Sunday
12PM One fried egg, one chicken sausage, spinach, 1/4 avocado, grilled portobello mushroom and tomato, baked beans on gluten-free toast, grapefruit juice, almond milk latte.
Hello, England! Or should I say “toodle-oo”? I am so excited to be visiting the very country that generated both Shakespeare and Cadbury Creme Eggs. I am ostensibly travelling to research a film project about a young medieval woman bucking against societal expectations, but I am equally excited to research traditional British food.
Yes, that much-derided cuisine of carbs that encircle other carbs, giving birth to still more carbs. And I sure have had trouble resisting carbs lately, which is why I am keeping this food diary. If I write down what I eat, I’ll have to hold myself accountable and accountable people don’t gain 3Olb in a single month. Yes, I am body positive but I am also a young single woman working in Hollywood, and I can’t just pretend that weight is not a thing. It’s a thing.
2PM French fries (‘chips’) with ketchup, two Diet Cokes.
7PM Earl Grey with almond milk and Splenda. Splenda is garbage that just makes us sadder!
Sadness is the only thing that’s ever made me lose weight. Two years ago, during the last gasps of my six-year relationship, I lost weight. Not a little weight. Not the kind of weight where your bras feel kind of generous and you marvel at your subtle but oh-wow-it’s-definitely-there-now clavicle. No, it was a lot of weight. The kind of weight that makes your trousers fall down and the salespeople in Barney’s fawn, and your great aunt asks if you’re eating with faux-concern. (She’s a glamour puss, she loves this.)
It happened, like many things, at first slowly, then all at once. It started with a stomach infection that necessitated a diet of basmati rice and bottles of Pedialyte (didn’t hate it).
Then came the 2016 election, when we all either started or stopped eating en masse and then to a romantic island vacation that was so bereft of romance I could barely stomach a spoonful of yogurt. After my second fainting spell, my boyfriend called for a doctor from the largest Maldivian island, who poked at my concave stomach and scrunched his face up in confusion and asked how I’d been feeling otherwise.
I wouldn’t have told him, or anyone, that my boyfriend and I were fighting all the time. I wouldn’t have mentioned the fantasies – sudden endings and infinite new beginnings – that kept me up at night. But my boyfriend complained that I picked at what I was served now or ordered oddly (there was a month of shrimp summer rolls, another month of hamburgers without the bun) and I was without an appetite, an experience I was utterly unfamiliar with.
At the end of the relationship, weight was falling off in double digits but, as I explained to close friends, I experienced none of the heady triumph of women showing off their formerly huge jeans in a weight-loss pills ad. My body felt frail and unlike my own.
At night, I curled into a ball, shirking his touch. Soon, he didn’t try. I told myself this was what relationships are like after half a decade of cohabitation. Now, if I did too much of anything it was work. I’d chew Klonopin [used to treat panic attacks] into a chalky paste between my molars and my cheek. I learned to like the taste of pills, bitter and dry.
Tuesday
11AM Coffee with milk.
1.3OPM Coffee with soya, three oat cakes (delicious, hard to resist, not-really-healthy-but-also-not-really-bad-for-you crackers), two pieces of salami, fruit cup with pineapple juice.
3PM Ham, cheese, lettuce and mayo on white bread (a dream, a fantasy, each bite as guilt-inducing and joyful as nailing someone else’s husband!), one packet of potato chips, two bites of apple, chocolate bar, two sparkling waters.
4PM Coke Zero.
5PM 1/4 bag of chocolate, cranberry and nut mix, lifted from the snack box provided by Fergus – the driver taking me through the countryside so I can behold medieval architecture and understand how to write this movie. Fergus wears a striped shirt (‘Loops’, he corrects me. ‘Stripes go up and down, loops go “around”.’) He seems to eat what he wants but often says no to my offered crackers, like someone who is in control of their basic faculties.
I don’t just eat the nut mix. I stuff it into my gullet through anxiety-inducing texts to the US, unwanted yet still consumed, just as I’m consumed with pleasing people I barely care about. *Pick nuts out of teeth with an earring.*
When my boyfriend and I broke up, I quickly took a lover. I’d known him from childhood and was, in many ways, exactly as I remembered: goofy, physical, boyish and sweet. I went from barely being touched to being the definition of touch. We lay in bed, stretched across each other in improbable configurations, like lounging cats. We kissed non-stop, not caring who was watching: at parties when I was meant to be networking, at dinner with my family, waiting for a taxi as teenagers laughed at us for being adults who couldn’t stop licking each other’s faces. And we ate.
We ate all day, runny eggs and cake with icing, hot dogs in the morning and hamburgers late at night, Chinese food in Chinatown and Italian food in Little Italy and there was nothing I wouldn’t try and nothing I didn’t love.
And when the media got wind of my breakup, we hid out in Venice Beach for a long weekend to evade discovery, eating croissants, drinking lattes and taking baths so long the water got cold.
Looking back at the photos that remain from that period (in a fit of confused grief after it ended, I deleted most of them so I have to Google ‘Lena Dunham breakup’ to see anything).
I look like a baby chicken who has stepped into an electric socket, all awkward limbs and hair sticking out every which way. My old clothes were too big but, with all this eating, my new ones were growing too tight. I was an ingénue in my own story, and my life was a non-stop celebration. The party was catered.
