The Blog About the Body

phantom limb

2010-06-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

I had a moment of mourning the other day, when I realized that if I wanted to be healthy, I could never binge again. The impetus for the mourning was actually reassuring--in a moment of stress I wanted to hide myself in food, live back in that swamp for a while instead of dealing with the issues at hand. But it was a wistful thought, a faraway one, somewhat like when you see an 8-year-old girl and wish you could be her again for a day. It didn't actually cross my mind to do it; less than a year ago, the second I had that impulse I would have been at the grocery store, eyes pointed down so as to avoid meeting the cashier's eye. I tried not to remember who my cashiers were, for fear I'd see them again.

Anyway. It was a memory more than an urge--a remembrance of one way that used to work for me to suppress my stress, however inefficiently and however brief the relief it would bring. And I don't want to belittle that. But the follow-up thought seemed almost grave to me: I will never do that again (I hope; I wish there were a whisper font I could write in, so that I'm not lying now if I turn out to be mistaken). I thought I had already dealt with the sort of "goodbye"s that addicts have when they enter recovery: I have waved goodbye to my symptoms (most of them, anyway) and recognized the pain that comes in having to develop other strategies instead of relying on this one. But I haven't dealt with the real goodbye yet.

I've been lucky enough to have never seriously grieved the permanent loss of someone I love (my grandmother is the closest, but even though she died young, I understood the cycle of life enough at age 11 to get that this was how things would just be sometimes). But those who have done it have reported to me the grief that comes not when the beloved dies or when they're learning how to live in the everyday without that person, but the first time they think "Oh, I've got to call so-and-so and tell them about this" before remembering that the person is dead. I feel like that's sort of what I'm doing here. The urges have diminished--they're not gone, but they're so small as to make the word "manageable" seem overblown. (At least, that's how I'm feeling today. Last week it was different. It's so hard to know in one moment how I could ever have felt anything different.) But they were a part of my life for so long that they feel like instinct, a phantom limb I feel myself wanting to scratch but being unable to.

No, I can't lose weight

2010-04-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

Because I've had some form of an eating disorder for more than 20 years, I have absolutely no idea what my natural set point is. I mean, I know that there's a weight range I've never fallen outside, and that when I've been on the upper end of it it's because I've been eating terribly, and that when I've been on the lower end of it I was chronically underfeeding myself. So I know my set point is somewhere in the middle. It's around where I'm at right now. In fact, given that while I've had flareups of my ED I haven't had a single true lapse (until last week, but it was indeed a lapse, not a relapse, so I'm OK) since November, it's probably exactly where I'm at right now. It's a healthy weight for me. It's not difficult to maintain. I look fine, I feel fine.

But--but. But. To say that--to say I do not need to lose weight, I am not trying to lose weight--is incredibly foreign to me. When I first entered treatment I remember feeling in awe of the possibility that I could eat normally; that no longer seems foreign to me. But as the weeks pass and I continue to be dissatisfied with my body and know that I am not doing anything to "fix" it, and that in fact I never will--well, that is really hard to accept. I am not "fixing" it because there is nothing to fix; this is where I should be, and I know it. But I feel like I'm trying to learn a language that I can read but not yet speak: I can see the words and know what they mean, but my mouth cannot form the sounds; the wrong words tumble out, unintelligible even to myself, the aggravating unease of knowing what I want to say but not having the tools to do so underlying my every word. I feel--helpless, like I'm stuck in this body that I'm just now getting to know.

One of the biggest surprises for me in getting treatment was how little I wound up thinking about my body. Part of the whole ED thing is that everything becomes wrapped up in the body: All troubles and frustrations center around food and eating and the body. When I pictured ED treatment, I envisioned lots of seminars on body image, and instead I got none. I grew to see poor body image as a symptom of my disorder, not as a cause. This makes it easier to sort of grin and bear with myself when I have poor body image, like I have been lately: I know that my body image and my eating are separate, and in fact need to be, because one is an act that I need to do to live and one is a series of funhouse mirrors that reflects absolutely nothing about reality. But what it does mean is that I'm left with that tongue-tied frustration when I have it: I can't do a damn thing about it. I have to sit with the feeling of looking down and hating what I see. I have to let that feeling just be. I have to let it just be.

Momma Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

2010-04-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Even before I got to the quote from the ED specialist in this Times piece about people who photograph everything they eat, disordered-eating alarm bells were going off in my head.

When I was initially assessed at Renfrew, one of the questions they asked was about "food rituals" and whether I had any, to which I replied no. It wasn't until we had a session on food rituals that I understood that pretty much every ED sufferer has them, to varying degrees of codification. I almost always ate one food at a time; I used to count how many times I would chew. Others smothered their food in condiments or seasonings; others couldn't have one food touching another. The mark of whether something was a ritual or a mere preference (I know plenty of non-disordered people who hate it when their potatoes touch their beef) was whether it was anxiety-producing to not do it. So when I read this...

She said she takes pictures of at least half the meals she eats, omitting, for example, multicourse meals when it might “interrupt the flow.” But she has noticed lately that it’s becoming harder to suppress the urge to shoot. “I get this ‘must take picture’ feeling before I eat, and what’s worse is that I hate bad pictures so I have to capture it in just the right light and at just the right angle,” Ms. Sherman said.

...it sounded familiar.

Certainly the hordes of amateur food photographers out there aren't all quietly suffering from eating disorders. But the reporter was perceptive enough to highlight that the hobby isn't always harmless:

Photos are also a means of self-motivation for Mr. Garcia, who began photographing his food after he lost 80 pounds. “It’s definitely part of my neuroticism about trying to keep thin,” he said. “It keeps you accountable because you don’t want to have to see that you ate an entire jar of peanut butter.”

And, ever the scientist, he hopes to one day use the photographs to calculate how much money he spends to consume a calorie versus how much he spends in gym memberships and sports gear to burn a calorie.

I can't see how this brings Garcia any joy; it seems like Kodak handcuffs to me.

This seems to bring attention to a major point for people in recovery: How do you celebrate the social rites of food without falling into the rabbit hole? When I traveled through Vietnam, I went nuts photographing what I was eating, and it felt joyous to do so. It was a way of recording and, later, sharing a vital sense of that most sensual country; I'm terrible with a video camera, so recording my gustation was one way I was able to keep Vietnam with me. I know other women who have recovered who turned their former fear of food into a celebration, with photography, food writing, and dinner clubs. But I also know that can be a dangerous line to toe: I have no doubt that my short-lived foray into pastry cheffery was linked in part (though not fully) to my disorder, and a good number of the women in my pastry course reported some seriously disordered eating in their past. At what point does waxing rhapsodic about hazelnut dacquoise veer from genuine appreciation of the gifts of food to an obsession?

Notes From Prague

2010-03-15T14:50:00.001-07:00

So on my very first night in Prague, I'm wandering around the old town in a total jet-lag haze, just trying to make it until 9 p.m. so I can go to sleep without further messing with my circadian rhythm. I find an Indian restaurant (because what's a trip to Prague without...Indian food?) and sit down. The two women next to me are speaking English, and are talking about none other than treating eating disorders. When they got up to leave, I introduced myself, just thinking--you know, what are the chances of that happening? Certainly I don't go around introducing myself to everyone I overhear talking about EDs, but I'd been hoping to find an English-language support group while here and thought maybe they could help.

One of the women is German but lives here in Prague, doing a study about online parental support groups. Unfortunately, there are no English-language support groups here, but she not only pointed me in the direction of a therapist in case I need one (I don't think I will); she also took me under her wing, and we've been hanging out. And really, that's what I need--to not feel isolated; to share food joyously; to feel connected to someone here in my environment.

All that is a lead-in to saying that I am doing well here. Not perfect, but well. The first week was a little rough--I felt lonely and disoriented, self-conscious and overwhelmed. I found myself doing a lot of wandering around the town, then getting hungry and not knowing where to find food, and in the process of figuring it out, passing my normal-hunger threshold and entering a bad zone of thinking that maybe I should just "wait it out" until the next mealtime. I finally sat down and made a food strategy for myself--my kitchen is stocked, I always have snacks with me, I have directions to 3-4 appealing-sounding restaurants in every neighborhood. And the plan has worked.

