Reading an interview with comedienne Victoria Wood, I was struck again by the similarities between binge-eating and anorexia.
Speaking in The Telegraph of her struggles with binge-eating, Wood comments:
I was never hungry. You’re not if you eat all the time. You never get that scary feeling of hunger. You want your mind to be distracted. You want to put a wall between you and real life. It’s like the drink or the fags or the drugs. It’s all the same.
Stuffing and starving may look very different, but they do the same things.
Killing desire.
Finding some other way of handling fears and needs.
Cocooning yourself from the world – either behind an extra layer of weight (the equivalent of a portable duvet) or with bones like spears.
Whether it’s the ‘jolly’ matron – asexual and comic, or the chilling skeleton that screams ‘look, don’t touch’ – both speak about desire through the language of food and the body. Both resist relationship and intimacy. Both promise comfort and freedom. Both end in slavery and isolation.