(Talk of eating disorders can be triggering. I have made sure to not include specific numbers and weights as this has little benefit to the story, and only leads to unnecessary comparisons. At the bottom of this post I have included the contact details for Beat, A UK eating disorder support charity)
Lets talk disordered eating.
I think it’s important to note that I’m saying disordered eating, rather than eating disorders, for two reasons:
· Firstly, I don’t want this post to be exclusionary. So many people experience such a wide range of difficulties surrounding food and their relationship with food/ exercise, but don’t have a formal eating disorder diagnosis, nor do other people know they are struggling. I don’t want someone to read the term eating disorder and feel like they don’t deserve to read it and resonate with it.
· Secondly, and I’m massively outing myself with this point, I don’t think I’m entirely comfortable with using the term eating disorder to describe my own behaviours yet. Maybe one day, but its all still a bit new for me.
My thoughts around this topic are still quite jumbled, because I’m not entirely sure how it fits in with the workings of my own brain yet, so bear with me for this one.
Here is my recent story. Like any of my other posts, I’m sharing my story so that if anyone else has these thoughts, you realise you arent as alone.
I think the main thing I want to say today is: eating disorders don’t have a look. Nor do they have a time frame.
Now, again, I am not good for taking this point on board. I repeatedly told my doctors that I clearly didn’t have an unhealthy relationship with eating because I was overweight. My BMI said I was overweight. The size of my clothes said I was overweight. I looked in the mirror and felt overweight. There was no way I had traits of disordered eating.
Long story short, I was pretty wrong about that. The restrictive and binge/ purging behaviours that had become my life, was causing damage to my body. For me, I have been really lucky, because my team noticed it before I did. I can openly talk about self-harm and suicidal thoughts to them, but the minute they brought up food I shut down and changed the subject. It made my skin crawl even just thinking about it. I was fine because I wasn’t underweight. It took months before I allowed it to be briefly discussed in an appointment, and even then, it was only in the context of me wanting to reduce my antipsychotic medication because I was worried it would lead to weight gain.
My psychiatrist decided she wanted my bloods to be checked. I contested this because of two reasons. Firstly, like I said, I was overweight so clearly didn’t have a problem. Secondly, because the thoughts and behaviours, whilst present for many years prior to a lesser extent, had only consumed my thoughts for the past few months. I am used to hearing stories, especially on social media, of people struggling for years with severe eating disorders and not having any effect on their blood tests. Therefore, in my head, I would have to be extremely underweight for many years before I would even start to consider blood tests being worth the cost, because obviously for me it was a waste of time, I was fine and my body was handling it fine, I felt fine.
One Wednesday afternoon I reluctantly went along to my GP surgery and had my bloods taken. Not only that, I had to be weighed. I saw the number on the scale and almost laughed, why was I there? No one with a weight that high should be having an eating disorder health screen. Then they took my blood pressure. The health care worker in me had decided that I only had an issue with eating if my blood pressure was low. In true me style, it was high. “See”, I said to the nurse “that proves I don’t have an eating disorder”. Again, I laughed at the ridiculousness of me being there, and thought what a waste of NHS money it was. I went to that appointment because the only thing I worry about more than wasting their time, is them thinking I’m non-compliant. I was adamant to be a good patient.
The next day, at 8am, I get a call from my GP. My bloods were abnormal, and he wanted me to attend hospital for treatment that day. I told him I would go the next day, because I felt fine. Honestly, I thought he was lying as a scare tactic. He said he was concerned I would cause irreversible damage to my kidneys. To be honest, even that wasn’t enough to make me go to the hospital. What made me go was him telling me he would spend the day worrying if I didn’t go. Like I said, I had to try and be a good patient.
Eventually I turned up at the hospital as my GP had arranged. A doctor sat down with me and took my history. I told them that I thought the blood sample must have clotted and so the results were inaccurate. They said it didn’t work like that. I told them that I didn’t think the bloods needed repeating because I had eaten dinner the day before, so even if they had been abnormal from restricting the previous days, they would now be normal. Again, they said it didn’t work like that. We joked that I was finding excuses, because I was. But I just couldn’t understand how they were abnormal. I was FINE, and so many people are so much poorlier.
PSA- your organs don’t know how much or how little someone else is eating. They just know what they need to survive. Whether that fits with your preconceived idea of what a “proper” eating disorder is, is irrelevant. If they don’t receive what they need, they will start to fail.
I ended up spending 3 days in hospital. This included being threatened with being sectioned if I kept leaving the ward to go for a walk at mealtimes. I honestly felt like I was in a fit-up comedy sketch. Couldn’t they see how fat I was?! Why on earth were they spending their time treating me as if I had an actual eating disorder.
That was 3 months ago. My behaviours around food are a bit more stable, but still present. Each week my psychologist has asked if I’m ready to start talking about food, and until 2 weeks ago, the answer has been a firm “no”. I finally gave in and have started some very basic work with her. If I’m honest, it’s scary. Even basic tasks such as writing down what you eat and what ED behaviours you undertake is scary. It feels overexposing. Like this is a thing that needs to be kept quiet.
It’s not going to kill me/ isn’t that bad, so I don’t need to put energy into improving it.
That’s wrong on two parts.
Firstly, it could kill you. And no, you don’t have to be severely underweight (although most ED related mortality is attributed to anorexia, it’s not all). The way ED’s survive and thrive is their skill at making you believe that you are never bad enough. No matter how bad you are, how much intervention you have needed, you are likely to continue feeling like its not bad enough to warrant support. So as a general rule, that voice telling you that you aren’t bad enough yet is probably lying to you. Don’t wait to get help until you feel “bad enough”, because you will probably never get there.
Secondly, you don’t only have to fix something if it is going to have fatal consequences. You deserve more than to be spending so much of your precious brain energy on counting calories, hiding purges, secret eating, panicking about eating in front of people, or any other of the countless ED behaviours that can consume peoples lives.
You deserve more than that.
And as someone of many words, I’m in an unusual position that I don’t know how to put it any other way other than: you deserve more.
-Lis
Help for adults The Beat Adult Helpline is open to anyone over 18. Parents, teachers or any concerned adults should call the adult helpline. Helpline: 0808 801 0677 Email: help@beateatingdisorders.org.uk
Help for young people The Beat Youthline is open to anyone under 18. Youthline: 0808 801 0711 Email: fyp@beateatingdisorders.org.uk