21 Things I don’t Miss About Living with Anorexia

1. Being unable to eat alone.

I remember driving to have lunch with my mum in her lunch break. I was utterly unable to eat a bite alone at 26/27 years old.

I remember spending hours, days waiting to eat this meal or this snack with someone (and interestingly often not being able to eat it when that time came). This was exhausting. I don’t miss that.

2. Always trying to pretend I was ok.

I remember being ok; always.

I didn’t want any attention on me and if I wasn’t ok, then it would make sense that I’d have to do something about anorexia wouldn’t I? If I wasn’t ok, then why didn’t I just eat? If I wasn’t ok, then why didn’t I just get better? I didn’t know how to eat. I didn’t know how to get better. So, I pretended I was ok. It was easier, safer more palatable for others to see me as “ok” than as suffering when all they thought I had to do was eat. I don’t miss that.

3. Finding mouldy bits of food in clothes pockets weeks after I’d hidden them.

The amount of food I spat into tissues, down sleeves, held in my mouth until I was alone and could get rid of it, “accidently” dropped would have added up over the years. Finding those mouldy bundles scattered throughout my room was a reinforcement of my inadequacy, my grotesqueness, my “messed-upness”, my shame.

I hated “wasting” any morsel of food and yet my eating the food felt even more wasteful than hiding it.

4. Swaying between constipation and diarrhoea.

Having such a messed-up digestive and nervous system after years of self-harm that I forgot what normal pooing was.

5. Feeling unloved.

When I was sick, I had an underlying, pervasive sense of being unloved. That’s gone now (thank you hypnotherapy).

6. Lying about what I’d eaten.

At the same time as I despised myself for lying, I continued to do it. I justified it under all sorts that I couldn’t hurt this or that person’s feelings, that they’d be let down or mad at me if I told the truth but really the truth was I was just scared. I was so scared. I don’t miss that.

7. Lying about how much exercise I’d done.

The look on the face of my mum if I ever admitted the amount of exercise, I’d done was heartbreaking. So, I lied. A lot.

8. People I loved lying to me with “misguided” good intentions.

The shame of looking into the eyes of people I loved and hearing them lie to me because they feared what I’d do with the truth was soul crushing.  

9. My inability to say no.

The plethora of requests from friends, partners, strangers, study and work situations I said yes to where I wanted to say no is as ludicrous as it is sad.

10. Being constantly cold.

This might not sound all that bad but believe me being constantly cold impacts your life. Couple this with an inability to express your needs and wow, you’ve got some painful situations.

I remember one night driving home from a friends’ 18^th birthday party with my boyfriend at the time. I was in the passenger seat; he had his window down and I was frozen.

I was totally unable to make the simple request that he please wind it up. I froze the whole way.

From memory I may have eventually expressed that I was cold, I am not sure if I was brave enough to ask that he wind his window up. Honestly, I’m not sure at that stage of the illness that I’d have been capable of recognising this was a request I could make. Whether or not I asked I can’t say (most likely I did not) however, in my mind the story I remember telling myself was “he doesn’t care how I feel = he doesn’t love me = no one loves me.” You can imagine that this became about far more than being cold. I cried a lot over that open window. He didn’t understand, I didn’t understand. I don’t miss that.

11. Not feeling I was enough.

If you’ve ever experienced that underlying, ever present feeling that you’re just not enough you’ll know what I’m talking about here. If you know it, you know it.

That feeling that perhaps no matter what you do you will never be enough, but you keep trying anyway to get that next degree, job, title, achievement, outside acknowledgement. You reach them, obtain them, earn them and immediately it’s onto the next without so much as stopping to breath let alone give yourself a tenth of the recognition you deserve.   

12. Feeling I was too much.

When I expressed myself, I always felt I was too much. I felt a constant need to hide, belittle and restrain my life.

I remember being on a camping trip with a friend and a bunch of his friends I didn’t know well. I remember apologising a lot that camping trip (during the moments I wasn’t hiding).

I remember one of the girls laughing and saying offhandedly one day, “what are you always apologising for, being perfect?” The humiliation enveloped me. I never wanted anyone to think I was “perfect”. Anorexia was a hidden secret that was always there and which I could use to say inside me mind “here, look they don’t know but I’m far from perfect”. I don’t miss that.

13. Being constantly bloated.

Years and years of bizarre eating rituals, over exercising and high anxiety will f*ck up your gastrointestinal tract this you can be sure of.

