Letter to Young Dieters and Women With Eating DIsorders
This was originally written after a couple of letters written to a young woman on the verge of anorexia helped her, according to her and her family, and that is the only reason I put such writing online. It's not advice that is necessarily applicable to everyone though it sounds a bit authoritative. This is really meant for girls and women who are on the verge of an eating disorder, or have recently developed one, or are dieting severely - which is why its sounds authoritative. Sorry I should have added this paragraph about three years ago.
By Jen, 1999
I want to tell you some things that I wish someone had told me when I was first dieting as an adolescent, or on the brink of anorexia, or in anorexia as a teenager. If any of this might pertain to you, or even if you only have a slight suspicion it will, please read it.
Anorexia from the inside-out is not attractive. It is a very ugly place to go. It is a very cold, empty, confining, and lonely prison. You feel that there is a civil war going on in your head, and every day it is a battle between the physical desire to eat and the knowledge that this is what you need to do, against the voice that tells you how unworthy you are, how horrible you are, how disgusting, how stupid, how much of a failure, how unlikable, how ugly, how self-centered and self-righteous, and how fat you are. When you are caught up in an eating disorder, the voice is usually winning.
All of your failures and faults (real and imagined), melt into this one convenient substance called FAT. Fat represents everything that you hate about yourself, and everything that bothers you, and maybe even every negative emotion you ever have. It is all dealt with the same way; your objective is to get rid of the fat. You think, somehow, that this is what will make everything OK. Get rid of the fat and you will be happy, you will be able to live with yourself, to like yourself, you will be successful at something, you will have done one thing right amidst all the other things you do wrong. In other words, losing weight becomes your coping mechanism for life.
If depression is the precursor to your eating disorder, you will think that losing weight makes you feel better, and the starvation highs you eventually get will only reinforce that idea. You might even think starvation is saving your life, and that if you give it up, you will not be able to live with yourself . The one thing that I can say about anyone with anorexia or bulimia is that she does not like herself. She might be obsessed with herself, and seem totally self-centered, but deep down she usually hates herself. You really have to hate yourself to do these things to your body.
There will be individual problems that explain why you feel this way about yourself. There may be a history of abuse, or neglect, or there may not be. There may be screwed up family "boundaries" and parents who are either not there or over-involved, or it may have little to do with your parents. You may or may not have parents who care that you are anorexic and want to help. Books often describe what an eating disorder does to the family, but these descriptions deny the fact that some people have families who do not really notice, or only notice once it is too late. Yes, it will affect your family, but, let's not forget that your family affects you too. The person with an eating disorder is often the "symptom-bearer" of family problems that other family members deal with in less obvious ways.
When you are in the middle of anorexia or bulimia, none of these things will matter much. It will not matter how or why you got there, and there will not be much hope in your mind of ever getting out. You will have tunnel vision, and nothing will matter to you as much as losing weight, counting your calories, keeping track of fat grams and your particular system of eating, exercising, or bingeing and purging. Nothing will matter except paying for your sin of existence, and your life will consist of endless efforts to appease that all-powerful one who rules the show, Holy Anorexia (or Bulimia). You will be in your own little world, a very small world in more ways than one.
What an eating disorder does to your body is miniscule in comparison to what it does to your mind and soul. You lose a lot more than fat cells. I don't think people realize that before they are well into an eating disorder. Being too thin and ruining your health are parts of it. The other part is that you completely lose control over your life, have no identity anymore, and are lost and alone, without any idea what to do about it other than to lose more weight.
You will miss out on a lot of things. You may, for instance, drop out of school, lose all of your friends, become completely isolated, and alienate everyone around you. You will feel that your are alienated, and that you are trapped in a cage and cannot get out. You will perceive a glass wall between yourself and the rest of the population, and even when you are physically better, that may never go away. A lot of your life will take place inside your head with no one else around.
You will probably want to die at some point. You may begin your eating disorder thinking that it is keeping you happy and saving you from killing yourself, if you have been depressed. Or you may consciously think that you are going to starve yourself to death. Or you may just eventually get so beaten down and tired of living in this lonely prison, this daily hell, that you decide that you want to end it all.
You may perceive, eventually, the facts of the situation. There are only two options: life or death. You cannot really live with anorexia or bulimia and have any kind of life. So if you do not want to die, you may decide to fight it. And there will be a lot of work ahead for you. Alice Walker said in, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, that what she learned from some bad experiences at Sarah Lawrence College was "how to survive with my soul intact and not lay down and die." That is one of my all-time favorite quotes. It encapsulates exactly what you must fight to do when you are trying to overcome an eating disorder or to avoid developing one.
