My Disordered Eating, part 1

I used to have an eating disorder. These days (and for quite a few years now), I don’t. I’ve been thinking about that a bit over the last few days. I decided I wanted to try and write about my experience, to really try to remember what it was like to have my waking hours consumed by the obsessive thoughts, scrutinisation, body dysmorphia, self-punishment and anxiety that for me, were part and parcel of the illness.

I’m not really a fan of neat stories of transformation where there’s a clear cut ‘before and after’. Over the last 5 years in particular, I’ve also grown increasingly uncomfortable with descriptions of pain or struggle that flatten the complexities and multitudes of the human experience into a neat line or two, particularly when that kind of language is used to sell people coaching programmes, wellbeing products or personal development courses (something I’ve seen done a lot online, and something I’m sure I’ve done myself at some point).

I think it’s very hard to pinpoint an exact beginning and end to things like this, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ve attempted to capture the truth of my experience in this piece, doing my best to avoid clichés, hyperbole or repetition of the way I used to describe it in recovery meetings. I’m going to see if I can explain to you what it was really like, and what it feels like now, because it’s a remarkable thing to be almost completely free of it (apart from the body dysmorphia side of things, which I wrote about here).

My memory feels fuzzy about a lot of things. But here are some things I do remember.

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I remember writing my food consumption in my diary one day. I must have been about 14, and I was, by that point, already ill enough to have gotten my food consumption down to something like 3 hard boiled sweets, 4 grapes and an apple. I remember knowing then that I was sick, and relishing it somehow. I was hurting, a lot, and alongside the rush of proving to myself that I could do it – that I could get away with eating so little – there was also this quiet desire for someone to see how much pain I was in, and to rescue me.

I remember lying on my bed in my hot pink bedroom, probably at 16 years old, and not being able to get to sleep because my bones were poking into the mattress and it hurt. Again, there was this part of me that was worried, that knew this thing had the ability to spiral out of control. My mum had told me stories of someone close to her who’d been hospitalised and nearly died from anorexia. I think a part of me wanted to get that bad, and a part of me was terrified of it.

I remember getting to 8.5 stone and feeling elated, and then a second later the goalposts changing in my mind. 8 stone was now the goal. Under 8 would be even better. I got to 8 and then dipped under it. It scared me. But I’d heard stories of girls who’d gotten down to 7, 6, 5 and 4 stone. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be so small that I would break if you touched me.

I remember learning about how anorexics perceived their bodies to be hideous and saw themselves as grotesquely large (and these days, I’m much more aware of how much bias against larger bodies had soaked into my mind – as if being large was in itself disgusting). I read about studies where girls with anorexia were shown photographs of silhouettes ranging from incredibly emaciated (their own), to obese – and how they belied theirs were the ones at the obese end of the scale. I wanted to be the girl with the skinniest silhouette, and felt a hardened contempt towards myself because I would always be one of the ones in the middle.

I also recall quite distinctly how absolutely and genuinely disgusting I was to myself. As my body blossomed and my hips opened, as I developed (very normal) cellulite, I would stare and stare at my body, seeing it in sections and bits, my eyes honing in on each area one at a time with an increasing sense of horror as the fat or bulge or wobbly bit seemed to grow and morph into something more grotesque with each passing second. I would look and look until what I saw in front of me was a freak.

Some days the dysmorphia was so bad that I couldn’t go to school. It was as if I thought other people would be so disgusted with me that they would recoil, the way I did towards myself.

I remember holding the fat on my legs, pinching it and looking down at the (once again, very normal) way that my legs spread out beneath me when sitting on a chair or bench and feeling an overwhelming urge to get a knife and cut it off of me.

I would do hundreds of sit ups and leg lifts in secret in my bedroom at night. I did them with little conviction that they would make a difference. My body seemed to be in a state of defiance. It wouldn’t get smaller. When I walked, I felt as if every inch of me wobbled and thundered around. All I wanted was legs like the models I saw on the catwalks - legs that didn’t wobble when I walked. I thought I would be happy if I could just have that. I studied and scrutinised the girls around me with a quiet, violent envy, taking in the shape of their legs, their hips, their waists. I wanted to be anyone apart from myself. I wanted to feel what I thought they felt – secure, confident and able to look other people in the eye, to be in their bodies without the crawling shame eating them up from the inside out.

I started counting calories, goading myself to eat fewer and fewer each day. I’d eat half a sandwich, then stop, the other half taunting me, and me somehow, finding the force of will to resist it. 1,000 calories a day soon became 750 and if I could drop below a 500 calorie day, I would feel a cold sense of triumph. Feeling triumphant was not something I experienced anywhere else in my life, which was full of chaos, loneliness, shame and pain. Even though I know many people with eating disorders operate on far less than that (a fact that even now provokes judgemental thoughts that I didn’t do it right), it was a small victory.

I remember hoping that I would grow the extra layer of fuzzy hair that people with bad anorexia develop – their body’s way of trying to protect them, an evolutionary survival mechanism to attempt to keep this cold, underfed organism alive.

One evening, my mum made me a meal. I had started doing what many anorexics do, pushing food around on the plate, cutting it up and trying to squish it all together to make it seem like I’d eaten something. The plate that evening had peas and sweetcorn on it. I was afraid of both, paranoid that they were the enemy, that they would get inside my body and start multiplying fat cells like it was their sole purpose for existing. I don’t remember anything else on the plate because by that point, it was out of the question to eat it. My mum, of course, “wasn’t born yesterday.” She knew what I was up to and pleaded with me – begged me, practically – to eat. That night, I refused, going to bed hungry.

