QUESTION: Dear Shannon, I am an ed-expert. I’ve been thru all stages and I’ve tried everything to get worse so far... I’ve learned to hate food at the age of 4 when we were made to sit down and eat. Nothing wrong with that buuuuut (and there’s always a but) I was hyper and a bad eater and just couldn’t eat as much as they had wanted me to.... the years flew by and my body started to change when I was around 12.... uuuuuuuugh... hated it hated it hated it... I loved my freedom and life and I was the happiest kid around.... buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut oh did I hate my body changing. So I started to try everything to stay ´neutral´ ... now here I am... 28 and still in the body of a 13 year old! I love it.... I really do... I enjoy being skinny and all the stuff that comes with it but believe me or not... I hate the attention! I hate to see my mother worry and I hate her friends being mad at me for doing this to her and to them and to myself. They want me healthy and I want to get sicker! It’s sooo stupid really! I know myself very very well! And no I’m not stupid! I know I’m quite smart but I also know that I don’t use my brains when it comes to this kinda stuff! I’m a thinker ... not a feeler! Does that make sense? And at the same time... I long to finally feel ... even though I’m scared of it! I want to feel my mother’s pain so I can finally start to take care of myself! So I can start to take responsibility when it comes to keep myself healthy and alive. I work ... I work hard and I love my job and I just love life.... but what is it that keeps me from erasing the dark part of my personality? I’d like to know how you recovered and how you could unmake yourself a pro ... it’s like I’m torn... part of me wants to get better... part of me wants to get worse ... I want to be able to make a decision and I want to feel good about it no matter what it’s gonna be.... arrrgh.

ANSWER: Hi – thank you for writing. You ask what seems to be an almost universal ‘crossroads question’ that we all have to get to at some point in our lives. ‘What is holding me back from being all that I know I can be?’

The answer, fortunately and unfortunately, is always ‘me’. Things happen to us when we are growing up. Parents love us imperfectly. Peers love us imperfectly. We love us imperfectly. And how we deal with the imperfections that life hands us shows in our health, our relationships, our careers, and our quality of life. Sometimes we develop inadequate coping mechanisms before we are biologically able to think our decisions all the way through to their logical conclusion – like when you felt uncomfortable with your growing and changing body at age 12, and your growing and developing mind created a simple ‘solution’ to the complex ‘problem’ of the inevitability of growing older.

This is why, while eating disorders affect the very young and very old as well, the largest at-risk population is still young teenagers. The body and the mind are both developing, but at different paces. In the population affected by eating disorders, genetics often kicks in almost unconsciously to ‘help’ us handle stressful life situations, and suggests restricting calories or attempting the impossible – a return to childhood. Many victims of eating disorders do not understand why they want the impossible dream – and that is because it is literally programmed into their DNA to turn to manipulation of food intake to survive. Endocrine system imbalances, particularly serotonin, dopamine and GABA, have also been implicated in the development of eating disorders.

I am taking a leap from your comment that you are an ‘ed-expert’, and assuming from that comment that you have already been through a thorough medical evaluation, including endocrine system level tests. If you have not, this would be your first step to identify any critical medical needs you may have. The more malnourished you are, the less clearly you are able to think, reason and make wise choices that reflect a desire for recovery. Your brain literally cannot support you if your body is busy eating itself alive just to stay alive. You cannot expect much, if anything, out of yourself right now in terms of a sincere desire o reffort to recover while you are severely undernourished. That must be your first goal – to stabilize your physical health and meet your basic nutritional needs as determined by qualified medical professionals. AFTER you have done that you will be better equipped to look at the underlying mental drivers for the continual of your eating disordered behaviors.

So then the next step is to figure out why you are still hanging on to life. Despite your words, your actions tell both of us that you are in a slow suicide attempt….which is truly the coward’s, not the thinker’s, way out. If you really wanted to die you would have done it already. You say you know yourself well – and yet through my own recovery years I have learned to question how well anyone can really know themselves if they steadfastly stay in their head and out of their heart. You say you ‘love life’, but the simple truth is that it is impossible to love anything if we do not first love ourselves. And love is a combination of personal choice and responsibility. What we love we care for - EVEN when we don’t want to. What we love we take care of, even when that care comes at the sacrifice of another cherished desire (like self-starvation or maturation inhibition). What we love we make our first priority in life, and our actions always speak louder than our words in highlighting where our priorities truly lie.

Furthermore, it is literally impossible to love an experience we cannot feel. If you are so afraid of feeling that you would rather starve yourself to death than attempt it, you cannot possibly love life. You (I am guessing) are instead so violently afraid of it – all of it – all of the unknowns of it and all of the unknowns of ‘you’ – that you have ‘checked out’ and painted a rather serene and idyllic picture of your ideal life in your head, and then went about convincing yourself that your eating disorder and this fantasy life can live peacefully and amicably side by side. In other words, you have at least done enough work to imagine the life you WISH to love, but you are not really living in it yet. REAL life is full of ups and downs, of hard choices, of courageous heroism, of having to stare yourself down until you do the right thing….real life is full of compromise, held breaths, leaps of faith and COMMITMENT. Real life – the kind of life worth living and loving – is impossible to experience while sitting on the fence.

One thing that was helpful for me during my own recovery was to realize that my biggest task was to turn my rebelling mind from my enemy into my ally. I had to get all of me on the same page before I could have any hope of healing from my eating disorder. I worked and worked and worked with my mind, literally ‘feeding’ it the kind of suggestions, ideas and thoughts that would make the rebellious part want to do the right thing by eating and taking care of my body. I read books about the value of food and the discipline of eating. I created a ‘90/10 Rule’ for myself – where 90% of the food I would choose each day was for healthy reasons of nutritional balance, and 10% of the food I would choose was for ‘fun’ – learning to enjoy the variety of food and take the sting of fear out of my ‘trigger foods’. I worked VERY hard to re-feed myself. I worked VERY hard to recruit my mind over to the side of life and health. I worked VERY hard to identify what in my life was worth fighting and living for – in my case it was music initially because I had lost my ability to perform due to the anorexia and bulimia – and then I pursued healing with the single-mindedness of an avenging angel. I didn’t care if it felt like an un-winnable fight. I didn’t care if no one but me was even aware that I was in a battle for my life. I didn’t care if I didn’t have anyone in my life who could walk me through the recovery process. I just decided one day that I’d rather go down fighting and know I gave it my best shot than die never knowing if there could have been more to my life than my eating disorder.

Go rent ‘A Beautiful Mind’ starring Russell Crowe and watch him teach himself to overcome his mental illness (and that’s what an eating disorder is – MENTAL illness). His story is my story. I have compassion for you – for where you are at – for the crossroads that has presented itself to you regardless of how well you convinced yourself that this day would never come. But if you want life and all it has to offer you have to FIGHT for it. You have to make yourself get off the fence, pick a side, and fight. We can only ride on our eating disorder’s coattails for so long before we get to the end of the road. The work of recovery is very difficult. It is ongoing. It is a life’s work. But if you choose recovery, and you commit to it and you do it and you survive your eating disorder, you will know that you can do ANYTHING you put your mind to. And, even more importantly, for once in your life you will have EARNED your own respect.

My blessings go out to you – I know that you did not write to me for sugar-coated sentiments. So instead I am giving you the facts as I know them to be, as best I can given the very little I know of you from your letter. And I truly hope that my thoughts and insights are of some value and support to you in making your decision.

Warmly,

Shannon

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