The reality of recovery

Recovering from an eating disorder is just as hard to deal with as any other stage of the illness. But people often think that once you are weight restored things will just fall into place.

When the hard core treatment has run its course and the doctors are no longer particularly concerned about your physical state anymore, you are on your own and the fun really starts. Sure you may not look like you are on death’s doorstep and you may no longer be displaying all the “classic” symptoms of a case that needs desperate intervention but, like the tip of an iceberg, there’s always more lurking beneath the surface that can’t be seen but can still cause a lot of damage.

Everyday you are stepping on eggshells with yourself, never knowing what is going to happen or how you are going to react. It’s World War 3 in your head, but you are the only one who knows about it; the only soldier fighting and whats-more, you’re fighting on both sides.

Yep, things get messy sometimes but you are expected to just slot right back into “normal” everyday life. – (Just as a side note, ‘normal’ is a word I have truly come to despise.)

It’s not like every time you do something brave or contradictory to what the illness would have you do you get a live band pop out from no where and start to play an emotional number to support you in your time of need – like it does in the movies. Nope, you’re on your own. You and your head, fighting all the time.

It’s quite amazing how your brain can actually contradict itself and fight against its own thoughts. Why is that? It’s not fair!

You no longer have your stark appearance or inpatient status to cushion you anymore. If people see you walking down the street, they might never guess that you are suffering or what you have had to go through. They might mistake you for a normal (there’s that word again!) person and that really hurts because you are so used to being different, so used to having something to show for your pain but now you are just like everybody else with nothing to show for your inner turmoil.

Yet your mind is always alert. You see someone skinny and instantly assume they have an eating disorder. You feel the jealousy bubbling up in you, a spark is re-ignited and the old competitive nature begins to surface again. You are bothered by that person and can’t get them out your head.

Even if that person is completely sound with food and actually just polished off a quarter-pounder with cheese, that’s not good enough. It’s not fair that they get to keep their beautiful body while you have to stay at this frumpy weight just so you can please those around you and so that they can convince themselves that because you look healthy, you are. That person will never have to suffer for being skinny, they are naturally perfect and can stay that way forever.

Everyone else is moving on and the whole world suddenly seems to be interested in health but you are not allowed to be because it could end in a “downwards spiral”. Wherever you go people are talking about their gluten free diets, their fat free, carb free, sugar free diets. You have done all of these yourself, you just did them wrong. And everyone is into their gym-ing, running, pilates, zumba, but knowing that just makes you sad and jealous and angry. You want to do all of those things too and you want to be the best.

You go on Facebook and look up your old friends you met in hospital. Half of them are skinny again and the others seem to be having the time of their lives. You are stuck in the measly middle. You’re left thinking “Great, so I’m just the fat one who doesn’t know how to have a good time”. You beat yourself up. Again. Because you are not good enough – of course.

You put on your favourite item of clothing but now notice that the fabric looks taut and there never used to be that bump where your belly is now! You feel like an over stuffed sausage spilling out of the pork belly lining. Just cook me now!

You catch a glimpse of yourself naked. There are purple stretch marks all over your thighs. “Great, I really needed that confidence booster”.

You go to the supermarket. You see ordinary items such as mars bars, english muffins, ribena – but for you they are not ordinary. They transport you back to the time you were force fed those. You will never look at them in the same way again, you vow to never eat them again.

A song comes on the radio and you get shivers up your spine. That song takes you right back to those dark days. The emotions you are feeling are tangible. You want to cry, it is so real. So raw.

You get a whiff of someone’s perfume or use some soap at a friends house and those smells trigger a memory. You can pinpoint exactly where you know that smell from, what day it was, where you were, what you ate.

It’s everywhere.It’s everything. It never goes away. It is part of you and always will be. You may be a healthy weight, you may eat all of your old fear foods, you may no longer be governed by a ruthless and uncompromising schedule BUT it’s always at the forefront of your mind. Ready to pounce at any moment. Catch you off guard. Haunt you.

This is what recovery is like but one day it may not be like this – It will not be something that occupies your thoughts all of the time. It may just be a distant memory; a message in a bottle that has been thrown out to sea, never to return.

Reaching this stage will, unfortunately, take time. Lots of time and lots of effort, but it can happen.

Maybe one day I’ll know that for myself.

R x

The morning after …

No, not that type of morning after … I mean the other one:

The “frantic-panicking-because-I’ve-eaten-WAY-too-much-the-day-before-and-now-I-detest-myself-and-want-to-cut-it-all-off” kind of morning after.

Yes, I’m referring to bingeing – again.

I’ve been doing really well recently and have been binge free for about 3 weeks now. But this weekend it came back to bite me in the bum.

When you are in the act of bingeing – in whatever form that may come in – you are completely entranced. Nothing can stop you and nothing does. You are entirely consumed in the process of drowning yourself in food.

