You don’t win friends with salad…my husband’s perspective on my disordered eating.
Hi, I’m James. Since Mel and I started dating in February 2011 we’ve gained a probably justified reputation for always being busy. Mel dragged me along (if not kicking and screaming, then at least mildly moaning) to all kinds of weird and wonderful events that tire me out just thinking about. We attended scarecrow festivals, jumped into inflatable rubber doughnuts and careered arse-first down icy rivers in deepest darkest winter, and spent the night cold and ever-so-slightly terrified in an Estonian bear hide (aka, a shed). When we weren’t doing all of the above we’d be trying out the latest local restaurant, or spending as much time as possible on holiday.
Following one of our unconventional getaways, a three month road trip around the USA followed by a month backpacking around Peru in 2013, we decided that we’d spent enough time in each others pockets that we were ready to make the commitment of buying a house together. Fast-forward several more very happy years to our wedding day in autumn 2017. It was a natural and easy step for us both, and my wife looked more perfect than I ever thought possible. Completely in love we both enjoyed the day in the company of our close friends and family.
If you think the picture I am painting is one of rainbows, lollipops and saccharine domestic bliss then that’s because it pretty much was. Mel and I, without significant deviation had a happy, fulfilling relationship in every way. Arguments were extremely rare and quickly forgotten, we had a great life and a despite my half-hearted grumpiness — a lot of fun; often having all weekends booked up months in advance. I’d often joke that Mel was my social secretary; organising our hectic but happy lifestyle.
At the time of our wedding I’d estimate that Melanie weighed in at 8st or perhaps a little over. In hindsight as Mel is fairly tall this was too close to the bottom of the BMI range for comfort, but she had been an athletic build since the day we met, so it was normal for her. At this time I don't think that either of us ever had given our weight a second thought, we didn’t even have scales in the house. It wasn’t until summer 2018 when my attention was first drawn to a potential problem.
Following dinner with my family, my mum confided in me that she was worried Mel was too thin. Initially I shrugged her comments off as overly maternal. It was the kind of thing I’d heard said about almost everyone that had ever set foot inside my grandma’s house, shortly before they were force fed cakes/biscuits/and in at least one known case…pork chops; regardless of their weight. I assumed mum was following in grandma’s footsteps. Regrettably, like perhaps many people in my situation, because I saw Mel day-in-day-out I struggled to see her weight loss at first.
Over the next few months I struggled to understand whether the seed that had been planted by my mum was making me see problems that weren’t there, or whether Mel had actually lost that half inch of cushion around her bum, or whether her pelvis and lower spine (which never had much fat on them to begin with) had become more pronounced. Mel hadn’t obviously changed her diet or stepped up her fitness regime; admittedly she’d opt for the ‘healthy choice’ more often than not and enjoyed exercise more than most people… certainly more than me, but that had always been the case. It was a confusing time, I was stuck halfway between denying there was a problem on Mel’s behalf, but also being worried about her and questioning whether I should bring it up with her directly.
While we were on holiday in Slovenia I finally plucked up the courage to express some of my concerns knowing that it would likely upset her. I don’t remember what made me choose a lovely relaxing holiday to do so, but I’d been sitting on my worries for a while and I needed to get them off my chest. Mel thought I was fretting over nothing, and my insistence that we talk about it on holiday made her upset. I felt worse not better, and felt dissuaded from bringing the matter up again.
I’ve known Mel for long enough to know she is a sensitive person, so I thought a better way to approach the situation would be to go gently and not make it about her. I tried to encourage larger portions sizes by praising the meal itself when there was lots of food; saying the food was delicious and we should have it again next week, or if I didn’t feel like it was a substantial plate I’d make light-hearted jokes like singing and dancing the “You don’t win friends with salad” from the Simpsons around our tiny kitchen — and fair play to her, Mel joined in with it. Not that she listened to the message and put any more food on her plate though.
