Walk 30 miles a day to stay thin
Darlene Rockey forcing a smile, with her dad.
Saturday 24th May 2008
Teeth gritted, I tried to ignore the agonising pain in my right knee.
'Just five more miles,' I puffed to myself, as my throbbing feet pounded the pavement. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see people staring at me as I staggered past.
'Look at that woman,' a little girl hissed. 'She looks like a skeleton.'
She was right — I weighed just 4st 4lb. But I didn't care.
'Got to keep walking,' I muttered.
It's an obsession I can't control. Every day, come rain or shine, I walk up to 30 miles. That's the equivalent of walking from London to Manchester every week. Sounds crazy, I know. It all started when I was growing up with my parents, Nelda and Michael Rockey. My dad was a bully, and a violent one at that.
One of my earliest memories is of him screaming at Mum and throwing dinner plates. At around the same time, Dad frogmarched me to the doctor to be put on a diet. I was 5 years old.
'She's fat,' he scowled, disgusted.
The doctor said my weight was fine. But from that moment on, Dad obsessively monitored everything I ate. I wasn't the only one who suffered. My twin sister, Marlene, and our 6-year-old brother, Phil, came under Dad's hawk-like scrutiny, too.
'That's all you're getting,' he'd say, putting a tiny ham sandwich and some carrot sticks on our plates. 'No kid of mine's going to be fat.'
Desperate to please, I'd sneak the food off my plate and hide it in my pockets. I want to make Daddy proud, I thought. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough.
'Greedy guts,' he'd taunt, whenever he saw me hungrily wolf down the smallest morsel.
In time, the need to make Dad proud turned into something else. The need to prove him wrong. I'll show him how strong I am, I vowed. I'm hardly going to eat anything at all. By the time I left my home in Renton, Washington, at 18, I was 5ft 2 and 7st 7lb — slim but healthy. Not that I thought so. I'm still podgy, I thought, whenever I looked in the mirror. I moved into a flat in nearby Seattle with Marlene and started working as an air stewardess. Back then, in the 60s, it was part of the job to be slim. So I started running six miles every day.
If I missed my run for any reason, I'd be fidgety with guilt.
'What's wrong with you?' Marlene, who had an office job, asked me one day. 'You're obsessed with running.'
'No I'm not!' I snapped. 'I'm just keeping healthy.'
But the truth was, pounding the streets was the only time I felt free, the only time I didn't have to worry about eating..
I couldn't, daren't. Because eating meant getting fat, being out of control.
I didn't realise it then, but Marlene was right — I was in the grip of an obsession.
At work, out with my friends… It didn't matter what I was doing, all I ever thought about was food and losing weight. So I almost sleepwalked my way into marrying John Mellor, then 31, in May 1970. It was a terrible mistake. Just like Dad, he always seemed disappointed in me. It's my fault, I thought bitterly. I'm fat and useless.
We divorced in 1979, without having any children and, after that, my life revolved around my job as a store detective at an electronics shop. And my daily six-mile run.
Forget men, I told myself. Being slim and in control was all that mattered from now on. Then, in May 1995, I was chasing after a shoplifter, when my right foot slipped off the kerb and I twisted my knee.
'You've torn the cartilage,' a doctor at Northwest Hospital & Medical Center, Seattle, said. 'We might have to operate.'
I was gripped with panic. What about my daily run?
'Out of the question,' my physiotherapist said, a few days later. 'But walking would be good for your knee.'
It was exactly what I needed to hear. So the very next day, I pulled on my trainers and
set off on a one-mile walk. It was agony. But while my body was in pain, my mind felt calm. I'm back in charge again. After that, I went walking every day, but my knee didn't heal. An operation in September 1995 didn't help either. By then, I could barely bend my leg at all, but that didn't stop me dragging myself around the streets every day.
'For goodness sake,' Marlene would say when she saw me. 'What are you doing?'
'Trying to keep fit,' I'd snap, annoyed. Wasn't that obvious?
But my knee refused to heal. And during the following five years, I needed four more ops. In August 2000, I even moved to Palm Springs, California, to be closer to a specialist. I was still walking six miles every day, and I'd started doing sit-ups and leg lifts, too. But my knee didn't improve and there was nothing the doctors could do about it.
'I hate it,' I'd cry down the phone to Marlene.
She still lived in Seattle, 1,250 miles away, with her husband, Lester Gamet, now 60.
'You need to look after yourself,' she'd reply. 'You exercise too much and don't eat enough.'
She was always saying that. So annoying.
'I'm fine,' I'd argue back.
It was my knee that was the problem. It was so badly damaged, I couldn't chase shoplifters any more and was on disability benefit.
Depressed and angry, I started to walk even more. Though it hurt terribly, it was a kind of therapy. So what went through my head as I walked the streets? Nothing. I didn't think about food, didn't think about my dad. Apart from the odd phone call and occasional visit, I didn't really have much to do with my parents. I was too wrapped up in my own world of exercising and starving.
By now, away from Marlene's protective gaze, I was eating even less. Most days, I'd get by on a handful of bran cereal in the morning, and a cup of popcorn in the evening. Then, in April 2001, Mum died, aged 72. I was devastated. While I'd feared Dad, I'd loved Mum, even though I didn't get to see her much. I cried for weeks. Even walking didn't make me feel better.
'You're depressed,' my doctor said in July 2002.
But that wasn't all. After being referred to Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, California, I received another diagnosis.
'You have anorexia.'
Bizarre as it seems, I was shocked. I was 47, and it was the first time anyone had ever said that to me. I was kept in hospital and, that night, I had to sit at the dinner table with the other patients, a plate of roast beef and mashed potato in front of me.
'You have to stay here until you've eaten,' the nurse said.
My heart thundered with panic. I felt like I was 5 again.
'I'm sorry, I just can't do it,' I told the doctors.
And after a week, they had no choice but to let me go home. So now I knew I was anorexic. But it didn't stop me going straight back to my walking. In fact, the more stressed I felt, the further I'd walk.
And when I got home, I'd switch on the food channel and drool over images of cakes and pizza while doing hundreds of sit-ups.
'You're ill,' Marlene would sob down the phone. 'Please get help.'
Over the next four years, I went to two more eating disorder clinics. But they always tried to force me to eat, and I always refused. Then, in August 2006, Dad died of kidney failure, aged 87. Maybe I should have felt relieved, free even. But the damage had been done. By the time I went to visit Marlene, in December 2007, I was walking up to 30 miles a day and doing hundreds of sit-ups. I weighed just 4st 6lb. It broke Marlene's heart.
'I have to keep exercising,' I told her. 'It keeps me sane.'
Believe me, I know how weird that sounds. I also know that if I don't stop exercising and start eating, I'll be walking my way into an early grave. But now, weighing 4st 4lb, I still can't stop my daily walks.
'Go and eat something!' someone shouted recently.
If only it were that simple. Deep down, though, I'm hopeful that one day, I'll be able to turn my back and walk away from the terrible disease that I know is killing me.
Marlene said: 'Darlene's walking is not healthy and it's not positive. I worry about her and it's always in the back of my mind that I might lose her, but I don't dwell on it — I can't. If I did, I'd never stop. Darlene's an adult and although I don't approve of what she's doing, I can't tell her what to do. I can only be here for her and listen to her. She's the only one who can make the change.'