The next morning however, is a completely different story and I guess, in a way, it is similar to a hangover; The after math from the night before shows you no mercy and you are forced to reap the consequences of your actions.

Guilt overwhelms you. Fear consumes you. Dread lingers over you.

Thoughts are going round and round in you head and you make stupid promises to yourself in an attempt to calm yourself down. You say things like “I won’t eat anything today”  OR “I’ll do loads of exercise to burn it all off”. But for anyone who’s at all like me, an all-or-nothing kind of person, you already know that you’ll either be really strict with yourself the next day or you’ll completely crumble and just do it all again or simply stay in bed because it’s just too hard to deal with.

When you wake up, it’s almost like your head has been placed on an alien body. “This isn’t mine, is it? I didn’t really do that last night, did I?” , but when realization hits and your worst fears are confirmed, you brace yourself for the fact that the next 24 hours are not going to be fun.

When I first started bingeing, I was very strict with myself and would maybe go swimming for a couple of hours or restrict my intake for a couple of days afterwards as a means to deal with the guilt. But the cycle still continued.

Now, I don’t have the energy to do that anymore. It’s exhausting and miserable. So I tend to just “sleep it off” or try and pretend it never happened or attempt to distract myself. But the reality is still the same and if I just sit around and do nothing about it, I am bound to gain endless amounts of weight and that simply isn’t an option. I can’t let that happen. Please no.

You look down at yourself and grab bits of flesh in despair. This can’t be real.

* * *

Recently I read the most poignant book by author and compulsive eater sufferer, Geneen Roth, called “When Food is Love”.

In that she depicts, what I consider, to be the most accurate representation of what it feels like to binge.

She writes:

You wake up in the morning confident that today will be a two-pounds-thinner day, even better than yesterday, when you lost 1 1/4 pounds; you put on your in-between pants, not the smallest size that’s hanging in your closet but not the largest size either. You notice that they zip easily with thumb’s worth of room to spare, which is very different from two weeks ago when you had to pour yourself into them and hold your stomach in all day, breathing in short shallow spurts to keep the button from popping and your awareness from the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed to death. You eat your poached egg on dry toast for breakfast, your apple for your mid-morning snack. For lunch, you eat a piece of cold broiled chicken without the skin and three slices of tomato, all the while congratulating yourself on how good you are being, how much weight you will loose. You reward yourself for the deprivation you feel by the vision of the thin you entering a room. All heads will turn as unsuspecting people are practically knocked off their chairs, so startled are they by the magnificence of your smile, your eyes, your lithe body. Today will be a good day to go shopping, you tell yourself, try on a few clothes, see how good you look in smaller sizes. So you get in the car and begin driving to your favorite store, but as you come to a stoplight, you realize that something is wrong. Something is gnawing at you. You can’t put into words, but as you sit there, it grows more and more oppressive until you feel you’ll suffocate under the weight of it. You’re having a hard time breathing, the anxiety is rising and you want it to stop. All you care about is having it stop, and you begin thinking about the eclairs in the bakery next to the clothes store. Suddenly you are relieved. Something will take this feeling away. You don’t have to come apart. You will not suffocate. With the determination of a samurai, you steer the car to the parking lot, click click click go your shoes on the pavement. You look at the man with the tortoiseshell glasses who is passing on your left but you don’t really see him, you don’t see anything, your mind is a laser beam of intent. You want the food. Then you are standing in front of the glass case, hearing yourself order three chocolate eclairs, five cookies, and a marzipan cake. You mutter something about having a party as you pay for your relief and leave. Click click click on the pavement, the sound of the door opening, the thud of its slamming shut and finally, finally, you are alone with your blessed relief. Quickly, frantically, and without tasting them, you inhale two eclairs. At a more leisurely pace, you eat a third. Your stomach is getting full; you can feel the whipped cream sloshing against your ribs, can feel your pants getting tighter. Oh crap*. You’ve blown it. You’ve flipping* blown it. You were doing so well, sixteen days of eating dry toast and skinless chicken and you blew it in one afternoon. Ten minutes. Ten lousy minutes and sixteen days are ruined. Ten lousy minutes and your whole life is ruined. One wrong move. Why did you have to go to the bakery? Why couldn’t you just have walked into the clothes store? Why can’t you do anything right? You knew it really wasn’t any use trying to loose weight, you knew it all the time, you shouldn’t have even tried. You can feel your skin stretching right now, this second, your stomach is getting bigger, it’s no use trying to get your weight under control, you might as well give up. Just the way you give up on everything.”

*Explicit language has been changed.

Powerful huh?

