Life Without Limits, A Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cloying bile and acid from my mouth before it rotted my teeth. My throat would grow hoarse and sore. I quickly realised that I shouldn’t be doing it, that it was an unnatural thing to do, but I persevered because it satisfied my craving for control.
    It was a secret. Only my friend knew. Matty would have been horrified, I think. It made no sense. I had a boyfriend I cared about who loved me as I was, but, perversely, that made me even more concerned about keeping a certain kind of figure. He would never have put any pressure on me over the shape of my body. It was all down to the pressure I put on myself. I wasn’t happy about it and I did it despite my self, but there has always been that little voice in my head urging me on to some notion of perfection, urging me to retain control over myself.
    It was the same impulse that drove me on at school and that drives me on now as a triathlete. I have to give it everything, to do the best I can. In this case it started out both as a desire to look like Kate Moss and as a fear of becoming fat, the carrot and stick, which are one and the same. Being so competitive and so sensitive to the views of others, I was bound to internalise the images we were being bombarded with. I have always been my own worst critic. People might say to me, ‘You’ve got an amazing figure,’ but I would strive for more. Soon you lose sight of the original object of the exercise – to achieve and maintain a certain look.
    Bulimia never worked in that sense, anyway. First, I wasn’t very good at it. Sometimes I would fail to bring anything up, and a crashing sense of disappointment would come over me. Second, the theory of it is flawed – once you’ve eaten something, you don’t just magic it out of your system by throwing it up. I never lost any weight as a result. Yet I continued with it, off and on, until well into my time at university. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t working. It was the illusion of control that had me.
    My social life in the sixth form suffered from a combination of the writing on the wall, and the importance I attached to my studies and my relationship with Matty. I did go out. De Niro’s nightclub in Newmarket was a regular haunt on Friday or Saturday nights, but I didn’t drink and so I was the designated driver. I was, and still am, an appalling driver. My accident-prone nature extended to that as well. The very day I passed my test I went round to Matty’s house in Mum’s car. I drove into a ditch. Hadn’t quite worked out how the headlights worked. A bit later I wrote off Mum’s car altogether by driving into a butcher’s van.
    I left school with three As at A-level and an A* (they had just introduced the star system) for the geology GCSE I had taken as an extra subject. I’d applied to Oxford, but they put me in St Hilda’s, an all girls’ college, and I knew even before the interview that I didn’t want to go there. I walked in and this woman with glasses on the end of her nose asked, ‘Christine, what is science?’ I wasn’t very good at thinking on my feet back then. Everything I had achieved had been through hard graft; I was uncomfortable having questions fired at me that I couldn’t prepare for.
    They didn’t accept me, but I can’t say I was disappointed about not going. The rejection certainly hurt, though. Other than the first time I tried to qualify as a lifeguard at Bury St Edmunds pool when I was sixteen, I had never failed anything.
    My dad drove me to all the universities I’d applied to, and I chose Birmingham. We used to go on canal holidays as a family – Dad is passionate about them – and I remember one that took us through Birmingham when I was fourteen or fifteen. The canal goes right through the university grounds, and my mum and I were walking along the towpath at one point. Through the trees I could see this beautiful courtyard of red-brick buildings, dominated by a huge clock tower, which turned out to be ‘Old