Enough is enough

When a person has an eating disorder nothing is ever enough. No matter how much weight I have lost, it has never felt like enough. I have always wanted to go one step further, lose just a little bit more, lower my BMI by just another point. The target weights I once set myself got lower and lower, and nothing satisfied me. In fact, the less I weighed, the fatter I felt.

Somehow I have been blessed with the constitution of an ox and my body has not reacted badly to years of starvation, bingeing, vomiting and laxative abuse. My organs did not start to fail, my blood tests usually came back normal, my hair never fell out and my teeth didn't start to rot. Rather than seeing that I have been exceptionally lucky, I use it as evidence to tell myself I am not thin enough, that I didn't take my anorexia far enough and that I am not sick enough to deserve my bed in hospital. When my consultant told me that I was ill enough to be detained under the mental health act if I tried to leave hospital, I still felt too fat to be here.

Finally, for the first time I am starting to see how very lucky I have been, and feel greatful rather than guilty. There are patients here who did not get to as low a weight as I did and who have not had anorexia as long, but they have started to lose their hair, damage their teeth or had organ damage. People blame genetics for a lot of flaws, but seeing what I very easily could have done to myself, I am beginning to feel thankful.

Still, enough is never enough. Now that I am attempting recovery, I feel like my positive efforts are never good enough. I look at patients who were admitted just a few weeks before me, who are already managing to eat meals on the unit unsupervised and go for meals out with staff and family members and I am frustrated that I am so far behind that. After almost three weeks in hospital, I am now just at the point where I will allow myself to add a tiny bit of extra milk to a coffee once a day. My doctor has reassured me that the team is happy with my progress, that I am doing well and that the people who are doing well came in here both physically and mentally in better condition to me, but it is still frustrating as recovery feels so far away.....

As I have said before though, it's all about the babysteps. My meal plan has been increased so that, from tomorrow morning, my breakfast will now include half a slice of toast. There is always jam on the table, which we can choose to use or not. Now I have a sweet tooth and love jam, but to be able to allow myself those extra calories and to put jam onto toast when nobody is making me do it feels wrong. The anorexic side of me says that any extra calories are unnecessary, that I don't deserve them, that I need to do everything I can to resist gaining weight and getting better. Luckily there is another side of me - the real me, who is sick of being miserable, sick of being unwell and sick of having a life ruled by a monkey on her shoulder. And it is that side of me which will be in control at breakfast tomorrow!

beat : Welcome to beat

21st - 27th February is Eating Disorders Awareness week, a subject far too close to my heart.

beat : Welcome to beat

If you, or anyone you know, are suffering from an eating disorder then this is a great website for getting help. From personal experience, I would urge anyone who is struggling to look into it because it is incredibly hard to beat this illness without professional support, and studies show that the sooner this support is in place, the higher a person's chances of recovery.

Remember, what you see on the outside is not a reflection on what is happening internally. People of all shapes and sizes, as well as of any sex, nationality, economic background or race, can suffer from an eating disorder.

It is a long and difficult battle, but I believe that eating disorders can be beaten. Hopefully including my own!

Admissions

A week ago I was admitted to an eating disorders unit. Finally giving in and accepting help is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but the worst thing is that the struggle is by no means over. In fact, it is actually only just beginning.

It is only just starting to hit me just how ill I have become and the extent to which the anorexia has taken over my mind. Physically, I feel ok and am convinced I look normal, if not fat. But had I weighed about 1kg less on admission, my weight would have been around the level where the unit prefer patients to go to a medical ward to be stabilised as they are considered too high a risk. And I cannot fathom how that could be me. I simply do not see or believe it. On Monday I was told that I am so sick that if I refuse to stay at the moment, I can be assessed and sectioned and treated here involuntarily. It must sound like I have well and truly lost my mind to anyone who knows me, but I genuinely do not see myself as the ill person the doctors keep talking about and it is as if they are talking about another person.

My doctors won't be pinned down to dates or target weights, but the general idea is that I will be here for several months. And I am torn between the real me, who wants to get well, to get to a healthy weight and go on and live life, and the anorexic me, the monkey on my shoulder, who believes I am the fattest patient here, that I am not thin or ill enough to deserve my bed. That side of me wants to cling to the eating disorder, to resist gaining weight and to get out of here and lose even more.

