I was an anorexic boy. This is my story.
2005 - 2008
2005 - 2008
2005 - Introduction
Between 1999 and 2005, I gained weight and maintained it unsteadily.
Despite my skewed body image, I can tell myself that I’m thin and enforce an eating regime (one that never permitted sweets or snacks for many years).
Almost inevitably, I would correct any weight gain by restricting the odd meal or working off calories. The disorder finds strength in moments of stress, which were abundant as I faced the gauntlet of exams used to convert us into adults. I would often revise whilst pacing a circuit around the room.
Soon after ending out-patient care, I convinced myself that it was a momentary illness. I neglected my emotional development, believing I could find self-worth as the straight-A student.
It’ll come as no surprise that this approach was doomed. You can’t smother mental health issues with cultural symbols of achievement - grades, clothes, cars, etc.
The causes of my eating disorder continued to fester beneath my alien skin.
The following posts for 2005 were written as a stream of consciousness in a single sitting. A tortured scream tearing through the silence that had perverted my recovery into an attack against myself.
The words I use are tainted by depression and the effects of bottling up my emotions. They should not be read as a truth of what an eating disorder means about someone.
The entry I wrote in 2005 reveals how a correct BMI score doesn’t mark the end of recovery.
Me aged 13 (1999)
I was making good headway with recovery at this point.
2005 - Part One
27th August 2005
Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote down my feelings, especially regarding the issue of anorexia. I suppose I have been hiding, avoiding, denying (whichever you wish to choose) the illness that stole a year of my life.
Actually, the word ‘stole’ is used wrongly because I hold myself to blame for what happened, so I should have said the year that I wasted.
Why now, after over five years, make an entry in this diary? Because I’m quite drunk after going to town? Probably.
It seems that lately I have been near to admitting my past to my new friends, despite fearing their reaction. It’s strange how I was always determined to hide it from those who witnessed my behaviour. I suppose it’s funny seeing as they in all likelihood knew full well that I was starving myself.
It was probably because I did not want to admit to myself that I was so stupid and weak that I would submit to fear and self-loathing in such an extreme way.
So why do I feel the urge to reveal all now? I mean why am I writing an entry regarding something that happened five years ago? Maybe I want to move on.
I have never had a relationship with anyone. Could it be because I knew that if I got close to anyone then I would eventually have to tell all? Possibly. Or maybe I’m just a pussy who uses his past in order to feel sorry for himself, and as a guard against taking a chance and getting close to someone.
I have no confidence.
Truth is, I have tried to separate my past from who I am now, but if you do not work with the foundations the entire structure will be faulty and fall down.
But when?
2005 - Part Two
27th August 2005 (continued)
After the last entry in this journal or diary I lost weight again. I hit the bottom from where the doctor said I could not come back. I avoided hospital. Call me lucky, call me jammy, but I did not get a tube stuffed up my nostrils.
Luck? What I was was stupid, there is no other way of saying it. Maybe I avoided hospital but I still hit the place where I should never have been.
I live in fear. Not of becoming anorexic again - I’ve learnt my lesson the hard way – but that I have caused myself damage. The question is, is it psychological or physical, or both?
I regained my weight, steadily. I was able to go on holiday and start doing more things without my parents distrusting me. I have eaten ever since and not put on weight.
I suppose my puerile diagram of eating equals weight gain to the extent that I have three tyres is false. I have also tried to eat healthily - maybe because I am still afraid of food with high fat content?
Fact is I am still conscious of my weight, but not in the extreme way. Does this mean that I am normal?
Yet the psychological question still remains. I have noticed that I have never mentioned whether I was hungry or any physical symptoms [in previous entries]. The focus was not aimed at any of the observable symptoms, but rather my feelings.
Feelings still remain with me after five years of having a relatively ‘normal’ life. These are guilt, anger, self-loathing, and depression.
I treated my parents like they were trying to destroy my life. They were the ones who stood in the way of my life goal – starvation. Especially my mother.
