Feeling Better

To take a break from Adventures in Treatment, I bring to you an update on how my weekend is going:

Thursday was my four year wedding anniversary with my husband, and we decided to go to dinner on Saturday despite being broke. I didn’t eat anything the entire day, although that’s not actually true given that I made cupcakes and had my fair share of frosting and batter as I was baking them. So to be more truthful, I didn’t have any “meals” the entire day.

Let me back up a second. On Saturday morning, I was up two pounds to my disbelief. I did splurge on Friday night and indulge in two mugs full of ice cream, but even I know that won’t make you gain two pounds overnight. I figured most of it was water weight. Throughout the day I didn’t have any chest pain or headaches, which was AWESOME, and that night we went out to dinner. I got a chance to dress up, which was nice because I have been feeling really lazy in regards to my attire lately and don’t make the effort to curl my hair anymore or wear nice blouses to work.

Anyway, dinner was….eh. I stressed a bit more over what to eat and eventually ordered a salad. Granted I know salads or no better than if I ordered a custom burger, but factoring in I hadn’t eaten any meals yet that day, I was willing to relax a little, especially as it was our anniversary. I forgot to order the dressing on the side though, and my fucking lettuce was soggy with it! It’s not that I don’t like it that way, but I couldn’t help but realize how the dressing defeated the purpose of getting a salad. I finished it despite my worries though, and split a milkshake with my husband. I had one of my cupcakes when I got home, and was able to avoid bingeing. So needless to say, I had somewhat of a “normal” eating day. I’m down a pound from yesterday, so still “up” a pound from Friday, but I’m hoping to eat very cleanly today and will be back on my regular 650 calorie meal plan starting Monday.

So my tumblr is getting quite popular, and I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. It has almost 1,000 followers and is still in its infancy stage. When I first started it, I thought the memes were really funny and a good way to laugh at our EDs. But the more attention is attracts, the more I feel like I’m being…insensitive? I also feel like it’s attracting the wrong kind of attention, although I don’t know what I really expected when I first started it.

Anywho — I haven’t had any chest pains this weekend which makes me feel better. Still have the pounding head problem when I get up off the couch, but not nearly as bad as it was on Friday.

To be honest, the more health stuff that occurs, the more guilty I feel for continuing on this way. And yet, the more readers I get the more pressured I feel to keep this blog interesting, and I fear entering recovery would suddenly make me boring. I know, sounds so self-centered and petty. Especially because my life is far more important than how many people read my blog, but I’ve said it before and I will say it again: even if I wanted to start eating normally again, would I even be able to? I feel so stuck and trapped in my behaviors that I don’t know what it will take for me to start changing.

Adventures in Treatment: Boost

2006:

It’s 9:45 at night; tea time. We are “required” to go into the dining room to put closure on our day. We are given the optional choice of having hot tea, hot cocoa, decaf coffee, and/or crackers for a snack. I often wonder, “Who the fuck would opt for more calories, especially if they don’t have to?” But several girls do take the hot cocoa and crackers. I guess they don’t have a problem with it; or maybe they just really want to enjoy some goddam hot cocoa and crackers for once. Who am I to judge? As much as I’d like to be brave enough to do the same, I’m too worried what other girls will think if I take them: “I thought she was anorexic, why is she eating MORE food?” I also don’t like the thought of even more calories in me on top of the 3,000 I already had to force down during the day, so most days I either just take the hot tea or nothing at all. On days I get Boost, I get coffee.

If we can’t finish 100% of our meals, we are required to drink Boost. A fellow patient, the 25-year-old emaciated anorectic who had already been in this facility twice before and almost died of a heart attack, informs us that it was better to eat all of our meals because the Boosts they are giving us actually tack on more calories than if we had just eaten all our food. Despite that, even if it’s true, my stomach is never big enough to finish all the food I have on my food plan, and I almost always ended up with a cup of Boost on a nightly basis.

