What happens when a diet gets out of hand? When a desire to get fitter goes to extremes? When watching what you eat becomes counting every morsel that goes into your mouth?
I didn't want to gain weight, that was all I knew, and despite having got the age of 17 never having had a weight problem and never thinking about what I ate, I began to pay closer attention to what I was putting in my mouth. I didn't set out to lose weight, but that happened as a natural consequence of over controlling and over estimating what I was eating, and over exercising.
It started off slowly, very slowly: insidiously creeping into my life so I didn't even know it was there, until it got to the point that what I had thought I was controlling was in fact controlling me. I lost a serious amount of weight, my whole life was ruled by food and exercise, food and exercise was all I thought about. Even when I was dangerously underweight it was still the same; food and exercise, food and exercise. I was totally obsessed.
Anorexia is not something you catch. It's more a state of mind, a way of thinking, an obsession that becomes so deep seated and entrenched in your psyche that you can see no way out. You forget what it feels like to have energy, you forget what it feels like to be happy. I mean you are miserable all the time. Every smile and laugh is a bit forced. Talking to people takes a huge amount of effort. You are so turned in on yourself that when you do get into conversation you are annoyed if it isn't about you. When you are with people you're constantly thinking about how long it is until you can leave. You never get that quiet contented feeling, or that feeling where you're happy for no apparent reason and everything just seems good in the world. You are constantly tired and have no energy except that which drives you to exercise, in secret if necessary, and what's more you can't remember any different. You know to shift it,but why bother you think? You're still alive (though barely) where you are, and you don't know that things can be any different.
It's not an illness, where you feel rotten but a few antibiotics and a few weeks or even months in bed will set you to rights and you can make plans for when you're well. It's a terrible state of mind where no-one understands you, no-one understands your mood at that precise moment to know whether it's the right time to shout at you or hug you, to order you to eat or to back off. You can't see that you're slowly killing yourself and you can't see the hurt that you're doing to the people around you. You can see no way out. It's just a vicious circle and you're spiralling down. In the end it's all you have to cling to, the anorexia is all that's left of you, it's all that defines you as who you are and that makes recovery even harder because it involves letting go of the last shred of who you are and discovering who you can become when you're not defined by your problem.
It's a very frightening process, especially as you have no energy left to fight with, and you are so obsessed there is very little room left to think about anything else.
I put off coming to York for a year because I was so ill, and through that year I managed to pull myself back from the brink. It took me the whole year to get anything like normality back in my life and it was the hardest thing I have ever done, but ultimately the best and most rewarding thing I have ever done. It was a very slow process, I had to re-train myself around food, re-learn what foods I liked and didn't like. I had to teach myself that food isn't dangerous, isn't the enemy. I had to learn that what I saw as a 'lot' of food was really a tiny amount, and to gain some understanding of what a 'normal' amount of food really is. I also had to come to terms with underlying insecurities about the way I look and feel about myself as a person. I was very anxious about what other people thought about me; I felt inferior to people I saw as more confident or prettier than myself and had very low self esteem. I had to learn, and am still learning, that it is not what other people think that's most important, but that it's being true to who I am and accepting and appreciating the way I look now that's crucial. Working through these issues helped me become more comfortable with myself, so I don't feel the need to engage in such self destructive behaviour.
Sometimes, particularly in times of stress, I can hear the old way of thinking working its way back into my head, but I have to keep reminding myself how much better my life is now, how much more energy I have, how much more fun I'm having. How I'm actually living now, rather than just existing.
