MOTHER WHO BECAME ADDICTED TO DIETING
All too often, it’s mums who watch in despair as their daughters starve themselves in pursuit of the perfect body. In this family, roles were shockingly reversed ...
THE lettuce had too much dressing. The salmon had been cooked in the wrong oil. There were too many boiled potatoes and she suspected the carrots had been roasted in alltoo-fattening butter.
As Alison Alden pushed food around her plate in the restaurant, her family looked on in silence, willing her to eat something . . . anything.
dining out had become fraught with embarrassment and anxiety for all concerned. While at home, Alison would avoid mealtimes altogether. Though unable to admit it, she had become addicted to dieting. Over four years she had lost three stone and now weighed just 5st 7lb.
But Alison wasn’t an impressionable, image- conscious teen — she was a 40- something mother- of-three, and it was her children who were trying to get her to eat.
Her daughter Barbie, then 15, was forced into the role of worried parent, desperate for Alison to realise the damage she was wreaking on herself — and the whole of the family.
‘The overriding memory from my teenage years is of feeling utter frustration,’ she says. ‘I’d lie awake at night worrying about whether Mum would end up hospitalised or even die, but I was angry rather than concerned. I was so cross with her for doing it to herself — and to us.’
Barbie, now a 29-year- old paediatric registrar, began to lose her doting mother to anorexia 16 years ago.
‘Mum started to slip away from us, as if she always had something more important to do or to think about,’ she recalls. ‘We never wanted for anything at all and there was always plenty of good, home- cooked food on the table, but she became distant, unapproachable, even.’
Alison, now 56, is not alone in her mid-life anorexia, although it is often assumed only young girls suffer from the illness.
STATISTICS are not yet categorised by age, but eating disorders charity B-eat has seen an anecdotal rise in the number of over40s seeking medical help for it.
Spokesperson rebecca Field says: ‘The figures monitor those in in- patient treatment and don’t show the number of people receiving out-patient treatment — or indeed those who haven’t sought help at all.
‘In the past ten years, we’ve been able to understand much more about the combination of factors causing the illness.
‘There is a genetic influence, which affects a person’s personality type. Brain chemistry also plays a part. Although an older person may always have had those risk factors, it can take a combination of life events and social pressures for the illness to develop.’
Some experts blame the expectation that older women should not only have a career, children and marriage but maintain an age-defying figure, too.
And anorexia is often triggered by a desire to gain control during a chaotic or stressful time. Alison says this is how her own illness started. Approaching her 40th birthday, she felt ‘ nothing was going right’.
She and husband Graham, now 59, owned a haulage business in Norfolk, which was under huge financial pressure. The stress of calling in debts and juggling a busy household — Barbie has two younger brothers, Alan, then 13, and Neil, ten — took its toll.
It was when Alison decided to treat herself to a makeover — a new haircut and clothes — that she began dieting.
She says: ‘At 5ft 4in and 8st 7lb I wasn’t fat, but like most women I thought I could do with losing a few pounds. I never intended to lose a huge amount. I just wanted to feel better about myself.
‘My husband had always been the type to compliment me on the way I looked, but the pressures we were both under meant it was the last thing that was on his mind.’
Alison began her diet by simply switching to skimmed from fullcream milk, and from butter to low-fat spread. ‘I started getting compliments and it became addictive,’ says Alison. ‘I got a buzz from being able to control what I put in my mouth and lose
weight.’ Soon, without her family even realising Alison was counting every single calorie.
‘At last, I had total control over something, and it felt wonderful,’ she recalls. ‘It didn’t matter how horrible people were to me or what else was going on, as long as I could retreat into my little bubble where all I thought about was food, I was OK. I’d finally found my safe haven.’
It was only after a year that Alison’s family cottoned on. ‘ She began making excuses not to join us at mealtimes,’ Barbie recalls. ‘She claimed to be too busy or told us she’d eat with Dad when he arrived home later.
‘Of course we accepted it at first. We were just children, after all, too caught up in our own little dramas to even notice.
‘But as Mum got thinner and thinner, she would snap and try to change the subject if we asked if she was eating with us.
‘We felt like we were always walking on eggshells, even when trying to start a conversation with her.
‘There wasn’t a light-bulb moment when we realised she’d pulled the wool over our eyes. It dawned on us gradually that she hadn’t been eating with Dad, and she’d been telling him she’d eaten with us and gone the whole evening without having anything at all.’ By then, Alison’s hip bones were protruding and her arms and legs were stick-thin. But she still saw a fat person staring back at her in the mirror. And so the starvation continued.