So that's good. What's interesting to me is the areas in which I'm thriving, foodwise. There's a freedom that comes along with having no attachment to the bulk of the food I'm surrounded by; better yet, I can't read labels (metric? kilojoules? whaaaa?), so I can't stand there in the grocery aisles comparing labels. I'm eating yogurt without knowing if it's full- or low-fat and am fine with it; I'll order the goulash if it sounds good, not thinking of it as a "bad" food. My newly discovered favorite snack, it turns out, is primarily for toddlers. So am I going for comfort food, even without realizing it? Yes. But I'm not overeating it, nor am I attaching anything but pure deliciousness to it.

In fact, I couldn't do the former without the latter. Rather, I can to a degree, but there are certain foods that are still "fear foods" for me. I've had ice cream a couple of times in a healthy manner since starting treatment, but overall I avoid it, because I just know that it's too big of a challenge for me right now. The times I've had it have sort of sprung up on me--a course on the house at a restaurant. Now that I'm thinking about ice cream in particular: A few days ago I was walking around here and saw a gelato stand, and they had my favorite flavor. And without thinking about it, I got a small cone, and enjoyed it, and that was that.

You know what's remarkable about that? It's not that I had it and enjoyed it and let it end there. It's that I didn't even count that as a victory because it felt so totally normal. Dobrý pro mě!

Woes for My Unborn Child

2010-02-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

Mariposai over at The Monster Beneath raises a point I haven't thought much about because I don't want to have children myself: What if you had a child who had an ED? Because I am not a parent and don't wish to become one, I have the luxury of looking at child-rearing what-ifs from a removed standpoint. It's a game, almost--theoretical, a reflection on myself, not the child-parent relationship, because I will likely only ever know one side of that pairing.

I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who's also a new parent. My friend doesn't have an eating disorder per se but has struggled with various forms of disordered eating, specifically orthorexia. She was petrified that her child wasn't getting enough to eat--she was constantly measuring and remeasuring her son's milk (she was unable to breastfeed), peppering the pediatrician with questions about her son's growth (which is normal), researching obscure pediatric swallowing disorders (which her son had zero signs of). This jibes perfectly with what a friend of mine who is a lactation consultant told me: Inevitably, when she has a client who is overly worried that her child is underfed, when my friend pressed the issue the client would reveal a history of disordered eating.

The uninformed snapshot of an ED patient's family history is that the parents encourage a disordered mindset: Praising her for losing weight, putting her on a diet at a young age, shaming her for a pubescent growth spurt that doesn't go from beanstalk to hourglass overnight. I've met a couple of patients with those kind of families, and I'm horrified at the thought of not having family be a refuge from the daily weight-loss assault the world throws at girls.

But most people I've met with EDs don't have such a seemingly logical family dynamic. The stories I heard that were more common were: the "perfect" family in which self-expression was silenced; families with too-permeable boundaries; distant, removed parents; the parents who told their daughter she was great as-is while the father openly ogled other women and the mother constantly dieted. And, of course, the families with abuse--sexual, physical, emotional--that is all too common when discussing women's mental health. It may be a biological crapshoot as to whether it's an ED or depression or OCD or a child who manages to somehow escape the darts of dysfunction (just as a highly functioning family is no guarantee of outrunning biological factors in mental health), but the point is: The things that actually trigger EDs at the base level are usually not what we, as ED patients and those who support them, think of as "triggers." My friend would never tell her son that he needed to change his body, but I can see how growing up with worry over food could confuse his own attitude toward nourishment when he's old enough to start making his own choices.

I was raised in a feminist household--I remember saving up my allowance to buy a Barbie (my parents wouldn't buy one) and my mother sitting down with me, undressing the doll, and pointing out how Barbie's body was different than real women's. They never did or said anything that a well-meaning but ignorant observer could point to as "why" I developed an ED. They never commented on my appearance (for good or bad), and the (very) few comments about my weight only took on a potency later on, after I began to examine why, in such a seemingly supportive environment, I was willing to do mean things to my body to make it "good enough." But children are intuitive: I saw my mother eating normal meals but saw her obesity, and somewhere in there knew that she must have been eating secretly. (Imagine my surprise when, decades later, we would start to discuss our own disorders and I found that we had the same binge foods, even though I'd never once seen her binge.) I knew that as the designated "good girl," I couldn't openly rebel; instead, I started restricting and desperately hoped they would notice that I needed help.

There are many reasons I don't want children, and fear of them developing an ED isn't at the top of the list. But, yes, it's on there. I've volleyed the questions to myself thousands of times: Is it in my brain / the magazines I work for / my home / what if I were born male / am I lucky it wasn't a "worse" affliction / what could I have done differently? I can't imagine asking the same questions for someone else's disease. When I told my mother that I was going into treatment and asked her why she wasn't as supportive as she could have been when I'd come to her for help years earlier, her response was one I couldn't have imagined: Because she'd been dealing with it all her life, she couldn't imagine that my problem warranted treatment. My mother loves me deeply, yet was blind to how that line of thinking jeopardized my own health--and her own, for that matter, as it kept her from having to confront her own ED. Perhaps my greatest fear is not that I'd have to deal with the pain of watching my child destroy herself, but that if my child developed an eating disorder, I'd have to confront my own recovery failures too.

(Laura Collins writes, excellently, about this in-depth at Are You Eating With Your Anorexic. She focuses on treatment methods, specifically Maudsley, and though I am not a parent I feel as though I've learned a good deal about family dynamics and EDs through her blog. As far as I can tell, Collins did not suffer from an ED herself, so her focus is different than what I'm addressing here.

Normalized Eating and Travel

2010-02-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

I spent six weeks in Vietnam last year in a fit of post-layoff malaise. And while I was there: I ate totally normally and didn't think about it.

I thought about my intake, of course; I made a point of walking everywhere to burn calories; I noticed that I was losing weight and was pleased. But as far as what I was actually eating: I ate with pleasure and gusto when the occasion called for it, and treated food as tasty sustenance when that was appropriate. I didn't overeat; I didn't restrict. I wasn't forcing myself to stay in line--it just happened, which, even at the healthy place I'm at right now, seems sort of miraculous.

Part of it was the lack of boredom, and the general lack of stress--I do fine in immediately stressful situations that travel calls for and am not a freaker-outer; the stress that triggers symptoms in me tends to be more of the chronic kind. Part of it was not wanting to miss out on the delicious foods surrounding me; to only stick with the familiar (which would have been impossible anyway) would have robbed me of an essential part of the adventure; part of it was the need to keep my energy up so that I could see all I wanted to see.

But what really made it felt so natural to eat normally in Vietnam was that I was culturally displaced. All of a sudden, food was how the rest of the world saw it, not how I've spent decades seeing it. Food was not comfort, food was not love, food was not a salve for anger or irritation or boredom or self-loathing, or an enemy to be conquered in order to feel like I had a right to exist. Instead, food was a way of connecting with my surroundings; a way for me to garner energy; a way to get to know people; a way for me to utterly enjoy myself; a way to be surprised. Half the time I had no idea what I was eating, and instead of being panicked by it, I went with the flow (even when it turned out I was eating half-hatched duck eggs). If I wanted to have rice crepes with barbecue sausage at 9 p.m., I had them--there was no cultural cue telling me that it was "wrong" or that I would need to somehow compensate for it later. Other people were doing it, it was available, I was hungry, so: I'd eat.

The Vietnamese do eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner of sorts, but there are also foods that are eaten at different times of the day (and different times of the day only--some vendors would sell their goods only from 3-5, for example), and besides, my idea of what a meal was became irrelevant. All of a sudden I was beginning my day with a steaming bowl of beef soup--I couldn't cling to my rigid patterns or treat every variation as an "extra" or "indulgence."

If I was to feed myself at all properly, I had to simultaneously A) look at the people around me and deduce from their food what was appropriate at any given time, whether that meant eating pho for breakfast or ordering multiple milky che drinks because one just wasn't enough, and B) let my body guide me to what it wanted. Rather, let my body guide me to when I wanted, because what I wanted was also irrelevant, as I never exactly got the hang of how to find exactly what I wanted to eat. But that also normalized my eating: If I was craving glass noodles and could only find buckwheat noodles, well, that's just how it is, and isn't it good anyway?

I'm going to be spending a couple of months in the Czech Republic soon, and I'm nervous about what this will mean for my meal plan. I've sort of gotten my meals down pat--still allowing for variety and flexibility, but I pretty much know what I'm going to be eating every day. I'll be thrown into a country with completely different food, with a lot of fear foods to boot--potatoes, breads, dumplings, etc. I'm trying to remember what Vietnam did for me--and that was unintentional, and before I had the tools that Renfrew gave me. But European culture is closer to American culture than Asia was--I will still be in a new place, but will have neither the continual awe I had in Vietnam, nor the sense of total displacement that forced me to go with my gut in an eat-or-die sort of way.

