8. What am I really hungry for?
When you eat more than you’d meant to, drink more than you need, spend more than you can afford, something in you is pleading for a conversation. Obesity is a sign of undernourishment, the body calling out ‘more, more’, hoping to siphon grains of goodness from processed food. Next time you over-indulge in any area, don’t punish yourself, ask yourself, ‘What am I really hungry for?’
The above is another quote from ‘What I learned today’ by my secular guru, Rikki Beadle Blair. Buy this book. Have it kicking around in your flat. It is essential life-equipment. Even more than a cafetière. And I would be delighted if you subscribed (see below, or in the column to the right) to my serialised autobiography A SMALL LIFE and thereby, simultaneously, to this blog. This would mean that each Thursday you’d get a little reminder-email of my story’s next installment and also that there’s a new pic and further conversation, and maybe a new poem… Which you might of course ignore/delete if you are busy. I don’t want to twist your arm, but will just say that every new addition to my subscribers list makes me ecstatically happy…
Art
Colin Morgan’s painting is of one of the poses I got from my Lucien Freud book. It looks a bit sexier than I thought I was being. Colin attends Doug Binder’s group at Dean Clough where his habitual cheery greeting is ‘Gerremoff’. I have now got over my Freud phase. I have a series of nativity poses: I do a good Angel Gabriel, also donkey.
Life
Arty fashion illustrator Feisty Fraulein J, she who enjoys the fantastical imagery of ‘more than humanly possible perfection’ in fashion illustration (see last week’s bloggery), has shown me a really interesting article on body image from The Guardian.
There seems to be a complex linkage between sex and self esteem and eating habits, and there are ever more eating disorders. Why? What’s going on? The article points to the insidious effects on us all of the standard practice of Photoshopping to perfection 2-D images of faces and bodies; also to the sheer number of ‘images of human perfection’ with which we are now bombarded in this visual era. But there’s so much more to it than those two factors.
Despite my claims to be liberated from all that (look at how I blithely get out my varicose-veined, scrawny old body)… I hereby confess to Food Anxiety. In my former life I loved food. Not the prep – not my strong point – but the aesthetics of it, the smell, the presentation, the taste, texture, the ambience of a shared meal, of an eating place. Now, food makes me anxious. So if you are kind enough to invite me round to eat, please – no carbs, sugar or fat. I will be delighted to eat nuts, seeds, plain yoghurt with bio-culture in it, and raw garlic cloves. Thank you so much.
This is a bit of a digression but I’ve just met up with First Proper Girlfriend’s ex-husband (she left him and moved in with me, all long, long ago). He was/is a mental health professional who also writes on the subject, who has spent the last few years as a Catholic monk but has left the community (I am adding this last bit because, well, it’s just interesting isn’t it). Anyway, our conversation educated me with the following info:
1) A third to a half of females who are traumatically sexually abused will develop an eating disorder – this may often be obesity. And it’s often true for men as well.
2) Historically, many female monastics, as in, nuns living an enclosed life – perhaps more than a quarter – had suffered sexual abuse (‘systematic/prolonged or traumatic’ abuse), which, when manifesting in eating disorders, got praised because they described it as ‘I’m having a week in the desert’, or ‘I’m fasting today’, or ‘I’m just going to subsist on the Holy Sacrament for the next three days’. (He did add though that today most monasteries are aware of this, and would see these problems as a red flag to entry).
No, I cannot verify any of this, but then I am not writing a thesis. And I trust my source.
At the end of this month’s topic (on Body Image – did you notice?) here’s a post-script from the inimitable Nic Carlyle:
‘One of my internet friends, Otis B Schucklemeyer III PhD (Spread-the-Word University, Alabama), reminded me that anorexia and other eating disorders are the product of manipulation of people since the late nineteenth century by the giant and growing food corporations who are ruled by inter-planetary multi-dimensional beings intent on cropping humans for physical essential fats (obesity) or nervous energy (anorexia). The full argument’s given in his revelatory book, Fat is an Alien Issue.’
Love
There are huge advantages to being alone. I just have to think some up.
Is being somebody’s part-time no.1 preferable to being nobody’s no.1?
Shortly after I wrote in last week’s blog (home alone, bruised after my bicycle accident) about Secret Lover’s family inevitably coming first, who should show up on my doorstep but… Secret Lover. Kissed better my two swollen knees and my left elbow. Left.
