Cry in the Dark

Recovering from an eating disorder is incredibly difficult. Fortunately, there are charities and support structures out there.

If you live in the UK, there is beat. If you live in the states, there is NEDA. Both of these organisations should help you find help near you.

Sometimes, there are no local groups. Sometimes, the thought of facing someone and telling them what you do is just too terrifying. In those cases, online groups can be an amazing help.

Livejournal communites like ed_friends and purgatorium can help you feel you're not alone. Be careful though, some people find that reading others going on about their disorders can trigger relapses. Make sure you join a group that supports recovery. Look at different communities and read a lot of their posts before joining. You want to join a group that's supportive and friendly, one that doesn't offer tips for continuing behaviour and one which will applaud you as you try to recover.

If you're not on livejournal, there are forums. One that is pretty quiet but very friendly is ED Friends Unite. This forum is very strictly pro-recovery, so it's a good place to go for any eating disorder. If that doesn't suit you, just search google. Remember, always look for pro-recovery. As with the livejournal groups, read through posts and check that the place is right for you. It should be supporting the fight to recover, with friendly members and not sharing tips for how to make your disorder worse.

All Alone in a Crowd

So, yesterday I went to meet the people who are starting on the same graduate training scheme as me. One part of the day was a "speed dating" section which involved us finding out each others' main hobbies. Three of the guys put down drinking.

Watching a presentation about how much fun last year's graduates had had on the scheme, there were an awful lot of pictures of people with drinks in hand.

Talking with the other people, there were plenty of comments about drinking, nights out and hangovers dropped into the conversation.

And suddenly I'm back to feeling like a sixteen year old freak who doesn't want to try drinking, isn't interested in dating and would rather stay in with a book than try and sneak into clubs. I was lucky in school; there were a couple of other girls who also didn't rush to the toilets to check their make-up at the end of the day, just in case they passed a guy while on the way home. I found a couple of people who weren't fussed about grabbing a boyfriend or going out clothes shopping or getting drunk. At university, I found a surprising number of friends who don't drink and plenty of others for whom alcohol is something occasionally sampled as a glass of wine at a party.

But there is still often that sense that I don't fit in. This loneliness and feeling of not being like everyone else was, I think, a large contributing factor in my developing a disorder.

I was talking to my mum the other day about one of my cousins. It seems he really doesn't fit in with his classmates at school because they're all interested in drinking, smoking, drugs and having sex (or at least pretending to be so for the sake of appearences). I went to a private school with a strong emphasis on academic acheivement, which meant that the crowd interested in those things was smaller and less influential. He's at a comprehensive and seems to be the only one not wanting to get drunk, high or laid.

I don't see most of my cousins that often, but I do sometimes worry. There is strong evidence that eating disorders have a major genetic factor. I can remember comments from my aunt in the past about how he seems to eat a lot but stay thin. Maybe he's lucky. Maybe he's energetic. Maybe my aunt has a different value for "a lot of food" than I do.

But I wonder and I worry and I wish there was some way that I could let him know that things get better. He won't always feel like he's the only one not interested.

Look what's inside

I like to know precisely what's in my food.

This is why I rarely eat out or buy food from cafes; I can't tell what's been added. I've no idea if the chef has added a load of olive oil or fried the ingredients in butter or added piles of fat. Not knowing what's in my food scares me a little sometimes.

I even have it with my mum's cooking. I'm travelling most of the length of the country and, rather than do it in one go, I'm staying at my parent's house tonight. My mum will be cooking dinner. She's a very good cook and is usually on a diet, so I know that what I'll be eating will be a healthy mixture of fresh ingredients. But I hate the fact that I don't know exactly what's in there in what proportions.

When I'm out somewhere and buy food, I would rather choose a less healthy option that comes with nutritional information and an ingredients list on the side, than buy something that looks all natural and good for me.

I've learned to cope with this fear. I will go out for dinner and not spend an hour pouring over the menu trying to decide which is the least fattening option. I will enjoy an item of food that doesn't say in clear numbers what it contains.

But in some ways, I feel like those people who have to overcome arachnophobia by being made to look at spiders, then handle them, then eventually pick up a tarantulla. I can control my fear of unknown foods well enough in normal circumstances, but I think I'm a long way from being ready for the tarantulla.

No more exams

Today, I had my last exam at university. This is a wonderful feeling.

I hate exams. I feel I have to get perfect marks. I'm terrified of doing badly. So, I eat. That's how it's worked since GCSE. Even since recovery, exams = eating. I eat more than is healthy, sometimes picking at food when I'm not hungry, sometimes eating quite large amounts in one go. It's as though for the length of the exam period, I acquire the symptoms of compulsive overeating disorder.

I know I don't have this disorder, but exams make me act like I do.

I don't purge anymore. I don't fast or skip meals. I exercise a healthy amount. I don't swallow loads of diet pills daily.

I worry more about purging techniques than I do about binging, which means that the week or so after exams, I feel horrendously guilty about what I've eaten, but don't get the satisfaction that always used to come with over-exercising or skipping meals. I eat way more than I should for the week or so that I have exams, but I don't burn it all off the way I used to. It means that weeks or months of being healthy get undone in a few days as the fat piles on again.

