Fat or dead? How I broke the ED cycle (Part 1)

Continuing with the theme of Eating Disorder Awareness month, I just want to talk a bit about how unbelievably stupid EDs are. Like, seriously, completely, 100% stupid. It’s shocking how many people who could otherwise be called just about every version of smart can fall prey to the insidiously backwards logic of EDs. I know because I had one for over 10 years, and I am truly fortunate to be able to say that I don’t have one anymore. I have never visited a treatment facility or had any actual/medical treatment for my ED, so I think it’s a story worth sharing.

It began with a compliment. I know that seems odd, as most people seem to set off in a quest for thinness because they are made to feel ashamed of their bodies. Not me, I like to stick to what I’m already good at, guaranteed to succeed.

When I was 13, another girl made a comment in the gym class changing rooms: “Whoa – you are sooooo skinny.” She made the mistake of saying it in a tone that conveyed nothing but admiration and respect. And as many of the girls in the room began nodding their heads in agreement, I felt like a door opened up to something I’d always wanted and never found: acceptance. Here it was. Years of being bullied for my personality and behaviour made me absolutely ravenous for that sense of acceptance which is already so important to any kid that age.

I was really skinny, there was no denying it. I come from a uniformly skinny family. But I’d never realized that some people found that admirable – attractive even – wtf???  OK, I figured: If skinny was what made me admirable, then I’d get even skinnier.

It’s incredible the ways you adapt, the subtle implications that humans use to navigate each other. I quickly noticed that being skinny seemed to convey some kind of appealing vulnerability – it made me, literally, little. And “little” brought out a protectiveness in people that I could fool myself into thinking of as caring about me personally. Being skinny also made me physically frail, weak, tragic, victimised – all the things I already felt internally but didn’t know how to express. Well now I could express them. And I could do it in a way that actually made other girls envious of me. Win-win all around!

Except not, of course.

90% of the time that I was restricting my calories, I was struck by how easy it was. I’d imagined it being so much harder based on how women always talk about the horrors of dieting. I was delighted by my self-discipline – until that other 10% kicked in.

That 10% was, of course, my body’s survival mechanisms, firing on all cylinders, making me have insane cravings, dreams about eating, obsessive thoughts about food that make you feel like you’re going nuts.

Just so no one is under the impression that there’s anything remotely glamourous about anorexia (despite what willowy celebrities and their fashionable rehab trips would have you believe), here’s what it’s like to be a functioning anorexic.

In those uncontrollable 10%-of-the-time states, I became, quite literally, like a starving animal. Almost all rational, higher thinking shut down and I would be unable to stop myself from eating. I kid you not, at times, I walked by unfinished plates in the school cafeteria and was unable to resist grabbing the food from them, running to the washroom to eat the crusts that other students had left. I have heard accounts of how when people get hungry enough, cannibalism becomes possible because the parts of the brain that register emotions (disgust, namely) about what you’re doing basically shut off until you get nutrients. As an ex-anorexic, I can say that does not surprise me at all.

Your emotions go haywire in ways that you refuse to associate with your basic need for food. Everything set me off. Everything was hurtful, personal, insensitive (this was ON TOP of the BPD – yikes). Everything made me want to scream and cry, or even have to cut. In this way, the self-harm and the anorexia went hand-in-hand for me: the less I ate, the less emotionally stable I was (= cut), but the more I DID eat, the more I’d punish myself by cutting. The whole thing came down to a lot of cutting, basically (a lot of which, however, had nothing to do with anorexia). Even now my arms are a patchwork of scars that I hate, although they do fade with each passing year.

You hate your body and your body hates you right back. You’re constantly cold, exhausted, beaten down by the simple movements of a sedentary day. You sleep endlessly and never feel rested. You take a crap once a week, tops, and become chronically constipated (sexy, right?). In your quest to be “attractive” (i.e. thin), ironically, your hair, skin, nails, and even your eyes are sacrificed – they all look awful: pale, dry, papery, dead.

But the worst part is the mental cycle you’re trapped in – the well-documented struggle anorexics face in both loathing and obsessing about the same thing. And of course, unlike drugs or other self-harming behaviours, you know that you can never just cut food out of your life. No matter how anorexic you get, you need to eat something – you know that sooner or later, you will have to to swallow the thing you hate. In this way, it’s a perpetually miserable situation that only has one outcome: lower and lower self-worth, deeper and deeper self-hatred.

When all you’re measuring yourself, your happiness, your value by is how much you eat, you begin to realize that you only have two options: get fat (i.e. get better or at least subsist), or die (i.e. “succeed” according to your inner anorexic voices).

Get fat or die. Get fat or die. Get fat or die. The choice circled my mind endlessly. The only answer was despair, in either case.

Like most long-term functional anorexics, I found myself trapped in a cycle that demonstrated those two choices in less extreme versions. I’d starve until I came close to literally collapsing or otherwise being ‘found out’ (BMI of around 14 was my ideal range), then have a ‘relapse’ into having to eat, gaining 10 pounds or so until I was disgusted with myself all over again… and plunged right back into the cycle.

This went on for 12 years. 12 fucking years (GOD, it depresses me to think of that). Sometimes, in my “it’s okay to eat for a while” phases, I’d think it was all behind me. But sooner or later, the weight would always creep back on and I’d have to resort to losing it the only way I knew how. And after all, it’s not like I was alone in thinking this way: it seems that to this day, plenty of prominent magazines, media moguls, celebrities and models rely on deprivation as the only possible weapon against getting “fat” and ugly. Ugh.

The truth is, deprivation never works. Not really. If you’ve ever dieted in any way at all, you know exactly how long and how well it “works.”

No, the key to breaking the “starve and die OR eat and hate my(fat)self” cycle was a third option that I’d never even heard of.

To be continued in Part 2… (it’s a much happier post – please don’t only read this part!!!)

Cat xxxx