🐟 we need to talk about tuna

it's like kevin, but in a can

This gorgeous newsletter talks about disordered eating, body image, therapeutic solutions and tuna. If you don’t want to read it because you think it will stir up bad feelings, or because you’re pescatarian, go ahead and delete. May I humbly suggest you watch Hard Quiz on ABC? Tom Gleeson is truly the greatest.

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Dear esteemed colleagues,

It is my utmost pleasure to welcome you to this – our first official correspondence of 2022!

While I have been firmly OOO for the past month, I have found great delight in the DMs that have crossed my desk this holiday period. Just last night, numerous employees sent me this Facebook Marketplace steal:

(It has since sold, and is most likely lighting up a lovely loghouse in the Greater Melbourne area.)

Tonight’s newsletter is a deviation from the regular format. I wrote on my instagram stories that it would be about body and food stuff. A raft of new employees have since joined the newsletter in anticipation of this. I wish to welcome them warmly, but a word of warning – this is a rare nugget of sincerity, and next week we will be returning to farts and poo.

I guess I wanted to write this because one way I deal with difficult emotions is to Google them and read about other people’s. My guilty pleasure is Quora – and if you’re familiar with that, you’ve likely found yourself searching things like ‘signs he likes you’ on Sunday evenings. I see you, and I especially see people who have made a Quora account because they’ve searched too much stuff and it’s a requirement. I really do see you.

Some iteration of this has sat in my notes for the past 2 years, and I told myself I wouldn’t post about it until I was much older, maybe 40, living in my humongous mansion without a worry in the world. I didn’t want to be ‘that bitch’, mining my personal life for content. I wanted to be funny!

Then about a month ago, a conversation I had with an old friend tipped me over the edge and inspired me to get this all out.

I was at an event, and bumped into a guy I went to uni with. He was working in advertising – the degree we studied – and we were having one of those rapid fire interactions where you’re simultaneously trying to fill each other in on the last 4 years while also being conscious there are other people in the circle who literally do not give a single fuck about that teacher or that particularly gnarly group assignment.

Anyway, we were doing that, and the Froomesworld Island episode came up. He was gassing me up, saying how much he loved it. Then – in a way that caught me by surprise – he mentioned how hot all the guys had been, how shit he had felt comparing himself to them, and how he’d since been using MyFitnessPal. It really came out of the blue, and when he was saying it, we were laughing like, how ridiculous. But something about the way he said it, and maybe the fact I’d always boxed him in as a bro type guy, really hit.

It felt like a rare moment of vulnerability, and I was blindsided. In my mind, it’s a very particular kind of person who is preoccupied with their weight. And it’s not a goofy, masculine advertising guy.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past few weeks, and I can’t shake the urge I have to write about it.

CEOs are notoriously private about what’s really going on behind the closed door of their rich, mahogany-clad corner offices. But tonight, I am standing up and swinging the door wide open. Don’t let it hit you on the way in.

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Growing up, I was a very particular sprog. I had to wear my socks a certain way, I wouldn’t wear pants unless they were very low on my hips (they felt funny otherwise) and I wore the same burgundy tracksuit for months on end.

These were garden variety quirks. And everything else I did was markedly carefree. I was silly, happy, obsessed with Mr Hanky The Christmas Poo and found great delight in saying “shit” and “fuck” around unsuspecting adults.

This laissez faire attitude extended to food. I loved McDonald’s and appreciated the complex flavour profile of a cheeseburger cut by a post-mix Sprite.

My unhealthy preoccupation with food didn’t kick in until around the age of 21, when I got my first full-time job as a Health and Fitness Editor at Pedestrian. It was my dream job and I was jumping out of my skin to start.

And it was as good as I thought it would be, maybe better. Everyone in the office was so cool. Working in a small editorial team coming up with funny headlines was the GOAT.

As fun as it was, I found it really difficult. For all its perks, it operated as a content factory, with writers expect to churn out upwards of five articles a day. For the most part I enjoyed the pace, but there were times when I felt like I was drowning, and about 6 months in had to be talked off the ledge of quitting.

I was mainly writing about wellness. Diets, fitness routines, new types of nut milks. Given I’d never struggled with eating, never dieted, I approached these stories from a wtf angle. Like, wtf is Freely The Banana Girl doing? I thought the very concept of ‘wellness’ was funny.

But it was clearly rubbing off on me, in some weird way that was imperceptible at the time.

I started binge eating. It was almost always on a hungover Sunday. I think it was a response to the stress of the job, though at the time I wouldn’t have put two and two together. I gained a little bit of weight, but panic stations had not been alerted.

