As I sit here and reflect on my recovery from anorexia nervosa it’s impossible to pinpoint a time where things changed.
It’s equally impossible to name a precise day where I knew recovery was done.
It sure wasn’t the case that one day I was sick with anorexia nervosa and the next I was happy, healthy and free.
There were many moments where things changed.
And at the same time there were no moments but rather a general advancement.
An advancement that I can only identify as an advancement looking back because I can assure you it was an advancement that very often did not feel like an advancement when I was in the thick of it.
If I hadn’t been through recovery myself and helped many others through their own recovery journeys since, I can very easily see how dauting it would be to be presented with a patient or be caring for someone you love in recovery from anorexia nervosa.
To sit and talk with someone you care about, to try to convince them of their beauty, place in the world and that they are deserving and worthy of eating while hearing back all the rules and rituals they have around food, the plethora of justifications, the twisted, rigid and unbreakable thoughts, weird and wonderful rationalisations and reasons for why they can’t eat, is, I imagine one of the most daunting experiences in the world.
Sometimes I put myself in the shoes of the parents or partners of the people I work with and wow.
Just wow.
It all seems frustrating and heartbreakingly absurd.
It feels impossible to know where to begin.
Where to begin in unpicking and healing the overabundance of strange and downright deluded things they are doing with food?…
I can’t remember the nuances of everything that made up living with anorexia nervosa to me but sometimes out of nowhere or more often than not when a client shares something they do with food I think “oh yeah I remember doing that too!”
There was a bottomless wealth of strange things I did when I lived with anorexia nervosa. Not all of them to do with food and if you’d like to read a post purely dedicated to a list of the very real day to day existence of living with anorexia nervosa see my earlier blog 64 Things You Won’t Find on WebMD About Living with Anorexia Nervosa….
In this post I’m going to briefly introduce a selection of just 10 weird things I did with food during various stages during the years I lived with anorexia nervosa.
I share these with the intention of helping you feel less alone in your journey of recovery.
I share these with the intention of removing some of the personalisation and shame that unnecessarily abounds in eating disorder recovery.
I can guarantee you for every weird thing you’re doing with food there is someone doing something weirder.
The first step towards change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.
~ Nathaniel Branden.
So, without further ado 10 weird things I did with food when I lived with anorexia nervosa were…
- Eating to Please Others
When I lived with anorexia the pressure, I felt to eat was immense.
The pressure I felt to act normal was crushing.
The pressure to not let others down in all areas of my life, but perhaps none more so than eating was overwhelming.
I put the comfort of others above my own needs in every situation.
To be honest, this is the main thing that has carried over into impacting my recovered life. The number of years I spent trying to interpret the needs and wants of others, downplaying, disregarding and more correctly simply unable to recognise let alone meet my own needs or wants has without a shadow of a doubt led me to a place in life I’d unlikely be had I been capable of listening to myself all along or sooner.
That’s tough to know.
To know the majority of decisions you made in your life that have led you to where you are now weren’t yours.
If I am honest putting my needs and wants first is still often a work in progress but it is now an option which I can choose. It may not always feel good but the very important distinction is that I can choose it. Having chocie is a freedom that only comes with recovery. In comparison when I lived with anorexia nervosa it wasn’t even a consideration that that was possible.
Certainly, in my life today, there wouldn’t be a situation where I would eat to please someone.
I believe no healthy and happy person needs someone else to eat a certain way in order to feel ok within themselves. I certianly don’t mind how anyone else chooses to eat. That’s their choice and entirely separate from my life. If someone did need me to eat a certain thing or amount in order to feel ok within themselves then that’s something they need to address and fix for them. It’s not my responsibility or my place to change my actions to accommodate their discomfort (and it’s not yours either).
2. Perpetually Seeking Permission to Eat
Oh, this one was exhausting.
There wasn’t much about living with anorexia that wasn’t exhausting to be honest. The number of things I had to take into consideration when making even the most minute of decisions was astounding.
But the inner battle of perpetually searching for permission, signs and “excuses” it was ok to eat or do the “right” thing was a full-time job.
I was incapable of giving myself permission to eat so I endlessly looked to other people to know it was ok. That’s why my hospitalisations and being “made to” eat were both the biggest relief and utterly terrifying at the same time.
What did I used to do to gain permission to eat?
So many things. Where to start?
I remember leaving certain foods out on the kitchen bench or in sight hoping someone would offer them to me and stewing over it for hours or sometimes weeks (no joke) if they didn’t. I also remember hoping to be offered the food and refusing it when I was.