On the odd occasion I did properly bring up her weight up in conversation, Mel was so unusually firm with her dismissal that it took several more months before I was certain there was an issue. “I don’t have a problem with my weight. I haven’t changed anything, and nothing is wrong”, was her common refrain. Mel can be to the surprise of most people, given her gentle, upbeat nature — extremely stubborn when she believes she is right. She gave absolutely no ground that the problem even existed, never mind being willing to discuss the cause; but as time went by the pounds very slowly but very surely continued to fall away from her.
Increasingly concerned by Mel’s weight, in December ’18 I bought some scales feigning a desire to put some weight on myself in the hope that she would either come along with me on a weight gain journey or use the scales in private and scare herself into action. Unfortunately Mel did neither, and I got a bit chunkier. My subsequent pleas to monitor her weight only served to make her more defensive and the pleas ultimately fell on deaf ears.
As is natural (I think) I eventually and somewhat inevitably ended up going down the Google rabbit hole of doom wondering whether there was an underlying medical cause. During the course of a few weeks I must have scoured the entire NHS website, consuming article after article about potential causes for unintentional weight loss convincing myself that Mel had something serious. Why else would someone’s weight decline when there were seemingly no radical changes in diet or exercise? Mel booked an appointment with the GP, mostly to shut me up, which I felt was a step in a direction, even if I didn’t know whether it was the right direction.
I’d half expected the doctor to think of Mel as a10-minute inconvenience, and I was right. A generic prodding of her abdomen, height and weight measurements taken and we were sent packing without any advice or way forward being suggested. It took far too much energy to persuade the doctor to check her blood work, but over the course of six months various tests were eventually taken and thankfully the results did come back healthy. Her GP was far from proactive, so after some more gentle persuasion we finally received a referral to see an NHS dietician. Mel was upset about what people might think if they found out she was seeing a dietician, but I felt confident that they would be best placed to either spot a glaring diet deficiency or to identify an eating disorder; not that I said that to Melanie for fear of scaring her off.
I wasn’t able to attend the first dietician session but Mel was asked to keep a food diary, which was to be reviewed a few weeks later. At the review I thought it encouraging that the dietician didn’t seem to think Mel’s daily intake was too far away from normal, but I was also worried that she was failing to get an accurate picture because there was no discussion about the amount of each food Mel was eating. Still, we walked away with a prescription for several months supply of weight gain milkshakes, taken once-a-day with the aim of adding an additional 300 daily calories to Mel’s diet.
A number of weeks into the ‘fat shake’ regime (as Mel had jokingly, but perhaps tellingly named them) there was no improvement. I had a feeling that Mel was removing items from her diet to compensate for the shakes, but this was just a feeling and hard to prove. You cannot be with someone 24/7… well, you couldn’t prior to COVID anyway, and with us both working I had to assume my wife who I’d never had reason to mistrust before was eating normally. However the fact Mel had not gained a single pound led me to suspect that she was either substituting food or exercising the extra 300 calories away.
I tried on many, many occasions to convince Mel to limit her exercise, asking her to just stop running for a month to see if she gained weight; to rule out a medical problem. However, exercise had always been a big part of Mel’s life, and to her this was an impossible ask. To this day the majority of my wife’s family take a great amount of of pride from being able to walk the fastest or the furthest, or from being able to run around the reservoir-de-jeur in the quickest time. I would not necessarily describe this behaviour as competitive, it is more a firm belief that doing those things is ‘healthy’ for body and mind, and doing them faster or for longer is ‘more healthy’.
To me this is weird, mostly because I get zero pleasure out of non-competitive exercise — but I suppose it’s fine if someone is in control. For Mel though exercising had become a harmful compulsion. At less than 7st she would still run 7 miles every weekend whatever the weather, in addition to hitting the gym a couple of times in the week for classes, and an extra 5km on the treadmill or rowing machine. I could see that nothing I could say was going to change Mel’s mind so I gave up trying, accepting that it was not a battle I was equipped to win. Exercise was too tangled up with Mel’s sense of self to be changed unless she wanted to change it. I had to focus on how she fuelled her body instead.