Then I planned a trip to Central America. I was going with two girlfriends. They both happened to be thin and athletic, but not in a ‘trying’ way – they just were. I had always felt confident in my body, but wearing bathers for 12 hours a day set me off, just a bit.

A few months later, I moved to Sydney.

Christ, I was so excited to be here. A room had opened up in my dream house, my housemates were like big sisters, I was doing more video work at Pedestrian and I was feeling cosmopolitan as fk.

frooomes

A post shared by lucinda froomes price (@frooomes)

Then shit started going downhill in a way that I thought was uphill. Quite literally uphill, because I started running.

I was “training” for a 10km marathon with Nike. As an asthmatic, I’d never run before – I rode my bike everywhere and did weights at the gym, but running was a firm no thanks fam.

I lost a little bit of weight and it’s like it kicked something off in my brain.

I started cooking for myself. I copied what my housemates were cooking, like salmon, greens, salads. (I want to mention here that their relationship with food was completely functional and complimentary of their lifestyle and they taught me a lot of basics that I am grateful for, thank u Jordana.)

Then I just kept on going. Meanwhile, I was experimenting with my style, wearing more colourful things, shopping more, peacocking. I was getting compliments. I think you might know where this is going!

In a matter of months I had dropped a considerable amount of weight. I have a distinct memory of going to Icebergs with my friend Michael and him commenting something along the lines of “you look great but make sure you don’t lose more weight”. But the wheels were in motion.

I started to feel like a new person. I got an agent, and was repped by what I considered to be the best comedy agency in Australia (whomst I am still with and they are lit). I think I assumed I would be getting a TV role ASAP, and therefore my smaller figure would come in handy. All presenters I’d seen were this size, after all.

I started to conflate thinness with success. I didn’t think I had a problem! This was just me now. And I was better than everyone.

I say that last line as a joke, but it’s true of the mentality I had at the time. I felt invincible and like I was putting my best foot forward.

Enter: Sirena Tuna.

If you are a long-term employee, you will be familiar with this CEO’s obsession with tuna. I have no fucken idea how I made the leap from thinking tuna was cat food to eating it for lunch every single day, but I did.

This was a behaviour I chalked up to a quirk – like wearing that burgundy tracksuit every day for the entirety of 2001.

Tuna became a personality trait. It was a big joke. And admittedly, I do think the whole tuna saga was funny:

frooomes

A post shared by lucinda froomes price (@frooomes)

Apart from the odd few people who warned of mercury poisoning, my strange obsession was of no concern to the people around me. No one said anything, apart from a colleague who ticked me off for heating it up in the microwave, a behaviour I stand by to this day.

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The wheels were starting to come off.

I started becoming impatient. If other people didn’t move at my pace, both literally and figuratively, I’d see red. This would manifest in strict rules I had, especially around socialising. I could go out, but I’d only have a few drinks, I’d be in bed by 10pm latest, I’d go to the gym in the morning.

There’s one particular instance that sticks in my mind and makes my face feel hot. One of my closest high school friends came and visited me in Sydney when I was deep in my bag. At the time I thought we had fun. We went to a Joyride show, we made dinners. But when he left, there was this weird feeling. I couldn’t get a hold of him for a month.

Eventually we had a phone chat, and he opened up to me, saying that I had made him feel so uncomfortable and annoying and that after that trip, he didn’t think we could be friends again. After 10 years of friendship! I was gutted.

There’s this strange thing that happens when you drop to a certain weight. The preoccupation with food is so unbelievably all-consuming, it makes socialising feel like a chore. Everything becomes boring. If you asked me now, I could recall almost every meal I ate for the entirety of 2019.

This routine became so normalised but I was beginning to lose my FROOMESWORLD style energy. I was presenting online as the real me, funnily enough. The biscuit and chocolate review videos are probably the clearest examples of this dissonance. Here I was, pretending to eat biscuits, meanwhile hoarding food underneath my bed and only allowing myself a treat when I’d ‘earned’ it through some ridiculous exercise class.

But in my everyday life away from work, I was an arsehole. And I was miserable.

I remember the day I hit the wall and decided I couldn’t go any further. I was walking up the street towards my house, and putting my key in the door, I just burst into tears. I was so tired, physically in my body. I called my Mum and cried and told her I couldn’t cope.

I went to the psychiatrist and she said the word anorexic and it was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. I wasn’t at a weight that required hospitalisation, far from it, but my behaviours, my mood, were enough to be diagnosed.

