Sick transit

Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed her thumbs deep into her eyelids, allowed herself to visualise a chocolate brownie and started to salivate. After work she stopped at the supermarket and bought some brownies… along with a chocolate loaf cake and a large pot of cream to pour over it, a giant chocolate bar, an apple puff, two eclairs, a cream slice, a selection of reduced pastries, a loaf of bread, a packet of butter and three packets of biscuits: bourbons, custard creams and Maryland cookies. When she got home she ate it all in under four hours.

In her thoughtful new memoir on her 14-year struggle with bulimia, Jones describes a moment of sharp self-awareness experienced two hours into that binge. There she is: a smart, attractive young woman, surrounded by empty food wrappers:

I think how insane this would look to someone watching. I’m disgusting, a freak. I eat more because I just want to get to the end and get all this food out of me… I drink more cups of tea because it makes the food liquid in my stomach and easier to vomit out at the end.

Compared to the binges of alcoholics or drug addicts, a bulimic bender seems incredibly controlled and strangely sensible. Jones planned her binges and stuck to a budget. She consumed and expelled the food in relative safety and without upsetting anybody else. Then, after vomiting, she would wait to brush her teeth until her saliva had neutralised her stomach acid to avoid damaging tooth enamel.

She had her chaos so terrifyingly organised, it’s no wonder she managed to hide it from her family for over a decade.