When I first read this I cried. I couldn’t believe that someone else, a complete stranger in fact, was able to articulate exactly what I feel. I felt so relieved and yet so pained that there are others out there suffering just as much as I am. It’s a cruel and ruthless illness and it sucks every morsel of life out of you. You are not allowed to act for yourself, you must always give in to it. Yet when you do, you hate yourself even more …. Is there ever an end?

When I was suffering with anorexia, there were times when I’d think to myself “Wouldn’t it be lovely to allow myself to eat some chocolate” … but now, on the opposite side of the spectrum I find myself saying “Wouldn’t it be great to have the control to deny myself from eating chocolate again”.

This is my reality – contradiction.

I do not eat chocolate because I actually want to, I eat it because I am told to. Forced to. Compulsed to. Yet equally, I will not deny myself from eating chocolate, not because I don’t want to eat it, I do not eat it because I am told not to. Forced not to. Bullied not to.

My life can be summed up by a three step diagram.

And this is what living that diagram feels like.

To all those out there stuck in the same situation, I hope you manage to break free.

In the meantime, I will be working on doing just that for myself.

Never good enough.

So, seeing as I am now unemployed again – (yup.) – I thought today’s topic would be based on a thought that has been swirling round in my head for some time; “I’m not good enough”.

I know that I am not alone in feeling like this and I’m sure we can all relate to those deflating experiences that make us feel that way; such as getting dressed up to go out (and feeling really good about yourself) but as soon as you arrive at the place you have been preparing for you look around and realise that everyone else looks so much better than you and you will always be ugly and frumpy…

Or working really hard on something but getting a disappointing result … You get the picture.

It’s really not pleasant feeling bad about yourself but it’s so hard to feel good when the majority of society has consistently and ruthlessly decided that the only way to be accepted is to look like this:

 

Whatever happened to this being the most desirable body?!

I mean, she looks happy enough, right?!

I must say however, that things have been getting a little better recently…

Model Tess Holliday is a size 22.

                                                      Model Chantelle Brown-Young suffers from the skin condition Vitiligo.

These two women are both undeniably stunning however they are considered to be “different”.

I do not agree with that, as “different” implies that they are abnormal somehow. They are not. They are simply flaunting their individuality and there are thousands of other people who look just like these two ladies but are not brave enough or in the position to show it off. But because these people aren’t successful models, they don’t get the “privilege” of just being called “different”, they are labelled as weird and ugly and strange.

Think of it this way; when a new scientific discovery is made, say a new deep sea creature such as the Aegirocassis (below) whose fossils were recovered just this year, we do not say “Urgh, Look at it! It’s so ugly and weird” (well, some might but that’s besides the point!), we say “Wow, that’s really cool!”.

 Scientific reconstruction of the Aegirocassis.

Now imagine if we were like that towards people. We would embrace each other’s uniqueness rather than judging them because they may not conform to “so-called” beauty as set by the narrow-minded standards of the 21st Century.

I’m not saying that I am completely innocent of such judgments myself as there has been many a time when I have had preconceptions towards a person just because of how they look, but it is so unfair and so unjustified. And just as much as we hate being made to feel worthless, so do others and we have to accept people for who they are.

Acceptance is a great thing and it is so important we learn to embrace those around us, but what about ourselves?

We deserve the love and acceptance we give to others just as much as they do but it is so much harder to do so.

So what can we do to overcome feelings of inadequacy?

Well, my suggestion is to surround yourself with positivism.

Watch good things, read good things, wear comfy clothes, be with people who make you laugh, be outside, make goals and be kind.

It’s an up-hill battle but maybe, someday, you might just win.

R xx

You’re never too old to …

The past few weeks in my life have been as fickle as the English weather of late; hot/cold, rainy/dry, cloudy/sunny.

My emotions have been all over the place and, as I cast my mind back to childhood memories, I can only think of how easy it was back then!

But then it got me thinking, just because I have officially entered adulthood, it doesn’t mean I have to act like an adult ALL the time.

In fact, in my humble opinion, I think you are never too old to…

Spend all day in your pajamas and get showered at 4pm! …

Have soft toys on display at the foot of the bed…

Get excited over new stationery…

Have colourful Tupperware in cute designs…

Still get excited when you see money…

See your favourite childhood band in concert…

Make your own ice lollies in summer…

Have ambitious goals…

Or even have a good cry – when needed!…

Too often we put far too much pressure on ourselves to be professional and “grown up”.

Our expectations are too high and sometimes we just need to cut ourselves some slack.

Unleashing the inner child is not a bad thing. My dream is to, one day, have a birthday party with a Great Big Whopping bouncy castle at centre stage. No shame.

It’ll be amazing.

So, moral of the story? – Go out there, have some fun and don’t be afraid to show your true colours.

(A word of warning, although unleashing the inner child is predominantly a good thing – try to keep the tantrums at bay!)

R x