I realise after reading my entries whilst I was anorexic that I talked about me. That I was afraid. That I was lonely. The only time I mentioned my parents was to say that they knew I was lying to them and I might not be able to do it again!
The truth is that as I was leaping towards suicide they were holding my legs, trying to stop me. But I was just dragging them to an early grave as well.
2005 - Part Three
27th August 2005 (continued)
I suppose the only way to explain it is to recite to you my behaviour, which was around meal times strangely enough.
On one occasion I tried to stop my mum from making tea by saying that she was a shit cook and that no one liked her meals. Why did I say this? Because she had used olive oil as a dressing on a salad which I love and is one of my favourite meals.
Another time I threw my meal into the back of the oven so that it would be too dirty to eat. And that was a quorn meal which had been specially bought for me and even when I did [eat it] I scrapped off all the coating.
The worst time was when I tried to go out on my bike when tea was served. I threw myself onto the floor and began screaming and kicking everything around me… including my mum. Like an infant who doesn’t get what he wants. I had regressed by about ten years.
The chairs in the kitchen were nearly knocked over and which would have come toppling down on me. Probably if it had, I would have been in the hospital for broken bones due to the state of my body at that point in time.
From the kitchen, I kicked my way into the hall by the front door by which time my mum was drowning in her tears. At that point my dad came home from work and found my mum emotionally drained and a skeleton lining his hallway.
I believe that I have dragged my parents closer to the grave and, even though it has been five years without a relapse, I cannot pull them away.
How did I lie to them? I say lie, but how can you lie about eating when each day a new bone becomes visible beneath your skin?
Once, when I was shouting at my dad he said that he thought my skin was going to snap because it was pulled so tight. Like a spring, it will return to its original position unless it goes past its limit. Have I pulled things too far? My relationships, my skin, my life?
2005 - Part Four
27th August 2005 (continued)
Well one of my methods [of lying] was to say that I was going to eat at another person’s house. Yet this one slipped away.
Originally, I chose someone who was not a good friend. This way there was no existing parental relationship to check out the veracity of my claims.
But I pushed this too far and my parents eventually took their number from the phone book. Obviously, I had never been at their house for a meal and spent the entire time cycling around town, despite being physically drained.
So what happened with meals at home? For reasons that are blatantly obvious, this situation was more difficult. Breakfasts began with getting up ridiculously early to put a small amount of milk in a bowl and then sprinkle flakes of cereal over it.
This worked for a while, but my dad began waking up earlier or just after me. At this point, I filled my bowl and took it into the lounge to stuff the contents into a tissue.
Then came supervised meals. Here, I put the food in my mouth and spat it out later or shoved it into a tissue when nobody was looking.
All this effort just to look thin… or kill myself.
What about those tissues? I either threw them away at school the next day, or I put them in my waste bag. This was where I hid my food that I was able to sneak away. This bag of rotting food was hidden in the garage, containing breakfasts, lunches, and teas over about two months.
I tried to get rid of it. I was found out. I suppose it was the fact that a bag that was meant to contain swimming trunks and a towel weighed like a school bag full of books.
2005 - Part Five
27th August 2005 (continued)
I think the most elaborate system was designed for lunches.
After being dropped off at school, I would dump my sandwiches in a bin as I walked past it without stopping. Then I would go outside and pour my drink away in the brushes, making it look like I was having a piss.
Afterwards, I would put the fruit and snacks in the bottom of my bag and throw it around, discreetly, until they had been squashed. Thereby giving me a legitimate excuse to throw them away.
However, this came close to falling apart when my brother’s friends informed him that I had been spotted. But I managed to fend him off from inspecting my bag for my lunch, which was now at the bottom of the bin.
My brother had caught me once though, before the lunch disposal. He found me once scrapping the margarine off the sandwiches made by my Mum.
This had been possible by a manipulation of routine. I had observed that my mum took a shower in the evening, which allowed me to tamper with my lunch without her noticing. Fair to say that after that incident, she took a shower while I was at school.