When I am honest with myself I know I am Secret Lover’s no.6-ish, rather than no.1 (part-time), but that’s okay because I’m busy.
Living alone
As I spend another Friday night home alone with a low-cal mini-wine, Nic emails a greeting from sophisticated London where he is setting out for ‘some nefarious drinkies with the Egypt Exploration Society, possibly re-enacting the resurrection of Osiris by Isis with chickens’. Yes he’s real. See here.
Which would I rather do, the mini-wine or Osiris’s resurrection? Or just weep?
PS: Attention UK readers – Aldi STILL has a brut champagne on at £12.99. It’s been 12 months. Awesome.
This week’s pic: COLIN MORGAN artistsandillustrators.co.uk/colin-john-morgan
OLD COMMENTS
These were the 42 Responses from the original blog. They have been copied here to the newly revised website. It is possible to add further comments below
- Nic Carlyle says:
Since my name’s been used several times, I’d like to clarify a few points.
To save the blushes of the Egypt Exploration Society, drinks alas have been postponed. And the chicken dish that a fellow anthropologist thought she’d seen that symbolically replicated Isis’s reassembly of Osiris, turned out to be a mis-remembered literary allusion (a total blooming illusion, thank you, Ms X). Yours truly, as the cook in our anthropologist organisation, has now been saddled with the task of creating a recipe (which I actually secretly relish).
‘What are you hungry for?’ Probably my blood, if you don’t appreciate that ‘fat is an alien issue’ is a joke about the nature of dietary discourse, the internet, and gullible Americans.
I have comments about ‘What are you hungry for?’ that I’ll post later. It’s all coincided with a rather personal discovery this week.
Finally, “I do a good Angel Gabriel, also donkey” – and there are questions as to whether I’m real?
Another theory about over-eating in particular is that it’s an attempt to to cover over something that we’re not addressing, stuffing it deep down inside us so we don’t have to look at it and can try to pretend it’s not there, in effect swamping a painful issue that we’d rather not think about with a big, thick duvet. Either way, it relates back to a tiny infant’s experience of the comfort experienced when feeding, and wanting to re-create that physical sense of security in our inner being.
Thanks for this Alison. I have heard it said too that over-eating and thus putting weight on is quite literally to create a physical protective barrier. And I’ve heard the expression ‘You’re eating your pain’ (Alice said it to Tina on ‘The L-Word’ before she knew that actually Tina was pregnant, not just fat. But I digress…)
As an only child I have often analysed being alone. I am happy on my own, cause or effect? I fundamentally believe that we are all alone but need to contact-exist to survive. Hence first live with yourself in harmony and then you will be prepared to interact with all the mixed emotions that are involved when with other people. As Jean Paul Sartre observed, “hell is other people”. With him on that!
Oh, I totally agree that we are fundamentally alone, David. But I am not good at all that ‘living with yourself in harmony’ mullarky, I just feel wretchedly wrenched by loneliness sometimes (and as a pleb, I know my experience represents that of millions) – and that’s it – one has to put one’s head under the pillow and wait for morning. No inner spiritual resources, in my plebby case, to make myself feel better: I just miserably sit it out. And I’d rather that I didn’t have to. Not that I believe in the myth of there being a special person for each of us in this world who will meet all our needs, but I do however know that another body around the place would at times make me feel infinitely better.
- David Thomas says:
I nearly blew up the boiler this afternoon. It was real torpedo in the engine room stuff what with the noise and water everywhere but I was not behaving like Noel Coward.
I ate nearly a whole packet of Jaffa cakes after. I think I was trying to say AArrgh!
Jaffa Cakes were the breaktime fodder of this evening’s modelling session in Shipley. I managed to circle round them without reaching out. I am anxious about being a kilo heavier since my weekend partying in Mecklenburg. I am smoking roll-ups in my flat to stop myself grazing.
I can understand the stress-related Jaffa Cake binge however, Dave. I guess you had more of a Basil Fawlty moment than a Noel Coward moment.
- David Thomas says:
Very true. Noel is what we’d like to think we would be; Basil is what we are. It’s the difference between the 50′s & the 70′s (when I say “we” I probably mean “men”).