I distinctly remember my mum coming into my room and giving me a little bowl of dates stuffed with cream cheese when I was on the phone with a friend at about 14 years old or so. I wanted to eat them, I didn’t want to eat them. I loved her, clearly she cared about me. I hated her, clearly she hated me. I cried my way through eating them.
The complexity, calculations and mind games that went into eating are gone. I have permission to eat in any and every situation. The difference between now and then is that now not only do I know that, I feel it and I believe it. Your mind doesn’t always tell you the truth.
3. Only Eating at Certain Times
When I lived with anorexia nervosa I had strict times I could and could not eat.
If I couldn’t access food within those times or if food was available even slightly outside of those time periods I’d simply miss that meal/snack without a second though.
I remember reading in a magazine when I was maybe 15 years old a random throw away article with a one line recommending not to eat after 7pm or 7:30pm I’ve forgotten now. Which is incredible given how once upon a time it basically felt like life or death to follow such an arbitrary rule. Anyhow, long story short I promptly stopped eating after 7pm (or 7:30pm).
No questions asked.
If I got home after 7pm I’d tell my boyfriend I’d already eaten out.
If I went out dancing with friends, they’d have midnight snacks when we got home (or kebabs at 2am) and it never even entered my mind that that was also an option for me even when I was the one driving through the McDonalds drive thru or when we were staying at my house, and it was my food. It wasn’t an option.
4. Only Eating Certain Things at Certain Times
To add another layer of conditions to an already rule abundant life not only was I unable to eat unless it was within strict windows of time, but I also could only eat certain things at certain meals and not others.
This made eating out or eating at friends places stressful to say the least because unfortunately everyone else in the universe did not abide by my ridiculously long list of nonsensical food rules.
I don’t have a lot to say about this one just that it wasn’t true. None of it was ever true or important but perhaps through striving for an unobtainable and ever-increasing set of demands and restrictions on my life I was unconscious striving for sense of control or safety I didn’t otherwise have. I’ll never truly know and can only psychoanalyse myself retrospectively but if you find yourself doing anything weird with food and I do mean anything get help. Food truly shouldn’t be a source of pain in your life. Life’s hard enough as it is and the peace and ease you’re unconscious is striving for won’t be found in restriction (not long term anyway).
5. Hiding Food
The hiding food era. I’m not sure when that one began or ended…
As I mentioned above, I remember my mum giving me food and I ate them without really considering that I could say no and certainly not considering that I could hide it. I even remember staying at the beach on holiday with my family as a teenager and one of my sisters wanted to get an lemonade icy-pole. My mum gave us money and told me to get a chocolate Heaven ice-cream. I fretted about it the whole way there, I bought it and I cried eating it. But I ate it and I don’t remember considering that I didn’t have to buy it or eat it. No one made me.
There was some point in time where I started to say no to food and also to hide food.
I remember many instances of hiding food in my pockets, pretending to blow my nose and spitting it into tissues, throwing it in the bin or hiding it in all sorts of locations throughout my room where I could get rid of it late but I didn’t always remember later which meant I was regularly coming across hard, mouldy balls of barely recognisable organic matter weeks later when I tried to hide some other chewed up and spat out chunk there.
I cannot say why I did this.
I cannot truly say why I did any of the disordered behaviours I did.
I didn’t learn it because no one ever said this was a good thing to do or showed me how to do it.
I didn’t choose to do it.
It was what I had to do.
The intensity of the desire to get rid of as soon as it was put out was extreme. There was no negotiating with that. I attempted but that sucked more. I remember the endless battle of spitting something out only to sneak it back onto my plate or into my bowl seconds or minutes later. Only to take it out again and hide it, battle with myself and put it back in.
This would go on and on and on.
If you feel fear at the size of a plate of food or the need to remove any of it before you’ve started and had a chance for your body to decide what is enough or not enough, if you feel you need to put out all your food or know exactly what’s in it please get help. I know it may feel that this is simply the way it is for you and I am not going to argue with that but just because it is that way does not mean it “should” be that way nor that it can’t be any other way.
One of the greatest things recovery from anorexia nervosa taught me is that there are other options. There are other possibilities. For thinking, for feeling and for doing. Your reality now is just one version of reality and not the reality.
6. Unable to Eat Alone
There was a time when it didn’t count if I ate on my own.