Afterwards, I began throwing the whole lunch away. Was it cause and effect, or merely the mounting obsessions – the progression of the illness into starvation? I believe it to be the former.
2005 - Part Six
27th August 2005 (continued)
So what happened after that entry on 6th May [1999]? I suppose I could say that I got better, in that I began to put on weight.
Was I cured? I think in the sense that I will not starve myself anymore, then yes I was.
But problems still linger and haunt me, which is probably one of the reasons why I feel somewhat motivated to admit it to my new friends.
I have run away scared of the past and ashamed of my weakness. Even Sarah, being the main source of help due to a shared experience, coughed in the dust I left as I sped away from my past. I cut her off.
She was the one who helped me, but she was also the one who knew it for sure, being the only one that I ever admitted it to.
Everyone else got an explanation that I was suffering from a failure in my digestive system. An implausible explanation that was almost certainly disbelieved but, nevertheless, I did not have to admit it.
So she was a dangerous figure standing in the way of the grave that I wanted to fill and walk away from. I ignored her.
What better way to resolve the problem than to throw the dirt on top of her and bury her along with my troubles? I had used her and run away, too ashamed to face up to my self-destructive actions and thank her.
2005 - Final Part
27th August 2005 (continued)
There is a phrase that Sarah referred to in her letters: what evidence have you got to prove that?
I stole a year from my life and destroyed my parents, a girl who accepted my problems on top of her own continuing battle, and jeopardised my brother’s GCSEs by causing him pain and distractions.
Where is my proof? I do not have any.
I remain too ashamed to discuss the issue with my family because I do not wish to get my hands dirty digging up the past.
Yet the truth is that proof is subjective and I still have unresolved feelings regarding anorexia. The proof that I need is the way that I feel. I hate who I was and who I am now. I am the proof that I crushed my family and threw her help back in her face.
My brother has told me that everyone was proud of how I overcame anorexia. Truth is that I am not over it. It still haunts me. It grabs me and plunges me into a pit of self-loathing and depression. A pit in which I have been setting up home in recently and taking it out on my family… again.
How can you be proud of someone who pulls you down into that pit incessantly?
Maybe this is why I am reluctant to start a relationship with someone because I do not wish to destroy another person.
I remain a perfectionist. I aim too high in my expectations, so I would end up trying to model someone in a way that would suit me, or rather in the image expected by others. Thereby destroying them.
The following posts are an abridged version of an article I wrote for Impact, the student magazine of The University of Nottingham, in April 2008.
2008 - Interactive Denial (1)
Human experience is no longer entirely rooted in reality. With our lives becoming increasingly divested of physical boundaries, we see a constant growth of floating cyber communities, where common issues and interests unite distant persons.
Whilst providing a vent for varied opinions, these forums threaten to stimulate and encourage harmful views. The feasibility of challenging their mandate is limited. You have to join or associate yourself with a group you vehemently disagree with, in order to gain access to the discussion boards.
Equally, if you do join the forums to challenge these views, you increase the number of members or likes. This count appears to represent a unanimous position and legitimates their viewpoint - how could so many of us be wrong?
Being both self-contained and unitary, this format flies in the face of a claim to free expression, as debate is rendered illusory. The lack of impetus to justify the claims made in these forums spawns a ‘create your own ethics’ phenomenon, as seen in pro-ana and pro-mia sites.
Supporters of these sites claim to provide a non-judgemental environment for people with eating disorders to express their anxieties. However, they undermine this rationale by romanticising the damaging consequences of starvation, as epitomised in the slogan:
‘An eating disorder is a lifestyle, not a disease.’
“They extol it as a lifestyle, as a choice and because of that … they find somebody who really seems to understand what it’s like.”
2008 - Interactive Denial (2)
A lifestyle not a disease? By its very nature, an eating disorder is a set of behaviours and beliefs which lend guidance to people’s lives.
But, when considered in light of the catastrophic effects to health, relationships and quality of life, the phrase becomes disconcertingly flippant. After all, the word ‘disease’ carries the value judgement.