Her lunchtime sandwich became a lettuce wrap, which became just lettuce, cucumber, tomato and onion. Eventually she dropped the tomato, too, afraid of the sugar content. At her worst, Alison would go four days without eating, followed by four days of salad.
Barbie remembers coming home from school and seeing her mother dressed in one of her little brother’s jumpers or clothes she herself had long grown out of.
On one shopping trip, Alison picked out a pair of jeans that had been cut to flatter the bottom. Barbie snapped: ‘Why would you want those? You haven’t even got a bum!’
She recalls sounding like ‘a mother tired of telling her toddler the same thing over and over again’.
And her resentment towards her mother intensified: ‘ I’d go to friends’ houses and see their loving and normal relationships with their mums, and wondered why mine couldn’t be the same.
‘I couldn’t talk to my mum, so I became very independent, building a wall around myself so I felt I didn’t need anybody.
Barbie says her fierce independence has advantages but means she is less willing to let anyone get close to her. And what about her own body image?
‘ I don’t think I worry about my weight, but my friends would disagree,’ she says. ‘They’ve often told me I have an unhealthy interest in “good” foods and think too much about how I look. I’m a size 10-12 and I know I’m not fat, but I do keep a keen eye on what I have to eat — it’s a throwback from those teenage years.’
YET such was the distance between Barbie and her mother by the time she sat her A- levels that, they didn’t discuss her future. ‘She knew I planned to study medicine in Newcastle, but I’d see friends poring over prospectuses with their mums, looking at the pros and cons of each course.
‘I never did that. I made all my decisions myself.’
It was when Barbie returned home after her first year at university that all of the frustrations boiled over.
‘I’d been at a friend’s house where her mum had been clearly happy to have her home, then I came back to our house to find my mum sitting on a chair staring into space like a frail old lady,’ she says.
‘And for the first time ever, I just looked at her and pleaded: “Mum, why don’t you just eat?”’
It was the first time anyone had properly confronted Alison. Her husband Graham had ‘been subtly trying to make her eat’, but had never told it to her straight. Alison says: ‘The look of pain on Barbie’s face broke my heart. At that moment, I finally realised the damage I’d been doing.
‘Barbie bolted out of the door, so I didn’t have a chance to respond. I told myself I had too many jobs to do to go after her, but the truth was, I didn’t know what to say.’
It made Alison think for the first time of the consequences for her family should she die of starvation, so she went to the doctor. But though she weighed just 5st 7lb, her GP diagnosed depression and prescribed antidepressants.
‘I realised if I didn’t take things into my own hands, I’d be putting myself in grave danger,’ she says. ‘I banned myself from looking in the mirror and willed myself to eat four times a day, even if it was just a mouthful of sandwich.’
LATER the GP referred her to a mental-health nurse who diagnosed an eating disorder, coupled with depression, and Alison was sent to a psychiatrist.
‘As soon as I started to eat, even a little bit, I felt better physically,’ says Alison. ‘I had so much more energy, and that feeling of the life seeping out of me disappeared.
‘The psychiatrist taught me to break the connection between emotions and food.’ Alison also began to realise how distant she’d been and began building bridges. ‘Barbie became ill shortly afterwards and had polyps in her throat that recurred,’ recalls Alison. ‘She needed regular surgery, so I’d go to Newcastle, to nurse her each time. ‘ She was like my baby again, and it gave me a chance to make up for when I wasn’t there for her.’ Now, 12 years on, Barbie lives in Norwich with her husband, Adam, 30, a bar manager, and their two-year- old daughter, Freya. It was Freya’s arrival that helped heal the rift with her mother once and for all.
‘I look after Freya while Barbie goes to work so we have a very close relationship, and that helped Barbie and I rebuild ours,’ says Alison.
‘I know I can’t undo what I did to Barbie, but if I’m the best grandma I can be, it might make up for it.
‘Barbie knows I’m here for her, and I’ll never let her down again.’
Barbie says: ‘I don’t feel resentful for those lost years — she was ill, after all, and it wasn’t her fault — but I do feel sad it happened.
‘As a new mum, I naturally turned to mine for advice and, thankfully, she was there for me. She’s a really wonderful grandma. I’m very lucky to have her back.’
Alison, whose weight now varies between 7st 7lb and 8st, says: ‘I can’t believe I let something come between us like that. But my experience just shows how tight a grip anorexia can have — and not just on vulnerable, young girls.’