I felt so stuck. It was as if I had walked into this really big maze, and I had gotten to the middle bit and felt this huge sense of achievement. Then one day I realised I had to get out, and I had no fucken idea where to start. The idea of gaining weight didn’t feel like an option.

When I was at my lowest, my judgement extended beyond me. I did judge other people’s bodies, to see how I measured up. I therefore assumed everyone was doing that to me, too. Now that I’m better, mentally, I realise people just don’t. And the people who do are battling their own demons.

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2020 was the year when things really started to shift.

I think maybe I just hit 25 and thought, sweet mother Mary, I never wanted to be this person.

I don’t actually think it was the pandemic itself that helped me switch gears… though I must hand it to Gal Gadot and co, their rendition of ‘Imagine’ may have been the cure.

A lot happened in 2020 that helped me switch things up. Being made redundant was a big part of it. I’m forever grateful I got the boot because it threw me into a new direction with a new routine, and proved to me that I didn’t necessarily need organisation, or an organisation, to succeed.

I continued going to my psychologist, and worked on figuring out my goals. I had to learn that work wasn’t everything. A big part of switching my priorities was the fear that I’d wake up in ten years time with a fabulous career and no friends.

Working out who I wanted to be in five years, outside of work, was helpful. I thought about the kind of person I want to be in the next phase of my life. And if I’m a mum, or an aunty, I never want to make the kids in my orbit second guess themselves, their bodies, their eating. I was lucky to grow up eating McDonald’s with reckless abandon – it’s only fair I pay that forward.

Getting out of it felt like a slide, much like how getting into it felt. I started cutting myself some slack. And every little inch I gave myself, my mood improved. I got happier and happier and gained weight and weirdly didn’t freak the fuck out.

It’s 2022 now, and the difference in my personality is unbelievable.

Whenever I ask my friends if they notice a difference in my personality, it’s an emphatic yes, and I can feel their excitement. I’m relaxed, I’m easy, my room is a mess and I’ve reverted into my 17-year-old self who is funny and engaged.

my dormant foot fetish has also returned

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I feel self-conscious now, about my body. Being as thin as possible is an armour. I used to think I was beyond reproach. I’m softer now. Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for someone to punch me, to make a comment that punctures me and makes me regret changing. But they never do, and it passes quickly.

I still binge eat, straight up. I’ve gone to therapy for it (I’ll give a bit of detail down the bottom cause it’s really interesting) but it’s slowly petering out. A big part of that was letting go of my food rules. Eating whenever I wanted. I still fight with the question of “is this going to make me fat?” but like my body concerns, it goes away quickly and I enjoy. I don’t feel hungry anymore, I feel satisfied.

I feel so hopeful now, for other people too. I think our collective idea of what it means to be healthy is shifting. Our idea of balance is realigning… and I do think the pandemic has played a part in that. Health in COVID times extends far beyond eating the right things and doing the right exercise.

My biggest wish is to be happy and carefree for the rest of my life! I love myself now, I love the way I can make my friends and family feel, I am the person I want to be around.

Maybe if you relate to this at all, I just want to say that I feel you and you don’t need to be diagnosed this or that way to have a dysfunctional relationship with food. The 180 parkour-style flip I’ve done this year is proof, to me at least, that the relationship you have with your body can change.

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The binge eating therapy course I mentioned earlier is a thing called ‘BEeT – Binge Eating E-Therapy’, a trial by Sydney Uni. I tried to get into an eating disorder psychologist earlier this year with no luck. Like every other area of medicine in this country, it’s impossibly overstretched. Anyway, the psych I was trying to get into referred me to the researcher, and I did the therapy for 6 months, logging all my food, working on my thought biases and triggers. It’s not available to the public yet because they’re still testing it – but I wanted to mention it because it makes me hopeful that treatment will one day be fairer and available to many more Australians.

One other resource that helped me recognise my disordered eating patterns early on was the writing of Emily T. Troscianko, Ph.D., an American researcher and writer.

If you feel stuck, you can start by contacting The Butterfly Foundation (1800 33 4673), headspace (online services) Lifeline (13 11 14) or BeyondBlue (1300 22 4636).

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a little quote (Jesus!!) that I read last night in a book by computer programmer and STEM queen, Reshma Saujani:

The pursuit of perfection may set us on a path that feels safe, but it’s bravery that lets us veer off that “supposed to” path onto the one we’re meant to follow. And also frogs are lit.

Lol.

Love you everyone,
Lucinda