Get Thin Or Die Tryin'

Sometimes I feel as though I live in a fun house. Only thing is, it’s not so much fun. The mirrors are there though.  Every day I walk past them. Sometimes, I actually do appear to look tall and thin, sick even, but most days I look short and fat. Never does my reflection appear normal.  It is because of these mirrors that I have become a slave to my scale. Each morning after I wake up, I undress and step upon the scale praying that the number is lower so that I can allow myself to eat. You see in this madhouse in which I dwell, I am a prisoner. I live as a slave to the voice in my head. She tells me that if I weigh less than I did the day before, I can eat a little bit more, if I weigh more, I must restrict my calories by at least one hundred less calories, and if I weigh the same, I must eat the exact same amount of calories I did the previous day. If you found that sentence exhausting, imagine what it is to live this way. In this madhouse, there is no room for error, everything must happen exactly this way. My therapist claims it is because of the lack of rules I had growing up, that I adhere so strictly to these rules now. I crave rules, I long for structure. I don’t know if her theory is true. What I do know is that in addition to this strict daily regimen of weighing and eating/not eating that must be followed, I am also tormented with mental abuse by the voice. She tells me constantly I am fat and worthless and that no one loves me. I believe everything the voice tells me, because she is inside of my head. She makes me believe her. If I attempt to question her, she will only offer me proof of why she is right. For example, she will tell me that no one cares about me. If I try to argue this is untrue, she will name examples of times people have let me down and say it’s because he or she didn’t care enough about me. For some reason I believe everything she says, because it’s not just words.  She makes me feel it too. When she tells me I am fat, I feel fat. I know therapists love to say, “Fat isn’t a feeling.” Trust me it is. I can actually look down and see my bloated stomach, and my stomach aches from the food I have just eaten even if the portions seem small to others. The only thing I think about all the time is food, my weight, my body etc. At night I can’t sleep because I am busy recounting the calories I have consumed throughout the day in my head. After I am done with that, I must think about what I can eat the next day, although the meal plan cannot be finalized until after my morning scale ritual. Sure, it sounds like I have a lot of time on my hands and must have nothing better to do than obsess on my daily caloric intake. However the absolute opposite is true. I actually have a super crazy, hectic, stressful schedule and have for quite some time. 

This pattern of obsession has spilled over into other areas of my life as well. With me there is no in between, everything is black or white, all or nothing. In some instances this is actually a positive thing, for example at work or school. I put one hundred percent of myself into everything I do in these areas, forcing myself to get As in all subjects no matter how many hours it takes me to study or get the work done. Sure, it all seems a bit extreme, but that’s just me, extreme. I don’t know that I was always this way; in fact I know I wasn’t. So how did I get this way? Can I ever go back? Honestly at this point I have been this way for so long, I am not sure I can ever go back. Approximately fifteen years ago, I went through a lot of major changes in my life, none of them positive. My parents divorced, we moved into a new house with my mom’s new boyfriend and his two kids in a different part of town, my brother went to live with my dad, and to top it all off my boyfriend’s drug use had finally gotten to me and I decided to end that relationship. While these things sound like a normal part of life that many teens go through, for me handling them all at once became far too much. I needed a way to cope. One day in our foods class at school, we were shown a made for TV movie called For the Love of Nancy, staring Tracy Gold. The movie outlined her descent into Anorexia. While most of the students found this film disturbing, I admired her incredibly strong will power. I realized the immense discipline it must take for someone to eat so little. Unfortunately, I used this film as a guide to self control. I thought that if I could be as disciplined and controlled as the character in this film that all of my other problems wouldn’t seem so bad, because I would be so focused on something else. First I just started eating less. I never really ate large portions to begin with, so this didn’t raise any eyebrows. Then I declared myself a vegetarian. My mother wasn’t too happy about this one. I remember her yelling at me and telling me that I was not a vegetarian as she forced me to eat a piece of fish. However I was determined to move forward. Over the next week, I insisted that I needed to live a vegetarian lifestyle and that it would not impact her in any way. I outlined meals that I could eat made from things already in the house so that she wouldn’t have to buy any special foods for me.  This plan worked and she caved in to my desire to stop eating meat. For the next phase of my plan, I decided the only food I could eat was salad. If it wasn’t leafy and green, I didn’t eat it. This also enabled me to stay low under the radar, as I had always enjoyed salads anyway so nothing appeared particularly unusual to my mother.  Then for the final phase of my weight loss plan, I decided to only drink liquids, no salads or solid food of anytime. The only exception would be if my mother got angry and tried to force me to eat, then I would be allowed a small salad. I lived off of diet soda, sugar-free hot chocolate and tea. The lower my weight got the more obsessive my thoughts became. Soon all I could think about was different foods. I would spend large amounts of time thumbing through cookbooks and soon took up an interest in cooking and baking.