How unfortunate (or fortunate) enough for me that nobody monitors tea time. As I said earlier, on nights I get Boost, I get the coffee as well. Instead of giving us Boost in a can, they poor about two cans worth (about 700 calories!) into a separate cup with a lid. Right before I enter the dining room, they give me the cup. When I  wait in line for everyone to pick their snack, I fill about 1/4 of a separate styrofoam cup with coffee. When I get into the dining room, I gush about how awesome it tastes to mix chocolate Boost with coffee because it is like a do-it-yourself mocha. Other girls praise me for my creativity, because nobody likes the taste of Boost (secretly, I do, but I can’t tell anyone that). I then poor the Boost into the styrofoam cup, leaving the Boost cup completely empty.

As tea time progresses, I pretend to sip the coffee/Boost concoction without actually swallowing anything. As each girl takes their turn, I pretend to sip, sip away, hoping that nobody will really notice my coffee isn’t disappearing. When everyone is done, I throw away the coffee, bring back my empty cup of Boost to the nurse, and get an A+ for the day for drinking all of it (when in reality, I hadn’t had a drop).

If anyone ever notices I throw away full cups of coffee during tea time, nobody says anything. And even though I often go to bed with an upset stomach because it is so full of food, I at least have the comfort in knowing I “worked the system” and avoided 700 extra calories from going into my body.

Eventually doing things like this becomes exhausting, but at the time, it’s all I can do to have my cake and eat it too. No pun intended.

Weight Range and Rituals

EDIT: I didn’t want to have to put something like this because I hoped most of us could be adults and understand that an entry titled “Weight Range and Rituals” could be triggering. Before I continue, this is not a post directed at any one person. I am writing this because I got the feeling it may have rubbed some readers the wrong way. With that said, I don’t want to have to throw out warnings all the time, because frankly, it’s not my repsponsiblity. I tried to word this entry very delicately. The questions I asked at the very bottom technically don’t ask for weight numbers or stats; if anyone provided them in the comments, that was their personal decision and I  don’t have a problem with it. If anyone was triggered or offended by this post; always remember what the subject of this blog is, and also keep in mind that nobody can make you feel anything but yourself. Your feelings are your own personal responsiblity and if you find yourself feeling less than stellar reading anything here, you have the ability to either stop reading, or change the way you feel about it. As hard as it sounds, you do have the power to change how you react to any given situation. You can either let it bring you down, or you can let it roll off your shoulders; either way, the choice is yours.

Disclaimer: The following entry is not a “tips or tricks” entry, nor is it an entry to encourage or promote eating disorders. It is, however, an entry about weight, so it may come off as pro-anorexic, but that is not my intention. It’s hard to not talk about weight when we are talking about eating disorders; that would be like asking someone in drug treatment never to talk about their drug of choice, and that’s both unrealistic and nearly impossible. So…it is what it is:

All of us have different “things” with our weights; some of us pick our goal weights based on a certain look we want to aim for, some of us pick our goals weights by a nice sounding number, some of us pick our goal weights by the BMI range we want to fit into, some of us pick our goal weights based on how far we want to compete with ourselves, some of us don’t even have goal weights. Regardless, we are all different in terms of what weight range we want to be in, and we all have different reasons for doing so, regardless if those reasons are healthy, unhealthy, rational, or irrational.

My goal weight is in the 14 BMI range for various reasons. One, because I’ve never been able to break a BMI of 15, and two, because I think it would look aesthetically pleasing on my frame to be that underweight. I suppose the fact that I don’t think a BMI of 15 is “good enough” (for me) fits in there somewhere, as in, I’m not a “good enough” anorectic until I reach a weight “worthy” of the disorder. But that’s a disordered thought that I’m not proud of. To reiterate something from a previous post, I don’t want to be thin because I think it will make me more attractive. Although I do think the emaciated figure is beautiful, I don’t think other people will see me that way if/when I hit my goal range. I don’t want to be thin because I think I’m fat; I actually  have a very good picture as to what I look like in real life, and I understand that I am not someone who is morbidly obese. I don’t want to be thin so I can fit in cute clothes, because no cute clothes would ever fit someone as short as I am. In order to find clothes that fit someone so short and thin, I would have to get them specially made, or at the least I’d have to go to brand name stores that sell a pair of jeans for $100. Given that those two things will never happen, I will forever be stuck with clothes that don’t fit me. I want to be thin because it’s a competition with myself, to prove to myself that I’m not a failure, and because I would like to see what I look like emaciated.

