Food for Thought: Musings of a Serial Dieter

SøEdited Team
Article: Katherine Gannon
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøDeputy-Editor: Savannah Barthorpe
​
Alison Foster has been dieting since she was eight years old. That fact alone tells you most of what you need to know about Musings of a Serial Dieter, the one woman show she has written and performed, under the direction of Peter Warnock, as part of this year's Camden Fringe.

"They say write about what you know," Foster tells me. "A relatable subject matter was essential. If you have dieted from the age of eight, and are still trying to reach that unreachable star in your fifties, then you have a lot of material to work with."

The show opens with a barrage of old school diet adverts and voiceover, delivered with the arch, knowing wit of a Mrs Maisel monologue, and from that first moment Foster has the room. 

What follows is a tour through a lifetime of dieting, from Atkins to intermittent fasting to whatever the algorithm is currently selling, told through exercise routines, pitch perfect impressions and full blown singing, all without ever losing momentum.

​Foster describes herself as a lifelong fan of black box theatre, and that instinct shapes the whole production. A multimedia backdrop reinforces the message, while music, dance and song keep the tone light even as the subject matter gets heavier. She credits Warnock with helping the ideas find their shape.

"We are both chocoholics," she says, "so I knew the collaboration would be successful."

Underneath the comedy sits something sharper. Foster is genuinely interested in what diet culture does to women, how it feeds on insecurity and repackages it as self improvement, and how current that machinery still is. 

"This show is not my life story," she says, "but holding up a mirror to many millions who go through their entire life on high alert, never satisfied with their body, or made to feel that way by others." 

She made a deliberate choice not to explain the why of her own relationship with food. The show isn't interested in origin stories. It's interesting in the loop itself, and how familiar that loop will feel to almost anyone watching.

That refusal to explain herself is, in a way, the point. Foster is performing, by her own account, at her heaviest and least fit, and she talks about that openly. 
"Losing weight is a minefield when you are middle aged," she says. "I am living out that purgatory on stage, but with hope." 

She invokes John Galsworthy's play Justice, which is credited with changing the length of solitary confinement in British prisons, as a model for what she wants her own show to do on a smaller scale, to shine a light on what she calls the self inflicted, society driven prison that the serial dieter builds for themselves.

The show returns again and again to the idea of "normal", a word Foster says she has spent her whole life trying to earn. 

She traces it back to a Marks & Spencer advertising campaign built around the same word, and forward to a line borrowed from Bridget Jones's Diary: "I like you very much, just the way you are." It's a line she says she would like to hear from people in her own life. 

The other word she keeps returning to is "waste", in the sense of time, energy and emotional purgatory spent chasing a version of herself that never quite arrives.
None of this is presented as misery. Foster is careful to note that the vulnerability she brings to the stage, the honesty about deprivation and self worth tangled up in food, is what gives the comedy its weight, rather than undercutting it. The laughs never come at the expense of the point being made. If anything, they are the way in.

​There is a moment near the end of the show where Foster apologises, as a serial dieter, to the people around her who have lived alongside that pattern. It is a small gesture, but it captures what she says the whole piece is reaching for: not a fix, and not a neat resolution, but a kind of permission. 

"It's not your fault," is the line she keeps coming back to. Whether or not audiences arrive at the theatre already fluent in that particular exhaustion, it's hard to leave without recognising it.