My self-esteem worsened, and soon the control I had felt over food was replaced with a controlling voice in my head dictating my every decision. It wasn’t long before my mom noticed that my once 115lb frame had dwindled down to 95lbs in just a little over a month. One day she looked at me and started yelling, “Look at you, you’re anorexic! Why are you doing this?” She then grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me upstairs to the scale. It read 95, which only enraged my mother more. She told me that she would be taking me to a doctor to get me help. The very next day, she had me leave school early for an appointment with my medical doctor.  She confirmed my mother’s suspicions that I was suffering from Anorexia Nervosa.  My mother didn’t really care why; she just wanted it to stop. She formulated a plan with the doctor that included me seeing a therapist, and drinking three cans of Ensure a day while at school to try and get my weight up.  In retrospect, the therapy may have actually helped, had my mother actually taken the time to listen to what it was that was bothering me. She brought me to a therapist, who looked quite young and inexperienced. She asked me to tell her what was going on, and so I started with just a handful of the things that were bothering me. I started with the most significant change, the one that had spawn all the other problems in my life; the dissolution of my parents’ marriage. My mother did not want to hear this. She couldn’t bear the idea that my illness was partially her fault. She spat back, “No I am sure it has nothing to do with your drug addict boyfriend.”  True, my break up with Brian had been particularly bad. I cried in my bed for days and it certainly contributed to my depression, but it was not the primary thing that had made me feel so out of control. My break up with Brian did not further create a series of unfortunate events as a result. It only created normal teenage heartbreak.  That was pretty much the end of therapy as my mother saw it. If she was going to get blamed in any way for my problems, she just couldn’t deal. Perhaps if back then she had actually listened, took the time to consider and hear my feelings about the divorce, it would have opened the doorway for much deeper conversation about much more troubling issues.

Since that didn’t happen, my weight gain was to be purely the result of physical treatment alone. I traded in my size 3 jeans for zeros and my incredibly shrinking frame became the gossip of school. I was required to visit the nurse three times a day to drink high calorie Ensures to try and get my weight up. Many times I “forgot” to visit the nurse, but there was always one of my friends who would notify a teacher right away. I found out many years later that one of my friends also used to call my mother on a daily basis to report that the sandwich I claimed I had for lunch was completely a figment of my imagination and in reality the only thing that passed through my lips was a diet Snapple iced tea. To this day I am not sure why she never called me out on it or said anything at the time. It wasn’t until years later that she finally confessed this to me. One day I got called into the social workers office at school. She seemed pleasant enough, but completely dumb and easy to manipulate. She asked to see me right before lunchtime. She said that she knew I was Anorexic and that she was here for me if I wanted to talk. At the end of her conversation she asked me what I was having for lunch. I had gotten so good at lying about food that I didn’t miss a beat. “I’m going to get a veggie sandwich from the deli,” I replied with a smile. After exiting her office I went to join my friends at the cafeteria table. At first glance I looked like a normal teenager enjoying lunch with friends; the only thing missing was an actual tray of food in front of me. I felt good that I had tricked the social worker. It made me feel superior to her that I could make her believe my bullshit stories. Eventually I did regain a normal weight, but deep inside something was still terribly wrong. Anorexia just lay dormant in my mind, like a cancer patient going into remission, only to resurface anytime I hit a rough patch in my life.

As the saying goes; some things never change. Today, I am twenty nine years old. I will be thirty in December. One would think that after all this time, I would have a grasp on my illness and how to combat that evil voice in my head by now, but sadly I don’t. Anorexia has revisited me numerous times over the years, creating havoc and misery in my life and amongst those closest to me. Rather than learning from my mistakes or getting better, I have perfected my eating disordered ways, and found new creative ways to lose weight. It also doesn’t help that in this modern age being eating disordered is simply….well….for lack of a better word… easier. Back then, my only method to calorie counting was the back of what food packages said, or possibly a calorie table in the back of a diet cookbook. Today there are numerous apps and web sites dedicated to calorie counting and charting your weight loss progress. While these programs are designed for those who are legitimately overweight and need true help with weight loss, they have become an Anorexic’s dream come true. I no longer have to wonder how many calories are in a specific food item, or guess at how many calories I’ve consumed for the day. I know precisely the amount of calories, fat, cholesterol, etc of every single item that passes my lips. All I have to do is type in the food item into my livestrong app on my iphone or on to the fitday website and voila! If you ask me what I ate or how many calories I’ve had on any day in my life for the past several years, I can pull it up with just a few keystrokes or the click of a mouse. In addition to calorie counting made easy, the food industry and U.S. Government has waged war on the ever present obesity epidemic. With the invention of Splenda, new products with Stevia and the ever growing list of popular low calorie and calorie free products, an Anorexic can appear to be eating normal quantities of food to her family and friends, when in reality she is in taking little to no calories for the day. Yes, complying with the voice in my head is easier now than ever before because our society has made it so. This only makes recovery that much harder. We live in a world where anyone can simply go online and illegally order prescription diet pills online, make charts and graphs of her weight loss, formulate a complete nutritional analysis of anything she eats in a matter of minutes. Don’t even get me started on the countless books on eating disorders which many use as a how to guide to be the best Anorexic possible. With all of these new easy to use tools to feed the need of that inner voice, the methods for treatment have not gotten much better.

