimes crematorium) of many a comedian’s career. It was basically a live audiobook, except you couldn’t skip the boring bits.
One day, there happened to be a publisher in the audience who stayed awake throughout and liked what they heard enough that they offered me a deal to release those diaries as a book. As news of this publishing contract emerged, people started to become more interested in me – mild success often breeds mild success. I certainly wasn’t in danger of becoming the next Russell T Davies, but there was now a distinct flow of offers coming in, which meant that I (and presumably Santander) had less of a constant feeling of vomity panic. It also meant I had the luxury of being a little pickier than when I was writing mother-in-law jokes for coked-up best men.
A sample week of email requests from my agent:
Would Adam be interested in writing copy for a campaign about weighted blankets? (No.)
Would Adam be interested in putting himself forward to the producer of a dramatic reconstruction of the 1970s LSD bust Operation Julie? (No.)
We have secured the movie rights to Play-Doh. Would Adam be interested in pitching for this? (No, sounds shitbad.)
Would Adam consider participating in a fundraiser for a dementia charity? (Yes!)
Charity work is always, at least in part, a selfish act – a ten quid pro quo situation. At one end, there’s the barefaced version: immortality on a brass plate, behind the velvet curtain you pull open as the cameras flash. Behold the Bannatyne Foundation, the Winfrey Ward, the DiCaprio Donkey Sanctuary. At the other end is the plain old nice warm glow: a feeling that, in a world of eight billion essentially powerless people, you’re being of use in some small way. Then, there’s that grey area in the middle, loaded with motive and false modesty. The LOOK HOW KIND I AM BUT I REALLY DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT social media post.
In my own case, warm glow aside, my willingness to help out with the fight against dementia was prompted by a more pragmatic kind of selfishness, based on the simple fact that of my three grandparents who reached dementable age, 100 per cent of them eventually succumbed. Marble deficit, to some degree or other, was fairly rife in my family. In fact, my last remaining grandparent was deeply mired in dementia at the time of the request. Therefore, assuming I wasn’t adopted (and I felt sure by then I’d disappointed my parents enough times that this news would have been blurted out in anger at some point), it made perfect sense for me to do everything in my power to help find a cure now rather than later when, let’s face it, I’d probably forget to.
There seem to be two distinct patterns when it comes to dementia: you can either drift off into a seemingly semi-pleasant fog, where everything you’ve seen or heard or known ebbs painlessly away like melting snow. Or you can be dragged off, kicking and screaming, defiant, terrified and in the worst, most heartbreaking distress you’ve ever known. Which way you go seems largely determined by how much awareness you have about what’s happening to you. And, of course, a horrible cocktail of both options is also available.*