In an attempt to make Mel more accountable and appeal to the side of her that loves checking things off a list, I roughly calculated her BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate — the minimum calories needed to keep yourself at the same weight) and I asked that she track her own calorie intake and weigh herself weekly. It was now well over a year since I’d first spoken to her about my concerns and we were both becoming increasingly fatigued with multiple daily discussions about portion sizes, exercise, and why she’d failed to track calories like she told me she would. Mel never forgets anything, but it was amazing how many times she ‘forgot’ to track calories. There was a small breakthrough in that I’d persuaded Mel to use our unloved scales, but the reality of seeing the numbers in person was shocking. At 6st 10lbs she was clinically anorexic, and it was terrifying and upsetting in equal measure. The first challenge was for her to admit that there was a problem, no matter what the root cause, and to actually commit to acting on it. Unfortunately at that point in time we were still a long way from that milestone.
Panicked by her situation I abandoned the softly-softly approach altogether, giving Mel a baby-step target of reaching 7st and I took over tracking her weight myself. Mel absolutely hated this, but I needed to do something as I was scared I’d lose her if her weight loss continued. At first Mel put on a couple of pounds and I was delighted with the breakthrough, but over time a pattern emerged where any weight gained would be cancelled out by losses in the following weeks. Despite paying lip service to the idea of putting weight on, Mel simply didn’t want to. I was torn between believing that the doctors had missed something serious and a growing realisation that Mel did have some food and exercise hang-ups that might be part of an eating disorder.
Around this time Mel’s initially dismissive and defensive behaviour gained an unwelcome accusatory edge which was extremely hard to deal with. It wasn’t the Mel I know and love. At times when I brought up the topic of her weight she would tell me that I should stop trying give her a weight complex, followed by tears and refusing to talk to me. I’d often end up apologising just to re-establish normality but it was incredibly upsetting for me. I felt that by saying sorry I was giving Mel permission to avoid facing reality. It was heartbreaking how Mel could look in the mirror, or at the miniscule number on the scales and be so deeply in denial that she could tell me straight-faced that nothing was wrong — and that it was all in my head.
My main concern was lunchtime, as this was the only meal I could not feasibly observe Mel eating as we were both at work. After a bit of poking about I discovered that she’d only been taking sandwiches and an apple to work and sometimes going to the gym after work without eating anything additional. Mel agreed with me that this probably wasn't enough food, so she started taking a falafel, or sometimes the world’s most embarrassingly small pizza slice to work as a snack. It was by no means enough to keep an adult going all day, but at the time I saw this as a little victory towards her getting better. Looking back now I see clearly that Mel was doing the bare minimum to show me what I wanted to see, but she was still very much in denial.
On Mel’s third and final appointment with the NHS dietician Mel was prescribed even more shakes and the dietician suggested we go back to the doctors to get further unspecified checks done. Mel wasn’t impressed that she had to add more ‘fat shakes’, telling me that there was too much sugar in them. Not that it mattered, she wasn’t drinking them anyway. As well as observing what she was taking to work I’d been counting the remaining shakes in the cupboard for the last few weeks and Mel was only having one every two days and sometimes nothing at all. The hardest part of this whole ordeal was the realisation that the person I trusted more than anyone else in the world was not being honest with me or herself. I kept Mel’s secret to myself for a while, neither being able to process it nor knowing how to best act on the information.
I knew Mel would accuse me of spying on her, to be fair I was — but the only way I could see to get shake-gate out in the open was to confront Mel directly. As you might imagine it was a very awkward conversation to have with a loved one, but Mel did own up to drinking less than one per day, and where she had drank a shake there had been occasions where she had removed other items from her diet to compensate. I asked desperately why she had done those things, but Mel couldn’t say. She just had. Melanie promised to have two shakes a day as long as she could buy some healthier but similar calorie whey protein bulk powder instead, which I agreed to in the hope Mel would turn the corner if she felt in control.