Rationally I know how insane that would be. We never know what the future will hold, and there could be no more chances. If I don't embrace this now, I could well and truly ruin my career as a teacher as well as my relationships with my friends and family. They have stood by me and supported me through so much and walking away from treatment would just be a real slap in the face to everyone. Recently I have really started to see just how much my illness upsets those around me and how much pain it causes my parents to see their daughter slowly starving herself to death. And then there is my physical health - until now I have been unbelievably lucky. Somehow I seem to have inherited the constitution of an ox and my blood tests come back relatively normal, which is apparently a miracle considering what I have been doing to my body for the past few years. But even I know that one day those tests may not come back alright and that by then it could be too late to reverse any damage I have done.

So for now, I am taking things day by day, trying to stick with the treatment and just hanging in there because I hope that one day I can look back and see that it will have been worth it. Deep down I do believe and know that I am doing the right thing, but when a force like anorexia which has literally taken over your entire mind keeps telling you otherwise, it is not always easy to fight.....

Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean.

~ Christopher Reeve



So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.....

To my eating disorder,

You have been by my side for thirteen long years, almost half of my life, present at every occasion, at every one of my triumphs and failures. There was a time when I considered you to be one of my greatest successes, but now I see that allowing you to remain part of my life has been my biggest mistake.

You have faithfully followed me through school and university, and all over the world, to America, Mexico, South Africa, Europe. A monkey on my shoulder, a voice in my head, you have never left me in peace. To others you are invisible, but when I look back at old pictures I can see you there behind my fake smile - a reminder of the meals I skipped, the food I purged, the tears I cried because you told me I was fat.

"Just lose another kilogram and then you can stop......", but we both know I will never be good enough for you. I could kill myself trying to lose enough weight, and you still will never be satisfied. You told me being thin would make me happy, but I have never been more miserable. I am at my lowest weight and all I feel is numb and ashamed of how I have messed my life up so spectacularly.

I thought you would give me everything I wanted, yet now I see that you have taken everything I want from me. You nearly cost me my degree, my career as a teacher, my friends, my family, my sanity, my health, almost my life. Because of you I have been reduced to an empty shell and a physical wreck.

There is still a chance for me to regain my life, to repair the damage I have done, and I need to embrace that opportunity. Learning to live without you will be harder than I can imagine, but continuing to allow you to be a part of me will eventually destroy me. Only one of us can make it out of this 'relationship' alive, and I am going to fight to the end to make sure that it is me. And on the days I don't feel like fighting for myself, I will do it because I despise you for the pain, hurt and worry I have caused the people who love me. I deserve better than this, and so do my family and friends.

For so long I wanted to be the best anorexic, but then it hit me that the best anorexics are dead. So instead I want to kick-ass at recovering and be the best at that. It won't be easy, and right now I'm even sure if I can do it. But it's worth a shot.

I can't exactly say it's been nice knowing you, although it certainly has been interesting and I have learnt a lot. Mainly about the calorie content of most foods, but hey-ho! But it is now time for me to say goodbye and for you to leave my life. I sincerely hope we never meet again.

Rebecca

Recipe for success....or failure

People who I have never met have read, followed and commented on my blog, which is scarily bizarre to me (albeit flattering!). In a way, it feels scary, as I just tend to ramble for myself. Does having an audience give me some sort of responsibility to say something profound, or at the very least, sensible?

A few years ago I spent far too much time at university not studying, and instead trawling the internet for tips on how to lose weight, how to perfect my eating disorder, and it got me thinking. What if a teenage girl was trying to lose weight and searching online for 'ana tipz'? What if she stumbled across my blog and used it to help her on her quest for anorexic perfection? What could I tell her to help?

Here is my story - a recipe of anorexia, bulimia and everything in between.......

Start off at age eleven or twelve maybe, feeling fat and unhappy. All you need to do at this stage is start skipping meals, cutting out 'treats'. You'll quickly get bored after a few weeks, but once you turn thirteen you should be getting increasingly unhappy with your body. You'll start exercising to lose weight......but nothing will happen fast enough. By fourteen you feel guilty for every mouthful you eat. Shortly after your birthday you'll go on a family holiday and feel guilty after eating a large meal. What should you do? Simple, go back to the hotel room and make yourself sick. You've read about people doing it and it can't hurt to try. It turns out to be surprisingly easier than you expected, but you're scared of getting caught, so it's just something you do every once in a while after a big meal.

