Losing weight and learning to be happy again
Psychotherapist Karina Melvin has learned that weight-loss and body image are not quick fixes. With her new book, she gets to the heart of the matter, writes Emily Hourican
‘MY daughter was a real catalyst for this book. I’m terrified for her,” says Karina Melvin, psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, mother of 10-month-old Claudia, and now author of Artful Eating: The Psychology of Lasting Weight Loss. What terrifies her is the new and never-ending social-media driven scrutiny around how we look.
‘‘I cannot imagine what it’s like now — being constantly confronted with your image. There is no escaping ‘what do I look like?’ and ‘do I look good enough?’”
The book is a mix of the latest medical research, various diet myths comprehensively debunked and recipes, with a series of personal exercises to do — there are morning rituals including meditation, honest assessments of your food pitfalls, visualisations and more — along with an overview of Karina’s own story, including her moments of realisation around the trouble with dieting.
“It was a personal realisation and I touch on it in the book and I was reluctant to do that originally,” she says, “because as a therapist, you keep yourself to yourself, but I realised that you need to share so people can get an understanding of what it’s like for you, rather than you just telling them ‘this is what you should do’.”
We are sitting in her beautiful Sandymount kitchen, a place full of delicate, quirky and lovely things: posters, peculiar pieces of driftwood, antique china. As we talk, over coffee and an orange sponge cake, a large bunch of flowers is delivered, from Karina’s friends, to celebrate the publication of Artful Eating.
Karina, who is in her mid-thirties, began her diet story at boarding school — “where I insisted on going!” she laughs — “I found a lot of girls had issues around food. Whether it was overeating or undereating, or more severe issues. I was 12 or 13 and I had never experienced that before. But seeing that began piquing my interest. Seeing that insistence we have in feeling dissatisfied with our bodies, even as young girls, where it’s not OK to go ‘I like my body’.”
There is, she rightly points out, almost a competitive spirit of unflattering comparison, in which girls hold up parts of themselves for group loathing: ‘my thighs are so fat, my stomach is so flabby...’
“It’s a joining-in mechanism,” says Karina, “but a very destructive one. You’re odd for liking your body, and arrogant for admitting it. So you join in. You want to fit in.”
When she was 16, and mad about performing, Karina was in Guys and Dolls. “I had to get into a little outfit, a leotard. Then I started to think ‘oh my goodness, do I need to lose weight?’ That was the first time, for me, that I started to think about dieting. There was a troupe of dancers all in the same boat. Instead of conversations about ‘how much fun is this?’ It was all about our diets.”
As girls, she says, we are on diets before we even know what a diet is, simply because that’s what grownup women “do” and, worse — “that insistence on feeling dissatisfied with how you look”.
All these experiences were slowly contributing to Karina’s insights into weight and body image, but it was really when she moved to London, after school, that the big realisations came.
“I was studying music and drama in Central School of Speech and Drama. I was told by the course director I’d need to lose weight if I didn’t want to always play ‘the fat, sidekick friend’” — even though Karina then was roughly the same size as Karina now — not fat at all.
In London, she lived with a housemate from New York, who “introduced me to diets in a big way, and it was an utter disaster. I got taken over. Probably because I was in the wrong place — I wasn’t meant to be studying what I was studying, it wasn’t right for me — and my housemate’s habits were so bad, and I just took them up. We’d diet all day and then binge. The creepiest thing was that I just put on more and more weight.”
In Artful Eating she describes being “miserable… I did not feel good in my skin and I was no longer my carefree, confident self.”
Only when she returned home to Dublin after her degree did Karina begin to understand what had happened.
“I lost the weight without any big drama. That was easy for me to do, because I hadn’t been overweight for long, and so as soon as I went back to eating normally, for me — it’s different for everybody — the weight fell off. For someone who has been at a heavier weight for a long time, it’s going to take them time. It will be slow.”
But — and this is the fundamental, almost counter-intuitive point of the book — it’s not really about losing weight. “Weight-loss is a ruse,” Karina disarmingly admits. “Yes, you will lose weight, which is lovely, but it’s not about that, it’s about changing your relationship with your body, changing your relationship with food. I think people will struggle to get their head around that — the idea that yes, you can have cake. Within society there is now such a demonisation of food — ‘good’ food and ‘bad’ food. That eats away at you.”
“You only have one life,” is her most heartfelt plea. “There are plenty of things we need to be worried about, with everything that’s going on in the world. There should be so many things to do with our time that there should be no time to spend worrying about weight or what we eat. What we eat should be a positive part of every day, a lovely part of our lives, a time to pause and enjoy.”
Artful Eating came about, partly because as Karina says: “I’ve never been any good at diets,” and so she had to find another way, but also because once she began practicing as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist (basically, it means an emphasis on the unconscious), she found that almost everyone who came to see her, was unhappy with their weight or their body.