The worst times during my disorder were when I had exams. The times I've come closest to relapsing afterwards have been during exams. Today, after I've gone so long without a real binge, I went to buy something for lunch and ended up buying:

• A pack of sandwiches
• Two mini apple pies
• A snack-pack of biscuits (two biscuits)
• A packet of jaffa cakes
• Two bottles of fizzy drink
• A packet of crisps
• And a huge, huge bag full of pick 'n' mix

Compared to binges in my past, that list is very short. The fact that some of the food remains uneaten is a sign of how far I've come. It was helped, no doubt, by the fact that I met a friend soon after buying all this. I could have gone and eaten it all in one go. Instead, with little difficulty, I stayed and ate some of it in a large, but not binge-like lunch. The rest stayed hidden in my bag.

I didn't binge today. I ate more than I should and this food, combined with dinner, have left me feeling fuller than is comfortable, but I didn't binge.

It doesn't change the fact that my reaction to stress is to go out and buy food. Even if I don't eat it all, that habit still lingers from my disorder. I haven't acted in a way that would classify as bulimic for years. So why can't I be rid of this need?

Recovery

Another blog I read posted a list of what recovery looks like. I thought I would try the same with my own experiences.

Recovery is...

• Walking into the supermarket and coming out again with only the things that were on my shopping list.
  
• Not instantly thinking of an excuse to leave when a friend mentions ordering take-away.
  
• Eating a slice of birthday cake and feeling good that it's my birthday not horrible about the amount of fat and sugar.
  
• Going out for a meal with my boyfriend and focussing more on him than working out the calorie count of my dinner.
  
• Buying an item of food because I like the taste, even when it has five more calories than another option.
  
• Standing on the scales in the morning, seeing my reflection and feeling hideously fat, then going and eating a healthy breakfast.
  
• Having a bad day, eating a load of junk in one go, and then managing to eat more than a stick of celery the next day.
  
• Taking a biscuit when a friend offers me the packet and knowing I'll be able to stop after one or two.
  
• Going to the gym because I want to keep fit, rather than because I want to burn off a binge.
  
• Not having a load of wrappers hidden around my room because I'm scared people will spot them if I throw them in the bin.
  
• Eating a bar of chocolate, fretting about the calorie count and then managing to cook dinner.
  
• Going for a long walk and not having to worry that I'll faint on the way.
  
• Being scared that I'm fat and hideous, but not letting it stop me living my life.
  

One and Lonely

Another Superchick song.

I would like to point out for any Americans who are watching this that the "size 12" mentioned at one point is the British size 12. This is size 8-10 in US sizes.

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.

Advertising rant

Two posts in one day because I've just seen something to make me really mad.

It's an advert for Slim-Fast. This is a brand of products supposed to make weight loss quick and easy. Originally, they just had milkshakes. The idea was that you would eat one for breakfast, one for lunch and then cook yourself a proper dinner in the evening. Then they started doing soups, bars and drinks as well. I've not tried them and I don't know anyone who has.

The advert has "How will you slim happy?" written in large letters. That seems to me to be implying that you can't be happy until you're slim.

To make things worse, the woman in the advert doesn't look like she needs to lose weight. She doesn't look skinny, but she doesn't look overweight either. She looks normal, healthy and not like someone who needs to resort to diet products.

I'm furious about this advert. It suggests that thinness is required for happiness and it shows someone who doesn't need to lose weight resorting to extreme diet measures.

I don't believe that adverts and media can cause eating disorders, but it can trigger the development of one in a person who is naturally susceptible. I'm not one for protesting about things I see in the media, but I may well make a complaint in this case.

Pull the String

Continuing my weekly video pattern. I'm not sure how long I'm going to be able to keep this as a weekly thing, because there's a limit to the number of songs I can use.



One thing that I've shown in this video are the scars on my wrists. I tried to kill myself when I was fifteen. It was undoubtedly the stupidest thing I've done in my life, but I'm glad I did it.

When it failed, I admitted to two of my friends that I'd been depressed. I didn't tell them about the binging because, at the time, I still didn't believe I had an eating disorder. But I was able to talk about other issues that bothered me and they were able to support me through the bad days.

My best friend was so completely distraut when I told her I'd tried to kill myself that I decided never again. I swore to myself that no matter how bad things got, I would never try to take my own life.

Which meant I was left with two options: I could spend the rest of my life being miserable and hating myself, or I could get better. That was the turning point for me. Yes, the binging continued for a couple of years more, but I was determined that I would recover. I was able to make more friends when I started sixth form, do things I enjoyed and actually have fun.

I feel quite proud when I look at this video and see that the scars are barely visible at this quality. I hid them for ages under bracelets when it seemed like they'd never fade and that they'd declare my idiocy for the rest of time. But they have faded. The evidence can only be seen if you look closely. And I kept my promise.

I never tried again.

I never will.

This is another video of my experiences with eating disorders. I may make this a regular weekly feature, but I might run out of songs.

This video shows the way I used to behave, not how I currently do. It shows the methods of purging I used: mainly diet pills, skipping meals, throwing away food, eating only vegetables and excessive exercise. It also includes vomiting. This was a very rare occurance for me, but I felt it worth including. Every time I threw up after a binge, I swore it would be the last time. That promise was rather difficult to keep.



I show myself reading a novel at one point. This is Perfect by Natasha Friend. It's an excellent story of a girl suffering from bulimia.

The next clip shows me with a DVD. This is the movie Sharing the Secret, which is based on a true story. It deals with a bulimic girl being discovered by her mum and her journey towards recovery.

I took a lot of comfort from stories like this because it helped me feel less alone.

There are also clips of me looking at websites. These are Food Focus, which is a site for calculating calories eaten and burned, Anorexics Advice, a site aimed at wannarexics but helpful to those with eating disorders, Why We Hate Anorexia and my own blog.