Fatness Does Not Equal Ignorance

First go read this about the proposed fat tax in America.

I used to be one of the masses who believed that education alone could save us. Save us from everything (including obesity) because obviously, ignorance is the enemy. And no, I am not promoting being an idiot. When it comes to being overweight, there always seems to be an underlying current of ‘they should know better’ and that once you learn the wonders of calorie counting and regular exercise, that is the matter sorted. If the deviant behaviour (e.g. eating) continues, a little bit of shame therapy (do you know how many blocks of butter you are putting on your body by eating that ice cream everyday?!) might just do the trick.

I don’t think anyone is under any illusions that their third bar of chocolate is doing them any favours. And of course, for your body to run at its peak of health, balanced eating and regular exercise is  major component. But I know girls who eat like horses and are a consistent size 8. I know girls who are far fitter than most people I know and maintain an “overweight” BMI. So who here needs to be taught the education of weight loss?

I am pretty knowledgeable on nutrition and weight loss. I pay out of my own pocket to see a dietitian, I research on the internet and I have in the past lost over 60lbs (until I had some sense knocked into me and stopped starving myself.) I know how much I should exercise, how much I should eat, how much protein I need and which carbs are preferable. I am anything but ignorant on living a healthy lifestyle. So why am I still fat?

Well for one, I come from a family of women with big boobs and hourglass figures and no matter how much weight I try to lose, there is no changing that. That is just the way I am built. Secondly, intellect is not as strong as emotion (in my brain anyway) and after months of therapy, I am finally seeing patterns in why I do what I do. I do not eat because I don’t know any better. I have enough guilt, shame and logic to know better than to overeat. So why do I still do it? Because it calms me, because it soothes the compulsion, because when I feel like I am not good enough for anyone or anything then I honestly don’t give a fuck because what’s the harm in ruining already damaged goods? There are many a reason why I am fat, but ignorance is certainly not one of them.

Whenever I watch a weight loss show, I am struck by how often the presenter gives the impression of lack of knowledge and laziness being the black-and-white reason behind why so many people are overweight. I have yet to hear about the socioeconomic culture of fast food and lack of activity that overwhelms some areas due to poverty. I have yet to hear an address of the emotional issues that accompany the lack of motivation for self care. I have yet to hear of an approach other that calories in vs calories out. All I see is shaming people when they break and then comforting them when they cry before pushing them back onto the treadmill.

If weight loss were as simple as knowing to put down the fork then the obesity crisis would be a thing of myth.

Dealing With Panic Attacks

I can’t remember my first panic attack. Previous to having them at all, I had the occasional emotional breakdown or angry outburst. Perhaps I had one beforehand, but I think I was in Cork the first time I had the scary experience of hyperventilation, fear and uncontrollable panic. Particularly in the first six months of recovery, my panic attacks were a regular occurrence.

Unsurprisingly, they were often triggered by food. The first time I went to a restaurant after leaving UCC, I spent an hour poring over the menu on the internet beforehand trying to figure out what I could eat, enveloped in the fear that I would binge, and at the meal, proceeded to spend half the time in the bathroom getting sick, not from bulimic compulsions, but because my stomach couldn’t handle the volume of food or the stress related to it.

I remember panicking and proceeding to burst into tears when my mom told me that my dad had planned on making stuffed mushrooms whose primary ingredient was cheese. I was so overwhelmed that he made me something different because I wasn’t emotionally able for the meal.

During this time, I got stage fright for the first time in my life as I sat at the side of a stage with the rest of my choir, stared at my thighs and decided that they were too fat. And that every member of the audience wouldn’t care how I sang because any talent was superseded by my fat thighs. It was not a fun performance.

My last panic attack in this period of time occurred on the bus to town. I was heading in and noticed some secondary school kids, uniform-free in the middle of the day, and realised it was the UL open day. This revelation brought me back to two years previous when I had first met himself which led me to the break up which led me back to my ED. Hyperventilating at the back of the bus whilst all these thought processes filled my brain.

The time on the bus was the first time I had been able to stop a panic attack by myself (which is no easy feat.) Five minutes into the attack, something clicked and I focused on the seat in front of me. I just kept repeating to myself: That is the seat. This is the bus. My hands are on the seat on the bus. My feet are on the floor of the bus. I kept repeating to myself the things that I saw, the facts that I knew, and silly as it sounds, I calmed down and got off the bus in a far more settled manner than I had been in. After that, due to a heady combination of meds, therapy and new found confidence in my ability to cope, my panic attacks stopped.

