In
Caroline Knapp’s memoir Appetites,
she writes about the calm, relief, and “transcendent solace” she experienced in
her mid-twenties by starving herself: “The lure of starving—the baffling,
seductive hook—was that is soothed, a balm of safety and containment that seemed
to remove me from the ordinary, fraught world of human hunger and place me high
above it, in a private kingdom of calm.” Retreating inside this “private
kingdom,” Knapp was able to allay the overpowering anxiety that she could be
overtaken at any moment by her hunger for food, lose all control, and lose her
sense of self resulting in shame and disgrace.
To
barricade herself from her pernicious hungers, she learned to rely on eating
rituals: “For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same
manner, at exactly the same times. I devoted a monumental amount of energy to
this endeavor—thinking about food, resisting food, observing other people’s
relationships with food, anticipating my own paltry indulgences in food—and
this narrowed, specific, driven rigidity made me feel supremely safe: one
concern, one feeling, everything else just background noise.”
Part of
her compulsion to maintain an eating ritual is her acute sense of
calorie-counting and her awareness of the consequences of eating foods that are
high in calories. She writes about the self-loathing that results from eating a
piece of cake: “These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake—add five
hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem . . .”
When we micro-manage our slightest activity to “protect” ourselves or to instill discipline, we have to ask ourselves, are we really living? I’m not just thinking about the way Knapp protects herself from the anxieties that erupt when she loses control of her eating, I’m thinking of other desires. Take, for example, a re-entry student who was enrolled in my college composition class several years ago. She was a single mother. Her husband had left her over ten years earlier when her daughter was one years old. She had never had a relationship since. She was protecting herself from getting hurt again, but she paid a price. She looked bitter and lonely, so much that when she walked into the classroom all the students would be quiet and look at her with unease. She had a dyspeptic, angry demeanor as if her face was broadcasting to the whole world that she was a pissed-off victim of her own prison. Her angry countenance barricaded her from other people, men specifically, to the point that she had reached the condition of being “undateable.” This is precisely what she wanted because by being undateable she would never get hurt again. She had successfully suppressed the urge to have intimacy in order to protect her feelings in the same way that Knapp had suppressed her appetite to protect herself from anxieties and a ruined self-esteem. But are we really alive if we successfully suppress our appetites in the purpose of protecting ourselves? Aren’t we really just creating a self-imposed prison and retreating into a smaller and smaller world? Aren't we seeking the oblivion that Tennessee Williams described when he indulged himself in his luxury hotel room or when I was a cardio junkie?
I find
myself haunted by these questions, for even though I do not, nor
have I ever suffered anorexia, I do share some disturbing similarities with
Knapp. Like her, I find myself overtaken by similar compulsions—the eating
rituals, the calorie counting, the fear that indulgence will be followed by a
sense of a degraded self. However, I feel balanced and moderated by my 3,000
Calories a Day. “There’s nothing anorexic or extreme or self-destructive about
that,” I say to myself. “Yes, I do
share Knapp’s obsessive, anxious tendencies, but look, everybody, I’m eating
3,000 calories a day!”
Of
course, my interior monologue belies the anxiety that my obsessive-compulsive
nature could cause me to lose my equilibrium at any moment. Like her, I could
be overtaken by hunger and devour a whole strawberry-rhubarb pie, an indulgence
that would result in the need to go on an austere diet. In fact, that is
exactly what happened to Knapp, both physically and psychologically. As she
writes: “The dance of the hungry woman—two steps toward the refrigerator, one
step back, that endless loop of hunger and indulgence and guilt—had ceased to
be a game; some key middle ground between gluttony and restraint, a place that
used to be easily accessible to me, had grown elusive and I didn’t know hoe to
get back there.”
For me,
this “middle ground” can be achieved by keeping my calories at or slightly
under 3,000 calories a day. I look to my goal of 3,000 calories as a model of
moderation helping me to avoid erring on the side of indulgence or deprivation.
For me, then, the “transcendent solace” that Knapp describes doesn’t come from
self-starvation but from moderation and this moderation is embodied by 3,000
Calories a Day.
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