Around that time, a teacher in primary school decided to weigh us all as part of our maths syllabus. I remember standing on the scales and the teacher looking at me after reading the number on the scales shaking her head and saying, “it’s hard Clare isn’t it?”.

And so it began, an early introduction to body shaming and a stormy tumultuous relationship with food that has lasted for over forty years. Other memories flood back as I write this - the 6th class girls in school striding into the classroom one day and one of them saying “Claire why do you never wear jeans?” And another answering on my behalf “It’s because she’s too fat”. After this I would eye up the dusty weighing scales that sat underneath the bookshelves at school and dread the moment it might be used again. I would feign illness when I thought weight was going to be coming up again in Maths because I did not want to be weighed again and to be made fun of. During one of these periods of pretending to be unwell with a stomach-ache, the doctor came into my bedroom to examine me and said to my mother “do you think it might be psychological?”. “Not at all” she replied and little did she know how right the doctor was at the time.

As a child I would eat normally during the day but at night I would sneak downstairs to the kitchen and make myself two rounds of cheese sandwiches and eat them in bed while reading. I have no recollection of how I managed to sneak down into the kitchen and prepare this food for myself unbeknown to my parents. But I do remember my aunt, a nun, was visiting from South Africa. She loved cleaning and she had her work cut out for her at our house -my mother hated housework and cooking! My aunt came into my room one day all set for a deep clean although we didn’t call it that at the time! She peered under my bed and spotted a plate of cheese sandwiches gathering dust and said, “Claire you know gluttony is a sin”. Small things that happened you might say, but I collected all these experiences together to use as little sets of evidence that a) I was fat – well I must be if my Dad had said I was because he knew everything, and b) I was different and c) eating was a sin. I look back on that young girl now and realise she was minding herself in the only way she knew how. There must have been something about the nighttime that made me uncomfortable. I was entirely self-sufficient, but I must have been very lonely. Geneen Roth writes that compulsive eating is "a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard." I think many of us can identify with this statement whether our substance of choice was or is alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, or something else. The addiction may vary for each of us, but the impulse is often the same: to leave ourselves, to leave the present moment, to leave uncomfortable feelings and I have left myself so many times. If there is something going on in my life, I no longer self soothe with alcohol, but I either deprive or comfort myself with food. And it has to be eaten while watching television or reading. That hand to mouth action is vital in times of stress or sadness. 

My father visited us in Ireland nearly twenty years ago - he had cycled all the way from Berkshire to West Clare. I remember waking up on the first morning of his stay and seeing M & M’s all over the kitchen counter and several jars and packets of food opened and it looked like they had been hastily put back in the cupboard. When my father got up that morning he said “You’ve got too much food in your cupboards” – and I felt shame again – and this was in my thirties. 

As a teenager I hated my thighs – if I could have physically detached them from my body I would have and I would get up early to run and try to lose weight. There was a wealth of material available to me at home to educate myself about calories- a book called How to be Lean, various calorie counting books, and I approached my new project – changing from a fat Claire into a thin Claire with all the zealousness of someone newly converted. Around this time my Dad went to Weight Watchers and lost a lot of weight, he would weigh out his food on a little weighing scale in the kitchen. Then there was the time my mother came home from town with a Dunnes Stores bag with some mint green summer trousers in it. They didn’t fit her and she remained quiet and withdrawn for the rest of the day. 

When my family and I moved to the UK at 17, food suddenly became a way of controlling what was going on around me. I couldn’t control the fact that I had been catapulted into a strange country where nobody sounded like me, so I started binging and depriving myself of food. A few years later I discovered the book by Rosemary Conely – The Hip and Thigh Diet - and I lost a significant amount of weight, I was delighted with myself - that’s it - job done, and I went back to eating normally and of course the weight piled back on. My mother went on the same diet and lost a lot of weight. I stared at her miserably as she ate yogurt feeling the rolls of fat digging into the waistband of my trousers.