#atypical anorexia

Last appointment my Dietitian ‘G’ suggested I complete a directed journal entry as I find it can be easier to articulate some of my ‘disordered’ thoughts through the written rather than the spoken word.

The prompt she gave me is:
What does it mean to be a lower weight?

Dear G,

I’m sorry but I find myself unable to complete your exercise.

When I write about depression the words rush out in waves and my fingers topple over to keep up with the tide of thoughts that spill out of me.

But when I sit down to write about restriction and weight, my mind becomes as empty as my stomach and I end up staring at a blank page. Sometimes it’s the same way when I’m asked to reflect on parts of my trauma. It’s like trying to press together two like poles of a magnet; something in my mind pushes me away from the dark crevices where those memories reside.

So because I am a perfectionist and couldn’t return empty-handed without an answer, I did what I always do and I read. And read and read and read. I read everything I could to find the ‘correct’ response.

Google tells me that eating disorders, particularly bulimia, are not uncommon among those that have experienced abuse. But in my heart that feels wrong.

After the rape I didn’t restrict. I indulged. I ate whole blocks of chocolate before I got up out of bed in the morning. I slept for days at a time. I drank myself into weekly episodes of unconsciousness. I put on a lot of weight. I went from my lowest to highest and not once did I purge.

Not to mention I first restricted my eating to lose weight years before it happened. It doesn’t fit.

When I started cutting Psychiatrists and Psychologists and Counsellors seemed to want a trauma to blame and it would frustrate all the professionals to no end that they couldn’t find a catalyst, no reason to point to and say, ‘Aha! It all makes sense.” Un-abused people supposedly just don’t start harming themselves, or so I guess everyone wants to believe. But they do and I did.

Maybe it’s the same here and now. Maybe I’m just horrifyingly vain? Would that be such a terrible thing to admit?

It never occurred to me when you warned me about the inevitability of ‘crashing’ that you might have meant bingeing. I feel like I’m fabricating an excuse, but after I spent many midnight hours ravishing the corners of the internet for answers, reading articles and journal entries on the relationship between eating disorders and abuse, I lost it. I binged like I hadn’t eaten in years. It was as if I was in [place] all over again and I was powerless to stop myself bleeding catastrophe everywhere.

I am fine when I am in control. I am fine when I know what I’m eating, when I’m eating it, the calorie make up, and when I am exercising it off. But all hell breaks loose when I am not in control.

At the moment, standing on the scales each morning to see the weight go down is the best part of my day. It is the only thing I look forward to, and I am trying to do everything I can to ensure that scrap of happiness, and I guess that has bred obsession.

There is barely a moment that food doesn’t occupy my waking consciousness: “Eat. Don’t eat. Just a bit. No no no.” There is no space in my mind for anything else.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but after eating at Christmas I was flooded with emotions and I cried and cried with a misery I did not know was hidden in me.

Sometimes I think restriction keeps the feelings away, pressed down somewhere inside, and maybe that’s why I struggle to access any thoughts to write about. It seems a cruel irony that I would first have to begin eating again in order to figure out why I’m not eating so that I’ll eat again.

So I’m awfully sorry but I’ve come up empty. Empty-handed. Empty inside. Entirely empty.

I do not know what it will mean to be a lower weight but somehow I know that I want it.

With regrets,
Montmorency

Last appointment my Dietitian G suggested waiting until our sessions to be weighed rather than doing it often myself and I think I actually laughed in her face. The thought amused me.

At the moment I am weighing myself multiple times a day, but I am only transcribing the initial figure of the day when I first wake up. I consider only that number to be my current weight, no matter what G says about day-to-day fluctuations not being ‘real’ losses and gains.

I have been chasing ??.something on the scales for what feels like the longest time and I was finally blessed with that number (??.1!) but it was in the middle of the day so it’s not real yet.

I also kind of cheated to get there. I donated blood today so I’ve lost of significant amount of weight from my veins and not actually from my body.

I’m trying not to think about eating more than I’d planned in post donation recovery and praying I’ll officially be in ?? land tomorrow morning.

I am the tension of an elastic band being pulled in opposite directions; the yearning to eat everything and anything and soothe the anxiety, and the desire to eat absolutely nothing and starve all this weight away.

I hear myself snapping at my mother completely irrationally but I am powerless to suppress the inexplicable irritability that seems to have taken up residence within me.

I am angry at my weight.
I am angry at the scales.
I am angry at food for existing.
I am angry at my finances.
But most of all, I am angry at myself.

I’m walking up the beach, back towards the street. With every step on the sand, a voice in my head says “no, no, no, no, no” and yet my feet continue onwards to the ice-cream shop.

How can my body be controlled by two opposing desires at the same time? I don’t know what I actually want anymore.

I order a single scoop of chocolate gelato. In the city they are stingy, serving the smallest portion they can get away with, and that’s what I was counting on, but the old Italian man adds extra to the top of the cone.

“Oh! No, no, no! That’s enough!” I blurt, panicked.

“I was just trying to make you happy!” he chides, crossly.

I hate how much I enjoy eating it. And I hate how much I don’t, too.

It’s probably just as well there are no scales in this holiday apartment. If I knew how much I have gained it would be infinitely harder to start restricting again with how much I’ve fallen behind in mind.

I have written the word ‘NO’ on my wrist over my old self-harm scars to encourage me to find ways to say ‘no’ to offered food. I am fine when I am in control, but all hell breaks loose when I am surrounded by food I was not expecting. I lasted all day consuming nothing but diet coke, and managed a jog in the evening, until mum insisted on eating out for dinner.

In the most un-Australian display of weather, there has still been no sun so far on this beach holiday, so I spent the day lounging around the apartment. I wish I hadn’t of come. I could be at home doing nothing instead of being here doing nothing and being forced to eat.

I want to eat chocolate, and sushi, and sandwiches, and pasta, and a laundry list of foods so long it contradicts my life-long identity as a fussy eater.
I want to eat without feeling like a failure.
I want to be able to think about eating without feeling like I’ve ruined a whole day.
I want to be excited for social events without the dread of eating.
I want to think about anything else except weight, food and exercise.

I don’t want to runanymore.
I don’t want to live with exhaustion coursing through my veins.
I don’t want to play mind games to run just that little bit further, just that little bit longer.
I don’t want to feel sad when the scale is honest.

I want to GIVE UP.
I want to crumple and fall into unconsciousness.
I want to crawl back into the coma I was in after I overdosed and be dead to the world.
I want to lose a week of my life and a kilogram a day without even trying. Without being a casualty of this internal war.

I want this to END.

I am turning my eating disorder into one of those Pinterest girl ‘lifestyles’ and will now no longer be considered mentally ill by society despite my diet not changing

coming home from vacation went from 209 lbs to 214 lbs and I am SO UPSET IJWCOQJR NCNQRIJKCNVQOIJRC

im on vacation rn and there’s so much food im dying

I would like to be under 200 lbs now pls ive been waiting for so long

Fuck fasting, restricting is bae

i’ve been at 202 for like two weeks but the last two days i was 206