Sunday
12PMOne fried egg, one chicken sausage,
spinach, 1/4 avocado, grilled portobello
mushroom and tomato, baked beans on gluten-
free toast, grapefruit juice, almond milk latte.
Hello, England! Or should I say “toodle- oo”?
I am so excited to be visiting the very
country that generated both Shakespeare
and Cadbury Creme Eggs. I am ostensibly
travelling to research a film project about a
young medieval woman bucking against
societal expectations, but I am equally excited
to research traditional British food. Yes, that
much-derided cuisine of carbs that encircle
other carbs, giving birth to still more carbs.
And I sure have had trouble resisting carbs
lately, which is why I am keeping this food diary.
I f I write down what I eat, I ’ ll ha ve to hold myself
accountable and accountable people don’t
gain 3Olb in a single month. Yes, I am body
positive but I am also a young single woman
working in Hollywood, and I can’t just pretend
that weight is not a thing. It’s a thing.
2PM French fries (‘chips’) with ketchup,
two Diet Cokes.
7PMEar l Grey wit h almond milk and Splenda.
Splenda is garbage that just makes us sadder!Sadness is the only thing that’s ever made me
lose weight. Two years ago, during the last
gasps of my six-year relationship, I lost weight.
Not a little weight. Not the kind of weight where
your bras feel kind of generous and you mar vel
at your subtle but oh-wow-it’s-definitely-there-
now clavicle. No, it was a lot of weight. The kind
of weight that makes your trousers fall down
and the salespeople in Barney’s fawn, and
your great aunt asks if you’re eating with faux-
concern. (She’s a glamour puss, she loves this.)
It happened, like many things, at first slowly,
then all at once. It started with a stomach
infection that necessitated a diet of basmati
rice and bottles of Pedialyte (didn’t hate it). Then
came the 2O16 election, when we all either
started or stopped eating en masse and then
to a romantic island vacation that was so bereft
of romance I could barely stomach a spoonful
of yogurt. After my second fainting spell, my
boyfriend called for a doctor from the largest
Maldivian island, who poked at my concave
stomach and scrunched his face up in confusion
and asked how I’d been feeling otherwise.
I wouldn’t have told him, or anyone, that my
boyfriend and I were fighting all the time.We d n e s d a y
11A MBlack coffee, Earl Grey tea.
12PM Ham and butter on white bread,
fruit cup, can of coffee.
This ham sandwich has become my equivalent
of masturbation – does Fergus judge me? Does
he notice I rushed back quickly from the manor
house we visited this morning asking about
the nearest convenience store, where I acted
surprised to come upon a ham sandwich?
3PMIced coffee, five oat cakes, two roast
chicken-flavour chips (or should it be ‘crisps’?).
The chips are like something Willy Wonka would
invent, cognitive dissonance as the crispness of
chips meets the vibe of a roast chicken. How
does anyone in this country get any work done
when there are these chips to ponder?
4PMCereal milk latte.
More foods meant to taste like other foods.
A horrifying invention the barista at Starbucks
describes as ‘tasting a bit like soggy cereal!’
Take two sips, dismiss it totally, finish it anyway.Tuesday
11A MCoffee with milk.
1.3OPMCoffee with soya, three oat cakes
(delicious, hard to resist, not-really-healthy-
but-also-not-really-bad-for-you crackers), two
pieces of salami, fruit cup with pineapple juice.
3PMHam, cheese, lettuce and mayo on white
bread (a dream, a fantasy, each bite as guilt-
inducing and joyful as nailing someone else’s
husband!), one packet of potato chips, two bites
of apple, chocolate bar, two sparkling waters.
4PMCoke Zero.
5PM1/4 bag of chocolate, cranberry and
nut mix, lifted from the snack box provided by
Fergus – the driver taking me through the
countryside so I can behold medieval
architecture and understand how to write this
movie. Fergus wears a striped shirt (‘Loops’, he
corrects me. ‘Stripes go up and down, loops
go “around”.’) He seems to eat what he wants
but often says no to my offered crackers, like
someone who is in control of their basic faculties.
I don’t justeatthe nut mix. I stuff it into my
gullet through anxiety-inducing texts to the
US, unwanted yet still consumed, just as I’m
consumed with pleasing people I barely care
about. *Pick nuts out of teeth with an earring.*When my boyfriend and I broke up, I quickly
took a lover. I’d known him from childhood andI wouldn’t have mentioned the fantasies – sudden
endings and infinite new beginnings – that
ke p t m e u p a t n i g h t. B u t m y b oy f r i e n d c o m p l a i n e d
that I picked at what I was served now or
ordered oddly (there was a month of shrimp
summer rolls, another month of hamburgers
without the bun) and I was without an appetite,
an experience I was utterly unfamiliar with.
At the end of the relationship, weight was
falling off in double digits but, as I explained to
close friends, I experienced none of the heady
triumph of women showing off their formerly
huge jeans in a weight-loss pills ad. My body
felt frail and unlike my own. At night, I curled
into a ball, shirking his touch. Soon, he didn’t try.
I told myself this was what relationships are
like after half a decade of cohabitation. Now, if
I did too much of anything it was work. I’d chew
Klonopin [used to treat panic attacks] into a
chalk y paste bet ween my molars and my cheek.
I learned to like the taste of pills, bitter and dry.was, in many ways, exactly as I remembered:
goofy, physical, boyish and sweet. I went from
barely being touched to being the definition
of touch. We lay in bed, stretched across
each other in improbable configurations,
like lounging cats. We kissed non-stop, not
caring who was watching: at parties when
I was meant to be networking, at dinner with
my family, waiting for a taxi as teenagers
laughed at us for being adults who couldn’t
stop licking each other’s faces. And we ate.
We ate all day, runny eggs and cake with
icing, hot dogs in the morning and hamburgers
late at night, Chinese food in Chinatown and
Italian food in Little Italy and there was nothing
I wouldn’t try and nothing I didn’t love. And when
the media got wind of my breakup, we hid out
in Venice Beach for a long weekend to evade
discovery, eating croissants, drinking lattes
and taking baths so long the water got cold.
Looking back at the photos that remain
from that period (in a fit of confused grief after
it ended, I deleted most of them so I have
to Google ‘Lena Dunham breakup’ to see
anything), I look like a baby chicken who has
stepped into an electric socket, all awkward
limbs and hair sticking out every which way. My
old clothes were too big but, with all this eating,
my new ones were growing too tight. I was an
ingénue in my own story, and my life was a
non-stop celebration. The party was catered.ELLEFeature114 ELLE.COM/UK November 2O19