At this stage Mel was very obviously critically underweight but she still spent time and money to make herself look good. There was an odd contradiction in her behaviour. Melanie made no secret to me that she was trying to control the perception of others by buying clothes to cover her wasting arms, and wearing jeans designed for pre-pubescent girls to hide the fact her old ones hung off her now tiny frame, while simultaneously insisting to me that she had “always been size 6” even though we both knew it wasn’t true. Challenging Mel would lead to more arguments, tears, accusations, rinse and repeat. I think Mel believed that the problem was other people’s perception of her weight, not her weight itself. If she could get others to stop thinking she was too thin, might the problem go away?
In private Mel didn’t seem particularly ashamed of her body. Our romantic life continued pretty much normally throughout her weight loss; something I felt guilty about. Sex used calories that she couldn't spare, but I didn’t want to lose that bond between us for fear our relationship would become one of carer/patient. It was such a difficult balance between keeping Mel’s self-esteem intact when she asked me if she looked beautiful, and not encouraging her weight problem. I dealt with it by hiding my deep sadness as I slowly watched the femininity waste from her once perfect body over the course of nearly two years. Her skin was no longer soft, her frame was nothing if it was not skeletal, and she was incredibly, incredibly fragile.
Even though I’d tell myself I was still attracted to Mel for sanity’s sake, I don’t think I really believed it. Our intimate times had become a time to inspect the damage she was doing to herself. I remember laying in bed looking at her side-on as she undressed one evening, and seeing that as she bent forward her knickers sagged deeply away from her public bone like a sail in the wind. I could see clean through to the bedroom wall at the other side. It’s an awful thing to think about one’s own wife, but seeing that made me feel sick and marked a major uptick in urgency for me. She was killing herself and desperately needed professional help.
I’d begged Mel to gain weight and she promised me that she would eat more, but it would rarely happen in successive weeks. The cycle of promises, hope and disappointment would then be repeated a week later on weigh day. At the time I put as brave a face on as I could muster, but I’m not afraid to say that I struggled to keep it together mentally as my thoughts were never too far away from Mel’s dire situation. I researched the different eating disorders and their manifestations: Anorexia, Bulimia, and one I’d never heard of before called Orthorexia — an eating disorder characterised by an obsession with healthy eating and over-exercise. If Mel did have an eating disorder Orthorexia was probably the closest. I asked Mel whether she thought she might have Orthorexia and showed her a website on the subject, I think she did see something of herself in what she read, but she focused on the pieces that didn’t fit.
It’s a thankless task loving someone with an eating disorder. I was the bad guy — the food police as Mel sometimes referred to me. Unlike with a teenager or child, being the partner of an adult-onset sufferer is a particularly precarious position. I could not demand anything from Melanie, she is her own adult woman and every time I mentioned her weight I risked chipping away at our relationship.
The only person I could really talk to about all this was my mum, who did understand to an extent and helped me vent, but sometimes I felt under suspicion of being complicit in Mel’s weight loss because I wasn’t seen to be ‘doing enough’. Everything is so black and white from the outside: if Mel weighs too little, then get her to eat more food. Simple, right?
I spoke about Mel’s disordered eating to a couple of friends I’ve known all my adult life and got very little back in return. I don't think they knew how to relate or react, which I suppose I can understand…and eating disorders are probably a bit of conversational hot Bombay potato for a lads curry night. Perhaps looking at social media, they thought everything was fine but I wasn’t asked about it again, and still haven’t been to this day. Of course, social media is the carefully curated ‘best bits’, not the evenings spent crying for your wife to stop starving herself.
There is very little support out there for sufferers of eating disorders, especially for people that develop symptoms in adulthood and their families. I was utterly ill prepared to deal with Mel’s psychological state (and I do not pretend to understand it any better now), alongside unpicking my own conflicted thoughts. The role of ‘partner of someone with an eating disorder’ is one of a willing but helpless bystander. I was unable to protect the person I care most about in the world, and every way I tried to fix the problem entrenched me deeper as the enemy. I considered all kinds of bizarre options to try to help Mel that made perfect sense at the time, such as:
· Starving myself by eating the same as her so she could see what she was doing to her body by proxy.