There was no point to eating unless there was a witness to verify that I had eaten.
There was no point to eating on my own.
I belied that.
I knew that to be true.
I remember the logic clear and true that there was no point to eating lunches at school when my parents didn’t believe I ate them anyway.
Imagine going through the pain of eating the thing only to have them not believe that I’d eaten the thing?
There was no reason I could think of for me to eat other than to please others.
Imagine that? Having such a low sense of self-worth that the only time eating is valid is when someone else is there to witness it or believes you are eating.
If you find yourself looking for reasons, justifications and permissions to eat, if you feel what you eat must be witnessed by others in order to make it worth it or because you feel (correctly or incorrectly) that it’s more important others believe you are eating than it is you are actually eating please get help.
The only person you should be eating for is you.
You don’t need a witness and you don’t need their “trust” when you have your own.
7. Food Shopping for Others
I shudder at the thought of how many hours I have spent walking the isles of supermarkets buying foods to stock the cupboards of my parents and my boyfriend’s place.
I found it virtually impossible to shop for food for myself, but it was oh so important to me that others had a plethora of options of foods to eat.
If you feel the need to take care of others excessively, to make sure they’re eating but you don’t feel that need for yourself please get help. People living with eating disorders often have an immense propensity for caring for others while being utterly incapable of showing themselves this care. If you resonate with this, please don’t fall into the mindset trap that your “empathy” is a good, selfless or noble thing.
On the other side of having felt that way myself and dreaming, wishing and wanting for a kinder world I know now that the most kind we can ever be to others and to this world is to truly take care of ourselves alongside others. Not first, not last but alongside. Get yourself there and you will see firsthand how your setting yourself free automatically gives others permission to set themselves free. You can’t do this for them in just the same way you cannot eat for them and keep them healthy, and you cannot control whether or not they develop an eating disorder (this is everyone with an eating disorders biggest fear that others may develop an eating disorder) but you can do it for you.
You can be the person you needed for all this to have never come into your life and that person I am sure was not someone who was obsessing about what others were and were not eating. More likely that person was someone awesome and calmly self-confident just living their free life choosing foods for themselves as though it wasn’t a life-or-death task, because it’s not.
8. Wanting Others to Eat
This one ties into number 7.
When I lived with anorexia nervosa I had this perpetual fear that others had or would develop eating disorders.
I saw eating disorders everywhere.
I wanted to protect the world from eating disorders.
Honestly, it stressed me out daily.
I didn’t want others to see what I was doing and then copy and end up with an eating disorder themselves.
The interesting thing now is thinking about how badly I didn’t want anyone to develop an eating disorder while I went on living with an eating disorder…
Today, I can look back and see that there was no way any healthy, happy person was going to copy what I was doing with food. It was so uninspiring it’s not funny.
The reason I copied others with food was because I hadn’t developed my own sense of identity and connection with myself so I looked outside of myself but if I had of developed those things I’d have had no reason to look to others. Just as I have no reason to now.
I also had this perverse fascination with seeing others eating so normally and naturally. It was almost as if, mind-blowingly, they were choosing to eat and even more mind-blowingly they wanted to eat!
I was hypervigilant for cracks in the facade. Surely it couldn’t be true. Surely, they didn’t really feel entitled, deserving or worthy to eat that?…
I know now that when you go to eat as a healthy and happy individual you don’t have to run through any justification or permission seeking thought processes at all. It really is as simple as being hungry and choosing something to eat, eating it and moving on.
There is so much more to life and if you know this but don’t feel this, please seek help until you both know and feel this to be true.
9. Certain Foods Were Off Limits
I will likely never forget the day my boyfriend put regular peanut butter in a meal he’d made for us. Wow.
I ate it.
Through every swallow I tried to be ok.
Boy did I try.
I sat and cried through it.
My whole body, every cell yelling no.
No.
No.
No!
I remember the moment of surprise when I saw the blood on my thigh where I’d dug my nails in so hard through each bite.
After I tried to let it go.
I tried to hug him and calm down.
But I couldn’t.
I remember taking off in the rain.
I remember sitting in my car down some side road watching my phone light up, again and again.
I remember how lost and utterly disorientated and disconnected from reality I was when he found me after hours of riding his motorbike in the rain.
I felt ashamed.
Defective.
Broken.
Hollow.
All because of a spoonful of peanut butter.
This is what it means to live with anorexia nervosa.