You must remember that there are millions of bodies in all shapes and sizes in this world, millions of people with horrible life problems to deal with, but we all have different, and very unique souls. There is only one you. If you sell your soul to the devil of weight obsession and give up your personality, your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams and hopes, your health, and your entire life, you are definitely not profiting in that equation. Your are losing something more valuable than any kind of beauty or any kind of avoidance mechanism that helps you escape pain and problems and the aftereffects of abuse. Once you lose yourself, you will no longer have your own beauty, and you will not heal from your pain or abuse issues. You will only create for yourself a prison of solitary confinement that will bring your more and more pain the longer you are in it.
And the more weight you lose, the more it eats away at your soul, your spirit, who you are. Once you have lost who you are to the T Factor Fat Gram Counter, or gym equipment, or your running shoes, or Dexatrim, or laxatives, eventually, you know what you have lost. And you will mourn that loss for the rest of your life if the loss becomes significant. Trust me, if you get an eating disorder the loss will become significant.
When you get better and gain weight, what you will never gain back is the months, years, or decades you lost to the obsession that ruled your life. You will never again be a teenager or a young adult experiencing those milestones that were supposed to have been celebrated. You will not get another chance to do all those things that you wanted to do but didn't because your eating disorder took over.
And this is very important and not often mentioned in writing about eating disorders, but you need to know it: you will also not regain the health that you once had. You may, literally, pay for your eating disorder for the rest of your life in the form of physical agony and illness and possibly even disability. You may literally become too sick to ever work or attend school again. On a lesser note, but one many of you might think is significant, you are likely to lose your ability to have a child, if your menstruation stopped during your eating disorder for any length of time.
So you see, even after you fight the gut-wrenching, terrifying, overwhelming, and very lonely task of recovering from your eating disorder, you still never get to really recover from it. It leaves permanent damage. And one day, when you are older and wiser and maybe a bit more confident, you will realize that having been ten or twenty or forty pounds lighter was not worth this loss of self and health which you will have with you for the rest of your life, no matter how much you weigh.
You will regret having embarked on this journey into the hell of self-imposed torture. But this is not to say it was your fault that you got an eating disorder, or that you cannot get better. It is, however, not uncommon for girls and women to think they are choosing to become anorexic or bulimic. At first it seems like a choice. Later on, when it controls you, you have a much lesser ability to choose to end it. To that end, it is vitally important that you realize where you are headed when you embark on an eating disorder and stop as soon as possible. The sooner you start to recover, the better your chances are of getting over it.
So whether or not you're a person who has had an eating disorder for years, or you are someone who does not think she has anorexia but knows that she feels she is obese even though she is not, or someone who makes herself throw up and binges but does not think she is bulimic, or even someone who (like I once did) thinks that she is choosing to become anorexic or bulimic as a way to cope with problems and deal with her self-hatred, my message to you is that you need to stop and force yourself to consider a future where you are older than you now are and still alive. In the mode you are now in, how do you think you will end up?
I promise you that if you think you will reach your perfect weight and stop and stay, magically, at that weight and be happy, you are in denial and kidding yourself. It does not work that way. And if you think that eating disorders are minor problems, you are also mistaken. They can, and will, destroy your entire life. Ask yourself, for a moment, is it worth it? Is your soul, your mind, your health, your dreams, your life worth fighting for? Do you not think you are strong enough to fight for it? Please believe me, as a therapist once said to me, you have to be strong to be able to starve yourself. You are strong enough to get better.
You deserve to get better. You deserve to be happy, and happiness does not mean being thin. Happiness means being free to live your life. You deserve that opportunity. You deserve pleasure. You might hate yourself, but somewhere inside you is a person who wants to live, because if that was not true you most likely would have killed yourself by now. Eating disorders are more often coping mechanisms than suicidal gestures. So if you are trying to cope, you are already fighting for your life. You are just using the wrong modus operandi. And it is time to stop and change your game plan into one that will lead you into the direction you actually want to go. Stop and redirect yourself down the path that leads you to being able to make real accomplishments. Stop and see that the path you are on is taking you nowhere but down, and the longer you stay on it, the more destructive it will be and the less likely you will be to ever get off of it and be able to live.