I have had three panic attacks in the last two weeks for various reasons. And I haven’t dealt with them well. This morning’s most recent attack was based off the fact that I am going to a work banquet later which serves a five course meal. This familiar territory of freaking out over possible meals scares me even more than the concept of the meal itself. I am becoming increasingly aware of patterns emerging, stresses repeating themselves and the possible triggers of something self destructive.

I started writing this post with a general idea of what I wanted to write about but until I started writing about the bus, I had forgotten how I had dealt in the past. Now I remember and now I am aware. And that is something that I didn’t have back then. I didn’t know I could fight and I didn’t know I could win. I don’t feel confident and I don’t feel strong. But I know I can be. And maybe that’s enough for now.

Working With My Anger

I awoke this morning to the most intense and latent rage I had experienced in years. I just wanted to punch everything and anything in the face. I was twitchy and bitchy and generally horrible to be around. So I watched the London marathon and then went running myself. I ran until I was too tired to be angry anymore because at this point my legs had forgotten how to be legs, let alone consider the possibility of kicking the shit out of someone.

I don’t deal well with anger. Happiness, excitement, depression, fear – I can take all these in my stride. Anger is something I tend to avoid, something to bury deep down until inevitably I have a fiery outburst and the poor person on the receiving end is wondering why I am getting so aggressive about milk in my tea.

I avoid anger for so many reasons. Some of it is to do with my fear of being disliked, some of it is to do with the moments in the past where I was on the fast track to violence. This leads to passive-aggressiveness, bitchiness, and hours of frustration. Maybe its the Dalai Lama book I’m reading, or maybe it was the straight up honesty of my best friend/wife, but for once, I did something other than bitch. (After I had had a few rants of course.)

On my long run, I was thinking about why I was so pissed. I blared out some Slipknot, pounded the pavement and systematically went through the reasons behind why I was so enraged.

Its been an emotional two weeks – I had issues in work, issues with friends, college work starting to pile up. I could only keep going for so long. But instead of addressing any of these issues, I allowed myself to become completely demotivated, ate with the reckless abandon of a 13 year old boy, lounged on the couch instead of running, and listened as my brain suggested various combinations of starving, throwing up, alcohol and self destruction. Like I said, it was a hard few weeks.

So this morning, I broke down the incident that sparked my mini downturn. My initial response was to blame the other party. After all, he was the one acting like an idiot. But I had been doing this for days and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. So maybe, just maybe, I needed to look at me.

There are two ways of going about this. The first way was to think: this happened because I’m not good enough, I’m too fat, too boring, too needy, too whatever-negative-quality and to berate myself, idealise my ED, drink myself into a stupor and huddle up into the foetal position until someone looked past all this and decided to fall in love with me.

The second way was to look at the facts. Starting with the positive: although I had lapsed into some comfort eating, I had fought through my ED compulsions and other self destructive thinking. Some less pleasant facts: I had been whining for a week and had only just realised that the person I was the most mad at was me. Mad because I had made the same mistake again, mad because I took people’s cruelty to heart, mad because I wasn’t strong enough to just get over it.

So what can I do? Well for one, I can accept that making the same mistake is pushing me to finally change a relationship that was perhaps more unhealthy than I had first realised and that it is going to painful and shit. I can stop punishing myself for being hurt but I can stop letting it dictate my entire day’s mood. I can accept that I won’t always be treated in the way I would prefer but complaining about it is just adding to the number of people who acting like douchelords.

There is no real conclusion to this because I’m still waiting for my epiphany to put up its hand and make itself known. But at least I won’t be arrested for assault this way.

Shame As A Motivational Tool

My general tendency in life is to jump to the worst possible conclusion. Miss two days of study? FAIL EVERYTHING. Eat a lot of chocolate last night? OBESITY CRISIS. Mistake pointed out in your work? WRONG CAREER CHOICE LIFE RUINED. And then I take these thoughts and I use them to motivate myself to do the “right” thing.

Motivating change is a funny thing. There is a very thin line between motivation and obsession in the same way that the reasons behind the change can be productive or destructive with the same end goal. Shame is a huge indicator of which side of the line you fall on.