Overengagement

2010-01-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

New post over at Velvet Steamroller about hyped-up food trends. I'm suspicious of trends of all sorts, but food trends not only are baffling, but I think can teeter on dangerous (or at least unhealthy), for the reasons I list there.

I haven't blogged much lately. Instead: I have been quilling, decoupaging, completing Project Zero (going from 445 messages in my personal e-mail inbox to 0). I have been investigating crockpot recipes, working a lot, cleaning my apartment. I have been sleeping eight hours a night.

In short, I have been living my life.

I have no intention of slowing down the blogging--I just got started, after all. But I was feeling like I was living in Eatingdisorderland--apparently it happens a lot in recovery, that you get so enthused about learning more about recovery that you sort of become preoccupied with it. I replaced reading about superfoods and the like with reading wonderful blogs like Are You Eating With Your Anorexic?, Weightless, and Grey Thinking, and I don't plan on stopping--but I wasn't reading much else. I was engaged with my eating disorder in a MUCH more positive way than I ever had been, but by having such a laser focus on it, I was still allowing it to become too much of my life. So I checked out for a while, coinciding with the holidays (which were good!), and feel much more moderate--I feel like I'll be able to better focus on the ED issues that interest me rather than just taking it all in indiscriminately, and I hope to develop more thoughts of my own through this blog.

Throwing Yourself Down the Stairs

2009-12-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

I've been relying on concrete data to "prove" that I'm recovery: X days without bingeing; X days without restricting. Renfrew was good about this--emphasizing hard data when we felt discouraged, but not using it as the sole benchmark of recovery. (I was particularly amused when my nutritionist whipped out a calculator to show that I had a "65% reduction in symptoms since admission" after a particularly bad night.)

That's great and all, but what is feeling like a more remarkable feat is the soft data--the times when I notice that my thoughts have actually changed. I gobbled down a candy bar this evening--not the end of the world, but it wasn't on my meal plan, and since I have a lot of dinners with friends this week at yummy restaurants, I know I'll be having my meal-plan desserts later this week. I ate the candy bar because I was hungry, and lonely, and hadn't followed my meal plan earlier in the day and was short on starch exchanges, so it was somehow "okay" because of that. Essentially, it was a mini version of the exact problem that landed me at Renfrew: restricting and bingeing.

Two months ago, the process would have been: I had a candy bar > that was wrong of me > the whole day is ruined > since the day is ruined I should go all the way and binge > binge > tomorrow I will restrict.

Tonight, it was: I had a candy bar > I haven't had dinner so was probably hungry > I'm going to have a yummy dinner that's on my meal plan > and if I'm hungry later I will have a snack. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

One of the women in my group was prone to my old-think too. She compared it to tripping while walking up the stairs, so standing up and throwing herself down the entire flight, because there was no point in continuing up the stairs anymore. We all laughed when she said that, because it sounds ridiculous in those terms--but that's exactly what so many of us are prone to. So I slipped, and it's fine. It's only a "slip" if I make it as such, anyway--a candy bar is not a binge; it's not anything that needs to be compensated for, even though it's not terribly healthy for me and I didn't plan for it. Having a candy bar sometimes when you didn't plan for it is normal. And again: I'm not a normal eater yet. But today's thought--which, incidentally, I arrived at organically, without having to force myself to think "right"--shows me that I'm getting a little bit closer.

End of IOP

2009-12-10T20:36:00.001-08:00

I write about my personal recovery here and use Velvet Steamroller to write about similar issues in a somewhat more sociological context. But I'll link to myself here: a post about the future of health reporting.

Personal recovery: Tonight was my last night in intensive outpatient treatment at Renfrew. I thought I would be feeling more of a jolt, either a sense of sudden isolation, or freedom, or something. But as my insurance-approved sessions slowly ran out, it sank in more and more that IOP is the beginning of treatment, not treatment in and of itself. I'll still have a nutritionist (monthly) and a therapist (weekly), plus weekly outpatient support group. Those are enormous, but in a way, they're incidental: I will not always have a nutritionist, or a therapist, or a support group. But I will always have my own resources, the tools that I've been given through the more active part of treatment.

I went into treatment not because my symptoms were so out of control (they were bad, but I've had worse and didn't seek treatment then), but because I realized I didn't know what to do to help myself. I thought I knew, but only through proper treatment did I learn that the ways I'd been trying to help myself were actually symptoms of my eating disorder. When I began to realize that, yes, I really had an eating disorder, not a lack of willpower, I looked up treatment plans and tried to do them on my own. I read that ED patients were instructed to eat every four hours, but that didn't work because I didn't know what to eat. I read about intuitive eating, but that didn't work because the barometer of my intuition was calibrated to my eating disorder, not my authentic self. I tried to avoid weight-loss information but instead started looking at the information reallyreallyfast, as though it wouldn't really do any damage that way. In short: I was unequipped to recover on my own. I needed help. And I got it.

I wish I had known earlier that eating disorders were actually treatable. Rather, I wish I'd known earlier that my eating disorder was actually treatable. I thought treatment was something that only really sick people got to have--like, if I'd messed up my heart by purging, or my bones through restricting, then I'd get to have treatment. I didn't know that what I was going through was "enough" to warrant treatment; I thought that, if I needed anything, I just needed some therapy to work on my body image and all would be well. I've read ad nauseam about eating disorders and how complex they are--how they're about control, and family, and expression, and emotion, and anger, and resistance, and, yes, the culture that tells us that our worth is in our shape. But ever since I can remember, my reaction to that has been, For them, sure. But me, I just want to lose a few pounds.

I was wrong.

Bikram Yoga Really, Really Sucks

2009-12-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

There are certain things or behaviors that automatically scream DISORDERED EATING to me, even if they're not things that are actual symptoms of an ED. Like, whenever I see a woman buying nonfat Greek yogurt along with Amy's frozen meals, I'm all, I'M ONTO YOU. Now, nonfat Greek yogurt and Amy's frozen meals are healthy and enjoyable, and I don't think that the items themselves encourage disordered eating in the least. But they're the kinds of foods that are constantly endorsed by the dietitians quoted in women's magazines, because they taste like they have more calories than they actually do; plus, they're in single servings, making them appear appropriate for a whole meal, even though they're not. (I used to eat Amy's for every single meal--which I thought was healthy and I now see was anything but. I still eat them, but I have sides with them to get all my exchanges.)

Anyway. One of those things, now that I've done it, is bikram yoga. As in hot yoga. As in yoga at 105 degrees, as in sweating through all of your clothes, as in the instructor was in boxer briefs. I'd heard various things about it--mostly from people who had tried it once, found it to be torturous, and never did it again. I do plain ol' room temperature yoga and find it the perfect combination of soothing and invigorating, and saw no need to turn up the heat. When I've done yoga in warm weather, it felt good but not necessarily better.

But on Saturday, I decided to give it a try. I told myself that it was because a new yoga studio opened in my neighborhood and had a price special. I told myself it was because I wanted to try something new. I told myself that I was just sating my curiosity. But I think that I was really just feeding my ED, trying to keep it alive in little ways--pushing the rules but not breaking them.

Just as with the legions of Greek-yogurt-eaters out there, it's not like I think that everyone who does bikram yoga has an ED. At the same time, unlike Greek yogurt, I do think that the practice inherently encourages a disordered mind-set.

A) It uses artificial means to create a response that's above and beyond what a "normal" response to a healthy situation would be (that is, it uses heat to increase the post-yoga "high").
B) It makes you sweat an enormous amount, leading to a (very) temporary weight loss.
C) Most importantly: All that sweating makes you feel lighter and somehow like you've gotten rid of something. It feels like you are purging. It feels like you are purifying. And that is the whole point of bikram yoga.

"Purity" is one of those words that can mask an ED, because it seems virtuous and healthy--few people would ever comment on the amount of food I was eating when I was restricting, but I would frequently be praised for my food choices. "Eating clean," "being pure"--I hear these just as much from my fellow patients as I do eating less, and those thoughts, when vocalized, are much less likely to garner concern/frustration/disdain than visibly restricting portions across the board.