- Nic Carlyle says:
Were they supermarket own brand or McVities? It makes a difference, packetwise.
Hello sue
good blog love corrine (now near cambridge!!)
Hi Corrine!
Introducing Corrine: a 20-something student Ilka and I knew in Aberdeen many many moons ago who has since worked in lots of countries. I wonder whether you are now married and have children?
- Nic Carlyle says:
“What am I really hungry for?” is, in my case, for food; namely, the buried memory of going without nourishment.
I have had, and still do have, a tendency towards over-eating, stuffing my face when I’m writing or drawing (if possible) and particularly so if angry or agitated. I’ve not had a difficult relationship with my weight hitherto – I’ve never been on sufficiently equitable terms with my body as such, neither liking it or disliking it.
But the health implications of my weight are now serious. My triglyceride level is stubbornly resistant to everything that can be thrown at it. (The irony of being an alcohol abstainer for 23 years, and such high trig levels being the mark of the heavy drinker just doesn’t amuse me). So kidneys, heart and liver are all under attack, and bidding a long final farewell.
But I really like food, and at times, need food. (I love cooking it, buying the ingredients, thinking about it, serving it, etc.)
So I’ve had to consider the base reasons for this. Why do I eat beyond my fill, even my physical comfort on occasions. And this week’s discovery has finally put things into a perspective, on a personal level.
I eat food to excess, because it is there. My body remembers that as a foetus and as a neonate, it wasn’t there. I was born in 1963, and I was born both post-mature and dis-mature. That is, I was born two weeks overdue, by Caesarean intervention, and that I had not developed properly in vitro. The placenta had packed in about the time of my due date (as is normal) and I’d been a bit hungry for the next two weeks. Added to which, some finer details had still not fully developed prior to my late birth (so I was in hospital for ops as a toddler). I was only three pounds / 1300g at birth (nothing too alarming nowadays, but rather dicey in 1963). So much, I had known for many years.
What my mother talked about, and I’d not really thought about, was that, after the operation (which my mother had under full anaesthetic), I was put straight into an incubator, and was in my fish-tank for five whole bloody weeks. My mother held me for the first time two days before my discharge. Apparently, I was fed breast-milk but by bottle (my mum wasn’t sure whether I received her milk remotely, or whether her expressed milk was added to a central store). In any event, no way could I have been given my mother’s colostrum milk. Such was maternity practice in 1963.
I mean knowing all this isn’t a reason for my rush towards savoury snacks. Forty-eight years on, it’s best described as a habit crystallised now by a narrative. But I feel in this tale of primal food rage, I get to write the ending. I’m going to tell my body, look, it’s okay, you don’t have to stuff food any longer, you (my body) can’t handle the fatty consequences. I’m now meditating on my body being psychically nurtured, climbing into ‘the womb of God’ as it were, and anticipating that reducing cravings.
Which is all a very long winded way of saying: I think all sorts of trauma can be sublimated into all sorts of bodily effects – I don’t think there’s any reason in getting all Freudianly reductionist about food disorders. Please disagree if that’s not reading of the situation.
Now, where did I hide the biscuit tin…?
Thanks Nic. Crazy isn’t it, that we eat even to the degree of feeling physical discomfort. What on earth are we doing? Not listening to our bodies, that’s for sure.
I shouldn’t say ‘We’ because I have given up that weird habit, but I do remember doing it.
It is almost frightening, how the course of our entire lives is so fundamentally shaped by our earliest experiences. It’s therefore an awesome responsibility, looking after a baby.
Wide awake in bed for over an hour and having read your post (Nic) I least expected the cherry on the cake ( referring to ‘the biscuit tin…’). That sure made my dessert, tickling me with laughter the same way my world becomes enlightened when having a sweet dessert (I have a super sweet tooth).
I must say, part of me does fear the thought of going hungry, hence carrying something in ma bag, purse, bedside drawer, hiding biscuit tin … lol lol lol …. and all for the incase moments of hunger. hmmmm!!!!
For starters: I really love your pose Suki. I can’t but let my mind wonder, staring at the drawing, wondering about the possible dilemma in the artist’s mind. Never mind, great pose.