“I couldn’t believe it. Every single person who came into my clinic would talk about weight. Regardless of age, sex or size — and I was seeing people aged from 9 or 10 up to 72 or 73; men and women, little and large — everybody at some point would allude to their weight. I thought,
‘what’s going on here?’ Everybody had a relationship to weight and their body that was, to varying degrees, problematic.”
Given the background of our country’s rising obesity crisis, Karina became interested, and started to look into the many, complex, reasons around weight issues. Funnily, at around the same time, she herself had “gotten really into cooking and growing food”.
She began to think about her own weight story — and bit by bit, through “a combination of what I do, what my understanding is and thinking, can this apply to others?” she found herself doing what psychoanalysts usually do not do: giving advice. “It started to develop that I said ‘try this, try that’ and it grew into a thing.” The feedback she got was enthusiastic. “People would say to me, ‘this is so simple, but it works’.”
From there, she moved to designing an online course — “putting into a formal framework all the different aspects” — and now a book.
Artful Eating is detailed and precise. This is not a dip-in-and-out type of book where you take the bits that you like and ignore the rest. It is something to commit to, that requires actual work — deep work, including a thorough overhaul of your living space, a de-cluttering, life-enhancing reorganisation of your personal space. It’s also beautiful, full of gorgeous photographs of cakes, flowers, pretty teacups.
The point is that the way we eat should not be a joyless equation of calories and endless substitutions for sugar. It should be a wonderful part of who we are, and key to everything we do. The reason for all the work is that there is no one-size-fits-all here — and because Karina is a psychoanalyst, things aren’t exactly what they seem; certainly weight isn’t.
“The most important part of the book is that this is your story. It’s how you relate to yourself, how you feel about your weight. What is the function of being overweight for you? There’s a perception that this is something that has happened to you — because of cake, or cream, or life is too stressful, or a slow metabolism. But in actual fact, it’s about how you feel inside and what your story is. Your weight is a symptom of something. You have to question and dig deep. Often weight is an unconscious excuse, it has a function that we’re not aware of. Because it is easy to lose weight. The body allows you to do that. It is absolutely possible. It takes time, but it’s possible.”
So, and this is perhaps a stupid question to ask of a therapist, does she believe that change is possible?
“Of course,” she says immediately. “I know it’s possible, because I’ve seen it, I’ve lived through it, with clients. Change is possible, but only if the person wants it. You may think you want it, but if you’re not acting in line with that change, then you don’t. It takes time. Change happens when you start to look at something differently.”
Karina came to psychoanalysis via a fairly circumstantial route. After graduating from Central School, she came back to Ireland determined to do something completely different.
“After London and how self-absorbed that all was — it was horrible — the pendulum just swung. I needed to give back, do something. I wanted to help. I was an on-street fundraiser for Concern.” A chugger, I ask? “Yes. That’s where I first met my husband, Liam. Then I got an internship in Armenia, working for World Vision, and after I came back to Ireland, I decided to apply for psychology.”
However, a chance meeting with a lecturer, sent her to read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which “blew my mind. It made me really think about, why are so many of the things we do and feel and say, so illogical?”
And so, psychoanalytic psychotherapy followed, in St Vincent’s which is linked with UCD, and where Karina now lectures, as well as her private practice.
She and Liam, who is training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, after many years as friends, began a relationship, married, and, 10 months ago, had Claudia. Karina is very funny about the inevitable
‘Yes, you will lose weight, but it’s not about that, it’s about changing your relationship with your body’
upheaval that follows a baby, particularly a first baby — and just how unprepared she was.
“When I was pregnant I said ‘this is not going to change anything’. I was a primary school teacher for a couple of years, teaching Junior Infants, I love kids, my nephew was a baby when I was still at home. I know how to change a nappy, I had worked with children with behavioural difficulties, I thought, ‘I know all this stuff! I’m going to be so good at this…’ Oh my God! It’s totally different — it’s worse than totally different — when it’s yours.”
And, she is honest too about the real difficulties that come with the upheaval. “I was fine until I stopped breastfeeding. Then I hit a wall. I found it really difficult. I found myself mourning who I was… I’m still that person, but different. It’s hard to get your head around the idea that you become a mother, and it doesn’t happen overnight.”
Claudia, she says “was very wanted, but I probably wouldn’t have had her when I did, except that all my friends were like ‘tick-tock…’ and Liam was dying to have a kid, and there is no good time. So I said, ‘OK, let’s go for it’, and we were lucky, and I got pregnant very quickly, but there was that massive adjustment.”
It’s this ability to be honest — with and about herself — that makes Karina such a good guide through the fundamental alterations that need to come with lasting weight-loss and greater body positivity. So, finally, who is the Artful Eating reader at the end of the book, once they have done all the work, Karina suggests? “That’s a lovely question,” she says. “They are the same person, but they have a different position towards their body and towards food. They are free. So many people have told me that they feel freedom. Freedom around food. Women — men too — tell me ‘I’m enjoying sex more, I’m dressing up and putting on a bit of lipstick every day’. It’s really gorgeous.”
‘Artful Eating: The Psychology of Lasting Weight Loss’, Black & White Publishing, £16.99