I love yoga, and its benefits have been widely documented--including its benefits for eating disorder patients. But yoga-as-practice differs from yoga-as-lifestyle, and, as in anything that is embraced as a lifestyle for its, well, style instead of for its intrinsic qualities, it becomes something that can be ranked. Yoga class trumps yoga DVD; yoga studio trumps gym-class yoga; bikram yoga trumps hatha yoga. So suddenly, simply practicing yoga isn't enough. It has to be pushed to another extreme. And that extreme, in order to have any meaning, has to be a symbol of greater health, greater purity, greater cleansing--forgetting, of course, that yoga is about balance, loss of ego, breath, and unity of the mind, body, and spirit. It becomes a competition instead of a cooperation. In becoming a lifestyle, it loses its essence and retains only ever-increasing hallmarks--more sweat, more discipline. Which is pretty much what one end of my eating disorder was all about: Instead of focusing on actual health, I focused on what signaled "health" to my ED.

So hot yoga is bad for me because I'm recovering from an eating disorder, but so are lots of things that might be perfectly healthy for others (tracking calories, taking body measurements). But I also think it's bad for the body. Not only was I extraordinarily sore the next day, but two days later I got a painful charley horse in my right thigh. I know the difference between normal postworkout soreness, or even the kind of soreness that comes after trying something new, and this kind of soreness. This was beyond what it should be--this was harmful.

So my legs ache, and only now, on Wednesday, are my shoulders feeling normal again. That's the physical damage. I'm pleased that my mental damage was minimal--in fact, if anything it may have made me more aware of the ways in which I try to trick myself, how I try to "get away" with things. Again: If I am going to recover fully, I need to not trick myself. It's easy enough to recognize my ED when it's telling me to binge or restrict; it's harder to identify it when it's leading me to hot yoga or crazy 1970s books on macrobiotics. But I recognized this as a trick, which is a start. A couple of months ago, I wouldn't have.

Grocery Shopping, Levity, Recovery

2009-12-06T13:19:00.000-08:00

I've always liked grocery shopping. I like going at off-hours--the piped-in music that's carefully calibrated to create a sense of well-being does exactly that to me, and when the store isn't heavily populated I can dance my way through the aisles. And I do: I shuffle off to Buffalo in frozen foods, I heel-toe my way through whole grains, I shake it in condiments. For all my food hang-ups, shopping for groceries has always brought me a sense of joy. (I once went on a date where the guy suggested we go grocery shopping together, and I was in heaven. But he smelled weird, so.)

So on my first official grocery trip of recovery, I was none too pleased to find myself panicked. The rules had changed. My assumptions about what I "could" and "couldn't" eat were in flux, so what had been a pleasant, simple routine was literally making me dizzy. What cheese should I get if it's not for a party, just for me? I "can" drink juice now--what kinds do I like? My god, the cereal aisle! I stood in front of the nuts section for a solid four minutes trying to decide if I could let go of the raw-foods dictate that only raw almonds were acceptable.

I knew that my reaction was understandable, but it was also disappointing: Was this paralysis what the future held for me? What new rules would I come up with for myself? The whole point of recovery is to make my life fuller, and because of the rules I'd come up with for myself in my normal grocery shopping, it was something I could relax into. I liked reading the backs of packages, I liked the constant back-and-forth of putting things back. It was a direct channel to expel my food anxieties; it contained them in a public manner--I'm not at home bingeing, there's nothing to be ashamed of--so it felt safe. I could relate to the world and food in a controlled environment without having to make the choice of what I was actually eating in any given moment. That's where the fear came in; that's when it wasn't enjoyable. Grocery shopping may be panic-filled for other ED sufferers; for me it was a joy.

Today was another grocery shopping expedition, the second one I've done with my newly developed list of staples.* I came to the yogurt aisle. Last week, I picked yogurt just on what sounded good, and found a new brand that had passionfruit and mango, two of my favorite fruits. I bought it without looking at the nutritional information, and only upon eating it and finding myself saying THIS IS SO GOOD out loud, alone, in my apartment, did I look--it was full-fat yogurt. I don't think I've ever had full-fat yogurt before, except as a part of a dessert (the one place I've never skimped--full-fat, real-sugar everything--which is probably why that, and nothing else, is what I would binge on). So today, I picked up that flavor again, and three other flavors of the same brand, all full-fat. And as I put them in my basket, I got this feeling in my solar plexus--light but full, a sort of content elation. It wasn't giddiness, exactly--it felt too deep to be that. It felt like a release.

The last time I felt something similar was the weekend after I broke up with an ex-boyfriend three years ago. It was a troubled relationship with a troubled person, and I'd been steeling myself for the unimaginable waves of pain that would hit once I left him. They never came. Instead: I woke up on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. without an alarm, jumped out of bed, and without putting too much though into it, started doing things that I had put off for years. I dyed my duvet cover. I scrubbed my cabinets. I took a dance class. I cooked myself a good meal. It was April, the time when New York begins to percolate with a certain kind of vibration, and for the first time in the six years since I'd been with him, I was a part of that energy. I walked through the city fully alive, fully awake. I remember it now in candy colors: the pink of spring coats in Soho, the green of the first batch of spring produce at the farmer's market. And, as in this weekend, it wasn't giddiness: It was seeing the world in the way that I'd be able to from that point on.

That feeling wore off, of course. And when it did, I was confused: Breaking up with him was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life, and I'd thought that the floaty feeling would be my reward--it was supposed to stick, to make sure I knew every day that I was finally happy, dammit.

I'm better prepared this time around. Happiness wasn't my reward for leaving my ex; leaving him was reward enough. I still had all the troubles I'd had, including the ones that led me to get into such a crappy relationship in the first place, but I didn't have to deal with him anymore. And it's the same with the levity I had in the grocery store today. I'm glad I had it--I'm thankful for all the bursts of revelation, all the jumbled emotions I've had since beginning recovery. But that is now what I'm doing it for. I am in recovery not to have the feeling of breaking free, but to be free. I don't think I'll ever take recovery for granted, but I see that the goal is to take the actual liberation for granted.

So: I'm going to enjoy those moments. I'm going to eat the full-fat yogurt and be thankful. I'm going to waltz through the grocery store when it's called for, but I will not cling to that as proof of my recovery. Recovery will come when I have the yogurt just because it tastes good, not because of what it signifies. It hurts to type that, because food has been a signifier for my whole life, and it's hard to give that up. But what I get in exchange is worth more.

*I sat down and made a list of foods I wanted to make sure I always had around so that I'd always be able to make an appropriate meal or have a good snack without having to go to the grocery store at the last minute. I look at it on Sunday, see what I do and don't have, and then go shopping. This is probably what most people in the entire world do, but I've never managed to do it until now.

"Now It's All Ruined": Perfectionism

2009-11-30T19:31:00.001-08:00

Art therapy has been a mild letdown until today. I have artistic impulses but little artistic skill, so I was looking forward to having a roomful of chalks and pieces of felt and watercolors and told to "run with it," with little import placed upon the final product. But more often than not, I'm left feeling confused by what I've created, or I intellectualize it.

But today, I was in a sort of haze all day--which, before I started treatment, was my default state. But in the past month, I've only rarely felt foggy or out-of-it; part of that is eating correctly, part is awareness, part is unmasked anxiety vigorously surfacing through the shroud of depression. So when we were told to create the "here and now," I wanted something muted, foggy, hazy--gray felt and olive mesh over periwinkle paper, with strips of black funneling through.

When I was explaining my piece, I used those words: muted, foggy, hazy. But the therapist noticed that letters were peeking out underneath pasted-on bits of felt, and asked me to share the words if I felt comfortable. I did: "Don't Pass Me By" (the Beatles song came to mind); "There's Luck Around Every Corner" (a tune that only came to me in-session--I'm not normally a songwriter, so it's Words and Lyrics By ED-NOS, I suppose); "just say it." I'm not sure what that means--but the obscured phrase that made my face go hot was: "Now it's all ruined."

I was referring to the piece of white paper that was covering the words. I'd intended to lightly chalk it with yellow and wound up getting it dirty--ruining it. But my reaction made me see that I meant more: the days I felt were ruined by bingeing, the "diets" I felt were ruined by me sating my hunger; the afternoons with my father that would be ruined by him exploding. One of the most hurtful things anybody has ever said to me was that I ruined his birthday. (He was a jerk and said it to be hurtful, which it was.) I am petrified of things being ruined. It's why I'm so eager to sweep personal tensions under the rug--tension might ruin the day. It's why I quit my first job and why I never gave editing a bigger chance. It's why I don't wear my prettiest dresses. It's why I follow my meal plan practically to the letter and yet still play games with myself about what I can "get away" with while doing so.