Ok now straight to the main: what am I hungry for ? (Wish I cud b true to maself n shout out loud what am really hungry for!!). It must be said that some people also eat because they r comfortable and in a safe place. Some of us simply love food and do eat for the love of it, although I must say, I watch my portions. I couldn’t live without carbs or live merely on nuts. Not sure how u do it, Suki, but hey I’ve got enough flesh to show for the food I eat, n so does Suki have the ribs to show for the no carbs.
Glad you like this week’s painting Nanna. Maybe Colin might elucidate on ‘the dilemma in the artist’s mind’?
Hey Nanna, feel free to ‘be true to yourself and shout out what you are really hungry for’. You can tell us. There’s only three punters and a dog looking at this blog. Your secrets will be safe.
(Note: Nanna is a lovely friend from Ghana, not my gran)
(Note: Nana isn’t even a mum yet, let alone a gran)
what am I hungry for???? …….
Guess will live in ma fantasy world for now.
- julia* says:
Regarding the photoshopped perfection of models in advertising I found out that the website I am working for tried to use normal, curvier women to advertise swimwear some time ago. But a survey showed that the majority of female customers didn’t like it and preferred to buy their size 16 swimsuit after seeing how it looks on a size 6.
It seems women are often seen as the victim of perfect images, but this story makes me think differently. They are the target group for fashion, so they decide by buying or not buying what the adverts show.
Me, I know that there are adverts and then there is a real world where beauty, to me, means something different from just looks. I wonder why women look at magazines and think that they have to look like women in magazines? That is as if every football fan, no matter what genetics he or she had, would train life-long, aiming to be a football player.
I don’t always understand women, although I am one. Another thing about this topic: how would women react if another woman turned around and said: “I am not on a diet and I am perfectly happy with my body”? I think the majority would find a woman saying this arrogant and weird… It’s like, having a moan about weight is being part of the group…
I think the skinny model look is definitely something us evil heterosexual white men aren’t guilty of, whilst accepting, of course, that we’re guilty of just about everything else. It is women who these images are marketed at and who buy the magazines. Images of women aimed at selling things to men are usually a quite different body shape.
Having two completely different “ideal body shapes” to aspire to can’t be much of a help to women.
I agree with you Gavin and with FFJ: it is women themselves who impose the skinny image on ourselves as the ideal. For our own mysterious and perverse reasons. The female bodies that sell stuff to men have got a greater “waist-hip ratio” than the size 6 skinnyness of the fashion mags. Feisty Fraulein J has got a book on this subject. Sexy is curvy, not skinny. I know that; I think everybody knows that? If I had what I perceived as a “sexy” body, I wonder to myself whether I would be so uninhibited about getting it out. As it is, I feel it is obvious to all that I am not taking my clothes off to display myself sexually. I know that skin-and-bone scrawniness is not the stuff of conventional erotic imagery. My hip-waist ratio is so slight that I have a couple of times actually been mistaken for a bloke by late-arriving artists when I have been in pose with my back turned. And I am regularly drawn – by men – looking like a man: see the cover drawing of forthcoming KUNST (on ‘Buy my books’ page) by David Thomas. I can be confident that they are not fancying me.
And thanks for your comment, Feisty Fraulein J – a voice from a woman designer working in the fashion industry who doesn’t go round being a size 6 fashionista.
Two men – Website Genius and Mr Excellence in Photography Mike Kilyon – have both alerted me to the ‘alternative’ female body images of artist Jenny Saville (who has a new exhibition, by the way, in Oxford). She gets mentioned a lot in life classes in college, second only (according to my eavesdropping while being the Thing In The Room) to Euan Uglow in terms of famed contemporary life drawing/painting. So at last, a timely pictoral addition to the four week topic of this blog: see below for Jenny Saville’s famous ‘Fulcrum’.
Why does anyone bother with Jenny Saville or Lucien Freud when there’s a REAL ARTIST like Colin Morgan around?
His picture is absolutely beautiful.
Colin, where are you Colin? You have fans.
I happen to know that if you google the Artists and Illustrators website then search under ‘Colin Morgan’ you will find more of his work (for sale).
P.S. Lois, I find your life drawings very beautiful too.