I don’t think people “larger” than me  are “fat.” I don’t think I am “better” than them. I don’t think I’m “more awesome” at my eating disorder. I don’t think people with binge eating disorder or bulimia or those who suffer from EDNOS, compulsive overeating, or disordered eating are lesser than me. Some of my posts may not reflect this very well, but when it truly comes down to it, I don’t care what you weigh or what you do with food. We all can relate in one way or another. I will say, however, that there are moments where I do feel “better” than non-eating disordered people who eat “normally,” and that goes hand-in-hand with the prideful part of my eating disorder.

In terms of my weight progress, because I’ve screwed up my metabolism so much, I’ve been maintaining my weight despite severely restricting my diet. The episodes where I binge do not help in the matter. Nor does the fact that I don’t exercise, at all. I don’t know if I’ll ever break a BMI of 15, and therefore, I’d say the bulk of my starvation and misery is all in vain. On the contrary, I continue doing the same shit everyday because I’m terrified to gain weight, and I’d rather maintain than go back up to a 16 BMI range. I don’t even like being a high 15, so I only really give myself a three pound range where I feel comfortable. And that’s not a lot of leeway when you can gain three pounds just by drinking a bunch of water or being constipated.

In terms of weighing rituals, I don’t really have any odd ones. I wake up, urinate (and/or have a bowel movement), and weigh. I get sort of paranoid that my scale reading is wrong because I pick up and set down the scale every morning, so I weigh multiple times to make sure. I weigh with nothing but underwear on. I keep my jewelry in, but take my glasses off. I never weigh during the day or at night because I know it won’t be accurate. I used to never weigh the day after bingeing, but now I do to track weight gain (if any).

So what are your rules with weight? Whether you are anorexic, bulimic, or suffer from EDNOS or binge eating disorder, are you trying to lose? Maintain? Gain? Do you have a goal weight or a goal weight range? Why did you pick your certain goal weight? Are you comfortable with a weight range or are you so rigid that only one specific weight number is “safe?” Did your eating disorder and/or disordered eating start off as a diet or was it something completely unrelated? Do you have any weird weighing rituals?

Do You Think You’re Fat?

I’m 12-years-old, sitting in a doctor’s office so the bones in my back can be checked. The school hired some people to check all the students for scoliosis, and although it’s not suspected that I have it, my shoulder blades are not even and one sits slightly higher than the other. I’m worried and scared; I’ve always hated the doctor, and any little thing that happens I feel like it’s the thing that’s going to kill me.

The young woman doctor walks in and introduces herself. My mom is sitting to my left, and the doctor sits to my right. Before she conducts the exam, she starts asking me a list of questions that have nothing to do with my back. They are okay at first, but then they transition into questions about food and weight:

Do you think you are fat?
Do you diet?
Do you eat three, healthy meals a day?
Do you exercise in order to lose weight?
Do you feel like you would be happier if you were thinner?
Do you make yourself throw up after any meals?