It's why I restrict or binge, and find it so difficult to do neither. A day is good or a day is ruined. I haven't considered myself a perfectionist since dropping AP history in high school--perfectionists, after all, are perfect, and I wasn't. But my non-perfect academic record and long (long!) bouts of slackerdom don't mean that I don't have perfectionistic tendencies. If anything, the slackerdom indicates the opposite: I don't want to write unless what I'm writing is good. Which makes me never want to write. This blog is freeing for that reason--I'm structuring my thoughts here, yes, but I'm not trying to let loose perfect pearls of recovery wisdom that will make the reader weep with perfectly worded recognition. I'm just sharing. It's good for me.

Hyperawareness

2009-11-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

My stated recovery goal is to eliminate my disordered eating behaviors and develop better coping mechanisms for anxiety and depression. My ultimate recovery goal, however, goes farther and will take longer: to turn off my mental treadmill of disordered thoughts and poor body image.*

Since starting recovery, I've found that I'm hyperaware of my eating.
(Obviously, hyperawareness of my food intake is nothing new to me. And this is a far cry from the disordered hyperawareness I've engaged in before...mostly.) Even when I'm not resisting impulses to restrict my intake, everything I eat takes on a new level of meaning. I'm having a salad for lunch, so I don't have to find an extra vegetable at dinner; I had a glass of juice midday, does that count as another fruit serving or just as a snack? There's no such thing as grazing from the potato chips bowl or having a bonbon anymore. I give myself those things as allotted exchanges or scheduled snacks, so it's not like I'm falling into good-food-bad-food thinking--but neither am I eating normally.

The whole idea of going on the meal plan was to regulate my eating behavior, which is working. But the thing is, as much as I restricted before in order to compensate for my bingeing, 70% of the time I wouldn't have been in a space where I wouldn't let myself graze from the potato chips bowl. That 70% of the time, I'd munch from the bowl at parties; would have a beer; might have an afternoon cookie. That 70% of the time, I'd at least appear normal to an observer, regardless of what I was doing for meals or at night. But now--now that I'm in treatment and feel as though everything that goes into my mouth means something, whether it means that I'm getting my protein exchanges or having carbohydrates where they still feel odd or am having one of my thrice-weekly desserts--now that observer would see me refrain in most instances. Now I don't appear normal.

I'm nervous about treating my meal plan as a diet--as another plan for me to get freaky about. My body will respond much better to a wholesome meal plan than it would to, say, my raw-foods phase (I felt great while doing raw foods, but "great" in that "I'm restricting every day and feeling TOTALLY AWESOME because of it" ersatz narcotic way, not in a truly healthful way). So at least my body is taken care of, but what about my mind?

So here comes my refrain: It took me 25 years to get to recovery; recovery will not be complete in my six weeks at Renfrew, or six weeks beyond that, or six weeks beyond that. I am hoping it won't take a lifetime--I'm hoping that I will get to a point where I'm able to eat intuitively and stop the whirring of mental calculations. But it will take time. I know that my body feels miles better, and my mind scads sharper, now that I'm nourishing myself properly. That is a victory. I think that the meal plan will eventually settle in and my vigilance will wane, if I pay as much attention to the rest of recovery as I have the meal plan. I'm ready for my thoughts to go elsewhere.

*Here's another place where finding "normal" feels impossible. It's hard to find the mythical "normal" eater, but doubly so to find an American woman with a wholly intact body image. I don't want to set a goal for myself that's unachievable; is it possible for anyone to feel only thanks for her body, no forgiveness, exceptions, or qualifiers needed?

Why Kate Moss Doesn't Matter

2009-11-22T19:25:00.000-08:00

One of the most remarkable surprises I've had in recovery is how little I'm thinking about my shape or weight.* My body size has preoccupied me for even longer than my eating disorder; I remember being eight years old and trying to decide between letting my stomach go au naturel (pooched out but with a slight indent at the waistline) and sucking in my stomach (flatter stomach but with no waistline). There have been periods of my life where I have thought about my body fat every single waking minute of the day.

Logically, I'm not surprised. I know that eating disorders are about control, not about losing weight or even about food. So in recovery, my thoughts are certainly food-oriented--but instead of thinking about food I want to eat and will deny myself, or about food I'm going to binge on, I'm thinking about food combinations, satiety, getting my proper exchanges. I still daydream about food, but overall it's been non-disordered.

More important, though, when it is disordered I'm able to look at it and examine it. Sometimes I merely tell myself to stop; more often, though, I ask myself, Why this? Why now? Why is that image popping up now; why are those words affecting me now? In short, I'm finally able to look at the cause, not the symptom.

And that's what I like about Laura Collins's take on the Kate Moss "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" bit. A month ago, prior to entering treatment, I would have pshawed the thought that the skinny-model phenomenon wasn't a primary cause of eating disorders. But--hello!--I have an eating disorder: I have a myopic focus on the body. Whatever anger I managed to take outward instead of inward, I targeted toward what I perceived as the problem: I wasn't skinny enough, and the reason I thought I wasn't skinny enough was because of the images I was absorbing. That anger, plus the righteous anger that comes with awareness of the double standard surrounding women's appearance, creates a laserlike focus on those images.

But those images weren't the problem, or at least weren't the locus of the problem. My desire to be thin was a symptom of my eating disorder, and my focus on those images a secondary symptom of that desire. If my true problem were merely a sheer desire to look like a model, I'd be abusing my face and hair the same way I have my body--plastic surgery, expensive hair treatments. But while I've certainly looked in the mirror and wished my teeth were more even, my pores less visible, my hair more naturally picture-perfect, it pretty much stops there. A bit of makeup, a deep conditioning, and I'm through. I treat my face much the way I imagine a non-disordered woman treats her body--wishing it were more to her liking and taking certain means to ensure that it's closer to her desires, and then directing her energies elsewhere.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to object to the iron maiden of beauty presented to us. What woman in the western world hasn't looked at a cover-girl model and felt inadequate? What woman hasn't cursed her body for being too fleshy, or too flat-chested, or too short, or too wide-hipped--the standard being the image of a model who is paid to look the way she does, and that image manipulated to inhuman proportions? Every day, women feel robbed of our own brand of beauty because of these images, and I'd love to see our culture's definition of beauty expand thousandfold. As a feminist--as a woman--I'll continue to seek out those images, applaud outlets that dare to use a wider definition of beauty, do my best to avoid those who take the narrow path.

This also isn't to say that those images don't play any role in eating disorders. Besides being fantastic fodder for using symptoms, they normalize body dissatisfaction and "fat talk," making it easier for those with EDs to engage in disordered behavior without others noticing. And, of course, the desire to be model-skinny has kick-started many a diet, which creates hungry people, which leads to disordered eating, if not eating disorders. But I'm happily signing on to Ms. Collins's rant nonetheless. The woman and feminist in me cares. The eating disorder patient in me doesn't.

*This may seem contradictory to last week's Rice Meltdown, which was, on its surface, provoked by appearing to have gained weight. But given that at its core I've always been more preoccupied by calories and food than by my body weight, and that an inconsistent up-down of less than two pounds has never bothered me because I know full well that it likely has nothing to do with my actual body fat, I can now see that it was about trust, not weight. Again: Weight was a symptom, not the root problem.

Sitting With It

2009-11-18T20:33:00.000-08:00

We have weekly weigh-ins at Renfrew. I'm guessing that the idea is that the staff can monitor by our weight whether we've been following the meal plan. Some women are weighed blind; I'm not one of them. Today I wish I were.

I have followed the meal plan very closely. I'm not always 100% perfect with it--but my slip-ups have been negligible. (I didn't eat enough for lunch on Saturday to pre-compensate for a big meal that night, which turned out to be not that big; I went over on exchanges a couple of times, but in the course of a normal meal, not bingeing--two starches over because I had two slices of pizza to get enough protein exchanges, for example.) And I have accepted on blind faith that my nutritionist is right: I will not gain weight with this plan, and in fact will probably lose some weight.

But this week I was up 1.5 pounds from last week. Now, I know full well that that means exactly nothing. Nothing! The clothes I was wearing, my water retention--1.5 pounds is utterly meaningless. But it still sunk me: I had been doing everything right, and I felt like my body was repaying me in fat.

