Living and dying it.
When it comes to talking about eating disorders, people are obsessed with the
all the gory details. They want to find out how skinny, how crazy. The scarier
the better. They want pictures of women with no hair and flesh, who can’t
support their own weight without passing out. They want the details on what it
felt like to get bruises on my butt and along my spine just from sitting in a
chair at school. Descriptions of how often I’d binge and purge, how much I
could eat in a single sitting. How long I used to go totally without food.
I hate that stuff. What no one realizes when they’re looking from the outside in
is that living inside the world of starvation is really just about the most boring
hell you could think of. It’s all-consuming, a means unto its own end, never
satisfied and never letting you take a break. Imagine sitting at a movie, one
you’ve been waiting desperately to see, only to be unable to concentrate on
anything because your mind is running non-stop calculations to figure out
how many calories are likely to be in one piece of popcorn, how far it is to the
bathroom, and whether there’s a strong likelihood of getting caught purging.
Every event is like this, be it taking communion at church (I’d sit there
calculating the calories in a one ounce cup of communion wine and a
cracker the size of a penny while the pastor prayed), to your best friend’s
birthday party, to Thanksgiving Dinner. When you can’t find a way out of
eating or a way to purge, you run the numbers to figure out how many calories
you can burn by fidgeting a lot through the rest of the church service or
walking around constantly at the party.
From the moment you wake up to the time you drift into a fitful sleep all you
can think about, no matter how hard you try, is food. When you finally fall
asleep, you dream about it. It’s like there’s a constant ticker tape running
through your head of calories consumed vs calories burned. You don’t even
have to look them up any more because they are memorized.
It gets really damn boring, really damn fast. And you feel completely,
hopelessly trapped.
So is it hopeless?
Short answer: no. Recovery is an incredibly long, difficult struggle, though.
Early in 2008 I re-entered treatment at a partial hospitalization program
(inpatient without the bed at night) at the Eating Disorder Center of Denver.
I've been in and out of treatment for years now. One of the therapists at EDCD
told me that the average course of recovery takes seven to ten years.
I'd hazard to say that overcoming an eating disorder without substantial
outside help is pretty much impossible. In the hundreds of women and men
I've spoken to, not one has mentioned recovering fully without treatment. For
some, weekly therapy is adequate. For others, intensive hospitalizations may
be required to stabilize physical health as well as mental. Not infrequently
multiple hospitalizations may be necessary.
If you get anything from this information, I hope you walk with these three,
very important facts:
1. Don't. Give. Up.
2. GET HELP.
3. It's only hopeless if we give up our hope.
You have the choice. Refuse to become a statistic.
When it comes to talking about eating disorders, people are obsessed with the
all the gory details. They want to find out how skinny, how crazy. The scarier
the better. They want pictures of women with no hair and flesh, who can’t
support their own weight without passing out. They want the details on what it
felt like to get bruises on my butt and along my spine just from sitting in a
chair at school. Descriptions of how often I’d binge and purge, how much I
could eat in a single sitting. How long I used to go totally without food.
I hate that stuff. What no one realizes when they’re looking from the outside in
is that living inside the world of starvation is really just about the most boring
hell you could think of. It’s all-consuming, a means unto its own end, never
satisfied and never letting you take a break. Imagine sitting at a movie, one
you’ve been waiting desperately to see, only to be unable to concentrate on
anything because your mind is running non-stop calculations to figure out
how many calories are likely to be in one piece of popcorn, how far it is to the
bathroom, and whether there’s a strong likelihood of getting caught purging.
Every event is like this, be it taking communion at church (I’d sit there
calculating the calories in a one ounce cup of communion wine and a
cracker the size of a penny while the pastor prayed), to your best friend’s
birthday party, to Thanksgiving Dinner. When you can’t find a way out of
eating or a way to purge, you run the numbers to figure out how many calories
you can burn by fidgeting a lot through the rest of the church service or
walking around constantly at the party.
From the moment you wake up to the time you drift into a fitful sleep all you
can think about, no matter how hard you try, is food. When you finally fall
asleep, you dream about it. It’s like there’s a constant ticker tape running
through your head of calories consumed vs calories burned. You don’t even
have to look them up any more because they are memorized.
It gets really damn boring, really damn fast. And you feel completely,
hopelessly trapped.
So is it hopeless?
Short answer: no. Recovery is an incredibly long, difficult struggle, though.
Early in 2008 I re-entered treatment at a partial hospitalization program
(inpatient without the bed at night) at the Eating Disorder Center of Denver.
I've been in and out of treatment for years now. One of the therapists at EDCD
told me that the average course of recovery takes seven to ten years.
I'd hazard to say that overcoming an eating disorder without substantial
outside help is pretty much impossible. In the hundreds of women and men
I've spoken to, not one has mentioned recovering fully without treatment. For
some, weekly therapy is adequate. For others, intensive hospitalizations may
be required to stabilize physical health as well as mental. Not infrequently
multiple hospitalizations may be necessary.
If you get anything from this information, I hope you walk with these three,
very important facts:
1. Don't. Give. Up.
2. GET HELP.
3. It's only hopeless if we give up our hope.
You have the choice. Refuse to become a statistic.
What's the big deal?
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