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 :)