I think I acted out at dinner as a result--I was supposed to eat a cup of rice and it felt like punishment. Punishment for having been fat in the first place, even though I'm not overweight by BMI standards. Punishment for every minute slip-up I've had; punishment for years of fucked-up eating that may have damaged my metabolism. Punishment for wanting to eat, punishment for being soothed by foot; punishment for having gotten to this place, even though "this place" is far, far away from where some of my fellow patients are. (I'm certainly on the healthier end of the spectrum there.) I didn't finish my meal, and the more the therapist intervened, the more upset I became. She gave me a supplement--which I think a part of me wanted (I wanted to get it, not to drink it), as a weird sort of badge of defiance. I think there was a part of me that was curious to know what would happen if I wasn't the model patient for once; if I said "fuck this" and didn't eat what I was supposed to. And doing so at Renfrew was a safe place to do that. There was support around me afterward; there was a therapist reminding me via the supplement that, yes, I really do need a cup of grains; nobody was going to either boot me out or treat me somehow "special" because I didn't eat my meal.

We talk a lot about "sitting with" a feeling. As in: You're anxious; can you just sit with that? "Sitting with" a feeling is a positive coping mechanism in and of itself, up there with reaching out for support, or going for a walk, or distracting yourself with a movie. It's not something I'm very good at. But the only way to get better at sitting with a feeling is to just do it.

So: I feel fat. Part of that is literal; I run my hands over my stomach, feel my flesh, feel my roundness, am upset. But "fat" is not a feeling--so what exactly is it I'm supposed to sit with? I feel disappointed in myself for not having exercised enough. I feel ashamed at having acted out at dinner; I feel sad and weak that a number on a scale can mean so much to me. I feel sad that I will never be as thin as I once was; I feel sad about no longer leading the life that symbolized (I was confused, but I was also having a lot of fun--everything felt new to me). I feel angry that I care about my weight; I feel angry that I'll never look a way I'll never look. I feel angry that I feel angry. I feel sad that I feel sad.

Light Like a Feather

2009-11-10T18:59:00.001-08:00

Joy at What I Weigh Today has a timely (for me) post about what actually happens to your mind and body when you eat three square meals:

It has taken me eons to realize that I’d rather weigh 150 pounds and have my full energy, intellect, creativity, and concentration at my disposal than be a 125 pound version of myself so clouded by chronic imperceptible hunger that I don’t even notice how dull my mind has become.

I'm beginning those eons now. I mean, I've been trying to "come to peace" with my body all my life, no matter if I was overweight or not. But I've always framed it in solely in terms of body image, of approval and acceptance of what I look like. Trying to hold onto those brief moments when I'd catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and like what I'd see; trying to dispel the distaste and shame that fills me when I cross my arms over my belly. At best, I'd frame my body in terms of its function: I can run several miles without stopping; I'm muscular; as a result I have an athletic heart rate and overall good health.

It has never occurred to me to think of bodily acceptance in terms of what I can gain by not being thin. It has always, always been a question of being at peace with what I thought I would lose by not being so.

I've been thin once in my adult life. I wasn't underweight, but I had the kind of body that salespeople felt free to comment on, for being "able to wear anything." (It was a very weird awakening, to find that people felt more free to comment on the body of a thin person than of an average or slightly above-average one.) I'd look in the mirror and see these little hips, these hips that weren't mine; I was constantly touching my hipbone because I'd never felt it so sharp before. I got attention from a certain kind of man I hadn't before. I liked being "able to wear anything"; I spent a lot of money on cute little dresses.

And. I was hungry. I smoked a lot and drank a lot of coffee. I went to bed hungry. I spent meals, say, ripping away any bread that wasn't necessary to hold together the sandwich. I knew I wasn't anywhere near fat, but the number of "fat days" I had decreased by maybe 10%. The "certain kind of man" I was meeting at that time was more often than not also sort of a jerk, so I was a faintheaded wreck, anxious over my love life and too hungry to have both feet on the ground. I was feeling great about running, but would come back after 3.5 miles so exhausted that I'd nearly pass out in the shower (what was I doing to my muscles?).

Okay, enough life-while-thin horror stories. The point is: It came with perks, but not one of those perks is worth its cost. I was hungry all the time. I was more motivated to "do something" with myself during that time than I'd ever been, before or since. I took writing classes; I joined writing groups. And it was impossible to concentrate during those: the anxiety, the lightheadedness, the hunger robbed that precious motivation of its rightful place in my life. It robbed me.

Fuck that shit. I'm going to have 1.5 ounces of hard cheese. NOW.

What do you do when you're hungry?

2009-11-10T12:34:00.000-08:00

The good news is that my meal plan no longer seems like it's enormous quantities of food. My body has adjusted; I can eat a bowl of cereal with milk and a cup of berries and a piece of toast for breakfast, and then have a big salad with a half-cup of quinoa and tortilla strips and 2/3 cup beans and so on and so on.

The bad news? I'm now hungry. I think. I don't know. All of last week I was feeling stuffed--I don't think I genuinely felt hungry until Friday (I started the plan on Monday). I was so focused on the stuffed feeling that it took me a few days to realize what I wasn't feeling: irritable, lightheaded. I wasn't ever feeling that floaty high I'd feel when I was eating what I thought was right and not bingeing--I do miss that feeling, I admit--but I wasn't feeling the negative side of hunger either.

So this week I'm feeling cranky and a little lightheaded and spotty, and I don't feel that way immediately after eating. I think it is hunger--but if over- and under-eating has been masking my emotions for so long, what if I'm just actually feeling like a big ol' grouch?

"Eat something and find out which it is, hunger or true irritability," says my sensible mind.

"You should relish this meal plan until you're bumped up to a higher-calorie one," says my eating-disordered mind.

They flip a fictional coin. Last night sensible won; today the other half wins. I am following my meal plan, after all; I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. On Monday I will be honest with my nutritionist, and I suspect she will move me to the next meal plan--right now I'm on a "transitional" plan, which is used for people who restrict, or for people who are very short. That is: It's not supposed to be quite enough. Not yet. So: not yet.

I don't know what to do when I'm hungry--are you "supposed" to eat when you just had something that "should" have filled you up? Or are you supposed to wait? Are you supposed to eat fruit, or string cheese, or graham crackers? Are you supposed to have whatever you want? What if you don't know what you want? What if you feed yourself and you can't stop?

Heading into week 2

2009-11-08T20:54:00.001-08:00

Eating "so much fucking food" has gotten easier over the past week. I was incredulous--as in, I literally did not believe it--when my nutritionist said that she thought my binges were provoked in part by hunger. But already I am seeing that she was right. Certainly hunger is not the entirety of it, but it's a much larger chunk than I was able to see, in part because I WAS HUNGRY AND WASN'T THINKING CLEARLY.

I mean, I was just as likely to binge after a full meal as I was after a skimpy one. I don't think I'm triggered to binge by hunger or by a big meal; it's more complex than that. Days of not eating enough cloud one's judgment, making one more prone to not-great choices where the primary focus on one's mind--food--is concerned. (Note that the people in the oft-quoted study that re-created dietary conditions of concentration camp victims--the one that showed that they all became seriously preoccupied with thoughts of food--were given food. They just weren't given enough.) So when I'd finally get proper nourishment, instead of feeling sated, I felt somehow wronged for what I hadn't been eating--like I wanted to go on a roll, but not with healthy food. When full portions are denied, they become the forbidden. I'd heard plenty that denying yourself one food was the surest way to make sure you'd eat in in the future. And I've only rarely denied myself any particular food; I'd just deny myself enough food in general. So food in general would become my preoccupation.

At some point I hope to be more focused in this blog. For now, I'm just sort of putting my thoughts out there.

I didn't follow my meal plan this weekend as closely as I'd planned to. I decided to make pancakes on Saturday, which required a trip to the store, and then it took a long time to actually make them. More than two hours passed between waking and eating; that's too long. I was ravenous and exhausted by the time I ate (I did eat an apple, but it wasn't enough). Not eating until noon threw me off for the whole day. I got in all my portions, but questioned myself more on Saturday and Sunday than I had the rest of the week. My weektime meals tend to be pretty structured--I welcome the variety that a meal plan steers me toward, but a structure is just easier to follow. So instead of "follow meal plan," I think my goal for this week should be to "plan meals." I was telling myself I shouldn't over-plan because that's not "normal." But the fact is, I'm not a normal eater yet, and won't be for a while. Years from now, I hope to not have to plan out every meal. But for now, I need to.

