Body and food un-ease came into my life unnecessarily early. As a child and teenager, I was very active person and didn’t pay much attention to eating until a plate of food was put in front of me. Sports, swimming, dancing took up most of my spare time. I revelled in using my body in all physical aspects. I especially fell in love with ballet dancing, and this was to become my career for many years. Food was just something that was a part of life, like breathing or sleeping or any of the other everyday things one did.
When I was in my final year of dance education I was told to ‘lose weight’ for my solo exam. I was by then dancing with the National Ballet of Rhodesia, classed as ‘not thin enough’ for a ballerina-to-be. I was given a diet to follow that had zero fat and carbs in it. By the time I had lost the required ‘excess’, I had developed an obsession with food.
Maintaining that low weight for the months leading to my exam was the hardest thing I had ever done, and everything in my life was adversely affected by my misery, including my dancing. I lost my joy, and I lost some strength and stamina. I failed my exam. My response to this utter shock and humiliation was to eat everything in sight for the next few weeks. Back came the lost weight – and then some; beginning the merry-go-round of dieting and regaining the weight loss.
A few months later my family took the decision to leave Zimbabwe (new name for Rhodesia) and move to South Africa. I went on to study Dance at University of Cape Town. In the turmoil of a new life as a student, in a new country and culture, where the overriding concern was to stay thin, and stay ahead in the fight for recognition as a dancer, and potential Ballet Company member, I never got a chance to work through, or grieve for, the loss of our beloved country and the beautiful life we had lived, and the support group of friends that had been built over a life-time.
Suddenly my weight and I were aliens alone in a new world. And my main focus was the ‘excess’ weight. The natural progression of this was the slow and debilitating blooming of major depression. This stayed with me for the full three years at University. But I genuinely believed that if I could get my weight under control, the depression would go away. Neither of those things happened. What did happen was an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with food.
This dysfunctional relationship continued into my career as a dancer and then dance teacher – being so physically active, seemed to help with an ever present struggle. When I left behind my dance career, after about 15 years, and took jobs that were not so physically active, the battle did not let up.
And then along came the onset of menopause – and a hysterectomy. Within a few years – the diet cycle kicked in big-time. Months of starvation alternated with months of eating past full. A few years ago I stumbled on SW. I decided that this was going to be my last ever diet, so I threw myself into it, counting every single ‘syn’, and sticking rigidly to the regime for a couple of years. This was combined with a severe exercise regime – 1 ½ to 2hrs of exercise every day. It worked, and I lost weight. However, although I could pretty much stick to the food regime, I could not keep up the exercise goals I had set myself. With age came a less able body, which led to extreme frustration and fatigue for me – so with the onset of Covid and Lockdown, I decided to still eat the SW way, but not obsess about exercise. And the weight came creeping back on. How unfair it seemed: I had at last found an eating regime I could live with – but my age and stage of life meant that unless I starved myself or severely restricted carbs, fats and sugars, the weight was not going to stay off.
The struggle was in full manifestation again: Starve or eat, thin or fat. The self loathing, the body loathing, the conflict. Seemingly I was stuck with it...