I will try not to bore anyone silly with long lists of the food choices I make every day. If I find an interesting recipe or devise one that I think tastes great , then I will post it. I want to write more about the internal struggles I face and how things affect me both psychologically and physically. Suffice it to say, I am feeling very uncomfortable today. One of the nicer aspects of being thin is that clothes hang loosely on the body and trousers and skirts are seldom too tight . When one’s stomach is empty, there is little chance to feel bloated and so when one increases the amount one eats, the effects are immediate and felt more acutely than the average person. My stomach has been raging all day against the rude interruption of its relatively peaceful existence. It has been protesting loudly with gurgles and groans , feels distended and bloated and there is no doubt that this will be the order of the day for some time. I also have body dysmorphia and think that I look huge already, a complete fallacy and impossibility at this stage but I have these feelings none the less. Again I stress that whilst I may know the lies that I am feeding myself are fictitious and unreal intellectually, yet my mind is so geared towards the misinterpretation of the truth that this may be the hardest thing to crack. I know that when one tries to help and heal someone with anorexia, most often the best thing to do is to get weight on first before trying to deal with the psychological aspect of the disease. When the brain is in a starved state, it cannot grasp reality, logic, rationality or those aspects of therapy outside of the physical realm. The more weight that is gained, the more chance there is that someone may be able to grasp things better and see themselves with more objectivity and realism. This is not written in stone of course, its merely my understanding of the starving brain. My obsession with food is another example of this – I am so preoccupied with food that I think of little else . I am starving but my brain can’t compute this into the then obvious need to eat because I have sunk to a weight that is abnormally thin and this I believe, has caused parts of my brain to shut down. Of course I manage to function in the world and people who don’t know me might think that I am too thin but may have no idea that its affecting me so much. I have lived like this for so long that it has become who I am and I literally don’t know of another way to live. The scary thing is that I don’t really know who the real me might be if she wasn’t anorexic and caught up in this whole ED world that I inhabit. Those close to me have tried to encourage me and have talked to me about changing over the years but its only really now that I see that they have grown weary and are becoming a little more hostile towards my behaviour because its impacting them more as time goes on. I am socially introverted ( that is another story ) and large social gatherings scare the pants off me but alongside this is also the need to escape, to run back to my safe space and the comfort of familiarity and privacy when it comes to eating. My daughters figured this out years ago and have seldom confronted me on the issue but they have expressed that it would be great to see me relaxed enough not to always feel the need to escape. The irony is that when I am with my family, I adore every second of hanging out with them. The reality is that the ED and my social reticence is bigger and stronger than anything else and invariably wins the day.
Another possible misnomer and illusion that I have always lived with is that if I fix my ED, then everything else will fall into place and all my problems will miraculously vanish. Surely I cannot be so naive to think that it would be that easy? Having never cracked it, I have no idea . This school of thought may well lie alongside the overweight person who thinks that if they wake up thin, all their angsts and issues will be resolved. Yes, perhaps initially, as one basks in the ’ success ’ of one’ achievement. But what happens when the dust has settled and normal life and routines take precedence ? I do not believe that in both cases , treating the physical manifestation of habits and addictions is the cure or end of previous problems and yet I still cling to this notion.
If I can look at this as a discovery of self, a journey towards freedom from bonds and addiction and not just the act of putting on weight, then I think I have a chance. I know that I am unhappy as I am so its worth the risk if changing it offers me so much more than I ever imagined. For me the biggest carrot dangling in front of me is the thought that I then might not have to live with so many regrets . Regrets about so much time wasted, so much enjoyment denied to me, so many discoveries and adventures that I have missed and so many relationships that could be better and more pleasurable because my head isn’t full of these inane obsessional thoughts about eating and food.