I am once again trying to lose weight. I am conscious of what I eat, I have specific plans on my exercise for the week, I am disappointed when I don’t meet those goals and sometimes need to white knuckle through to meet them. Some days I worry if I am slipping back into old habits and then I think of shame. In the height of my ED, I was more than conscious of what I ate. I was so consumed with meeting my deficit for the day that I weighed everything. I weighed lettuce, which is essentially water, for fear of going overboard. I measured calories burnt on my heart rate monitor and wouldn’t allow myself to stop exercising until I had reached 600+ calories burnt. I had no life outside weight loss and situations that might cause deviance from the plan caused my so much stress and panic that I often just avoided social situations.

Looking back on it, I see a lot of similarities between how I treated food and how I treated my work when I was doing my leaving cert. It was all or nothing and since nothing meant overwhelming guilt, I was going to commit all to studying and all to weight loss. In both endeavors, there was no clear end point, just a vague goal of “Get medicine” and “Lose weight.” When I got medicine it wasn’t enough. When I lost weight, I needed to lose more. And I was able to maintain this hellish lifestyle because of that voice in my head that reminded me of the dreaded alternative – a B instead of an A, a size 12 instead of a size 4.

When we look at how we motivate ourselves, it is essential to look at our driving force. Denouncing the use of shame is not the same as letting yourself off the hook and continuing with your damaging behavior (in my case, overeating.) The original damaging behavior is no better because it comes from a place of self hatred. When I am eating my third helping of Tesco brand chocolate, I can easily convince myself that I am making up for all the abuse I put my body through in the past few  years. But cut to an hour later when I am nauseous and bloated, and I feel like shit for overeating, it is all too clear that my “treat” was really a punishment. It is no different from starving myself all day and feeling really proud about it until I faint into my friend’s arms and have to explain the headaches and the hunger pains. Both situations are riddled in detrimental emotion and neither allow for a life outside the food (or whatever change you are making.)

In my life right now, I am trying to lose weight. But I am also working, studying, going out, writing, singing, having fun, and all manner of things in between. Sometimes I don’t have time and sometimes I fuck up (read: the last 10 days.) But today I am getting out of my motivational slump and am determined to push myself back onto the right track. And under no circumstances are the words “not good enough,” “failure,” “too fat/lazy,” or anything remotely similar going to be used in this process. Instead, I remind myself of the extra energy, the extra confidence, the more stable emotions and reactions I felt when my diet and exercise patterns were more balanced. Oh, and I lost a few pounds. But that’s not what is important.

Size V Shape

Written in June 2011 and forgotten about. 

The weighing scales in my kitchen is in easy view, even from one seat in the living room, so this had to on the sly. I snuck a jelly snake out of the bag lying on the counter, placed it carefully and silently on the tray and noted its 8g of weight. A quick look at the back of the bag and some stealthy calculations and success: 14 calories a snake. I had already had 3 and that was quite enough.

There is something consuming and unrelenting about calorie counting. What was once a vague note of your daily intake soon becomes a mission in accuracy and a never ending game of find the deficit. Well, for me it was anyway. And for what? Sculpted biceps, long lean legs and the elusive flat stomach?

One of the first things I learned in recovery was that no matter how thin I became (and I was thin) I was still me. Admittedly, an undernourished, cranky and bony me, but me nonetheless, and I was just going to have to deal with that. So what is me?

Even with XXlbs of a weight difference, I still have muscles on my arms, skinny calves and a relatively small waist. I still have big boobs, big eyes, big hair. Maybe I am a little larger, but I essentially look the same. I could change my size but not my shape.

So why become so invested in this societal notion that restriction, over exercise, thinness will make your life magically better? Of course, eat well, run, skip, play, be healthy! But a sub-18 BMI will not make your bills smaller, your classes easier, your life more enjoyable. Because honestly, whats enjoyable about secretly weighing snakes? Nothing.

The Pinch Of Salt

Its very easy not to practice what you preach. On the blog and in real life, I am never short of feel good whims that this whole “loving yourself” thing is far more important than being picture perfect and stick thin with a trophy boy on the arm. You know. To other people. When it comes to myself however, there is this underlying strain of thoughts and emotions that tell me that to achieve anything, I must achieve everything and I get caught in a cycle of perfectionism.

