Feeling Fat is Gross: Obesity and Depression

In recent weeks obesity has become the measure of a great many lamentable social ills. They read like a litany of sins: greed, sloth, indulgence.

It seems the soup we’re drowning in includes rampant consumerism, junk food advertising, all-you-can-eat bistros, town planning that leaves precious little space for children to move, parents who can’t say no, and bubble-wrapped kids whose parents feel neighbourhoods are the terrain of child abductors and paedophiles.

It is self-evident these factors and more have contributed to the expanding girths of over half of Australians, and to Australia having the fastest rising rate of childhood obesity in the world. Yet none of these factors can fully account for why increasing numbers of men, women and children are overeating.

Somewhere between the mind and mouth of each overeater is a hunger that has no name.

Obese Australians are characterised as greedy, self-indulgent, ignorant, lazy, indifferent, resigned and heedless to well-publicised health warnings, not to mention social ostracism. But there is a good chance they are grappling with a whole set of other attributes we more readily associate with depression and anxiety. Could they in fact be addicted, compulsive, self-destructive, sad, numb, overwhelmed, guilt-ridden, panicked and self-loathing?

There was a time when I worried too much about my weight. This did not set me apart from any of the young women I knew. Only I was little more preoccupied, a little more vigilant, a little more determined. I was soon more than a little ill.

400 sit ups at a time, a bagel a day and measuring my finger with a piece of string before I went to sleep each night seems to bear little relation to the apparent apathy of the obese. Or does it? Over 7 lost years in my youth I assembled an intimate, ritualised knowledge of craving and addiction.

I knew exactly what the pungent smell of diarrhoea in the toilets before the aerobics class was about. I could spot the tell tale scuff behind the knuckles and the raw stretch in the corners of a friend’s mouth on her returning from the toilet straight after a meal. These were the deductions of a bulimic.

In retrospect, it was simply how I ‘did’ anxiety. The sugar highs gave credence to groundless panic, the emptied expanse of the mind after the jolt of the spine, the physical ordeal of purging, felt like quietude and calm.

I could have used heroin or alcohol, and like food they too would have become an addiction, not purely for their physiological effects but because they become personalised sites of emotional self-regulation.

I have a hard-won sixth sense when I see a waddling bottom. I see a person devoting a great deal of thought to food. I can guarantee they hate the fact of their fat. It’s likely that the guilt over things they shouldn’t have eaten that day is already spinning deep within their minds in a loop of such velocity that any perspective and self-forgiveness are simply deflected off. The craving to relieve the panic and self-loathing rotates with growing intensity and is met with the involuntary comfort of addiction – get me a thickshake and get it now.

With any addiction self-loathing and self-comfort become bound within a mutually sustaining, closed system. They feed off each other. They become all consuming. Overeating is simply a matter of putting this logic into effect.

I wonder that nobody has put this unembellished question to the arrayed academics and medical task forces and advisory expert panels on the epidemic of obesity. Precisely what is the hunger?

If they were to ask this question they might find that overeating is addictive, it manages depression or anxiety, and obesity is an eating disorder.

Twenty years on and paradoxically lighter I can say I eat widely and well, though sometimes I forget. I did not recover through dieting because I realised that placing food in opposing categories of good and bad would set the loop of failure and guilt spinning again.

I did three life-changing things that turned food from a prison hell to a mundane, occasionally delicious, nurturing part of everyday life. One day I bought fish and chips for lunch and discovered the difference between appetite and guilt. Another day I put a packet of chocolate biscuits in my room and discovered the difference between enjoyment and compulsion. They ended up being eaten mostly by my friends. Another day I took the bottle of laxatives out into the backyard and smashed it on the concrete path, leaving the tablets to dissolve in the grass. The vicious little bastards burnt brown pits in the turf.

It took a pilot ‘eating awareness programme’ to get me to this point. Thereafter food did not consume me.

We should offer the obese this relief because my hunch is that it’s not just their internal organs that are feeling like crap about themselves.