Sounds like a normal sentence, right? “It’s time to eat”. Those words invoked a sense a fear like I had never experienced before. Eat, what do you mean, eat? By now, I realized that I had been starving myself, BUT, as many of you already know, just because you KNOW you are anorexic and you KNOW you are killing yourself and you KNOW you need to eat – it doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to start eating. The thought of eating anything out of my comfort zone (aka Protein and veggies) was terrifying. The thought of eating everyday was terrifying. The thought of eating 3 times a day was like a death sentence for me. There was NO WAY I could do this. How in the world was I supposed to do this?
Again, I’m going to bring up a higher power here. There was no way I was going to be able to do this on my own. I needed help – and so I thought and prayed and thought and prayed and one day something happened that was just the little nudge that I needed. We were sitting down to dinner (one of the 3 I would eat that week) and my young daughter asked me why I wasn’t eating what the rest of the family was eating. They were having lasagna, garlic bread and caesar salad. On my plate I had caesar salad and chicken breast, so I told her “I am, see, I’m eating the salad”. And she said, “but it’s not the same as mine or Dad’s or my brothers’”. And I quickly told her I didn’t like lasagna and garlic bread. She then said, “your food is always special, it’s always, Mom’s special sugar (Splenda), mom’s special veggies (no starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn that they frequently ate), Mom’s special meat (no sauces, sugar, gravy)” etc…. And I didn’t have an answer for her. I knew that at that moment I was teaching her ALL the wrong things about food. I was literally showing her how NOT to eat properly. She knew I didn’t eat dinner with them most nights of the week, she saw me eating all of my special foods, she saw me chugging coffee, Gatorade and diet coke. She saw it all. And I knew that I was the one who had to end it. My mother saw her mother, I saw my mother, and she was now watching me. My mother never developed an eating disorder, but she has been on the low-carb roller coaster for 50+ years of her life and to this day SWEARS by it; more on her later.
So I decided it was time to eat. I knew that I just couldn’t go “all in” (side bar: this is a term used frequently in the recovery world which means you give yourself permission to eat ALL foods; normally this starts with ALL the foods you have been restricting for however long).
I started with baby steps. I knew that it was going to be a challenge. The first food I ate that wasn’t on any previous meal plan – a cappuccino. Ideally, I should have had it with real sugar instead of my Splenda, but the fact that I was having a ¼ cup of milk was already so distressing, I couldn’t have handled anything else.
So there I was having a cappuccino every morning. It’s of course, not breakfast, but for me, drinking MILK with my coffee (and I even got myself a frother to make it extra fancy) was, well, if I’m being honest, ABSOUTELY DELICIOUS. I don’t think I had ever tasted a cappuccino that good before. I will never forget the taste of it.
I know that everyone who has to start eating does so at a different rate, with different foods and what they are comfortable with. I was going slow, so slow in fact that my therapist called me out and basically told me, “the longer you wait to start eating, the longer this process and your entire recovery is going to take”. So by going slow, I was actually prolonging things AND, if I’m being honest, I was still trying to control. Trying to control everything
So something had to give. Either I continued the SLOW and STEADY process of adding 1 small thing every 3-4 weeks, OR I go all in and jump head first into my biggest fears. I was torn. On one hand, adding small things over a long period of time allowed me to feel in control of my eating, what I gave myself permission to eat, in what quantities, etc. I wasn’t saying “no”, but I was still controlling things, well, so that I didn’t lose control. It sounds so silly, but without control, what was I? What could I control if I could no longer control my food? I had been doing it for so long it was part of my identity.
So with the help of my therapist and dietician, I went ALL IN. But with structured control. We started with breakfast and identified fear foods associated with that meal. For me it included donuts, muffins, pancakes, French toast, orange juice, fruits, flavored yogurt with sugar, coffee with sugar, hash browns, waffles, real maple syrup, you get the idea. And what I had to do was choose ONE of my fear foods and eat it everyday at breakfast. EVERY.SINGLE.DAY I had to both physically AND mentally (this was KEY!) allow myself to eat that food every day for as long as I wanted in whatever quality I wanted.
This was far easier to do with fruit; bananas, apples, raspberries, blueberries, pineapple, than it was with pancakes, waffles, muffins, donuts, etc. WHY? Because in my head although fruits contained carbs which is why I avoided them for so long, society told me that fruits were actually HEALTHY for me. So overcoming that fear of eating fruits was FAR easier than eating the “unhealthy processed carbs”.
I repeated this process for each meal and listed ALL my fear foods. Day by day and week by week I started eating ALL of them. The entire process took around 4 months. If I had forgotten a food or nothing in my house looked good to eat, I would go to the grocery store and walk up and down the center isles (yes, the ones with all the “processed foods”) and would add them to my my shopping cart. Then I would eat the food whenever I wanted and in whatever quantities I wanted. Sometimes I drove back to the store the same day to get more, sometimes I was ok and went back the next week to get more. I listened to every single craving I had for any food. My brain was in charge and was basically telling me – giving me signals – as to the foods that I needed to make peace with.
Do not think for a second that this was easy. This was excruciatingly hard. There were some things that I ate that invoked and almost PRIMAL response in me. It was as if I had never had this food NOR was I ever going to get this food again. It was as if it was my last supper before an execution. I inhaled these foods – it wasn’t like a binge, it was different and it’s hard to explain.
One of my HUGE trigger foods was full-sized chocolate bars. These had been my nemesis since I was a little girl. I was the kid who knew which house gave them out at Halloween and would go home, change my costume, and hit the house up again on Halloween night to get more. My allowance was normally spent on full-sized chocolate bars that I purchased at the local convenience store. When I introduced this fear food, I bought 1 of each type of chocolate bar that I wanted. I think I had 10-12 bars at one point? I’ll never forget that when I took the first bite of the first bar, I proceeded to eat ALL 12 bars in one day, in about an hour. And I freaked out. Called everyone on my ED team and cried into the phone. I told them I had to stop doing this. It wasn’t working. Who eats 12 full-sized chocolate bars in one day!??! How is that better than eating my chicken and veggies?
To my surprise they asked me one question – “Did you eat a nourishing breakfast, lunch and dinner the day you ate 12 chocolate bars?” I had that day – I made sure I ate evert 3-4 hours and had snacks when needed. And they said – NO PROBLEM and advised to continue eating regular meals at regular intervals and eating my fear foods just as I had been.
I’m also going to tell you that the majority of the food I ate in VERY LARGE quantities were the EXACT foods I had been restricting for 5, 10,15,20+ years of my life. That totally explains why I felt the need to eat so many cholate bars when I finally gave myself unconditional permission to eat them. There were a few foods that really challenged me. When I say challenged, I mean that I had no problem physically eating them, but mentally, WHOA….the things I used to say to myself when I ate them clearly showed that I was NOT giving myself unconditional “mental” permission to eat them. Instead, I would physically eat the food but then silently say to myself “Aren’t you over this food yet? Why do you still want it? You’ve been eating this every day for like 3 months? What gives? Why isn’t my body telling me I don’t want it anymore? How many more of these do I have to eat in order to satisfy this craving? When is this going to be over?
The foods that took me the longest to legalize, in no particular order were: Sugar in my daily cappuccino, pop/soda, gummy sour keys, full-sized chocolate bars, jujubes, juice, bananas, white bread, Haagen Dazs ice cream, white rice, honey and chips. So now what? What happened after I did all of this and ate extremely large qualities of food, ALL of my fear foods and ate until I was both physically AND mentally satisfied? I completely lost it and it was the first time (of many) that I was tempted to relapse…..