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in the top for a head and wore it around the house like a huge poncho. Whenever I came into the room in my sheet-dress, Joseph used to shout out,  ‘Man the hatches! Iceberg ahoy!’ and pretend he was on the Titanic. After he’d done this every day for 24 days straight I told him to shut up which was all the excuse he needed to fly into a rage. Shouting about what an ungrateful little bitch I was and how I couldn’t take a joke.
    Other times he’d call me the Great White Mope. I think he picked that one up from telly, he couldn’t have come with it by himself.
    ‘Don’t tell me you’re eating again?’ he’d bellow out from the lounge if he heard me trying to tiptoe around the kitchen. Like a malicious mosquito, he never let up.
    ‘Who ate that leftover chicken breast?’ he’d demand, looking at me. ‘Who’s eaten one of the biscuits?you'll never find a man if you stay so fat! Are you one of them lesbians?’
    Joseph was a food Nazi. He was obsessive in keeping a record of everything in the kitchen and with a thick, black felt-pen would mark the level on bottles of chocolate sauce, lemonade or whatever, so he could tell if anyone (me) had sneaked some behind his back. He claimed that he only did it for my own good. He’d count the slices of bread in the bag, weigh the container of ice cream after any had been eaten and write the new weight on the lid. He would count the number of chocolates in a box and how many biscuits were in the tin, making a note of it all.
    The hate between us raged as this food war. He might’ve been older and more powerful but I was smarter than him and took great pleasure in cleverly hiding my tracks and fooling him so he didn’t know I’d eaten an entire loaf of bread and half a kilo of peanut butter virtually under his nose. Yeah, did I ever show him! I'd be fat and miserable just to spite him.
    Apart from snide swipes and insults, Joseph and I generally didn’t speak to each other unless there was no other option.
    He thought I was lazy, greedy, fat and ugly.
    I thought he was a stupid, small-minded, bullying control freak.
    Suffice to say my teen years weren’t the happiest in the world. And as the food war raged with Joseph, I got fatter and fatter. My life totally sucked and I was convinced it would continue to suck until I lost weight.
    But for some reason -- call it desperate hope -- I honestly believed that I was in some kind of ‘waiting room’ for life and just beyond the door was my real, happy, successful life, which would begin as soon as I lost that pesky 40kgs. Then I’d get the great boyfriend, the fabulous job involving overseas travel and tons of money, the amazing friends, and invitations to all the coolest parties.
    With this in mind, I would get up every morning determined that that was the day everything would change.  That was the day it would all just click into place and I’d start losing weight.
    But I couldn’t lose an ounce. Even though when I wasn’t sneaking food from under Joseph’s nose, I’d be earnestly trying to stick to whichever diet Mum had me on that week. And even though every morning Mum would weigh me and give me a pep talk about how it was going to be different that day, how today was a new beginning, how today I really could do it! And even though every morning I’d resolve to stick to the diet and lose weight so that finally my real life could begin. I never did. It was never different. Every day wound up the same. I’d start with a tiny, calorie controlled breakfast and miniscule lunch but the minute I got in the door from school at 3.45pm, tired and starving, the binge monster took over. And in the evenings, the food war with Joseph took hold.
    I was a dieting Jekyll and Hyde, religiously good while anyone was looking but as soon as I was alone I would uncontrollably shovel food into my mouth with my hands, so fast that I couldn’t even taste it. While I shovelled, everything else was forgotten - there was nothing in the