To try and break this cycle, I usually go the logical route of reminding myself that the only person who expects me to be perfect is me. Even looking back on past experience, actually achieving the level of “perfection” I wanted to achieve – my entry to medicine, my extreme weight loss – didn’t bring me any closer to being happy. Looking at the lives of others, I also know that it isn’t only very smart, very thin girls that are in relationships so this need for perfection has very little basis in reality. And this train of thought has gotten me quite far in staying social, reducing panic attacks and coming along in recovery. Then, stuff happens.

Pictures aren’t necessarily the best thing. I’ve never loved pictures anyway and unfortunately, a bad angle here and there is enough to throw all my logic out the window and start longing for the days when I could buy a size 6 again. I worry am I deluding myself, I wonder if what I see in the mirror is real at all, I freak out that everyone is judging me for evident elephantism.

People aren’t always the best thing either. Usually, it is just my own paranoia of thinking people are looking at me in a bad way but yesterday, I was proven right and I was not happy. I was standing outside Centra in Dublin, eating a Freddo, and not freaking out about eating said Freddo, because its a small bar, I wasn’t binging and I have been really balanced in my eating lately. Then an old man came out of the shop, looked at me, told me that eating chocolate makes you fat and walked away. I wasn’t sure what had shocked me more: the fact that a stranger had said this to me in the street or that I had been caught out, an overweight girl eating chocolate.

All ten people I was with had to hear about this. Because when in doubt, look for the approval of others to reassure you. But that in itself… I wonder why I can’t give that approval to myself, that reassurance that some people might just be a bit rude, that these seem people don’t know who you are and what your background is, so their judgement is not necessarily a reflection on you.

Self love is not a process of delusion. Think about a person you love – someone who you really and truly love unashamedly and without condition. You know they are not perfect, you know they have flaws. But you also see that they have these amazing qualities and that is why you love them. Not for the weak points they succeeded in diminishing but for just being themselves. So why on earth is it so difficult to see this reflection in ourselves. Because people love us and people see us in the same non-deluded-but-still-loving way. The pinch of salt is hard to take sometimes but it is so necessary – why let the words of strangers, or of yourself, destroy you? You are worth so much more than that.

National Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2012

I am no stranger to writing about my own experience of having an eating disorder and wrote an awareness post this time last year too. Reading back on it now I seem so young and naive and yet only twelve months have past. I feel like I have learned so much since that fateful day I broke down in Cork – but I still have (and always will have) room to grow.

A lot of the themes across the blogosphere this week have focused on awareness, body image and self love – all of which are very important. But I said it last year and I will say it again – ED is not about the weight. This post from ED Bites is an interesting piece on the whole concept of awareness and I am inclined to say I agree.

If you have been reading my stuff for a while or have had a root through my confessions posts, you will probably have noticed that I write about EDs from one of two perspectives – 1. I can’t handle my life so help me get better OR 2. Listen to my epiphany and positive spin. And for the most part that is what I am going for anyway. But today I am going to go in a different direction.

The Reality of Recovering from an Eating Disorder (and why it will be worth it in the end)

Two very important parts before I start. This is potentially triggering so read at your own risk or click the little x in the corner of your screen now. Also, there are pictures pre-ED, mid-ED and post-ED and I would appreciate if people can keep negative comments to themselves because Internet anonymity doesn’t make it any less rude

• You will question your healthcare team. I am not saying that you should assume they are wrong – I am just saying that you probably will. I know I did. I was angry – I was angry I had to gain weight and I was angry that nobody was addressing my binge eating. I was angry that I didn’t have a traditional eating disorder that had an established recovery program. I just didn’t see the point at all.

The reality: I still sometimes wish that my recovery had gone a different way, that I had been referred to a dietician earlier, that my team had focused on some aspects sooner. But when you get right down to it, I needed to trust them, I needed to learn that getting mad wasn’t going to make me better and the sooner I learnt to get on with the professionals, the sooner I was going to get well.

• You will question yourself. In every sense of the word. Recovering is one of the most trying things that a person can do. You ask yourself how you got here, you wonder which version of your own body image is true, you will wonder why you ever agreed to this recovery crap in the first place. And, if like me, you go from underweight to overweight, the doubt grows even more. You will idealise your ED, you will miss the days you shivered from lack of body fat, you will look at skinny girls and hate them for their fat free ease. Activities you once loved (like socialising, performing, getting dressed up) become ordeals of anxiety and emotion, photos become torture when you realise that you are a lot heavier in real life than you are in your head, recovery seems a far worse alternative to the disorder but in its elusiveness, you cannot recapture the painful yet effective behaviour of the ED.

