Warning: This column discusses eating disorders and disordered eating
One Sunday morning, I got up, and was pottering around the house before breakfast. I had a craft project, so I was checking on that, and tending to my plants. I checked my social media, read one of the many longreads I have in the 60-something open tabs in my phone.
Megan Whelan. Photo: Rebekah Parsons-King / RNZ
I was planning to cook myself an omelette with hot smoked salmon. I was looking forward to it, but for some reason I kept putting off actually making it.
By the time I started in the kitchen, I was so hungry I was shaking. Chopping chives, I put down the knife because I was worried I would slice open a finger.
The voice in the back of my head, the one that usually berates me, chirped up. "Well done," it said. "You've finally successfully starved yourself."
I thought, before my diabetes diagnosis, that I had gotten rid of that voice. I thought I had unlearned diet culture to the extent that I knew starving myself was not the path to any of my health goals. But it turns out that 40 years of being told to lose weight at any cost exacts a price.
What was going on that day was that my anxiety was spiking - something that happens regularly in the days before my period. I was, frankly, salty at having to manage my diet because of the stupid diabetes (yes, you can imagine me stamping my foot when I say that), and I was hungry! I needed some carbohydrates and fats to help my brain function properly. To help it remember that not only am I allowed to eat, it's really important I do.
To be clear, I don't have an eating disorder. That's a specific, clinical diagnosis, and next week, we will talk to a specialist in eating disorders. I hate admitting this, but I do have what some people call "disordered eating."
Like many women, over the years I've absorbed the message that being thin is the most important goal there is, and that no end of dangerous behaviour (like starving yourself) is justified to reach it. And I can see how easy it could be for that to tip my behaviours over into something much worse.
And the hard part is, the tools that help me manage my condition are the same tools that have been being suggested to me my whole life. Calorie counting, weighing my food, obsessive exercise, very low-calorie diets. I've had people suggest intermittent fasting where they only eat for anywhere between two and six hours of the day. There is some evidence that intermittent fasting does have some benefit for insulin sensitivity, though perhaps not for weight loss.
My email is full of people who have tried these methods and feel like they have great results. But the question I always have is ... OK, but then what? Do you just have to live on 1200 calories for the rest of your life? Can you never eat a banana again? Do you carry your scales with you to restaurants to you can properly track your macros?
What if very close friends are moving to a different city and they ask you to come over and have pizza on their last night in town and you go to the bathroom in your office and cry because you can't possibly have pizza because carbs and you're not allowed that many carbs in one go and how will you ever manage to have this condition and have a life?
Ahem.
I was talking to some students this week, and I was asked a spectacular question. "We asked about your health, and you've talked about your physical health, but what about the other kinds of health?"
In the rush to "fix" the body, it can be really easy to not think about the other kinds of health. I first wrote about my mental health eight years ago, and I guard it really closely. The revelations in this column don't come just from me, but from hours spent in a therapist's office.
But I had forgotten about social health - about the importance of breaking bread with people you love. Freaking out about pizza was probably worse for my overall wellbeing in the long run than just eating a couple of slices would have been.
I had forgotten that obsessively worrying about what and when I was nourishing myself with was getting in the way of actually enjoying my newfound lease on life. That when I tried to exist on fewer than 100 grams of carbohydrates a day I struggled to do my job, let alone be able to do the exercise that seems to be helping so much.
The challenge now is to have some balance. Take my medication, lift my weights, go on my silly mental health walks. Manage my diet as best I can, but not to the point where I miss out on the things that make my life feel like mine.
The last word here should go to my mum. The day I found out about my diabetes, I rang her in tears, and she talked me through what to do next. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I was dreading the parties. What canapés would be OK? Could I have a glass (or several) of wine?
Wise woman that she is, she reassured me. "You've got to still enjoy life, Megan. Otherwise, what's the point?"