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 :)

Mistletoe and whine

Christmas is supposed to be merry and bright, but it can also be hard........really hard when you have an eating disorder, and also when your family is split. But this year has been exceptionally lovely - relaxed and chilled and spent with the entire family - just not at the same time! Despite facing hospital treatment soon into the New Year, I have eaten and managed better for the past week or so than since I can remember. No bingeing, no vomiting, and I have allowed myself to eat some treats, to drink and to be merry without feeling too guilty. The guilt will come next week when I get on the scales and face the damage, but I'm trying to ignore that for now.

I think the key this year has been spending time with my amazing family, not being alone and making sure not to isolate myself. As much as I want to hide away from the world at the moment, I can see that it just makes me more unhappy in the long run. My family are also all an incredibly good lesson in how to be 'normal', how to enjoy life and of how I could be in the future.

One of my biggest fears is that, one day, enough will be enough for them, and they will give up on me. Quite honestly, I am surprised that day hasn't already come. There is, however, a downside to having a supportive family, as strange as that may sound! It means that no matter how tired I am of fighting, I have to bloody carry on......and the eating-disordered side of myself really hates that ;) Slowly I have realised that my illness doesn't just affect me, but everyone around me. Even if I do want to self -destruct, in doing that I would be hurting a great many people, and I refuse to do that any more. Some people say their family will be the death of them. Right now, as corny as it sounds, mine are my salvation.

I've learned that all a person has in life is family and friends. If you lose those, you have nothing, so friends are to be treasured more than anything else in the world.

~ South Park



So much to gain....

Doctors always seem reluctant to discuss a target weight with me, presumably because they think I will freak out at the thought of being healthy, at how much weight I will have to gain. If numbers are mentioned, they say I can consider just getting to a 'safer' body mass index of around 15 for now (anything below 17.5 is classed as anorexic and 'healthy' is around 20-25). That has never actually been acceptable to me - if I am to recover and gain weight, I need to do it properly, and remaining at a low BMI feels like a bit of a cop-out to be honest. It is allowing myself to remain anorexic and unhealthy, albeit healthier than right now.

Yet just to get my body back into the range where my BMI is no longer 'anorexic', I need to gain a good two stone. And to be back at a 'healthy' BMI of 20, it turns out I'll have to pack on three stone. Those numbers truly stagger me and I can't quite make sense of them. How can I actually be so underweight but feel so fat? If I can't look at myself in the mirror now, if the sight of my body at my current weight makes me want to cry, how can I possible tolerate it any bigger?

Strangely enough, the abstract idea of having to gain all that weight in the future doesn't scare me as much as you might expect. But if I were asked to gain a couple of pounds in the next week, my reaction would be one of horror and I would downright refuse. Stepping on the scales and seeing a gain feels to me like a failure, and I want to howl with rage and despair and actually hurt myself for being so fat and disgusting. I claim I want to get better, but I suppose I am still hoping there is a way of doing that without gaining weight!

Right now even drinking a glass of water makes me feel full, which equates to dirty, fat and revolting. I have to shower first thing in the morning before I put anything inside my body and I have perfected the art of doing that and getting dressed without seeing myself naked. My Grandmother thinks I wear baggy clothes to hide how much weight I have lost - really it is because I can't stand to look at myself, and any clothes which fit closely convince me I have gained weight and am fat. If I don't have to see myself properly, I can pretend the fat is not there. Last time I was this weight I had stopped drinking alcohol because of its calorific content, so people around me see the fact that I will now do that as a positive sign and an improvement. The truth is, I only drink because it numbs the voices in my head, because it dulls the pain of how wretched and wrong I feel in this skin.

So I am torn, because I certainly don't want to remain miserable and ill, but if I don't even want to maintain my current weight, let alone gain any, do I really stand any chance of getting better?

'I don't care if it hurts, I want to have control.

I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul.' 

~  Radiohead, Creep

Wasted

I have no words at the moment, so I am going to borrow some from Marya Hornbacher in Wasted, because this sums up how I feel right now.......

'When, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be "well" or "normal", when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.

You have this: You are thin.

Whoop-de-f**king-dee.'

Giving thanks

Blah, blah, whinge, whine, moan, gripe, rant.....anorexia and bulimia have f**ked my life up and the truth is that right now I'm feeling physically and mentally worse than ever before - literally on the edge. BUT, things are not always bad, and I do have a lot to be thankful for.

