For most, food is a pleasure.  For me, it has always been a problem.  Rather than something to be enjoyed, food has always been a means of consolation, replacement and punishment, central to the way I see and treat myself.  My first year at university has made this explicit to me.

Before coming to University, the image I had of myself was fat, weak and unremarkable.  University meant the opportunity for "improvement" and change.  With my new-found independence I could exert complete control over everything I did, and more importantly, everything I ate.  How could this fail to lead to weight loss, the answer to all my problems and insecurities?

I began this endeavour for 'self-improvement' through an obsessive regime of only eating certain foods, at specific times of the day. If I ate cereal for breakfast at 9am, then I couldn't eat anything else until five hours had elapsed. If I ate any later than 4pm, it could only be fruit. If I ate fruit, it would have to be precisely five pieces throughout the course of the day. Any variation to my formula was not allowed. I kept an exasperating mental record of what I had eaten, which I emphatically repeated over and over again. This was my means of control.

Inevitably, this incessant preoccupation with how much I was eating and how much I was subsequently 'changing' became an obstacle in establishing a social life at University.  If I felt I had over indulged, I would deny any offer of socialising. I would stay in my room, going over and over in my head what I needed to do to get back on track, analysing my goal, and monitoring my improvement or failure. I craved such solitude. I joined a few societies, but in the back of my mind I was always worrying about food. I just wanted to retreat to my room, where nothing and no one could bother me. This was my reasoning; the only path to happiness would be restriction, denial, control.

Yet after obsessively monitoring my food, I would eventually lose all control. I would eat. Eat and eat and eat, as much as possible, in the shortest amount of time possible. I rarely even tasted the food. It was merely a tool to fill the emptiness I was feeling inside.  Afterwards I always I hated myself for what I was doing. I felt guilty. I felt utter self-disgust. I didn't want to see anyone; I couldn't face anyone after I'd done such horrible things.  Solitude was integral to my process of control and collapse, of lenience and binging.

Not once did it occur to me that the solitude I sought throughout this time was just as damaging as the obsessive process itself. I craved solitude, but found no real solace in it. It was just another means of 'control'. So long as I was alone in my room, nothing could get in the way of my plan. Looking back, I realise now that what I probably needed was a real distraction from my preoccupation with how I looked and what I was eating. I needed human contact. Yet at the time this was the last thing I wanted. How could I seek human contact when I had just had an eating binge? No one could know. No one could know how fat and ugly I was. No one could know what I did. 

It is only recently that I have begun to question this reasoning. As time elapsed and I got to know a couple of people more closely, I began to feel increasingly more in control. The binges and periods of guilt and self-disgust became fewer. I depended on food less as a means of filling the emptiness. It was what I needed; to realise that another world existed, and that this world was ultimately more important, and more powerful than the one I'd created for myself.