"All day the chocolate treats tempted her and Maya wondered desperately why she couldn’t win a battle of wills with a slice of fudge cake, just once..."
Can you remember how it felt to be a child? When you were helpless, dependent on your parents for everything, and powerless, your life subject to their every whim. Do you remember how frustrated you felt, whenever you wanted to do something and weren’t allowed, or wanted to eat something but they wouldn’t let you? Did your parents force you to swallow peas but deny you the delights of chocolate cake? Did your mum hide the yummy snacks and give you carrot sticks instead? Perhaps you were actually put on a diet and deprived of food while the rest of the family ate whatever they wanted to.
When we’re young we’re powerless to control our lives. And, while our desires are forever thwarted, we often console ourselves with the knowledge that when we grow up we will do whatever we damn-well please. We will wake up late, watch TV in the middle of the day, stay up into the early hours feasting on films and ice cream. So, with the exception of the occasional teenage tantrum, we store up our frustration and just wait it out.
Finally, we leave home, and are free to do and eat what we want. The world, and the sweet aisle in every supermarket, is our oyster. There is only one problem. You’re not four anymore. You’re acutely aware of your body and, more than likely, you don’t like it. So, as much as you want to assert your newfound independence by scoffing your way through the pastry section, you also want to be thin. And, in a misguided bid to squeeze into a smaller size, you’ve stuck yourself on a diet.
And so begins the life-long inner battle of domination and rebellion.
With the rules and regulations of a diet you have unwittingly subjected yourself to the traumas of childhood once more. You have become the dominating adult, telling yourself what you can and can’t eat, controlling calories, making certain foods forbidden and generally ensuring that you feel powerless all over again. Inevitably, sooner or later, your inner child kicks in. You see the chocolate cake, you tell yourself you’re not allowed a bite, and then the internal toddler, fed up with feeling powerless, rises up, grabs the sugary goodness and gobbles it up.
And so it goes, on and on and on. You’ve doomed yourself to years of deprivation and rebellion, a cycle of diets you will stick to for a few days and then rebel against, and a lifetime of hating yourself and your body.
When your inner child takes over, and you scoff the sweets, devour the doughnuts, and stuff yourself with everything you think you shouldn’t eat, you feel as though you’re a runaway train, a drug addict, completely out of control. But this is only partly true because, as far as your inner child is concerned, you’ve finally found control. She is sick of being told what to eat, yet again, she’s fed up with feeling powerless and she’s had enough. Scoffing sugar is her only way of seizing control and, dammit, she’s going to take it!
When you force yourself onto a food regime you’re replacing your parents with the diet dictator, whose fascist rule leaves you in such powerless pain that your only option is to surrender to that suffering or rebel against it. With the cruel government of dieting and deprivation to which we subject ourselves, the way we beat up our bodies, is it any wonder that we channel our frustrated four-year-old and rebel against ourselves? The torture we submit ourselves to in the name of thinness is probably as painful as anything we suffered as a child, so that it evokes our inner rage is hardly surprising.
Until you realise the frustration simmering underneath your obsessive fantasies about forbidden foods - the anger that fuels your overwhelming desire for yet another chocolate bar; the helpless rage that feeds your fight with the fridge - you’ll never be free.
At the moment you are caught in a cycle of domination and rebellion where your food choices aren’t really made from your true desires for doughnuts but as a knee jerk reaction, carefully honed as a child, against all the carrot sticks you’ve forced yourself to eat. And, as long as you maintain the regime, you’ll continue to rebel against it.
If you drop the diet, if you depose the dictator, you might discover some surprising things about yourself. Firstly, you might want to have a no holds barred freak out in your bedroom, a full-fledged cathartic adult tantrum, instead of munching on yet another flapjack. Given permission to finally vent all that frustration you could find food doesn’t hold quite as much interest anymore. Then you might realise that perhaps you don’t actually want to eat twelve chocolate bars a day, maybe you wouldn’t really enjoy ice cream for dinner every day of the week, it’s possible you don’t even love cake that much. But, until you stop threatening yourself with celery sticks and broccoli spears, you’ll never know.
Once you stop telling yourself what to do, as far as food is concerned, then you’ll also stop doing the opposite. Then you will be neither four nor forty-four, you won’t be an angry child or a dominating adult, you’ll just be you, free to put down the rules, give up the rebellion and just choose, perhaps for the first time in your life, what you really want to do.
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