Lois, thank you very much for blog. Any praise means so much when living in an artistic vaccum! I doubt you would have liked the watercolour I did of her in the same pose just before this one. It was the “dealing with her genitalia” one. Positioned between her legs. Sue loved it. Do you paint? first blog I’ve answered, Colin
Sue did not ‘love’ – in particular – your picture ‘dealing with her genitalia’ Colin, though there are several of your paintings she especially likes. Don’t forget that Sue Vickerman did two degrees in a Theology and Religious Studies department, has taught Sunday School, and is adamant (in her uptight way) that the life-modelling she does has absolutely nothing to do with erotica.
I am not quite with her on that: a dimension of sensuality in the life room is, in my opinion, undeniable (as per all the wonderful discussion ensuing from posts 1-4). I might even go so far as to venture that life modelling is at one end of a spectrum, the other end of which is erotic modelling/sex work. I would say there’s a continuum between these occupations, rather than their relationship being as quantity surveyor to district nurse.
I nearly edited your post, Colin (yes, I have an omnipotent reach when it comes to what goes on this blog!) but after all, it’s a good honest earthy illustration of what is going on in the life room for some.
And I chose this week’s painting because, yes, it is quite sexy in a flattering way, which is a refreshing antidote to all the blokey pictures of me and the ones where people paint in my cold-sores. (-;
At least your genitalia get drawn. Mine seem to go missing in half the pictures and in others I inexplicably regrow my foreskin. I realise it’s not the most important thing to draw, and don’t really want people to be staring at it anyway, but if they’re not going to draw it, I’d sooner just put it away really. I have several odd socks that could be used for just this purpose.
Hee hee hee hee ha ha.
Titter titter.
I’m trying to do some work but just noticed this new response from Gavin.
Ho ho ho.
- Nic Carlyle says:
I remember studios, etc, so cold that said member effectively disappeared anyway. Suki, may I suggest a subject for comments sometime of the male posing pouch, drapes, and other bits of vague clothing as accentuators, modesty props, etc?
Suki – I agree it’s at the soft end of the spectrum- it’s no different ultimately. People are clothed most of the time and it’s a fascination with the things that you don’t normally see – it’s vaguely exciting – for a while. Nothing wrong with that – we are human beings after all and we are fascinating. I’m a chartered surveyor by the way (ex Valuer, not Quantity surveyor and I’m not a nurse, but I am a model).
Thanks for your response Ken. Good to find agreement with a fellow life-model. As a chartered surveyor, you are not, like me, modelling to make your daily bread. So what makes you want to model?
Just interested – don’t answer if you don’t want!
You must be happy with your body image – whatever that may be.
Colin, I’m glad not to have seen the splayed genitalia picture. I think genitalia can dominate far too much – to the extent that you might just as well paint them on their own or on a spike.
As for the gem before us, it has been painted as though you were in love with the subject – a quality only ever seen in the most beautifully executed paintings.
I hope this appraisal does not disappoint as I sense from your blog you would rather be explicit and hard core.
I do paint but rather badly.
Thank you for the joy of your picture.
Lois does not “paint rather badly”. She is gifted. People want to buy her fab paintings from life.
Especially that one of me and a duck.
- Nic Carlyle says:
“Especially that one of me and a duck”. I’d love to see it. Is it perhaps another topic, life models and working with children and animals?
An aside: I just received an emailed photograph – see below – of a newly completed Suki cushion… Artist Jane Hurford has also in the past knelt at my feet and moulded them in clay…
She says of this piece that it “begs the question of Craft vs Art. When does it cease to be a useful cushion for the life model’s head and start to be a portrait of the model? Placed under your elbow is it just a cushion? Hanging on a gallery wall is it art?”
Hi Suki
About eating – I was fortunate enough to attend an audience with The Dalai Lama last week in Leeds. It was an amazing opportunity! He spoke mainly to young school children (he had asked to see the young people – so I kept myself well in the background!).
One young man asked why food manufacturers have been allowed ‘to make us fat’ and referred to the global obesity epidemic. The Dalai Lama said he often wanted to eat more than he knew was good for him – but that he carried with him self discipline to keep his weight in check.
He told the story of a driver he had in New York. The driver was a very, very large man and he told the Dalai Lama that he would prefer to be slim – as he was saying this he was reaching into a potato chip bag and shovelling potato chips down his throat. The Dali Lama said that the driver was the creator of his own obesity problems.
