An Apple a Day by Emma Woolf Page A

croissant or the brownie you used to have with a friend in a café, you drag yourself to the gym every morning, and it starts working. Fewer calories in, more calories out: the numbers on the scale go down. It really is that simple.
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    It may be simple in theory, but in practice it’s not easy to stop eating. Human beings—even superhuman anorexics—are programmedto hunt, gather, and consume; calories are life and survival. It takes a lot of energy to overcome the natural impulse to eat, to deny yourself food every hour, every day, when you’re constantly hungry. And this is one of the greatest misunderstandings about this disease—that anorexics don’t like food. One of the questions I’m continually asked is: “So why don’t you like food?” Really, truthfully, I don’t hate food. (Fear, yes; hate, no.) I spend most of my life worrying about it; perhaps that’s why I avoid it so assiduously.
    What do I love? Oh, foods I haven’t eaten for years: pasta shells drizzled with butter and grated Cheddar cheese, the butter collecting inside the shells; doorstep-thick whole-wheat toast loaded with chunky marmalade; tagliatelle and pesto; take-out fries in greasy newspaper covered in salt and vinegar; stir-fries and veggie curries and all Chinese food; freshly baked French bread torn off the baguette and eaten with wedges of melting brie and rough red wine; baked potatoes and baked beans; tacos and refried beans and enchiladas and seven-layer burritos from Taco Bell in Florida; the first new potatoes of the season, piping hot in garlic butter—the tasty, indulgent things we all love. Late at night, chocolate and peanut M&M’s mixed up in colorful handfuls. The macaroni and cheese my mum used to make when we were little.
    I’m amazed as I write this of the memories that flood back, the flavors I can almost taste, all the foods I might eat if there were no rules. And yet I’m detached as I remember them, because I can’t imagine eating them ever again. I just can’t countenance allowing myself to. I call them memories because it’s so long since I tasted them. Sometimes I walk slowly past the Cornish pasty place in the tube station on a cold winter’s day, and I want to faint with the smell that comes out (can smells make you fat?). Of course those are pasties and pies—I admit, I couldn’t eat a pie in a million years—but when you’re starving the pie smell (potato, cheese, crust) is so warm and delicious, so complex. I still remember howgood fish and chips used to taste. As children, on family vacations, we’d share a large bag of fries in the backseat of the car, or on vacation at the seaside. The greasy bag, the salty, crispy potato wedges, the taste on one’s lips, the warmth of food . . .
    Looking back at what I’ve just written, I see that my favorite foods are simple, you might even say childish. It’s as if I missed out on developing adult tastes because I developed anorexia just as I was becoming an adult.
    â€œBut what do you actually eat?” That’s the other question everyone asks when you have an eating disorder. Fruit and vegetables mostly: apples, oranges, bananas, broccoli, asparagus, spinach. A lot of muesli and probiotic natural yogurt. Sometimes, for a treat, whole-wheat pita bread and low-fat hummus. More recently, perhaps buoyed up by the first days of spring, I’ve embarked on some new food experiments: Super Wholefood Couscous from Marks & Spencer, three-bean and tomato soup. Tom and I have been out in his garden, planting some April bulbs. New life, a new season—and it reminds me I have to stay focused on my challenge, I have to keep expanding my food horizons.
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    Back in Oxford, I was eating very little. For me, anorexia really did start like that: first just cutting out treats, then cutting out all fattening foods, then skipping entire meals—seeing the scales