It’s all reversible but not quickly or easily. The road of getting to a normal functioning digestive system is much longer than the process of weight gain and isn’t complete even after weight restoration.

14. Coordinating meals.

Ahhhh the task of organising (micromanaging in real OCD style) and fitting 1001 meals into life used to take up a huge part of my daily mental capacity. Especially because as I mentioned I couldn’t eat any of those meals and snacks alone!

On top of that they had to consist of a very limited variety of options and be eaten at damn precise times otherwise they weren’t eaten at all. I now love the eating at anytime, anywhere, anything and on my own or with others. I never thought I’d write these words because I don’t even think I truly appreciated how exhausting it was when I was in it, it just was. I don’t miss that.

15. My life revolving around food and treatment appointments.

My life honestly did revolve around food even when food was the thing I feared most, ate very little of and avoided at all costs which is interesting because you’d think it would be the opposite.

I didn’t know just how much of my brain space this took up until it began to take up less and less. I didn’t know just how much brain space you could have.

Before I had that brain space, I was fearful of having that brain space! Now that I have that brain space believe me, I’ve never been stuck for things to fill it with and the thought that that was ever a concern is incomprehensible.

The amount of my time which was spent at or getting to and from appointments for treatment was phenomenal. That is another thing I just accepted as “normal” and which now that it is not like that, I wonder how it was ever not the biggest inconvenience in the world to have to make time to attend all those things. Let alone the reality of how poorly I was actually treated at the vast majority of those “treatments.” I don’t miss that.

16. Being constantly on high alert.

The level of anxiety that was my daily baseline is incomprehensible to me now. It’s exhausting to even remember. I was anxious about everything and anything and nothing all at once.

I used to wake up with a literal shot of adrenaline, the need to get out, to run was overwhelming (and I did every morning) and this wasn’t for a few days, weeks or months this went on for multiple years. I don’t miss that.

17. Never being fully present.

I had many moments during my sick years in which I was happy, but I don’t know if I was ever fully present.

Not in the way I am now. Not in the way that I can now sit and talk and truly be there, truly hear another human being and truly feel heard myself.

When I was sick there was always a part of me that wasn’t there no matter how much I loved the person or people I was with or the thing I was doing. I don’t miss that.

18. Shallow one-sided relationships.

The relationships and friendships I had when I was sick are incomparable to those I have today.

The ones I used to have were based upon my misguided sense of loyalty and dedication to people who in every sense of the word abused me.

Why did I stay? Because I hadn’t yet developed a sense of self, because I believed I could help them, change them, make them more trusting of the world and convince them humans were good (only I couldn’t no matter what I did and no matter what pain I stayed and stayed through because they knew that not all humans were good because they were not good). I don’t miss that.

19. The excruciating inability to make decisions.

When you have a low sense of self making decisions is incredibly hard. You have no internal compass. No internal guidance system. I don’t miss the time I used to spend deliberating over which decision to make. It all becomes so easy when you know why you are and what’s important to you.

20. Heart pains and palpitations.

I shudder when I remember the physical symptoms and manifestations of malnutrition and starvation that were my everyday reality. The number of horrific pains I so readily played down and blatantly ignored or shrugged off when I was sick is terrifying in hindsight.

If I were to experience any of the major health issues which were the norm of my sick life now in my healthy, recovered life I’d be first at the doctors office, I’d be in bed, I’d be learning all I could to take care of myself the best I could, I’d be telling others so they could also help. When I was sick it was the polar opposite. I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t adjust any of my actions and it makes me shudder at the thought of what I put my body through. I don’t miss that. I don’t know how long my body could have gone on with that treatment, that’s the interesting thing no one does. Living with an eating disorder is always a risk, any day, any moment could be your last even when you don’t believe that, you don’t know when will be the moment your exhausted body will give up.

21. The unrelenting shame.

Hello darkness my old friend.

How many times do we hear variations of the story “I was outwardly successful but suffering so much inside.” Maybe you’ve even had your own experience of this? Yeah? Well, that’s been my story too.

I remember people from school to university to work to social remarking at various stages throughout the years I spent sick with anorexia nervosa that I was so beautiful, so smart, so healthy and so on and on and on. Under it all was an unrelenting shame. A shame that I was none of those things, a shame that I was a failure, a shame that I would never be anything, a shame that I was empty. I don’t miss that.