I quickly have to think what to say; I never lie, because lying would make my mother mad. But I can’t be honest with this doctor, because if I’m honest about thinking I am fat, that will also make my mother mad. So I tell her no, I don’t think I’m fat, no, I don’t diet, yes, I do eat three healthy meals a day, no, I don’t exercise to lose weight, no, I don’t think I’d be happier if I were thinner, no, I don’t throw up my meals. Butterflies fly around in my stomach, but for different reasons now. I’m afraid my mother will see through the lies, I’m afraid she will notice my hesitation and shifty eyes, I’m afraid she will take me home and yell and scream and force feed me to eat. But I do think I’m fat. I do think I’d be happier if I were thinner. I don’t eat three meals a day because I do want to lose weight. But if I tell the truth, all that will be taken from me, and I don’t want that to be taken from me! The questions continue, and so do the lies.

The good angel on my shoulder says, “Shouldn’t you be honest? You may not have a problem, but maybe this woman can help you like yourself.” The devil disagrees and says, “No, if you tell the truth, your mother will make you eat and you will get fat.”

My mother asks if these questions are always normally asked. The doctor responds with the fact that they are new and that she’s really glad they have started to implement them as they are very much needed in this day and age.

I relax a little when the questions are over. A part of me wishes my mother were not in the room, because I think I really would have been honest had she not been there. A part of me wonders if I would have been diagnosed with one of those eating disorders if I had just told the truth. But the questions are over and I will never know. It’s the first time I ever lied about anything, and I feel guilty. But I also feel elated, like I’ve just protected something — my own little secret that’s mine.

The doctor checks my back. My right shoulder blade is indeed higher than the other, but the doctor says it may be normal as my body is still changing. She wants me to come back for a follow-up in a few months to see if anything has changed. I beg my mom not to make me go back, and she agrees. Her co-dependency is amazing, as my begging worked, and I never see that doctor ever again.

Body Fight

I feel like my body hates me; being the same weight for almost six months makes me feel insane and inferior.

I make new plans everyday, hoping something will satisfy both my hunger cravings and the will to lose weight.

I try to eat 750 calories a day to alleviate the cravings, but weight loss is too slow. I eat 500 calories to speed it up and end up overeating. Thus…a weight of 81, 81, 81.

I make myself feel better and say it’s my metabolism. My body is at a normal plateau. But in reality I think I am just weak.

But then again, I can’t imagine I am eating enough to stay plateaued, even with the overeating. I would think I would at least lose a pound a week.

The 79 pounds was so short-lived, and to jump to 81 the very next day perplexes me and frustrates me. I want so badly to manage the eating disorder, but I am so desperate to lose more weight that I end up sabotaging everything.

Realistically I would probably lose weight in the long run by consistently eating a higher caloric daily intake than what I am doing now, which is heavy restricting and overeating/bingeing. And yet, I can’t seem to let go and eat that much food during the day. It makes me feel too much like a normal person.

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Stuck at 81 lbs.

Yesterday morning I weighed 81.0 pounds and this morning I weighed 81.6. Neither time I weighed myself was it first thing in the morning and neither time was on a completely empty stomach. I’m also still on my period. I’m secretly hoping I’m 80 pounds, but for the most part I’ve been stuck at this dreaded weight since November. I managed to not binge at all the entire week. The urge to do so was horrible this afternoon, but I was too tired to go through with anything more than a handful of almonds.

More good news on the job front. I found out that I’d be getting paid more under this new agency. Granted I still haven’t been formerly offered the position, it still seems like a done deal. All my other  coworkers are freaking out because the agencies taking over their programs apparently pay five dollars less than what we get now. I got pretty lucky with what I’ve been offered and its really taken a weight off my shoulders. I did find out a scary thing though — the woman who would be my new boss doesn’t play around with people in recovery who relapse. She let go of one of her guys for relapsing on drugs. Granted it’s a bit harder to get away with using over not eating — not eating isn’t illegal — but if my current boss says anything (which I think would be illegal?), that would be devastating. She asked me how many meetings I go to a week, and I told her two. That’s technically the truth; I’m just not overly devoted to them at the moment.