By denying this ‘lifestyle’ of its real, and sometimes irreparable consequences, pro-ana and mia sites feed into distorted psyches.
They pass off an unrepentant illness as an autonomous choice. As one user claimed, “anorexia is for skinny chicks, if I was skinny then I wouldn’t have this problem.”
They are viciously circular. Eating disorders stem from being ill at ease in one’s own skin, due to a perceived misalignment with the socially desirable ideal.
To add credence to that misconstrued ideal, whether explicit or implicit, perpetuates the downward spiral of destructive obsessions and compulsions.
The seemingly inextricable link between eating and weight gain is fortified when discussion boards are monopolised by an all or nothing logic of thin = perfect.
In the bosom of your brethren, you can kid yourself that there is no problem - it appears to be exactly what you want it to be, a lifestyle and nothing more.
“[The thinspo blog] documents addictive and compulsive behaviour, yet masks this behaviour in the rhetoric of self-control and willpower”
— The Hunger Blogs: A secret world of teenage thinspiration by Carolyn Gregoire
2008 - Interactive Denial (3)
Many people believe eating disorders to be an acceptable form of self-determination. This line of reasoning claims that if there’s a significant clergy supporting these traits, it’s no longer an illness.
That’s simply denial masquerading as a justification.
People with disturbed thought patterns often seek to normalise them, in order to stifle the distress of conflicting social demands. Indeed escapism is a natural reaction for many disaffected people, as relief flows from compulsions that distract from internal conflicts.
Yet there is no relief. A competitive atmosphere brews when pro-ana and mia sites are moulded by those who advocate an unhealthy definition of the perfect body.
The phrase ‘thinspiration’ describes how members encourage each other’s afflictions with images of gaunt models for aspiration, and of obese people to induce a gag effect.
Obsessions with weight loss are bolstered once they become ingrained with a sense of achievement - the progressive assimilation into this ‘ideal’. Take, for instance, users who trade two hours of fasting for every like that a post receives, or the thigh-gap challenge.
It is difficult to disassociate yourself from the crippling loop of self-destruction when your obsessions are mirrored and validated within these networks. Strength in numbers reinforces the disorder, denying it of the detrimental aspects and legitimising it as a ‘lifestyle choice.’
“First, they bestow moral permission. Then, they teach the self-destructive person how to do it. Finally, they keep the suicidal person company until the deed is done.”
2008 - Interactive Denial (4)
By feeding into destructive and distorted views, pro-ana and pro-mia sites can systematically destabilise a person’s resistance to embedded thought processes.
This space has been created where society offers little support or understanding for people who are isolated by their bodies. A failing that has abandoned teenagers (and older) to chat rooms that goad the depression, compulsions, or obsessions to take control.
With little element of contradiction, a precarious situation builds in groups or feeds made up of people with concurring disillusions. Restricting, purging, self-harm, and suicide; the subject and ultimate end of these networks.
Many people with eating disorders use internet communities to allay their sense of claustrophobia in society. Those people seeking salvation in others - who seem to understand just how you feel - find only a poisoned challis. The voice of your tormenter, once content to rumble beneath your skin, is amplified through a hive mind heavy with abject despair.
We can see the problem by looking to suicide pacts, underneath which lies the syndrome folie à deux - a shared psychosis. This happens when kindred spirits recognise in each other a disassociation with the world and sink faster.
No benefit can come from unquestioned acceptance, only encouragement.
'Every one of us, every person here, every human life presents a negotiation between public and private identity… Anonymity allows you access to civic space, to a form of participation in public life, to an egalitarian invisibility…
“If I had remained invisible, the truth would have remained hidden and I couldn’t allow that.”… [K]nowledge has an actual materiality, not unlike the materiality of a ladder, that could be used to gain access to places and worlds that are previously unimaginable…
Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head – that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable…
Invisibility is indivisible from visibility… If I can be that person [visible] for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value.’