Wednesday
11AM Black coffee, Earl Grey tea.
12PM Ham and butter on white bread, fruit cup, can of coffee.
This ham sandwich has become my equivalent of masturbation – does Fergus judge me?
Does he notice I rushed back quickly from the manor house we visited this morning asking about the nearest convenience store, where I acted surprised to come upon a ham sandwich?
3PM Iced coffee, five oat cakes, two roast chicken-flavour chips (or should it be ‘crisps’?).
The chips are like something Willy Wonka would invent, cognitive dissonance as the crispness of chips meets the vibe of a roast chicken. How does anyone in this country get any work done when there are these chips to ponder?
4PM Cereal milk latte.
More foods meant to taste like other foods. A horrifying invention the barista at Starbucks describes as ‘tasting a bit like soggy cereal!’ Take two sips, dismiss it totally, finish it anyway.
5PM More oat cakes (always more oat cakes, I can’t tell you what sights I saw today because I was so focused on not finishing the oat cakes).
7PM Scallops and prawns in spicy broth with marsh weeds. (Marsh weeds! Lambs eat this and make good meat, Fergus says. I stare at him, but he’s focused on his reasonably portioned bowl of pasta.) Lamb with flowering broccoli that tastes like regular broccoli, shepherd’s pie, which is pulled lamb with sweet potato on top (so much lamb), then pineapple tartin with lime ice cream that sticks in my teeth and is hard to chew but I press on.
I also eat half of Fergus’ chocolate soufflé, then order another sparkling water and feel so sick that I lie face down in my hotel room and moan. I dream about Canada Dry ginger ale like some might dream of a romance on the windy bluffs of Cornwall.
By the time I was five months out of my long-term relationship and nearly out of my post-break-up affair, I’d also completed in-patient treatment, known to the public as rehab for trauma and prescription drug dependency or, as I like to call it, a five-star hotel where they confiscate your razors.
On my first day, I sat down for lunch with a group of strangers who dug into a family-style meal of roast chicken and vegetables, brownies and sorbet. They all ate happily, chattily, and I heard one man look down at his plate and sing a little song. The lyrics were: ‘I like chicken, and chicken likes me.’ Forgive me, father, but what the heck am I doing here?
Later that day, I sat across from the facility’s nutritionist, who gently told me that if I didn’t feel I could enjoy their offerings, they’d be happy to make me ‘a smoothie or a soup’ but I had to eat.
‘You don’t get it,’ I told her. ‘I love food.’
She looked like she’d heard this protest before, from women who’d denied themselves for so long that they had forgotten the alternative. Maybe, she surmised, as I got more comfortable with my surroundings, my appetite would return and I could swallow ‘a little something’.
It took a week, but as the drugs left my body and I made peace with the fact that I was here to heal, not just to cut my own bangs and weep (just kidding: you can’t cut your own bangs because they won’t give you scissors), I got real hungry, real fast. If it wasn’t nailed down, I ate it. Before they cleared breakfast, I grabbed fistfuls of bacon.
At lunch, I tasted three kinds of burgers at the burger bar. Before bed, I got into a habit of eating three butter sandwiches lying down, using my chest as a tray. By the time I completed the 30 days, I was sober as a bone and my socks were tight.
Thursday
11AM Puffy with a food hangover, I slug lukewarm breakfast tea from a travel mug.
12PM Coffee with soya milk, vegan gluten-free leek, mushroom and sweet potato tart – I say I don’t mind it unheated (‘I love a cold tart!’) but it tastes like sandpaper. I scoop off the leeks and eat the depressing shell in the preserved prison of Lincoln Castle and it makes good sense because I’m in a prison of my appetites.
1PM More Earl Grey, two-thirds of a ginger ‘detox’ bar that invites you to ‘slip into your skinny jeans and enjoy!’ Why are they selling this at a castle gift shop? But this is what I deserve after last night . And isn’t that the thing about food diaries, a vaguely embarrassing form? It’s not what we eat – it’s about what we think we deserve, who we imagine we could be, and the painful truth about who we are. It wouldn’t be so humiliating to reveal what we ate if we didn’t think our appetites were dark, forbidden and altogether too much.
When I commit my meals to paper, I make the wild leap towards being honest about what I want. Imagine if we all told the truth about our desires? The world would be lousy with demand for pizza, Louis Vuitton-print furniture, jungle cats kept as pets and – gasp! – love.
1.15PM Time to get lunch. I stroll down a street whose claim to fame is its preserved medieval architecture and, I now see, meat pies. I already ate a pie: that grotesque little sand tart, but oh, it smells so good and look at them sitting in the window waiting for me. So I walk in and ask, ‘How much is that meat pie in the window?’ Soon it’s mine, a perfect, delicious, warm lamb pie, which tells a million stories with its crust and is on par with A&E’s healing powers.
After one bite I’m in ecstasy. After the second, I miss my mom, the only person or thing that can rival this pie for comfort. After the third, I shed a tear. For all the bad bites I’ve ever taken. For all the things I’ve hated and finished anyway and all the delicious things I haven’t allowed myself to finish.
Loving this meat pie means I’m alive. Loving this meat pie means I can feel. Loving this meat pie means I am unafraid to open the door to pleasure and that, just for this moment, I am saying goodbye to pain.
This article originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of ELLE UK. Subscribe here to make sure you never miss an issue.