What’s weird is that I don’t really remember feeling hungry. I’m sure I was. I must have been, surely? I do remember feeling shaky, often, and that would give way to a euphoric high that comes from deprivation. I would run on that energy, but it was hard work too. Part of me wanted to eat, wanted to stuff and gobble and inhale caramel and chocolate and cake and ice cream until I literally couldn’t cram any more in.

I had a very sweet tooth as a child, although I was incredibly skinny regardless of how much I ate. The memory of my voracious appetite scared me. What would I become if I gave into it?

I remember being jealous of the proper anorexics – the girls who could keep it up for months and years.

I also remember feeling incredibly alone.

I don’t know if anyone knew quite what I was going through. I thought about other stuff too – boys, my grades, and worrying about which version of my mum I would come home to each day after school. But the vast majority of my attention in my adolescence was fixated on my body, food and on all that felt wrong with me.

Then there were the words.

Fat. Skinny. Skinny. Fat. Those two words bookended my life.

Fat, fat, fat, fat, FAT. I must have used that word thousands of times in my head and out loud, my tone disgusted, my contempt for myself complete. I thought I was fat, I was convinced I was fat, and that word was abhorrent. It was the enemy.

And oh, skinny. Skinny skinny skinny skinnyskinnyskinnyskinny. I wanted so badly to be skinny. To be skinny was everything. There was no consideration of my body’s frame, of what it naturally wanted to be. There was just this goal, and in every magazine I saw dozens, hundreds of images that let me know without any doubt what being skinny would get me. Skinny was everything. It was my passport to a different self, a different life, a way to get away from Elloa and to become someone powerful, someone in control, someone who no matter what would be better than other people in this one small but instantly visible way. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so honest about this before. When I was ill, I really did believe that people didn’t like me for the same reasons I didn’t like me – my body, my weirdness, the way my body curved in and out instead of going straight up and down. I hated every part of my body and wanted to shrink so much that I would disappear. But looking back, I think a lot of it was a quest for some tiny corner of power, some way of feeling like I was in control.

Those two words, fat and skinny, reverberated around my head day in, day out.

I began to check my reflection everywhere I could. I’d check it in car windows and shop windows and normal windows. I’d check and check and check, trying to catch every angle, trying to see how flat my stomach was or if my disgustingly large and hanging bum had shrunk yet. I wished for a silhouette like the women in the movies, and I never liked what I saw. There was measuring, too, weighing and measuring. I’ve talked a bit about the weighing of myself, but the measuring was a compulsion that accelerated and fuelled the sickness. I didn’t ever religiously record my measurements, but I’ve just had a distinct memory of writing down and tracking the size of my thighs, hips and waist repeatedly. Any number was bad. Nothing – nothing – was satisfactory. There was always the next size down.

But it wasn’t just about size. It didn’t really matter how much I weighed, or whether I could wrap my fingers all the way around my upper arm so they would touch (and they did – big hands, I told myself); every single time I looked at myself, all I saw was what was wrong, bad and ugly about me.

If any item of clothing dug into me even a little bit (which, I’m sure you’ve noticed, clothing just does), I saw it as proof of what a pathetic, weak failure I was.

This habit, of seeing the bad, the ugly and the wrong, has been hard to shake. At 37 years old, I’ve never learned how to ‘pose’ in front of a camera, and still scrutinise every photo of myself, constantly finding fault. There’s a reason why I take so few selfies.

When you’re thin and people tell you how thin you are, it’s a strange dual-experience; on the one hand, there’s another moment of triumph. On the other, you also hear that you’re not really that thin at all and you want to push it even further, to make them even more worried, to be even bonier, for there to be even less of you there.

I read about organ failure in anorexics and wanted that to happen to me. I wanted my head to look too big on my body. I wanted to shrink, maybe even to die. But looking at it now, with some twenty years’ life between that time and this, it seems obvious that what I really wanted, as I said earlier, was for everyone to see how much pain I was in. I wanted to not be in pain.

I honestly don’t know how long I kept it up. What I do know is that at a certain point, I started eating again. I started, and I couldn’t stop. The reins I had had such a tight grip on slid and slipped through my fingers and the horse I’d had the illusion of being in control of started being in control of me. The former anorexic became a binge eater, and a failed bulimic, and I ate myself into a hole that took me around ten years to dig myself out of.

My experience with anorexia wasn’t the most extreme, but I look back upon it with great sadness. It reminds me of how desperately I didn’t want to exist, how I wanted to shrink and deprive and starve myself into oblivion. It was the manifestation of deep self-hatred, overwhelming shame and a sense of crushing unworthiness that dogged me day and night. It robbed me of so much.

When I think about all the girls and women who are out there right now also struggling with anorexia, my heart feels heavy with grief. Anorexia took so much from me, and it left wounds that took years and years to heal. I know it served a purpose, that it gave me something I desperately needed, but if there was one thing I could wish for all the people suffering with it, it would be for an experience of all that life has to offer that has nothing to do with the size of your body, the calories you’ve consumed or the hate you feel for yourself.

There’s more I want to say about what I wish, and about the vast shifts in perspective that I’m so grateful to have accumulated since I recovered, but in order to fully grasp those, first I need to revisit the binge eating years. They took me to an entirely different kind of hell, one that was just as painful and even harder to get out of.

I’ll write about that next time.

Image by Siora Photography via Unsplash.