I have made it abundantly clear since I started sharing my story with you, that I have an eating disorder. Or should I say, I had an eating disorder. I have been pursuing recovery since I first graced the doorstep of my psychologist in 2015 and I can say with absolute certainty that I have reached a very happy place when it comes to my relationship with food.
The things we take for granted . . . I have experienced a great deal of privilege in my life. I am […]
Now, I have talked endlessly about body image at different times. It is something I have struggled with my entire life. As my journey of recovery took on an upward trajectory in the past 15 months, I worked on the acceptance thing. Trying to accept myself as is, right now. I hear other people do this and it’s good for you.
I’ve been recovering for six months now. Just over. And I guess the difference between actively seeking recovery and actually recovering is the associated behaviours. It may seem blindingly obvious, but changing eating disorder behaviours is really fucking hard. It’s taken me years of psychological therapies to put into practice the very things that make perfect, logical sense. But here I am – putting stuff into practice for six months now. More if you count my time in the clinic where I was forced to be healthy.
The trouble with rapid weight gain is there’s no time to let your wardrobe adjust – one day everything fits and the next day nothing fits. Well – there’s perhaps a three-month passage of time but still, slowly morphing your wardrobe into something three sizes bigger should take time. It didn’t. Due to medication, I ballooned fast and today I had to finally accept I couldn’t squeeze my sorry ass into any of my clothes anymore.
Today I watched the film Embrace again. It should be compulsory viewing and reminded me that if I can’t love the body I’m in right now, I won’t love the body I dream of having. The perfect body is a perfect lie.
“We belong to what we value, not what we desire.” A cool guy I know. I love that statement – it really resonates with me. I spend time and energy, make commitments and secret pacts, with the things I value. Not with the things I desire.
The universal human need to be needed. The basic human rights of love, care and acceptance. The intimacy of belonging to community. These are the emotional truths I wish to explore. How my needs, rights and sense of belonging have, and have not, been met. The consequences to me, and to everyone I connect with, from my lack of self-love.
People with eating disorders often talk about the eating disorder voice that natters away, telling us what to do. Or not. Undermining recovery. Making us doubt ourselves. But I wonder what that means to someone without an eating disorder voice? Or even what it means to other eating disordered people – I doubt we’re all the same.
While you’d think fear and loathing around body size would make me eat less and move more – proven methods of weight loss – it does in fact increase my anxiety which makes me eat more food, more often, and much faster. Counter intuitive. But my reality. This in turn makes me more unhappy and I find myself in a vicious downhill spiral.
For me, “triggered” means feeling a compulsion to succumb to the disorder. As a bulimic, that means compensatory eating behaviours. Binging, purging, or both. Finding any means possible to compensate for having eaten. Finding any means possible to reduce the size of my body so clothes hang loosely and my bones become visible. Feeling triggered means a huge risk of relapsing.
Every day – every moment – of my life, I change and transform one way or another. My body constantly regenerates – most of it anyway. Some cells every few days, some every few years. And a few important cells in the brain we apparently need to treat carefully as they’re just one-timers. But overall, my body has been changing and transforming since that winning sperm first introduced itself to a welcoming ovum more than 52 years ago.
Today’s psychology task – write two letters. One from my body to me. One from me to my body. Here goes:
See that picture? That’s my toes. Pointing at a blank spot. A blank spot where my scales have sat since we renovated the bathroom about 12 years ago. (Before that they sat somewhere else…) For as long as I can remember, I have weighed myself first thing every morning – day in day out. Like clockwork. A special, comforting routine. I’d climb out of bed, empty bladder, strip naked, stare at fateful numbers.
I have a body. As I said once before, it has served me faithfully all my years. I have been blessed with strong bones, good teeth, a great immune system and most excellent health. I am indeed extremely fortunate.