The more “good” things happen, the more and more I feel like not eating isn’t that big of an issue. I get butterflies in my stomach thinking about dropping down to 75 pounds. I comfort myself with the thought that no matter how long it takes me, I will “starve” myself down to an elegant, sophisticated creature with sharp edges and flawless features. It’s like I want it more than anything, and ever since I’ve eased up on myself (not weighing religiously, being more flexible with food, not having any target dates to lose weight), it’s like the pressure and hatred is off and I can just casually lose when I lose. If it takes a few months, then so be it. The reason why alarm bells didn’t ring very loudly with my husband is because it took me a year to lose 20 pounds and another eight months to lose  another 12. I don’t lose weight fast and I never have. Does that mean I don’t have an eating disorder? Maybe. I sure don’t feel like I’m qualified enough to have one — I don’t hate every inch of my body, I don’t wish I were someone else, I don’t hate all aspects of my life. Then again — why do I have such a weird perception of what beauty is? What normal, rational human being wants to be grossly underweight? But then you have to ask — what normal, rational human being would want to stretch their ear lobes or tattoo their bodies? Beauty is different for everyone — if someone chooses to have tattoos all over, does that mean they have a mental disorder? No. So why should I say I have an eating disorder if I choose to look thin?

I know I go over and over with this argument. One could argue that tattooing oneself doesn’t necessarily affect other areas of one’s life: relationships, finances, emotional health. In other words, it doesn’t really do any harm. But not eating and the emotional toll that comes with it DOES. Whether physical or emotional, starving oneself affects almost everything, even if it’s in a subtle way.

Anyway — I didn’t bring the scale home this weekend. So I won’t be able to know if I’ve lose any weight until Tuesday. Even then it’s not “true” weight because it won’t be first thing in the morning. I hate that.

Food Plan Day 1 Results

I managed to eat five times throughout the day in order to alleviate any binge cravings. My husband has been upstairs, and so far I haven’t binged (I tend to binge when I can get away with it). My food intake for the day consisted of the following:

Breakfast: 1/2 cup light vanilla yogurt (55) mixed with 1/2 cup Rice Chex (50)
Lunch: 9 fat free tortilla chips (130) with 1/2 can tuna (50), 1 slice reduced fat cheese (60) and 1 Tbs. teriyaki sauce (35)
Dinner: 3/4 cup stir fry (30), 1 small frozen chicken breast (110), 1/2 cup rice-o-roni rice, no butter (95), 1/2 cup peaches (50)
Snacks: 1 cinnamon rice cake (45) and 13 almonds (50)
Total calories:  760

I calculated my BMR (1406 cals) and according to this specific calculator, to lose one pound a week I have to eat 900 calories a day. I figure if I average in the 700s, I should be okay. I would love to lose weight quicker, but if I try to go any less with calories, I’ll just end up bingeing and gaining instead. Hence why I’ve been the same friggin’ weight for like six months (if you’ve followed my Open Diary, you know).

On that note — how do you spell BINGEING? I’ve seen it spelled both ways. I used to not be able to stand it when people spelled it with the e. But now I can’t stand it when people spell it without it. Without the e, I read BINGING (rhymes with RINGING). According to dictionary.com, you can spell it either way.

PS: Reading sites like whyeat.net make me feel like a fat cow. 760 calories on there is like FAIL to the extreme.

Why is Anorexia so Fascinating?

This is something I wrote on an ED forum:

I remember, at six-years-old, watching the HBO special “Lifestories” with my mom. The episode was called, “The Secret Life of Mary Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic.” At the time I had no idea what an eating disorder was, or that throwing up your food was called bulimia. I had no weight issues of my own; even as a child I was underweight and had not yet experienced the hopelessness of insecurity and self-consciousness.

And yet…I remember thinking it was so fascinating. Watching this girl control her weight by starving, bingeing, and purging. Or in my six-year-old vocabulary, not eating, eating a lot, and throwing up.

I didn’t find it fascinating because I felt sorry for her. I found it fascinating because I thought it looked glamorous and romantic. I’m sure I didn’t use those words at six, but I can’t even describe what I thought at the time. My mother was always thin, and I can’t recall her ever really dieting, although I guess to some extent I knew that diet and exercise = not fat.