If you have an eating disorder right now, or think you may have one, please seek some help. These resources can help you find treatment centers and therapists who may be able to help you. If you cannot afford such treatment, there are community mental health agencies in most areas of the United States. There are also some organizations, hospitals, and treatment centers that hold free support groups for people with eating disorders. Please, try to find help for yourself. And, more importantly, start trying to help yourself right now. Because, in the end, only you will be able to break yourself out of this solitary cell.
It will not be easy. It is not something anyone can do for you, although support is usually helpful and sometimes absolutely necessary (if your health is in danger you may need to go to a hospital). In the long run, this battle is one that you will fight alone, primarily in your own head. A civil war between your neurotransmitters and the ideas society has given you about weight and beauty and the mood you are in and the way you feel about yourself will rage in your brain.
But do not despair. This is a battle you can win. I did it and so have many others. The first thing you have to do is make the choice to join the other side. Be a traitor to anorexia. Join forces with that little part of yourself that wants freedom. And try, as much as you can, all the time, to fight the guilt that this battle will put upon you.
Remember that you are worthy of health, happiness, freedom, and the ability to have control of your own life rather than be controlled by an illness or addiction. Remember that you do not have to die or live a life of constant dying through torturing your body. You can get better, you can overcome the guilt, you can learn to direct you're anger and sadness where they belong and not on your body, you can stop despising yourself (or at least hate yourself less), and you can be free and happy. But you must make the choice to begin the battle.
I recommend arming yourself for this battle with some specific weapons.
One is feminism, which will make you think about exactly what you are doing when you starve yourself and why you have chosen that way of to harm yourself. It will show you what real women look like and what real women have as accomplishments that are admirable (not tiny wastes).
Women's history is another excellent weapon to help you in the same way. It is important to find out about all the real accomplishments women have made throughout history, which had nothing to do with their looks, and were most likely not in your history books. Explore great women who have been overweight, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wrote The Women's Bible an the Declaration of Sentiments at the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848. She was one of the most intstrumental people in getting women the right to vote in the United States. And she was obese.
Admirable women who make accomplishments today and are not concerned about their appearance at all are also great role models. They can be hard to find in pop culture, but there are plenty of them out there if you look.
A therapist, if you find one you can connect with, is often necessary and is usually helpful.
A hospital or treatment center can provide an environment where you are safe to eat and get control for a temporary period over your eating disorder, by being surrounded by support. However, in the long run hospitals are not a permanent solution; they are most helpful for a temporary time and are best for those who are very sick and absolutely need to be in them.
Another weapon is any human support you can get, whether it be on the internet, in support groups, in friends or family members or teachers or college professors or guidance counselors.
Another weapon is taking up a hobby or activity of some sort that you can practice on a regular basis as a way of refocusing your attention on something other than self-destruction. Creative endeavors (taking a pottery class; making bead jewelry, writing poetry or stories, painting, music therapy) can be helpful. They open your mind up to its creative area which is usually not very active when your entire brain is focused on an eating disorder.
Another weapon is positive affirmations you say to yourself or write to yourself or read in a book; this may be as hard or impossible for you as it was for me, but it is often recommended as a way of improving self esteem.
A nutritionist, if you can afford to see one, who understands eating disorders, can guide you and make the process of returning to normal eating less confusing an less terrifying.
Writing in a journal is one weapon in this battle that I believe is essential for many people. Writing is very cathartic and can help you get out your emotions in a way that is not harmful to you, but actually helps you.
If you do not like writing, try talking about how you feel to someone you can trust, or if there is no one, talking out loud to yourself is not crazy. You must argue with the eating disorder messages in your head, and if you are unable to get help in doing this you will need to work very hard to do it yourself.
Singing also is a great way to release emotion and express yourself. Anorexia especially thrives on silence. You must learn to use your voice.
If you are on the road to recovery already, talking to other people about eating disorders, if you can do so, can also be very helpful, because once you break that secret it helps you to see it for what it really is, an illness and not something you want to return to. It can also help other people to hear about what having an eating disorder is like. You have the potential to spare other girls the same pain you went through if you talk to them about it and they listen. And some of them will.
In general, anything you can do that is good for you and is not focused on weight or exercise at all will be helpful.
Weighing yourself will be detrimental. Eventually you should stop that altogether, if possible, and when you can stop counting calories and fat grams too, you will experience the true freedom of eating like a regular human being. You will get to that point; it may take a while and it will require hard work and some pain and a lot of anxiety, but when you get there you will realize that battle was definitely worth fighting.
To put it simplistically, the most important thing to remember is fight it and don't give up. You deserve to eat, to breathe, and to take up space on this planet. You are worthy of happiness and freedom.