You'll 'experiment' with eating disorders throughout your teens, occasionally going through phases of starving yourself and bingeing and purging. By the time you sit your A-Levels, however, you're comfort eating due to stress and have gained a lot of weight. Passing your exams and doing well will be more important to you, and so you stop vomiting to avoid messing up your future. Make the most of this and be aware that this sensible attitude will not last and that you'll sit some of your university finals on no sleep having sat up most of the night attempting to revise, but bingeing and vomiting in a blind panic.

Get to university and allow yourself a year off from your eating problems. You're a little overweight again and never happy with your body, but it's not ruling your life. But then during the holidays after your first year you manage to lose weight by eating sensibly and joining a gym. It's the first time in your life you've managed to do it properly and you feel amazing. When you get back to university, everyone will compliment you on your figure. This is new to you, and you love the praise. Forget being known for working hard and getting good marks - you want people to be commenting on your body. You try harder to lose weight faster, resulting in not eating during the week and going home at weekends, breaking your diet, vomiting to get rid of the 'bad' food and exercising. Very soon the bulimia you dabbled with during your teens is back and getting out of control.

Go on your year abroad and cope for the first semester. You know you're bulimic, but you're happy and you can hide it. But after Christmas you move to France and you're lonely, miserable and depressed. You decide to focus on losing weight and manage pretty well. When you get home for the summer you've finally managed to get the dial on the scales to read below 9 stone. However, by this time you're seriously bulimic and obsessed with exercising. Your mother works out what's going on, your GP diagnoses you as depressed and you start therapy.

Return to university for your final year and, despite epic bulimia, you manage to make it through and graduate. You're happier about the scales reading close to 8 stone on your graduation day and the 2.1 you achieved is an afterthought. You make it through the next year and your life starts to fall apart after your parents split up. In September 2007, after struggling to cope spending the summer in America, you see a psychiatrist who suggests you go into a private hospital to deal with the bulimia. You don't know what else to do, so you give it a go. And although you learn to eat normally and maintain your weight, you still feel fat. Within a few days of being discharged you start throwing up again.

Almost a year after you were first admitted to hospital, you do something incredibly desperate and stupid and take an overdose because you feel like you can't cope with the bulimia anymore. Being unconscious and in hospital for a few days means that your weight drops below 8 stone, which isn't a bad thing to you. However, you will later identify this as the trigger which led your diagnosed 'anorexic thoughts' to turn into full blown anorexia.

Your weight continues to drop and by November 2008 your psychiatrist tells you that you are anorexic and should consider going to hospital again, just for a few weeks, to regain the weight. You agree, you know you are too thin and you want to get well, but then make your biggest mistake by deciding to put the admission off until after Christmas. By January, the anorexia has taken hold of your body and mind and you just want to carry on losing weight. The admission ends up being just for two weeks and you spend most of it trying to hide food and exercising in secret. When you come out of hospital, you are hell bent on losing weight and do pretty damn well. By this point, you should be spending a couple of days a week starving yourself on 300 calories a day and the rest of the time bingeing, vomiting and taking laxatives. In May 2009 you are re-admitted to hospital weighing 5 and a half stone and you're scared that you're going to die.

You will, at this point, be committed to recovering and getting well. But within a few days you start to feel better, or at least no longer about to collapse. You become convinced you are too fat and are terrified of gaining any more weight. All you can think about is getting out of hospital, so you start drinking water to artificially increase your weight and are able to walk out of hospital after just 6 weeks. Somehow, for the next year, you stay stable.

You do more than just stay stable actually. Life starts to go well and you do incredible things like travelling to South Africa to volunteer in a pre-school. You get your life back on track, move out of home and get a place on a teacher training course. Finally you feel like your family are proud of you, and you actually think you could be proud of yourself. But is sneaks back. Slowly at first, and then it gathers speed. Although you had wanted to celebrate the one year annivesary of your last hospital admission, now you just feel ashamed that you weigh more than you did back then. The number on the scales starts to drop, as the number of laxatives you are downing every day begins to increase. A few weeks earlier, your new GP referred you to local eating disorders services as a 'precaution' and 'to keep you in the system'. Now she is so concerned that she phones them and asks for you to be seen urgently.