· Physically stopping her from exercising, by stopping her from leaving the house… not breaking her legs; which incidentally would have been easy as they were so thin.
· Committing her to some kind of institution, if such an institution exists.
· Picking up our lives and moving to Bristol to be closer to her twin sister who’d recently moved away, just in case that was the trigger.
· Appealing to her that we might struggle to have children if she didn’t gain weight.
· I contemplated moving out and even leaving Mel as a shock tactic, but I thought better of it. At least when I was there I could see what she was eating.
…but ultimately the only person that could make the decision to get better was Mel, I couldn’t force her, I could only try to nudge her towards the right path.
One day while I was at work I called up a local eating disorder clinic to see if they could offer guidance. They reassured me that they might be able to help if Mel personally came to them for an appointment. I spoke to Mel about it that night and left it up to her how to proceed. I was pretty surprised and relieved to learn that the following day Mel did call the clinic. This was the first occasion Mel had taken responsibility for her situation, and it was a big step for her. Mel had several more telephone consultations between late 2019 to early 2020 which resulted in a diagnosis of Anorexia Nervosa.
Mel reacted really badly to this at first and I thought I’d made a huge mistake by contacting the clinic, but it was this (probably incorrect) Anorexia diagnosis that eventually kickstarted Mel’s recovery as she felt aggrieved that she had been labelled with a condition she didn’t think she had. I said she was stubborn, didn’t I? I think she wanted to show them that she wasn’t anorexic — and I was delighted that she wanted to prove that, finally we wanted the same thing. This turning point also coincided with Mel being on furlough due to the pandemic, and although it is absolutely terrible how many people have suffered as a result of death, illness and lost jobs/income, it was nothing short of critical in Mel’s recovery. I honestly do not think that she would have recovered so rapidly if she hadn’t been legally forced to limit her activity, stay indoors and focus on eating properly.
By mid-2020 and with the encouragement of the support staff and dietician at the eating disorder clinic Mel had worked hard to make a near full recovery back to 8st. The weight she was at our wedding. She did it her way; only putting on ‘healthy’ mass (which at the time I thought was code for “I’m not committing to this”) not stuffing her face with McDonalds — at times I wish she’d grab a dozen Big Mac’s just so we could stop talking about weight! Mel never has fully acknowledged having an eating disorder, and I agree that she did not have a ‘traditional’ eating disorder like the ones I’d researched. Nevertheless, she definitely did have to work hard on her relationship with food and exercise over the course of 2020 to re-define what healthy meant to her. Nothing is plain sailing and there are still minor wobbles from time to time but I feel incredibly lucky to have her back to a safe weight…and that our conversations about food now are just whether it tastes good.
Unfortunately one of the warnings I gave to Mel about her weight loss being detrimental to her fertility has so far proved prophetic. Mel stopped taking the contraceptive pill almost a year ago, and her periods have not returned. She has since been advised by a gynaecologist to gain an additional stone in weight (to 9st) to give her the best chance of her periods coming back — more than she has ever weighed. Mel has since determinedly soldiered on with the additional weight gain. I’m so proud that when she thought she’d already scaled the peak, and realised that she must go double-distance she has still applied herself and proved to be up to the task. Mel is now very nearly there, a handful of pounds to go… that’s what, five Steak Bakes and a bag of chips? Hopefully mother nature respects all her hard work.
Taken alongside a hectic social life, work, running and gym classes; what was in actual fact was a relatively small calorie deficit meant Mel was not fueling her body sufficiently to maintain her weight. It had taken its toll slowly, perhaps even over the course of several years without anyone really noticing. I think back now to two or three faint spells Mel had at work back in 2015 or 2016 and wonder whether this marked the start of Mel’s issues with food, but no-one, including Mel can be sure. As I write this, a little more than a month over our ten years together and three years married; I’m happy to say that despite the challenges of the last two years, we’ve stuck by each other for better or worse and will continue to do so no matter what happens.