I did love the attention. I did love the approval. I loved when people took pleasure in my hero’s narrative—my journey from fat to thin. But, in a way, I think I got a little hooked on all that. In the past, I had looked to my mum and dad to reassure me that I was okay. Now, I looked to the world—to the other kids, their mothers, to the magazines.
Inside me, there was a quiet anger bubbling. I was angry, I think, on behalf of my old self. Although I looked different on the outside, on the inside I was just the same person I’d always been. I was Clare Bowditch, daughter of Ian and Maria, sister of Anna and Lisa and James and Rowena. Why, now that I was thin, did people act as though I was suddenly more worthy of their attention? There was something wrong with that, and I knew it. My ten- and then eleven- and then twelve-year-old brain had trouble making sense of these things. Mum and I talked about this quite a lot.
In the end, although I didn’t necessarily agree with the way people treated me, or why, being thin was much easier than being fat. Although I missed the comfort of my fat little body, and the feeling of knowing where it belonged in the world, I didn’t miss the teasing, or the fact that normal kids’ clothes didn’t fit me. I didn’t want things to go back to the way they’d been before.
I knew I must never ever let myself get fat again.
I read an article recently about girls and puberty, and I learned something that I wish I’d known when I was a kid: just before puberty, it’s important and natural for girls to put on weight, because this weight gain is the trigger for the cascade of hormones that tells their reproductive system to release its first eggs. If I had known that, if someone had explained that to me, I wonder how different my life might have been?
One morning in Year Six, I jumped on the scales and saw that I had gained weight. How could that be? I had noticed I was feeling hungry all the time, but I had been doing my best not to overeat. I would need to be more vigilant.
From then on, every morning before school I locked myself in the bathroom and recorded my weight, which, to my dismay, seemed to be climbing. Not by much, but by some. That was enough to release the old spectre of anxiety that started circling once again with its message of ‘too big’ and ‘too much’.
I knew what I had to do—I just had to follow the old Dr Von Thinburger diet, and everything would be fine. But, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to do it anymore without overeating. I took this as a sign of moral weakness. The voice in my head told me I needed to buckle down, try harder.
Calories. Until this point, I didn’t really know what a calorie was, but from the conversations with my friends’ mothers, I had learned that one of the ways ladies lose weight is to count their calories.
At the local newsagency, with my saved pocket money, I bought my first calorie book. I discovered that when I planned my meals in advance, when I knew exactly how many calories I was supposed to eat, and ate accordingly, it made my life feel more contained. In a curious way, it brought me a sense of comfort. A sense of control. It gave me somewhere to hide when the sticky thoughts came visiting.
I didn’t tell anyone about my new diet: not my parents, not my sisters, brother or friends. I hid my calorie book under my bed. I didn’t want any fuss this time. I just wanted to lose the weight quietly, and have this all be over with, once and for all.
The story in my head—that I was getting fat again—felt both terrifying, and true. Photos of me around this time reveal the exact opposite: they show a very slim young girl who is smiling and waving at the camera. The smile is genuine. But, behind closed doors, my battle with my body was turning darker. I did not notice that I was growing taller. All I saw was that my weight on the scale was still rising. It was time for me to try something more drastic.
During first-aid class, I learned that there was a syrup you could drink that made you throw up. I had read about bulimia in Dolly magazine, but I didn’t like the idea of putting my fingers down my throat, so this sounded like a good option to me. I saved up three weeks of pocket money, went to the chemist, got the syrup, and that night at home, aged twelve, I gave bulimia a red-hot crack.
Fortunately, things went badly. The liquid was disgusting, it made my stomach ache horribly and, when I did throw up, the smell reminded me so much of hospital, and Rowena, and her death, I never did it again. Out of ten, bulimia gets a zero.
But dieting? That was different. Everyone did that. That was normal.
You might wonder where my parents were during all of this. They were there, of course, but not only was I sneaky, they had a good reason to be distracted. This was the year my brother James, who was fifteen, had a stroke. Juvenile ischemic stroke. Like Rowena’s illness, it was rare, with no known cause. Not again, I thought. As usual, Mum and Dad used Jesus as their role model. They walked under an umbrella of grace and love that, to this day, I still can’t quite comprehend. Although it meant being plunged back
