To The Bone

On Sunday night, I finally watched the movie “To The Bone” on Netflix. I was eager to watch it since Angel Metro posted about it a while ago, and yet was somewhat anxious due to the subject matter: eating disorders treatment. The movie was my trigger in wanting to post about my journey. I have mixed opinions about the movie and it brought to light some things that I want to discuss in later posts. I decided that today I want to talk about my history with disordered eating. My next post will be about what happens in a treatment program and my experience there. I find that people are curious about it and aren’t certain HOW to ask questions, so I’ll take care of that.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had never had anyone place a label on my eating behavior until February 2017. It’s not even August yet, so you can see how “new” I am to this reality. On February 7, 2017, I had an appointment with my bariatric surgeon per his request. During our meeting, his approval of my weight loss progress quickly turned to his concerns about performing the surgery on me. He wasn’t comfortable with doing it until he saw marked improvement in my binge eating disorder. He had a right to be concerned, but an eating disorder??? He said that he absolutely refused to perform the gastric bypass/Roux-en-Y surgery because with the eating disorder my stomach might “explode” and kill me. He said that at this point with continuing the eating disorder behavior, that even with the sleeve surgery I would become very ill and eventually gain all of the weight back or possibly die. At this point, he didn’t put a hard requirement on me to take action and I left the meeting feeling like he was just calling my eating behaviors “disordered” for lack of a better word. This was what I now know to be denial.

Over the next few days, I slowly started to think about what it meant to have an eating disorder. I still strongly refused to believe that my behavior qualified me for any sort of eating disorder. I wasn’t some malnourished, skeletal, frail, weak, non-minority woman on the verge of death. That’s what an eating disorder was to me. I was just a “hefty eater”. I started researching what technically encompassed “eating disorders” and particularly binge eating disorder. I soon started to realize that I had been suffering with an eating disorder for as long as I have memories of my life.

My history as an eating disorder sufferer is quite uneventful compared to some. It was a slow progression that went unnoticed by everyone in my life, including myself. One of the hardest parts of my new reality is accepting responsibility for my actions and the consequences of those actions. I’ve spent a lifetime blaming everyone and everything for my life events. I have to be honest with myself. In treatment I learned that there is no answer to what “causes” someone to develop an eating disorder. Our behaviors are shaped by environment, genetics, experiences, and so many other things. Early on I learned that what people couldn’t give me, food could. Food meant comfort, control, pleasure, euphoria, kindness, love, distraction, numbness, and soothing. Until only a few weeks ago I personified food, calling it my “friend” or “enemy”. It was this “person” forcing me to behave and not me making a choice.

Going off to college at UVA was a trigger for my eating disorder. I had never spent a significant amount of time away from home before. I was pushed into an environment where I was responsible for my own care and I didn’t realize that I was not equipped to do that. The first manifestation of disordered eating was that I stopped eating regularly. During my Summer Transition Program prior to my first year at UVA, I rarely ate and I walked everywhere (I was afraid to ride the bus and end up lost). I can’t even recollect any meals during that summer. That’s how infrequently I ate. I was homesick and I was uncomfortable eating around other people who I assumed would judge my eating habits and behaviors or food selections because I was overweight. The lack of food along with walking so much in the summer heat caused a noticeable drop in my weight in a short period of time.

During my first year at UVA, my eating disorder was truly starting to develop and take shape. I figured out what foods had a laxative effect for me. Without realizing that it had a clinical name, I was “purging”. I continued to eat minimally and now I had figured out how to get rid of even those small amounts of food. I loved seeing my body changing and getting smaller. I loved the attention that I was getting when people noticed that I was losing weight. People rarely genuinely care how others lose weight as long as they are getting thinner and don’t “look sick”. It solidified my connections between thinness and beauty and worthiness. I wasn’t invisible to guys anymore. I loved buying pretty clothes and feeling like I “fit in” with people my age. I added a strict gym regimen along with walking everywhere. I thought things were going well and that this was just how life was.

The first year or two right after attending UVA were probably my most “normal” in regards to eating. I had fallen into a healthier usage of food. I was maintaining the weight that I had lost during college, but not through any concerted effort. I ate what I wanted to and was active enough in my daily life to burn calories. Then I turned my focus to other things and other people over the years. I started to have frequent episodes of depression and anxiety which triggered my binge eating without purging. By, 2005 or so I had reached my all-time highest weight. Around that time, I started food restricting. I can easily go 16 hours without eating most days of the workweek. I am accustomed to the extreme pain of hunger. About 3 weeks ago, I admitted to my nutritionist, Russ, and myself that I actually enjoy the pain, lightheadedness, and shakiness from hunger. It’s a form of punishing myself as well as taking control and testing my will and strength. When I finally do eat from approximately 6pm-2am each night (yes, it effects my getting to work on time every morning), I binge until I’m sick. I feel both control and no control. I can be free and yet I’m completely trapped. I’m both happy and sad. I feel nothing and feel everything at the same time. This is my life right now with an eating disorder.

I’ve been through my treatment program and am technically in the “recovery” stage. That just means that I’m no longer in a structured treatment program. Am I “recovered”? No. I still display the habits at least 4 or 5 days per week. I’m still very ill. My eating disorder consumes most of my waking hours and many of my sleeping ones. It’s a cycle that I often feel like I’m never going to be able to stop. Then I have moments of clarity and I think that “I’ve got this”. I’m choosing to live life one second at a time. Literally. Each second I fight the urge to just get lost in my drug of choice. Sometimes I win the fight, sometimes I don’t. And, I’m learning to be okay with that by being kinder and gentler with myself. Despite still displaying the binge eating disorder behaviors, I know that I’m improving. I once NEVER saw a life without regularly binging. Now, I can imagine what that would be like and that it MAY be possible.