No, I can't lose weight

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.

Why Kate Moss Doesn't Matter

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

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.