Insurance companies still fight footing the bill for the intense treatment needed to fight this disorder, and doctors still don’t completely understand the disease. Many simply try to get the patient to gain weight without anyone ever offering an answer to how to stop the voice. Many books will tell you the power lives within you. A certain amount of willingness must reside with the patient. Therein lays the problem. Sure, it sounds simple. Just eat. If it were that easy no one would ever have an eating disorder. The guilt and feelings associated with consuming food are so great, not to mention the intense fear of gaining weight. The fear is so intense that even when faced with poor health or death, a patient can’t bring herself to resume “normal” eating. In addition, New York City has implemented a law demanding all eateries post the amount of calories on their menu. Again, this move was made to combat the ever growing obese population of America, but it makes it that much harder for an Anorexic to simply eat without obsessing. You see obsessing is what we do best. Believe me; I can obsess with the best of them. One day around Valentine’s Day a girl at work offered me a chocolate covered strawberry. Being that this treat was unplanned, after eating it I felt immense guilt for the next two days. For dinner I only permitted myself to eat half an ear of corn, and the next day didn’t touch a morsel of food or drink until after 5PM when I forced down a salad for dinner.  Yes, I do realize how completely insane this all sounds, but this is my world. This is the nightmare I live in and have lived in on and off for nearly 15 years. I wish that I could just eat normally. I wish that I could go out for pizza with my friends, or enjoy a serving of French fries without feeling guilty, but those things will probably never happen or not anytime soon at least.

I am not your typical Anorexic teenager unhappy with her family life. I am a grown woman with a thriving career in finance. Yet despite all of my life successes, the one hurdle I have never been able to overcome is fighting the evil voice in my head who tells me what to do.  Some of my friends just think I don’t make much of an effort to combat the voice. However the battle I endure is often so exhausting that most days it is just easier to give in. This essay is not intended for the eating disordered, they have all heard this story before, for it is their story as well. It is intended for the rest of you. It is for those friends who ask their sick friend for diet tips, or commend an Anorexic on her tremendous will power. Don’t any of you get it? It is not a joke, it is living torture. The other day at work a woman said to me, “God I would kill to be as thin as you.” I smiled and walked away. What I wanted to say was, “I am killing myself. You have no idea what I do, the extreme lengths to which I go to stay this thin. Trust me it’s a living hell and you wouldn’t want to trade places with me for all the money in the world if you really knew the constant battle going on in my head.” While I realize there is a certain amount of ignorance that goes along with knowing what to say or do around those with an eating disorder, some things are just common sense.  To look at someone who is so severely underweight that her body is feeding on her own internal tissues and bones with envy is sick. This is what our society teaches though; one can never be too thin or too rich.  The truth is this illness is not about being thin, or living up to a society ideal. It is about control. When everything else seems beyond something you can handle, the one thing you can control is the food that goes into your body. It’s a coping mechanism, a way out, or a way in really. It is a way so deep within yourself that nothing else outside of you matters.

I would imagine many of the difficulties one with Anorexia faces are those similar to a recovering Alcoholic.  Perhaps this is why some of the treatment methods for eating disorders follow a modified twelve step program. I am not nor have I ever had a drinking problem. However everywhere you turn there are billboards for beer, or commercials on TV for alcohol. Everyone always wants to go out for drinks, especially after work. Drinking is such a normal part of our society and culture that if you don’t drink you appear abnormal and people act as if there is something wrong with you. Well every time I thumb through a magazine, or turn on the TV or go to the grocery store, I am bombarded with ads for weight loss products, and images of stick thin celebrities. We are made to believe that this is the ideal and this may be the reason some people can look at me and think there is nothing wrong.

There is something wrong, something very wrong. At twenty nine years of age I have been diagnosed with Osteopenia. My hair is falling out in clumps. My blood pressure is abnormally low. When I stand up I get extremely dizzy. My heart beats abnormally. Size double zero pants hang off of me as though I purchased size extra large. I am always weak, tired and cranky. Yet, I won’t stop. No, nothing will stop me from listening to the voice in my head. She is my best friend; she has always been there for me and always will be. Because of her I probably will never be able to have children, even if I wanted them. I do regularly see a nutritionist and am currently exploring treatment options, but most women with Anorexia live with this illness in some form or another for the rest of her life. So until there is a cure, a real treatment, I implore you all to think before you speak. Before you tell that thin girl in the office how much you envy her, maybe you should think about what she is really going through. To the insurance companies, and politicians so concerned about America’s obesity epidemic, don’t forget too about the small population of us who are suffering with eating disorders. For parents who are so afraid of being blamed for their child’s problems, think first of how you can help them. For any of you who know someone who has ever suffered with an eating disorder, be there for her, be a good friend, listen when she is scared and tell her it’s ok. If you are a family member or a friend of someone with Anorexia, no matter how scared or angry or frustrated you may be, just remember she is probably a million times more scared than you are.