I could see he was also using that story as a metaphor about personal responsibility.
What do you think?
Best Regards,
Julie
The trouble is, self-discipline is SO unfashionable. I use self-discipline almost in equation with personal responsibility. Don’t people need to (re-)learn that the buck stops here…? With our own self. Ultimately it is down to me to look after myself.
Doing anything hard is – well, hard. Isn’t it. The little boy blaming the food manufacturers is not too young to be set straight on that one. Wanna lose weight? Don’t eat all that stuff.
Hi there
Just been on holiday..so didn’t reply to your earlier post…why do I model?…because I haven’t worked as a surveyor for a good few years (would you want to work in chaotic, highly inefficient and nasty rip-off capitalism?) and the wife’s wages have been eroded. Because I did it a good few times as a student. Because it’s like being an actor but you don’t have the stress of remembering the lines. Because it’s arty and it gets you out of the house. Because it’s challenging and makes you nervous some times. Because it makes me exercise and vaguely give me a a reason to do the exercise. Because …a lot of people would find it unacceptable..I like being a rebel. Because religion mostly denies people the right to be human (as a kid I was forced to go to a methodist church which I held in great disdain) and they would hate anything to do with nudity (for them close to that awful thing..sex) and what people really do with their lives. Because the alternatives are working in a shop or a pub…which I could do and aren’t that bad, but there’s more enjoyable (albeit painful things to do). Because I grew up in the 60′s/70′s where nudity was exotic..I don’t think it is so much now. …sorry for all the brackets
err ..can’t think of any other things for the moment.. I’m sure that they are similar to your own reasons. Maybe not?
Ken
None of these reasons are contra to my own motivations for life modelling. My two main reasons are, 1. it is work which, like no other paid work I’ve ever done, feeds my creative life (whereas much of my paid work in the past has impeded – even obliterated – my creative life). 2. IT IS MY ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME (not including paltry book sales and very very occasional writers’ residencies or grants).
I too am of Methodist heritage. Are there any other ex-Methodist life models out there?
- Nic Carlyle says:
Of Methodist / low Anglican background, but when I model I look Jewish! LOL
By the time I did my stint of life-modelling, I was nothing much and kicking against the traces. I took up life-modelling as something of an anti-job. Miserable three months, only partly due to the job.
I had a big lull in my creative history – from ages seventeen to twenty-seven. Three years of studying theology from eighteen to twenty-one, and Sue Vickerman had no idea of my artistic bent. Anyway, I was firmly married before I took up painting again. I have a wife who is chronically unable to stay still for a moment, and I have only a few sketches of her, all of doing some activity. She has yet to pose for me… more of reasons of lack of time, and the boredom factor rather than of exposure, and its recording. A question Suki – does the artist / model domain intrude, strengthen or change relationships?
re your last question Nic: I haven’t so far modelled for any artist with whom I had any other sort of friendship or acquaintance prior to that. So for me the artist-model relationship is that entity and only that entity from the outset.
So, whether beginning to model for someone with whom one already has a long-standing friendship or relationship will CHANGE that dynamic…? Um. Dunno. It might well do.
- Gerard says:
Re: page 8 (this week’s episode) of Suki’s autobiography A SMALL LIFE
…scenting the artist’s shirt from your underarm – that’s a pretty primitive seduction move for a model to make. xxx
- Nic Carlyle says:
Older than the human species: I believe most female primates will scent fruit and mark out territorial patches with their oestrus. All rather more psychologically subtle in female humans, as humans don’t have distinct oestrus cycles as such.
It’s all very strange territory here – humans are more visually attuned, and the model is here deliberately trying to attract an exceptionally highly visually attuned target person. And, further, with a sensory approach practically consciously lost in modern humans. It is all highly ironic and intriguing.
Do women actually go scent-stalking partners? Most of the ‘literature’ I’ve read (I draw a veil over what exactly) treats the topic as a territorial issue: scent marking existing partners, rather than attraction.
Or are you going to make my eyes pop out and my mind boggle with tales of West Yorkshire ‘women’s work’ as mysterious as the secrets of any women’s initiation society of western Africa?
- Sue Vickerman says:
I really do not know what induced Suki to do such an outlandish thing.
Comments
8. What am I really hungry for? — No Comments
HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>