For me there was a complete inability to emotionally regulate let alone not get so distressed over something that didn’t merit that level (any level) of distress in the first place.
If you experience the need for food to be any particular way in order to feel safe and semi-emotionally regulated and if you know that if food were to fall outside those criteria even on a very one-off occasion you wouldn’t be able to cope please get help. I assure you it doesn’t have to be that way, but it will be that way until you address it because eating disorders go nowhere on their own. I have never come across someone who “grew out of their eating disorder” without a lot of hard work.
10. Putting Bread in Milk
Just as a fun last food fact to throw in I used to have 3 Sustagen drinks per day plus smoothies and a warm milk in the night-time. I remember putting my bread in the smoothies and it would soak up all the sweet milk and I’d eat it all milk soaked. Something I wouldn’t think about doing now.
It’s common for people with eating disorders to make weird and wonderful food combinations and I have to say because of the limited range of things I could eat I wasn’t on this band wagon as much as I could have been.
I did used to put a lot of lemon or a lot of chilli on my foods, I drank milk with melted butter in it, I put powdered milk in everything, and I honestly think that when in lived in Puerto Rico I invented smoothie bowls. On one of my desperate weight gain streaks but exceptionally limited in the variety of foods I could eat I’d blend 9-10 bananas with peanut butter and greens from the garden and I’d eat it out of a bowl with a spoon because it was too thick to drink.
Nutritional science is such a new field, and we definitely can’t and don’t claim we know the best things to eat but we do know for certain that it takes a lot to run a human body and the best way to make sure we aren’t missing out on any of those “a lot” including micronutrients such as iron and magnesium is to eat a wide variety of foods. If you find yourself doing strange food combinations or only able to eat a limited variety of foods, please get help not just for the psychological freedom but also because your physical health will thank you.
Summary
There are hundreds more things I did with food when I lived with anorexia nervosa that I explained away and justified to myself and others in so many ways. Things I knew were harmful or that I didn’t want to be doing and things I really had no clue were “disordered” because I fully bought into my lies.
Some of them were trivial and some of them were extreme.
It doesn’t matter anymore because at the end of the day not a single one of them remains in my life.
I can’t tell you exactly what I did to overcome each.
I can tell you that in the end it wasn’t my determination, willpower or perseverance with re-exposure, it wasn’t the challenges, the trying, the fighting, the being brave, the feeling the fear and doing it anyway that got me to a life a freedom. It was the work I did with a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner that helped me to change my beliefs, align my actions with my values and ultimately create a new self-identity. It was the work I did that allowed me to become me.
The consequences being that those higher levels of change (being me) filtered down into my behaviours, naturally. The new behaviours increasingly became my norm.
I was no longer at war within myself.
For the first time I felt I had choice.
In comparison (and I want to preface this with recognition that psychology is an amazing field and very beneficial and my experience with traditional psychology is not reflective of everyone’s experience with psychology) when I worked with psychologists during my recovery we’d talk about overcoming this or that thing and for the next 3 years we’d continue to talk about it.
In that time, I had “successes”. For example, I’d manage to eat the odd meal alone or I’d take a day off running.
But they were hollow “successes”. Because I always felt like it was a battle.
Which meant they never lasted.
I often came along to sessions ashamed and disheartened.
At one point I even began to come along to sessions and lie.
There was nothing I could say.
I knew everything I was doing was wrong.
And yet, I couldn’t change it in any sustainable way.
Clinical hypnotherapy was the beginning of the real change.
Clinical hypnotherapy allowed me to feel true self-acceptance and self-forgiveness as well as create a safe internal environment to begin to develop the skills and resources I was lacking in order to move forward into an increasingly empowered future.
A future I could be excited about.
A future I wanted.
Now, all those weird things which came so naturally to me have faded into oblivion.
It is my wish that you, one day also get the chance to experience this freedom.
It is your responsibility to set in place the first step of the plan that will make that outcome more than a wish.
If you, someone you love or one of your patients is doing an impossibly long list of weird things with food and you’re feeling overwhelmed with where to start unravelling them or feeling it would take multiple lifetimes to go through them one by one (it probably would) please know you don’t have to! Deal with those deeper issues and the laundry list of weird behaviours sort themselves out. I promise you this because all they are are symptoms of more core issues. No genuinely happy and healthy person does particularly weird things with food.
If you’re curious to experience hypnosis and what it’s like to work with your unconscious mind instead of against yourself get in touch with me [email protected].
Recovery doesn’t have to suck.
