"'The heroin addicts look down on the coke addicts. The coke addicts look down on the alcoholics. And everyone thinks the people with eating disorders--fat or thin--are scum.' And there's your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination--except eating....Even though, by any way we can calculate it, [Keith Richards] would almost certainly have been a complete nightmare to be around...we still have a slight, cultural frisson of 'Huh--cool' when people get this fucked up.
But imagine if--instead of taking heroin--Keith had started overeating and gotten really fat instead...Everyone would have mocked of the Stones for having a faintly ludicrous wobble bot on guitar who was ruining to concept of rock 'n' roll. But of course, all this time, Keith would have been behaving like a total darling...
Because people overeat for exactly the same reason they drink, smoke...or take drugs. I must be clear that I am not talking about the kind of overeating that's just plain, cheerful greed--the kind of Rabelaisian, Falstaffian figures who treat the world as a series of sensory delights...Someone who walks away from a table--replete--shouting, "THAT WAS SPLENDID!'...They are in a consensual relationship with eating and, almost unfailingly, couldn't care less about how it's put an extra couple of pounds on them.
No--I'm talking about those for whom the whole idea of food is not one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary background static to normal thought...until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of chewing and swallowing, spooning and swallowing. In this trancelike state, you can find a welcome, temporary relief from thinking for 10, 20 minutes at a time, until finally a new set of sensations--physical discomfort and immense regret--make you stop, in the same way you finally pass out on whisky or dope...
You get all the temporary release of drinking...or taking drugs, but without--and I think this is the important bit, ever being left in a state where you can't remain responsible and cogent...
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the 'luxury' of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice...
I sometimes wonder if the only way we'll ever get around to properly considering overeating is if it does come to take on the same perverse, rock 'n' roll cool of other addictions. Perhaps it's time for women to finally stope being secretive about their vices and start treating them like all other addicts treat their habits instead. Coming into the office looking raddled, signing, 'Man, I was on the shepherd's pie last night like you wouldn't believe. I had like, MASH in my EYEBROWS by 10 p.m. I was on a total mince rush!'...
Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others...
Because at the moment, I can't help but notice that in a society obsessed with fat--so eager in the appellation, so vocal in its disapproval--the only people who aren't talking about it are the only people whose business it really is."
~Caitlin Moran, How to Be A Woman
But imagine if--instead of taking heroin--Keith had started overeating and gotten really fat instead...Everyone would have mocked of the Stones for having a faintly ludicrous wobble bot on guitar who was ruining to concept of rock 'n' roll. But of course, all this time, Keith would have been behaving like a total darling...
Because people overeat for exactly the same reason they drink, smoke...or take drugs. I must be clear that I am not talking about the kind of overeating that's just plain, cheerful greed--the kind of Rabelaisian, Falstaffian figures who treat the world as a series of sensory delights...Someone who walks away from a table--replete--shouting, "THAT WAS SPLENDID!'...They are in a consensual relationship with eating and, almost unfailingly, couldn't care less about how it's put an extra couple of pounds on them.
No--I'm talking about those for whom the whole idea of food is not one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary background static to normal thought...until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of chewing and swallowing, spooning and swallowing. In this trancelike state, you can find a welcome, temporary relief from thinking for 10, 20 minutes at a time, until finally a new set of sensations--physical discomfort and immense regret--make you stop, in the same way you finally pass out on whisky or dope...
You get all the temporary release of drinking...or taking drugs, but without--and I think this is the important bit, ever being left in a state where you can't remain responsible and cogent...
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that's why it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren't indulging in the 'luxury' of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone. And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice...
I sometimes wonder if the only way we'll ever get around to properly considering overeating is if it does come to take on the same perverse, rock 'n' roll cool of other addictions. Perhaps it's time for women to finally stope being secretive about their vices and start treating them like all other addicts treat their habits instead. Coming into the office looking raddled, signing, 'Man, I was on the shepherd's pie last night like you wouldn't believe. I had like, MASH in my EYEBROWS by 10 p.m. I was on a total mince rush!'...
Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others...
Because at the moment, I can't help but notice that in a society obsessed with fat--so eager in the appellation, so vocal in its disapproval--the only people who aren't talking about it are the only people whose business it really is."
~Caitlin Moran, How to Be A Woman
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