The reality: I went from this at age 17, before my ED behaviours began

to this (about 6 months before I entered recovery)

to now (this was taken last week)

Its quite a difference and to be honest, I’m not loving it. I can rationalise and placate myself and repeat all the feel good mantras the world can think up and I am not going to love being overweight. What I can focus on right now is the increased energy, the better social skills when I am not focusing all my energy on exercising and not eating, and the ever decreasing amount of depressed days I now have.

• Some days, you just have to white knuckle it. I’m still not great at this. Some days, I still have the panic attacks, I still reach for chocolate to settle myself, I skip a meal or I make myself sick in the bathroom, I check the price of liposuction, I drink too much and tell myself at least its not ED again. But then again, there are days when I can eat when I am hungry and stop when I am full. Its just a matter of getting those days to win out even if it is an absolutely shite process in its doing.

The reality: Recovery is not something that is over in 3 months, or a year, or as I’ve speculated before, maybe ever. And you get to a point where it feels too much effort to keep it going all the time and that’s when you want to quit. I got sad on the bus the other day for no particular reason and my first thought was “Its the ED emotions again.” But then I realised it wasn’t – I was just feeling my feelings, real untarnished-by-addiction feelings, for the first time in a long time. And it wasn’t pleasant – but it wasn’t necessarily bad either.

What The Blogosphere Has Taught Me About ED Recovery

Before I started blogging, I read them. Daily and in copious amounts. And before I started writing about recovery, I read about it, I marvelled at these bloggers who were changing their lives and I grabbed at straws of wisdom for dear life.

I do have a few favourite nuggets of advice and sayings from this exploration of the blogosphere in the last 18 months.

1. Realize that you never feel any better after two cupcakes than you do after one

I only read this this morning but its a simple fact that just did not occur to me. I have yet to put this into practice, but the fact of the matter is that the second or third bar of chocolate is not more satisfying – I either want the taste in my mouth (which is stupid because I already have the taste in my mouth) or else I want to numb myself (which is so mentally unhealthy I barely want to admit it.) The beauty of this is also that it reminds you that you can have nice things – just have one and be satisfied with the experience

2. Nobody ever got fat from too many roasted veggies (originally from HangryPants but her site seems to be shut down?)

The first time I saw this, I was only 3 or 4lbs up from my lowest weight and I was still trying to make peace with the fact that people cannot survive on <1000 calories a day. I wanted to cross stitch this on a pillow – it was so true! I could actually eat.

3.  “I had to commit to accepting myself for who I was at this very moment in time- not 10 pounds from now”

This is still ongoing, but the ah-ha moment that comes with this advice is monumental to any recovery process. Life does not start when you lose the weight, there is no miracle transformation once you shed those 5lbs. Once I hit a weight goal, I would tell myself “10 more lbs and then I’ll stop.” But I know I wouldn’t – because I was procrastinating, putting off dealing my issues, feeling my feelings and living my life. I was so afraid to let of this thing that was keeping me (what I saw as) sane and I was loathe to let it go, even though I was becoming increasingly aware that I had a problem. Although I still struggle with my weight (from the opposite end of the spectrum) I now live my life, I socialise and I do more with my time than plan my calories and exercise routine.

 

In the end, blogging has provided me with an outlet and a means of support that I find so difficult to look for in real life. With blogging, not only can you access the thoughts and writings of people from all over the world who have lived through this, you can also throw out your own little specks of wisdom and hope that someone else finds them a help.

What has the blogosphere taught you?

Coming Clean: A Year On

One year ago today, I packed up all my things and left my house in Cork with the intention of snuggling up in my Limerick bed and never coming out.

I could go into the highs and lows, the ups and downs of the last year but I have covered it in excruciating detail already (up in the Confessions tab) and I don’t want to bore my lovely readers.

The important thing is this: I may live as a statistic but I am certainly not going to die a statistic.

One year ago today, I took my life back. And agains my own expectations, I came out of it alive.

Ed, Mia and Ana? I’m done playing your silly games now. Kindly fuck off home now.