That's actually a recurring theme--two, really--normality, and patience.

1) Normality: NOBODY IS FUCKING NORMAL ABOUT FOOD. I hung out with a friend on Friday night, someone I consider "normal" about food. At one point she said that a coworker brought in a bag of candy corn specifically for my friend, because the coworker knew that my friend loves candy corn. Which she does. But it was Halloween last week, so my friend had had her fill of Halloween candy and didn't want any more. In order to not hurt her coworker's feelings, she put the candy corn in a bowl between their desks, and my friend makes a show of grabbing some whenever she walks by. She then throws it away.

Now, this is "normal" in the sense that she recognizes the emotional connection to food (her coworker doing something nice for her), and "normal" in the sense that she's not eating more sweets than she would like to consume (she had had enough candy for the week and didn't want to have more). So this behavior is normal, because she's a normal eater. But it's also weird! It's just weird! Weird in general that anyone would have to put a show into taking candy corn. I get why she did it, and obviously it's not disordered eating. But for me, it would be. My boyfriend will throw a fit if there's mayo on his sandwich. That's not normal. He's totally normal about food, but not in that way. Nobody is fucking normal.

2) Patience. I don't consider myself a patient person. I'm not necessarily impatient, but during my time in therapy I would repeatedly get frustrated by how much time it took for something to sink in. Like, I'd intellectually recognize that X was a problem for me as a kid, which makes me do Y now. I'd get that. But I'd still keep doing Y. I couldn't understand why an intellectual understanding of it wouldn't just make it poof go bye-bye.

I'm glad I met with a nutritionist before jumping into the program. Because that showed me that I really don't even have an intellectual understanding of eating disorders, or at least of mine. I had no idea I was restricting to the extent that I was. I was utterly blind to that. I saw quickly and dramatically how I had to just sort of close my eyes and put myself into the hands of this program--that is, I have to do the work. And I have to put my own individual effort into it, and it has to be real effort. It will work. I don't know exactly in what ways it will work; I have no idea, realistically, how I will be in five years. But it will work in the sense that I trust that my life will be more livable because of this program. I have to do the faith fall. That means following all the rules and listening to myself while doing so. That means not brushing off my reactions as overblown or inauthentic; that means not creating food issues for myself where there are none. That means not looking at raw food diets; that means not entering my intake into calorie calculators. That means using my food diary. That means planning for meals, and planning for weekends, and not spacing out in group. That means effort, and I will do it.

Day One, or: The Wheat Germ Meltdown

2009-11-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

I entered Renfrew because my binge eating felt out of my control. So I pictured my treatment plan as focusing on stress-relief techniques other than bingeing ("take a walk!" "call a friend!") and, I don't know, drawing some sort of picture of my body that would then give me a Big Happy Magic Moment when I realize that my body is just fine. The nutrition part I figured would be a snap--my meals are complete and healthy; the problem comes after 10 p.m. on nights when I'm alone.

What I didn't expect was that not only would I be put on a meal plan, but that it would be SO MUCH FUCKING FOOD. When my nutritionist began asking me about my meals, I interrupted her: "I know you haven't seen my chart [my nutritionist was switched at the last minute] so you don't know this, but mealtime isn't my problem; it's bingeing." She asked me to articulate my meals anyway, which I did, expecting gold stars for my daytime eating: six ounces nonfat yogurt with berries and two tablespoons muesli for breakfast; spinach salad with bell pepper and chicken or beans for lunch; five prunes and eleven almonds for a snack; dinner, depends. (Yes, I know that eating the same thing pretty much every day is also a sign of disordered eating. What can I say--that works for me.)

"How many calories do you think you're taking in on a given day?" she asked.

"Probably 1,600 to 2,200, depending on my dinner."

"You're not taking in anywhere near that amount." I felt--proud, tight in my solar plexus, scared. Then she began saying what I should be eating, how I can make my meals more complete: Add half a cup of muesli instead of two tablespoons. Have bread with lunch. Have a cup of rice with dinner instead of "a bit." These are all things I've purposely cut down on in order to either lose or maintain weight. The thought of having bread with lunch--not because I'm at a restaurant and the bread basket is good, not because it's homemade, not because I'm choosing a sandwich over a salad, but because bread is a part of a normal meal--fills me with panic. I thought panic would be reserved for the mythical anorexic 12-year-old I had in my mind; I'm a big girl (heh heh), I can have a goddamned piece of bread without freaking out. This is a part of my recovery; I'm signing up for this.

But I had underestimated how strong the power of restriction had become for me--how easily I'd made it a part of what I considered "normal" eating. I didn't think I'd done any restricting for years--but then, my definition of "restricting" was "not eating," not "not eating enough." I had been so focused on the enormous volume of food I had been consuming that I hadn't looked at what I hadn't been consuming.

I looked at the sheet of meal plan guidelines, looking at how I could update my breakfast. A half-cup of muesli is a lot; I could instead have...three tablespoons wheat germ? I pictured three tablespoons, saw the fullness, the richness of wheat germ--a health richness, a nutrient-filled richness, a richness I had forbidden myself more than a tablespoon of, ever, without really thinking about why.

I occasionally make breakfast bars for my boyfriend, who used to be prone to skipping "the most important meal of the day" (there's an irony in there, oui? He's not the one with an eating disorder). I pack them full of wheat germ, thinking that will help him power through the day. I usually give him the whole pan minus two bars, which stay in my freezer until I throw them out. My preteen-sized nonfat yogurt is waiting.

"You're flushing," the nutritionist said. I hadn't noticed; instead, I was noticing my shallow breath, the tears, the world seeming vivid, almost hallucinatory, my nutritionist's face coming into hyperfocus. A panicked reaction I never thought I would have--a reaction, in fact, that I'd read about in my "learn all about eating disorders so I can learn how to do it right" and both wanted and couldn't at all imagine--a reaction to three tablespoons of wheat germ.

"Does that seem like a lot?" she asked. I nodded. "It doesn't seem like a lot to me," she continued. "You have an eating disorder. You've had one for twenty-five years. This will seem hard at first, but this is what will help you know what's normal." We went through the meal plan, me recognizing that my reaction was borne of those twenty-five years--of a whole box of cereal in one sitting, of day after day of starvation, of Amy's Organic Brown Rice Bowls for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which was during a period I thought I was being sensible.

So I'm sitting here with index cards, putting together meals that I think I can eat, enjoy, finish. I had two of those meals today. It is a lot of food--I went onto a calorie-counter website (which is probably verboten, but hell, the literature said "No diet books" so...) and by the end of the day I'll have consumed almost 2,100 calories--which, as it happens, is about my daily caloric need. It seems like a lot of food, but it is what I need. More than that, doing this--sticking with it, slogging my way through a full serving of yogurt with the goddamned wheat germ and toast--will help me figure out hunger, and need, and satiety. I won't have to have two grains, one fat, one dairy, one fruit every morning for the rest of my life. But until I know what my body needs, and until I have worked my way through my food compulsions, until I know what is actually, truly, really normal for me, this is what I have to do. I am already dreading when I have to step up to the next level of meal planning, which will be even more food. The nutritionist assured me at the beginning that this meal plan wouldn't make me gain weight, and I believed her--until I figured out what my caloric intake would be (which, duh, is probably why they don't want us reading diet literature). I will figure that out, with her aid, when I get there.

I thought the hardest part would be sitting through the nights when I wanted more than anything to black out with food. That might be the hardest part, eventually--I don't know; I haven't had that kind of night yet. But this part--the eating part--is already harder than I'd imagined.

eve of treatment

2009-11-01T20:11:00.000-08:00

The thing about announcing to people, even just a handful of them, that you're beginning an official program to rid yourself of an addiction, is that then they're going to expect you to live up to it. I enter the Renfrew Center's intensive outpatient program tomorrow and am nervous--scared. Nervous that all the ideas of addiction and illness are bullshit and I just lack willpower. Nervous that it's too late. Nervous that I'll walk in and it will be a bunch of anorexic 12-year-olds and me. Nervous that I'll get worse instead of better. Nervous that I'll get off the binge eating cycle and onto the restricting one. Nervous that I'll enjoy restricting if that happens. Nervous that I'm just lazy. Nervous that this will lead me to say "fuck it" and I'll eat whatever I goddamn want and will become fat. Nervous that I don't really have a problem. Nervous that I do. Nervous that my insurance will crap out. Nervous that I will be too ashamed to look anyone in the eye.

