So there I was, as described in the last post, standing on the scale with my jaw to the floor. I had been starving myself, eating 3 times a week for over 2 years and I lost 10 lbs. TEN POUNDS! I was beyond angry at myself, the world, everyone in my path. Seriously?!?! I wasn’t even eating, how could I have not lost more weight?!?! I remember I weighed in at 150 lbs. I hated everything about that number. I was in shock. What more could I have done? There was a moment when I said “well, I’ll just stop eating at all then”. I don’t know why I didn’t go down that path. To this day, I’m still not sure.
Let’s take a moment to talk about a greater power. Mine is God. Yours could be something or someone else. I don’t care who you believe in or what you believe. What I’m trying to say is that you will NEED something like that in your life. There will come a time (in fact many times) when you will have no choice but to surrender. Surrender everything you have ever known to something higher, greater, stronger than you. Mine is God. Always has been, always will be. I implore you to find something similar in your life because believe me when I say, if you are going through this journey, you are going to need all the help you can get.
To this day, I believe it was God who steered me in a different direction. I so wanted to continue starving myself, but out of desperation I think I Googled something so nonsensical like “losing weight without dieting” or “why can’t I eat the food I want without gaining weight”. And I came upon a site, which was basically telling me that I could eat anything I wanted, at any time, at any place and get to a point where I was no longer fighting food.
I was desperate – what more could I have done? I first signed up for “the course” this website offered in hopes that I could finally lose more weight. Boy, was I in for the shock of my life. Not only was the course NOT about weight loss, it was about something so foreign to me – body love and acceptance? WHAT.DID.YOU.JUST.SAY?!? You mean, I have to love myself? Yeah, no, I hated myself and my body. It wasn’t listening to me and doing what I wanted it to. It was broken. It didn’t know that I needed it to be 140 lbs. It was falling apart because it was wrong and I knew best what was good for it. I was SO WRONG.
This course blew all that away. It was structured in a way where I learned about several new concepts that I had NEVER heard of. Intuitive eating, Emotional eating, Binge Eating, Diet Culture & the media, Weight set-point theory, Anxiety & Control and Discrimination, Fat Bias and so MUCH MORE. I can say that collectively, I had no idea what ANY of these concepts meant. I was a total newbie and if I’m being honest, was blown away. I paid $500 for that course on October 20, 2020. And it changed the entire course of my life. I didn’t say it was good, just that it changed it.
That course made me realize that I had a problem. It was the first time in my life where I realized that how I was eating and how I viewed myself and my body was distorted. It was also the first time a realized I was in trouble. All of the symptoms I had been experiencing for years were catching up to me and I just couldn’t function anymore. My hair was falling out, my skin was dry and clammy. I was cold all the time (slept with flannel PJ’s and a down comforter in the summer months with the windows open). My period was irregular, I was depressed, irritable, exhausted, snapping at my kids and other family members and just desperate for something to change. I just did not want to live this life anymore.
About half way through the self-paced course, I reached out to an eating disorder center where I began my treatment. Now, since we were in the middle of a pandemic, everything was done online. I don’t know how things would have looked had everything been done in person. But I seemed to do ok with zoom calls and such. I has access to my psychiatrist and my dietician who were amazing. There are several places you can reach out for help – just make sure whoever you are working with are qualified to deal with eating disorder recovery AND atypical anorexia. The challenges those recovering in a larger body face can be significantly different that those recovering into a normal sized body. For example, a typical anorexic who was a size 2 may recover into a size 12. Someone with atypical anorexia may start at a size 8 and recover into a plus sized body at a size 18. These 2 women will experience different challenges and your treatment teams NEEDS to know how to navigate those challenges.
Moving forward, I’m going to dedicate entire blog posts to the challenges I experienced as I started recovery. It’s not going to be pretty. I’m really angry at recovery. I’m having a hard time navigating all the crap that has happened because of it. I don’t want to feel this way, but it’s a constant daily battle trying to change my mindset. Off we go my friends……