Anorexia
has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. 20% of anorexia
sufferers will die prematurely from their illness. I was lucky.
When talking
about recovery, it is important to remember that I am one person who has had
one eating disorder. My experiences with anorexia are individual to me and I
cannot speak for everyone that has had this illness and I certainly cannot
speak for sufferers of other eating disorders. This being said, here is the
story of the long process of recovery I started over a year ago, and am still
going through today.
I plummeted
into my recovery after being hit with ‘extreme hunger’, something that I didn’t
actually know existed until I experienced it first-hand. Let me paint the
picture…I was home from school this day, having been to the doctor’s the
previous day due to finding painful rashes on my entire body. At my visit to
the doctor’s, I was told that this was due to my rapid weight loss. Seeing my
gaunt face and disproportioned body, the Doctor asked to weigh me, and I
agreed. My only request was that my mother, who I’d come to the doctor’s with,
should leave the room. I remember this so vividly. I knew that my Mum had to leave
because for months up until this point I had been obsessively weighing myself,
infatuated with the idea of being underweight. This is why, when I stepped on
the scales, closing my eyes and holding my breath, I already knew that I was
medically underweight. This is why, when the Doctor took an intake of breath
and calmly told me that from what I had told her together with my worrying weight,
that I was anorexic, I was not at all surprised. I knew I had been for months.
The following
day, I sat down at my desk, ready to do some revision as this was during my
year 11 mocks, with my real exams only months away. This day wasn’t much
different from how any day had been for me for the past few months. I had
already planned what I would eat that day on my calorie counting app, which had
been installed on my phone for over a year at this point. The amount of
calories that I was consuming per day was terrifyingly low. On this day, I ate
my breakfast and got on with some revision. However, less than an hour later, I
found my body was screaming at me for more food. This was something I was used
to, and having been restricting my food intake for an extended period of time,
I had become accustomed to ignoring these desires of my body. On this day in
particular, for a reason I do not know, I simply could not supress the hunger
any longer. I started by snacking on small items, convincing myself that I
could still stay within my calorie limit for the day, I’d just eat less later.
Soon enough, it become uncontrollable, and I had blown my calorie limit for the
week in under an hour. This was my
first binge.
On this day,
I remember eating and eating until I was so full that I could not stand up
straight. I remember lying in my bed in the most physical pain I had ever felt.
I was full, yet I could not stop eating. Food had become my enemy, yet I was
letting it in. As much as this hurt my body and angered the voices that had
been telling me not to eat, I made the decision that day that I would rather be
‘fat’ than ever count calories again. I deleted my calorie counting apps and
vowed to myself that things would be different from here on out.
The
following day was Pancake Day! There are two moments I remember vividly from
this day. The first was at break time, after an English mock; I sat down with
my friends and ate a Nakd bar. Due to my low weight and small food intake, my
stomach size had massively shrunk and so this was usually enough to fill me up
for hours. On this day however, I was still hungry. This was a hunger I could
not control. I thought back to the binge of the previous day, and I thought
back to the promise I made that I would not restrict my food ever again, and I
ate a second Nakd bar. I remember how self-conscious I felt that day. I was
scared what my friends would think of me – would they think I was greedy? Would
they think I was acting ‘fat’? Needless to say, I’m sure none of them noticed or
gave a shit. Following this rather minor incident, my day continued as normal.
As I mentioned, this day was Pancake Day, and my sister was coming over that
evening to make pancakes. This had been planned days in advance, and when I was
in my previous mind-set, I had spent hours searching the internet for
low-calorie pancake recipes, that would allow me to stay within the
ridiculously low calorie limit I had set myself. However, having told myself
that I would no longer restrict, I found a new recipe. When my sister came over
that evening, she made herself some pasta and said we would make pancakes
afterwards. She offered me some pasta too, and I enthusiastically said yes –
“I’m no longer going to restrict”. But, having given it some thought, I
realised that I wasn’t actually hungry, and I had just said yes out of
excitement at the thought of freedom around food. The night went on, I didn’t
eat the pasta, I ate the pancakes, I enjoyed the pancakes, and we watched a
Louis Theroux documentary. Now, this all seems pretty boring to most people,
and I’d agree, but every time I had been put into a situation that involved
food that day, I had to make the decision that I was not going to restrict
myself. This is a perfect example of the first point that I would like to make
about recovery…
Recovery is
not one decision. It is a million tiny decisions made every single day.
Later on that evening, after all the efforts I had made to
eat what I thought a ‘normal person’ would eat, even though quite frankly I no
longer had any idea what a normal relationship with food was, were destroyed. I
binged again, the same way I had the night before. I ate till I was full, and
then I kept on eating. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. I could no longer
control myself around food, and it terrified me.
This same
cycle happened every single night for the rest of the week. I’d eat normally
throughout the day, and then at night I would binge and binge and binge.
Honestly, I started to hate myself. Having control over food was the one thing
I had to pride myself on and dedicate myself to, and now this had gone. I
didn’t know who the hell I was anymore, and I definitely had no idea how to
deal with this. Being an alone and afraid teenager, I did what any alone and
afraid teenager would do, and I took to the internet. I wanted to understand
why I was binging and how I could deal with it. After hours of reading articles
and watching YouTube videos, I found my answer. The same thing was coming up in
everything I watched and read. It was telling me that no matter what I thought,
the reason that I was binging so much at night was because I was not eating
enough during the day. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had to. Despite my
best efforts, things still had to change.
It was after
this discovery, that I entered a new phase of recovery. One defined by a phrase
I mentioned before – ‘extreme hunger’.
“The mental
hunger is distressing. It is like fingers on a chalkboard. It won’t leave you
alone. It is a clawing, screaming, kicking, poking, thrashing hunger”.
This is what
consumed me for the next few months of my life. I will write about this
separately as the experience of extreme hunger is more exhausting, draining and
heart-breaking than I could ever describe in just a few sentences. It’s a
hunger you can’t ignore, can’t escape and can’t find peace from.
Honestly, I
wanted this post to be less about my experience and more about helping people
to understand recovery and how to assist yourself or others when going through
an experience similar to this, but it seems that to understand how to recover,
you have to really learn what recovery is, and to do this you have to learn
what an eating disorder really is. We all have our preconceived ideas, and if someone
would have told me everything that I would go through as a result of it, I
never would have started counting calories or over-exercising or restricting my
food intake in any way. Ending this post with the hope that it can clear some
things up, I shall work on writing more in terms of advice for similar
situations. I also hope to do another post on extreme hunger itself, as it is
something that I wish I had known about before, and I definitely wish it was
something that my friends and family could understand without my shitty
explanations of “I’m just really hungry all the time”. I hope everyone is
finding what I have to say interesting, and I am so thankful and feel so
strengthened by all the messages I received regarding my last post. Lots of
love x
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