Anyway, ever since then I had always been attracted to eating disorders, fully aware I was never fat or overweight. I remember opening up an old copy of the journal version of “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul” and seeing that I had written “I sometimes wish I had anorexia” when I was about 11 or 12. I don’t remember writing this. Underneath I wrote, “But I could never become anorexic because I’d be too scared of the health consequences.” But why? Why on earth did I wish to have anorexia? Logically I knew I wasn’t fat, but I sometimes thought I was, but normal people’s first instinct is to diet. Why was mine EATING DISORDER?

Was it for attention? To feel special? Unique? Troubled? I can see how I would do that now as an adult, but at SIX?

I won’t lie. I miss the romantic feelings the onset of my eating disorder gave me. The secrets, the feeling of superiority, the attention. Even when I was bingeing it felt romantic, because that’s what the REAL GIRLS WITH EDs DID in ALL THE LIFETIME MOVIES. Sad, I know. But now? It’s not so fascinating. Now it’s boring. Now it feels like a trap. Now it feels like Hell. Ugh.

Picking my Abstinence

So I’ve been struggling with picking my abstinence. I’ve struggled with this the entire four years I’ve been in the OA program, because I think anyone who knows what I’m talking about understands how different abstinence in a food program differs from an alcohol program like AA.

I find it particularly hard even for an anorexic vs. a compulsive overeater. Compulsive overeaters abstain from compulsive overeating. Anorexics abstain from…dieting? Food restriction? What constitutes food restriction? What constitutes dieting? Are we not allowed to diet if we’ve gained an unhealthy amount of weight? If we get pregnant? What if we lose weight unconsciously? Is eating a salad for a meal breaking abstinence?

Guilt with Food Plan

I feel guilty for being on a food plan. It takes me quite a while  to figure out what I’m eating, measuring it, and entering it into sparkpeople.com. So I feel like I’m back in my anorexia in a way — mostly because I freak out if I go over an allotted amount and I have to have the RIGHT calculations, measurements, and amounts. I also feel guilty for it being a “weight loss” food plan.

But on the flip-side, I’m eating way healthier than I was before. Even when I thought I was following a food plan, I never took the time to read the labels on foods. So before when I would have “two servings” of pasta as my “carbs for the night,” I didn’t realize that 1/3 cup of pasta was like 300 calories (600 total). And that was JUST for the carb portion of my meal!

I also didn’t realize how fattening the microwavable foods were.

I’m getting in about 5 servings of real fruits and veggies a day which I’ve never done in my entire life (except in treatment). I’ve also cut out my soda intake and drink about 3 to 4 cups of the Crystal Light drinks a day.

The only downside is I start to get hungry about two hours after each meal.

I don’t know whether or not my guilt is “justified.” There are tons of people in OA who weigh and measure their food. But I know there are also a lot of anorexics who don’t because it’s triggering. I also have some guilt with the weight loss, but I’m also unhappy with what my body looks like (aren’t we all?).

It’s also making me question my abstinence. I believe I’m still abstinent, although my definition of said abstinence has changed over time. When I first got into recovery, my abstinence was no restricting whatsoever. However, at that time, I needed to gain weight.

It’s now evolved into “no anorexia behaviors,” however, one would count being on a “weight loss” food plan as an “anorexic behavior.” But this is what I classify to be MY anorexic behaviors:

1.) Putting less than was is called for of any serving of food.
2.) Weighing myself more than once a week.
3.) Lying to anyone about my food.
4.) Thinking about food excessively.
5.) Measuring any body parts.
6.) Skipping entire meals.

In all honesty I know I’m riding a pretty slippery slope. I have a caloric range and I always try to get my meals on the lower end of the scale than the higher. I figure as long as I never go under I’m ok.

We’ll see what happens.