Dear Anonymous

I received a comment on one of my earlier posts. The commenter gave a question, but since he/she was anonymous, I don't have any way to reply. So I will answer it here.

"how are you still kind of fat if you spend so much time starving yourself? You're not huge, but you have a lot of fat on your stomach area..."

Thank you for that wonderful boost to my self esteem. [/sarcasm]

I gained weight during my eating disorder. Quite a large number of bulimics do. During the periods of starvation/eating only vegetables/strenuous exercise, there are parts of the brain that are tricked into believing there's a famine. The body starts to crave fatty and sugary foods as a survival instinct. The metabolism slows down because the body is getting less food and so outputs less energy as a response.

Then I would binge. I would eat a huge amount of junk, most of which was full of sugar and fat. My body would then store all of this as fat. Even bulimics who throw up never manage to completely empty their stomachs. The body still digests part of the binge as stores it entirely as fat. This is why the majority of bulimics are a healthy weight or even overweight. Those bulimics who are underweight tend (this is a generalisation and not always true) to be bulimic with strong anorexic tendencies. Some may even qualify as anorexic with binging when their body mass drops enough.

I would starve myself and use diet pills and exercises and every trick I could think of to lose weight. But I would put it all back on when I binged.

Being eating disordered doesn't mean being skeletal thin. With most bulimics, you'd never know by looking at them that there was anything wrong.

Other cultures

The statistics in this blog entry are from three different sources, so they don't analyse exactly the same thing and I can't be certain that they define anorexia in exactly the same way. This basically means that any conclusions are scientifically invalid, but I'll keep my opinions nonetheless.

I've spend considerable time in Finland including a three month stretch last summer. I noticed a lot of things about the country but one of them was that the population was, on the whole, thinner. Sure, there were overweight people, but a lot less than I see in England and usually not quite as fat. I don't remember seeing a single morbidly obese person in my time there.

The canteen at the place I worked served, on the whole, healthy food and there was always an option to go for the "green line." This was a wide variety of salads with something light as the main meal. It was very rare for there to be anything particularly unhealthy. Even the deserts were usually of the stewed fruit and yoghurt variety. Occasionally, there were cakes as an option, but no more than once a week at most.

There was also a lot of emphasis on exercise and sport. Children play a lot of sport at school, there are wide cycle paths through the city and alongside the main roads (something I wish Britain would imitate) and people walked quite a lot.

Then, there might be a genetic element to it. Finland gets incredibly cold in winter, so maybe, over the centuries, Finns have bred a tendency to a good metabolism because keeping the body warm means they're more likely to survive the cold season. Certainly, the Finns I saw didn't seem to skimp on the portion sizes and were still a healthy size.

Whatever the reason for it, the Finnish population appear, on the surface, to be a much healthier group than in the UK. They appear to have a much healthier relationship to food and exercise than those of us in the US or the UK. From what I'd seen and the people I'd met, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to find out that eating disorders were rare in Finland.

So let's look at the stats.

According to a nationwide study, 2.2% of Finnish young women suffer from severe anorexia nervosa. Up to 5% of Finnish women suffer anorexic symptoms in their lifetime.

That doesn't look very good. Then again, there are some large figures floating around the web stating how a huge proportion of people in America have an eating disorder. I looked solely at the numbers relating to anorexia, since those were the only figures I'd found for Finland.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health in the US, somewhere between 0.5 and 3.7% of females suffer anorexic symptoms in their lifetime.

That's low. That's a lot lower than in Finland. Now, maybe the definition is less strict in Finland. Certainly, I feel that the American definition has some problems with it, because it focuses on physical rather than psychological symptoms. I can't be sure. But it's obvious the result I was expecting doesn't seem to be forthcoming.

So let's look at the UK. According to the eating disorder charity Beat, 1-2% of women are anorexic at any one time. Comparing this with the other Finnish figure now, it seems that more than that were anorexic at the time the study was performed.

Again, different definitions of anorexia might be responsible, but it seems obvious to me that appearances can be deceiving. On the surface, it might seem that Finland has a much better relationship with food and exercise than we do in the UK, but anorexia is at least as common. Maybe Finland has lower rates for binge eating disorder, compulsive over eating, bulimia or ednos. Maybe not. Until the results of a nationwide survey on those released on the web, I can't be sure.

I think it's reasonable to believe that eating disorders appear in every country, even ones where the culture and social behaviour is quite different from that of the UK. Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to blame our schools, media and culture.

I wanted to celebrate how far I've come. This song really suits my feelings because of a couple of appropriate lines.

"Never thought I'd have this feeling. Never thought I'd get this far."

"Changed my mind, changed my ways. Wasn't going to do this anymore."

There were a lot of times during my recovery when it felt like I was going nowhere or worse. I want to show that it is possible to reach a point where life can be good again. I climbed out of darkness and now I get to fly.

Duchess against fat

Britain is "eating itself to death."

There's an article in BBC news about how Duchess Sarah Ferguson is planning on a campaign to promote healthy eating. Those are the words used in the opening paragraph: "healthy eating." So how come it spends the rest of the article talking about fat?

The message I'm getting from the article is that the only way to be healthy is to be thin.

I'm very much in favour of healthy eating, but people need to understand that healthy eating doesn't always involve losing weight. The right ballance of food is important, the right nutrients and the right amount. I wish articles would stress this as much or more than the need to be thin. If the message is targetted at the obese, I could understand it, but the article seems to imply that everyone in the country needs to shape up and get thin.

I hope the documentary is better. I really hope it takes some time to consider eating disorders and those who take dieting too far. But I won't be watching to find out. I don't need former royalty telling me that I need to be thin from my TV screen.

Weekly Update 11th May 2008

I've eaten more than I should this past week, but I've not binged. I've had Chinese take-away two days in a row, but it's been shared with friends as part of a fun evening and I've enjoyed eating the food I ordered. I will try and focus on that fact when I see my reflection in the bathroom mirror tomorrow.

I have done exercise over the past few days, but not out of guilt. There was badminton and there were games with friends, all of which fun and none of which driven by guilt. I will go to the gym tomorrow, but because I'm trying to be healthy, not out of a desperate urge to burn off the egg fried rice. The line between trying to be healthy and trying to undo days of bad eating is a fine one, but I'm still on the right side of it at the moment.

My university work has been handed in and there's nothing that I can do to change the marks now. It's like a cloud has lifted from my thoughts. The need for food to calm me about grades has faded for the time being.