Honestly, I am a little bit petrified. But now that I am writing it out, I see that I am indeed terrified and that it's okay. It's a feeling I can handle. It's better than numbness. I hope I can remember that when feelings stronger than "a little bit petrified" begin to kick in.

I want to sit here and vow that I will give this my all. Because I have to; because it's been 25 years; because this is my chance. Because it's time. Because it could be the rest of my life like this if I don't. But I don't know if I can make that promise--I don't want to make a promise I won't be able to keep. I don't even know what "giving this my all" would mean--I've made so many halfhearted promises to myself and broken them in the light of morning. Write every day / No sugar / Spend 20 minutes cleaning my apartment every day / meditate every day / call my brother once a month / write a letter once a week. These are not impossible promises to keep, but I've broken every one. So if I were to say "I promise to give this my all," I would be lying.

What I can say: I will do my best. I will be kind to myself, while noting that "kind" does not equal permission to numb myself with food and television. I will approach this with an open mind. I will trust that this can work, but that I will have to do my part for that to happen.

Fat Talk Week

2009-10-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

I love the idea behind Fat Talk Free Week (and wrote more about it here). I love how it lays out specific actions for women to take, because so often the supposedly compassionate response to "I'm so fat" is "No you're not." But that response doesn't help, because it A) assumes the position that fat is awful, B) might not be true, and someone who is genuinely fat will only feel pandered to if you tell them that they're not, C) keeps the focus on what may or may not be "wrong" with the person, and D) doesn't make anybody feel any better anyway. (The response that the sponsors suggest is to form a pact with a friend and to call them out on the pact whenever they break it.)

But the thing is, I hardly ever engage in fat talk. Even before it was a conscious feminist effort, I just felt stupid doing it--saying "Oh, I look disgusting" is an invitation for reassurance, which never helps me feel better. (It can help with momentary anxiety over something fleeting--like, being assured that my zit does not overtake my entire aura--but that's not fat talk.) I hate forcing other people to compliment me as much as I hate being forced to compliment others. Nowadays when I hear fat talk from someone, I just say, "Oh, stop that." If I'm in a situation where it makes sense to have a real conversation about body image, I'll invite that--but the people with whom I have that rapport know better than to throw around "Oh, I'm fat" in my presence.

So fat talk isn't exactly the issue for me. My words reflect someone with an intact bodily self-esteem; my thoughts do not. I'd like to be able to just do this with myself, but that makes me feel like one of Eve's three faces. I'm almost wondering if I should start saying what I say to myself out loud, to other people. Not because I want to get into the oh-you-look-fine game, but because it might help me recognize how ridiculous what I am saying is.

The larger issue is one I've come up against repeatedly: how to reconcile my feminism with my body issues. One of the big reasons I'm so vocal about being feminist is because of the body issues I've had all my life; reading about the sociology surrounding body issues and eating disorders has informed me well, from recognizing the unrealistic standards I'm held to as a woman to getting more deeply into recognizing the link between the tightening of the Iron Maiden and the emancipation of women during the second wave. I'm no longer at the point where I feel like a Bad Feminist for having body and food issues, but the fact remains that what I say ideologically is miles away from where I am with my most private thoughts and actions. I've always known that the personal is political--now I want to invert it and make the political, personal.

But you know what? A lot of bloggers are playing along and saying what they like about their bodies on their blogs. So I will too:

I love my legs--I'm probably even vain about them. They're strong and curvy, hard in the places I want them to be, soft in the places I want them to be. They help me look good in a dress; they show the world that I'm active; they bring me pleasure to look down and see strong, long calves. Even the burn I got on my right calf this spring in Vietnam, I love: I got off on the wrong side of a motorbike on my second day there and got an enormous burn, a perfect circle the size of the bottom of a pint glass. Every time I see it, I am reminded of an extraordinary time in an extraordinary place. I laughed to myself that my father and grandfather both fought in Vietnam and I'm the one who came back wounded--a joke I'd never say out loud, because certainly they were wounded in a much different way, despite the lack of physical marks. But it ties me to one of my main reasons for going there, which was them and their times of service; it's almost like a little nod toward them, and how, a generation later, I needed to have my own marks of that long, skinny, hot little county on me.

Genes and Eating Disorders

2009-10-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

Sunny at Healthy Girl brings up the role of genetics in eating disorders. I tend to have an irrational gut reaction against thinking that my issues could stem from a brain-wiring issue; I prefer to think that my problems stem from some sort of murky thing that happened circa 1979 or so and can be unearthed through therapy alone (which is why I was in therapy for 7 years before I quit). But it's obviously a worthy question.

One sort of offshoot question about genetics and eating disorders, though: What did people with ED genes do before eating disorders were, well, "invented"? I mean, I know that eating disorders go way back--Freud writes of patients with symptoms we now term anorexia, for example. But EDs have become a sort of handy place for people with generalized "issues" to turn. The "hysteria" epidemic of the 19th century wasn't actually an epidemic; rather, it was a way for culturally restricted women to act out in a way that, though it wasn't exactly understood by the establishment, was at least recognized. In the same way, EDs are far from understood in our culture, but we recognize them as requiring care.

It makes sense that there's a good amount of ED sufferers out there who turned to restricting or bingeing or purging not because some synapse organically told them to, but because in a culture that A) has an abundance of food and B) therefore treats food not as nutrition but as a thing of cultural and familial significance, and C) has a strict standard of beauty that requires thinness, food seemed like a pretty good way to deal with personal issues. In much the same way that hysteria became nearly a fad in the 19th century--not because it was to be aspired to, but because it was a recognizable funnel for one's social and personal issues--eating disorders can spread like wildfire in our environment.

What the studies linking genes with eating disorders are actually saying isn't exactly that there's a gene that makes you want to starve. ED sufferers are more prone to irregularities in mood-regulation hormones--the same hormones that play a role in depression and anxiety. And one way to spike a low serotonin level (linked to depression) is to eat lots of sugar (a common binge target); similarly, a way to calm a perpetually high serotonin level (linked to anxiety) is to starve it to death. But plenty of people have messed-up hormone levels--some just deal with it, others go on medication, others self-medicate through addictive substances or behaviors. Not all of those people go on to develop eating disorders.

And that's where images come into play for people who develop not just unhealthy body image, but eating disorders. When your mood regulators aren't regulating themselves and you find something that "works" for you (e.g. bingeing or restricting), you do that thing. And you have reinforcement on every billboard and magazine cover around you.

It's much more complicated than what I'm saying here, and it varies patient by patient. Few people in the ED community would argue that EDs are caused exclusively by genes, brain chemistry, family, or culture. The combustion point of all these factors (and more) is where EDs spring from. I'm just wary of jumping too heavily on the "it's genetic" bandwagon. If the "it's in the genes" theory comes to dominate ED research, it's not too far-fetched to think that ED treatment can be written from a general practitioner's prescription pad instead of from the comprehensive therapy that currently comprises ED treatment. (Which is the case with several other psychiatric and mood disorders.) And if an ED sufferer opts not to swallow a pill, then what are they complaining about? There's a "cure," after all. And then we're still left with the cultural images that tell overweight women that they're not really worthy; images that exclude an enormous proportion of beautiful people. We're left with associations with the words "thin" and "fat" that have nothing to do with being thin or being fat (like pretty, or slovenly, or loved). We're left where we are. A pill might be nice for ED patients, but it'll suck for everyone else.

First Post, Which Is Scattered But I've Put Off Starting This Damn Thing for Months

2009-09-29T22:33:00.001-07:00

I’ve given myself a lot of eating disorder mythologies over the years. I’m anorexic (except I’ve never been underweight); I’m bulimic (except I only purged a handful of times); I’m orthorexic (for a grand total of the three weeks I spent on a macrobiotic diet); I’m normal (except for the starvation, occasional purging, macrobiotic diets, and ability to down 15,000 calories in a sitting, sure, yes, normal!).

It’s been nearly twenty-five years since I first dabbled in disordered eating. I’m tired of mythology. I have messed-up attitudes toward food and my body, and have binge eating disorder. I decided at the beginning of 2009 that this would be the year I dealt with "all that body stuff." That was a hopeful thought, likely the child of the "do X for a year and blog about it" body of work (say yes to everything! cook Julia Child recipes! go out on a date with everyone who asks!). It’s not something I can lick in a year, even if I’d been as diligent as I planned on January 1. It will be an ongoing project.

And this blog, a chronicle of my experiences and reflections, will be one spoke on the wheel.