So, in honour of Thanksgiving in America, a short list of what I am thankful for:

• My family. Words will never be enough to describe just how fortunate I am to be surrounded by amazing people who seem to forgive and accept my faults, love me for myself and stand by me through thick and thin.  

• My wonderful friends, who not only forgive, but also try to understand the reasons behind my bizarre behaviour. One of my best friends recently told me she wants to see 'the old me' back. At the moment, I can't really remember who I was before I got ill, and I am thankful that my friends have stuck around to remind me. 

• The times I have had, especially in the past 18 months or so, which have shown me brief glimpses of a normal life. Going to South Africa last year, family holidays this year, and just spending time with people I love, laughing and being happy - I cling to the memories because I know I can do it again and recover. I want those times back and more.

• That I am still physically healthy. I have been making myself vomit, sometimes several times a day, since I was 14, and I still have strong teeth. There are days when I can't believe I have never had any serious problems, considering what I can put my body through, and all I can say is that I have been very lucky. And I am so thankful for that. Although I never admit it, I am absolutely terrified that my body could give up on me at any time.

• To live in a country where I can access the healthcare I need, when I need it. Actually, to live in an area of the country is more accurate! NHS services for mental health are notoriously patchy and underfunded, yet I have been one of the fortunate few to access great NHS help this year. The unfortunate thing in the equation is that I am too stubborn and scared to accept it.....

• To have a home and a warm place to sleep at night. At any time of year it breaks my heart to see people begging and living on the streets, but it becomes even harder at Christmas, when the emphasis is on families and being happy.

• Pepsi Max, Splenda and sugar free jelly - so sweet and barely any calories!

• My dog. Some would call her an overgrown rat, but I respectfully disagree. And, as Christmas is coming, there will be chance to dress her up like this again:

• Sky Plus TV - I have no idea how I lived without it! Ditto my Blackberry!

• "24" DVD boxsets, as I'm currently binge-watching series 5, loving Jack Bauer and reconsidering my plans to become a primary school teacher in favour of working for CTU.

• Music. I can't imagine a world without it.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

~ William Arthur Ward

What a difference a year makes

Exactly a year ago I was in South Africa, volunteering with children, learning a lot about myself, having fun and generally doing something amazing. I was proud of myself. And more importantly, I felt like my family could finally start to be proud of me too. One year on and I can't even look at myself in the mirror. Not just because I feel fat, because I hate my body, but because I hate myself for what I have become. I owe my parents, the rest of my family, my friends, even myself, so much more than this.

At 27, I am a burden to my parents, a constant source of worry, concern and frustration. When their friends ask after me, I can only imagine how utterly embarassed they must be to admit the truth. 'Stepmom', one of my favourite films, was on TV last night so I sat down to watch it. It always breaks my heart at the end where Susan Sarandon's character has to say goodbye to her children, but yesterday more than usual. My Mum and I do not always have a perfect relationship, but I love her to pieces, would never swap her and can't imagine life without her. However, as a child, you do have to accept that there will come a time when you will have to face the loss of your parents. As unthinkable as it is to me, it is the natural order of things....not the other way around.

But I know that my Mother, and the rest of my family, have had to think about the fact that I might not recover, even that I may die. Knowing that I am putting people through that makes me feel so ashamed, and I often wish that I had a different illness. I feel like this should be something I can stop, that I can manage myself. Everyone must hate me for not doing more than I am doing, for seeming not to fight hard enough. It's not that I want cancer or heart disease, but if  it was anything other than a mental illness, it wouldn't be my fault. And deep down, I feel like the eating disorder is my fault.

I read somewhere that to get better, I need to get angry with the eating disorder, for everything it has made me lose, for every opportunity I have missed, and to use that anger to fight to do the right thing. I think I am getting to that point, slowly but surely, but I am terrified that by the time I get there it will be too late and everyone will have given up on me already. A year ago I had dreams, passion, ambition and hope. Now I feel very much alone, very scared and overwhelmed. Although it is my worst enemy, there are times when anorexia seems like my only friend.......

"One minute I held the key,

Next the walls were closed on me.

And I discovered that my castles stand

Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand."

~ Coldplay, Viva La Vida