Today is the first day of my Dukan Diet attempt.   I seriously need to lose weight but it's something I've been working hard to ignore for a long time now.  So, apart from adhering to Dr. Dukan's principles, I am trying to analyse my attitude to weight, dieting, and womanliness.   I think if this is going to work, I'll have to understand my resistance to undertaking this very needful prescription. 

I have dieted before, and successfully.  I used the Scarsdale diet  - do I have a transference to foreign male doctors, I wonder?   I had been told by my GP that I had gallstones and that my diet was aggravating the condition, so from time to time I went on the Scarsdale to relieve a flare-up.   (Of course, since then I discovered that my gallstones were an ulcer caused by my hiatus hernia, but that's a while 'nother story.)   The Scarsdale is quite expensive and requires a lot of shopping and charting but it worked very successfully at relieving my gallstones/ulcer.  Then, flare-up treated, I went back to my Ben & Jerry's lifestyle...

 ::  ::  ::

All day I've been dreaming about Ben & Jerry's Caramel Chew Chew... It's not even my favourite flavour now that they've introduced Fairtrade Fairly Nuts...

::  ::  :: 

I went on the Cabbage Soup Diet soon after moving to Dublin.  It's harsh, very harsh, no doubt about it.   I think my sister told me about it and got a copy of the diet-plan from a colleague at work.   I do remember that I lost 10lbs in the first week!  I did it for two weeks and looked remarkable, if I say so myself.    Of course, that was 17 years ago...

::  ::  ::

I know now from the Dukan website that I was underweight for most of my young adult life.   It is still gratifying to know that.   I had a petite bootilicious body, somewhat pear-shaped, but cute.   I think what changed my shape most dramatically was my second pregnancy, twenty years ago. 

It was a difficult pregnancy; I had morning sickness and put on a lot of extra weight, despite the fact that I was running after a three-year-old daughter every day.  I can say now that I didn't like where we lived and I felt trapped a lot of the time.   Back then, I couldn't have admitted this.   We had a nice house and my husband was working in a good job; we had a lovely daughter and I had given up a very demanding job to have this second child.   But I couldn't have an intelligent conversation with most of my neighbours.  I certainly couldn't be honest with them!   I was thinking the other day that I must have been depressed when my son was born, my experience of his infancy coloured by the loneliness and desperation of an overqualified suburban housewife. 

After my son was born - a traumatic delivery worthy of its own post - I was still carrying a lot of baby weight.   During the pregnancy my husband had smoked himself into giving up a cigarette addiction he'd had since his early teens.   Although he frequently asked me to, I refused to put myself through the additional suffering of nicotine withdrawal until after the birth.   Eventually, four months later, on Ash Wednesday, I stopped smoking.   I just woke up that day and said, 'Enough! It's Lent!'   (You see?  I do have resolution and self-control!  Mmm, next week vegetables, ... )   Three days later, realising what I had achieved and determined to never smoke again, I told my husband what a great non-smoker I was.    He failed to point out to me the trail of Mars Bar wrappers he had left in his wake since giving them up himself.  Together we littered in virtuous abandon as we spread ourselves fat in the pursuit of healthiness...  

A month or two after that, my sister suffered a dreadful experience alone in a land far, far away.   Never  had the world seemed so vast.   Eventually we got her home, though it was a long time until she felt safe again.   I remember one morning I sneaked into work early to fax her a letter at her temporary accommodation - it was the only form of communication available to us in that God-forsaken place and time.   I had been gardening the day before and pulled something in my back, which was only a damned inconvenience as I prepared the fax.  When I leaned over the machine to press the 'send' button, however, my back went into spasm.  I writhed for several minutes in indecisive agony: yell for help and get caught sending a very personal letter to a very expensive destination? Or somehow move into the corridor and seek the assistance of a colleague in the adjoining office?    That initial spasm passed while I dithered and the fax was transmitted.    I was able to make my way, very carefully, to the corridor before it disabled me completely.  

This back injury has been the cause of chronic disability since then.   And now that I weigh one and a half times what I weighed when I got married, it's causing me more and more frequent spells of pain and the symptoms are getting more complicated.   You know, I didn't even get a perverse pleasure out of writing that: 'one and a half times what I weighed when I got married'.   I liked my waist, I remember.   I thought my breasts were too small and my thighs were too big.   I liked my hair and I hated my chin.    Well, I have breasts now, all right...

I used to joke with my in-laws that I was going to get plastic surgery.  I would get liposuction, I told them, to take the fat off my thighs and then use that fat to augment my breasts.   Of course, I had no real intention of doing this but the kids called the money I used to pay my Master's tuition my 'Boobie' money!    I'm not sure what proposal horrified my in-laws most: plastic surgery or further education.   

::  ::  ::

::  ::  ::

I remember when I attended the first case conference of my clinical training.  I was nervous, apprehensive, as the patient was led out to speak with us.   Unfortunately, a vast majority of the cases we saw in that placement were anorexics and bulimics.   I shouldn't have been surprised at this, knowing as I did the pathological narcissism inherent in the disorder.  But it was disturbing to view each week these women and men who presented themselves to us seeking to affirm their own faulty self-image in our dismay.  As one, my class headed directly to the canteen after each such case conference, to devour vast quantities of muffins and chocolate in an elemental carbohydrate acting-out.

I was fascinated by these patients and their extraordinary ability to deny their own survival instincts, to defy their most archaic drives.  I found being with them in the clinic to be seriously disconcerting and I brought it up in my analysis.  My mother had a history of using slimming tablets before her marriage; she had told me that my father 'saved' her from them.  Did I unconsciously fear I had a genetic predisposition to a slimming disorder? 

I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing and, when language failed, my body spoke for me in a primitive flood of oral jouissance displaced onto food.   Each day in the clinic began with a Venti Hot Chocolate, sometimes with hazelnut or other flavouring.   Each evening I picked up a tub of ice cream or a block of cheese on the way home.   I had no time to bake so I was spared the culinary indulgences that had caused me to go on the Cabbage Soup Diet.  But there was no time to diet now, anyway: clinic, lectures, assignments, research conspired to deflect my attention from my increasing waistline.  

What blindness was this?  What repression, what unconscious defence against traumatic discovery operated there?   I must ask these questions of myself now if I intend to persevere with this diet and reconcile myself, body and psyche.