When the new psychiatrist meets you and tells you that you need to be admitted to an inpatient unit again, you panic and offer to gain weight to stay out of hospital and keep your place on your PGCE. She points out that you're to sick to be driving to your current primary school placement, and that gaining weight as an outpatient without being closely monitored is too dangerous. Deep down, you know she is right and so you go back into hospital because you feel dreadful. This unit is different from the last place. You can tell the staff know what they're doing and that, should you engage in treatment, you could actually get better. This scares you, so after a fortnight, for reasons you cannot explain to yourself, let alone anyone else, you discharge yourself. Within two weeks your weight is right back down to where it was and you are referred back to the unit.

Again, you insist on putting the admission off until after Christmas. This turns out to be another epic mistake as, by January, there are no free beds and you have to wait. This is partly a huge relief as you're terrified about going back in, but at the same time, things are worse than they've ever been and you're seriously scared. Some days you struggle to get out of bed and by the time you're showered and dressed, you're so tired that you just want to go back to sleep. You once studied French and German Literature, but these days can barely follow an episode of Coronation Street because your head is buzzing with thoughts about food, weight and calories. Despite being physically and mentally exhausted, you can't sleep. But the thing is, you've done this to yourself and there's nobody to blame but you. Perhaps this is karma's way of paying you back for refusing to engage in treatment before. After all, wouldn't the biggest irony be if your body packed in on you once you finally realised enough was enough and it was time to stop and get better?!

What started as an innocent diet as a teenager has turned into a living nightmare. You try to smile and put on a brave front, but some days you are terrified that you are dying. Once upon a time you could run for over an hour on the treadmill, now you barely have enough energy to climb the stairs. Doctors will tell you that you have to go back into hospital, that the decision can be taken out of your hands, that you may die if you don't get treatment. You smile sweetly, tell them things aren't that bad and that you can cope. This is a lie, but part of you believes it, while the other part is terrifed that your eating disorder is going to be taken away from you. By now you have no idea how to be anything but anorexic and bulimic, and as much as you detest it, you have no idea how to exist without it. The doctors start to talk about assessing your capacity to make decisions regarding your treatment and you feel as if they are talking about someone else. Although you recognise that your BMI is a ridiculously low number, you don't look thin, and you feel as fat as you did at your heaviest. The scales will read a number lower than you ever thought possible, and the ironic thing is that you don't even care anymore.

So, for anyone looking for tips and hints - that is how I did it. Others did it better than me, made it to lower weights, and possibly even killed themselves in the process.  Others gave up sooner, recovered and went on to live their lives. When I was a teenager I wanted to be thin and anorexic. Well, I got my wish and lost nearly everything else in doing so. Maybe reading something like this would have helped me achieve my goal, maybe it would have made me think again and I'd have found a more admirable goal than being thin. I can't tell anyone what to do and I know from personal experience that when someone is hell bent on self-destruction, nothing can stop them. But just don't say I didn't warn you.......

Fireworks

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag,
Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?
Do you ever feel, feel so paper-thin
Like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?

Do you ever feel already buried deep?
Six feet under screams, but no one seems to hear a thing
Do you know that there's still a chance for you?
'Cause there's a spark in you

You just gotta ignite the light, and let it shine
Just own the night like the Fourth of July

'Cause baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
As you shoot across the sky-y-y

Baby, you're a firework
Come on, let your colors burst
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
You're gonna leave 'em all in awe, awe, awe

You don't have to feel like a waste of space
You're original, cannot be replaced
If you only knew what the future holds
After a hurricane, comes a rainbow

Maybe the reason why all the doors are closed
So you could open one that leads you to the perfect road
Like a lightning bolt, your heart will glow
And when it's time you know

You just gotta ignite the light, and let it shine
Just own the night like the Fourth of July

'Cause baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
As you shoot across the sky-y-y

Baby, you're a firework
Come on, let your colors burst
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
You're gonna leave 'em all in awe, awe, awe

Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon
It's always been inside of you, you, you
And now it's time to let it through

'Cause baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
As you shoot across the sky-y-y

Baby, you're a firework
Come on, let your colors burst
Make 'em go "ah, ah, ah!"
You're gonna leave 'em all in awe, awe, awe

Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon
Boom, boom, boom
Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon

~ Katy Perry, Firework

I LOVE this song.....it makes me cry but also feel hopeful :)