2016: The Year I Recovered from an Eating Disorder
In 2014 I was diagnosed with an eating disorder. I was not anorexic, I did not have a binge eating disorder, and I was not bulimic. I have OSFED.
The easiest way to describe OSFED is that I had symptoms of all three eating disorders but not enough of one of them to be put into one of their categories. It took me over 20 years to figure out that my obsession with looking thin, how much I weighed, what I ate, and how much I exercised was actually a mental illness.
In reflection, I recognize that I started exhibiting symptoms around the age of 11. I remember constantly comparing myself to the other girls on my competitive swim team. Why was I so big and they were so little? How could I make myself look like them? This intensified through out junior high and high school. Negative self talk was constant and I began trying to restrict what I ate.
My symptoms lessened in my undergraduate years. I had new friends, loved school, and focusing on my body became less of a priority. After about two years I rediscovered swimming and started training for triathlons. The side effect was significant weight loss. It was the first time I did something that directly and measurably caused me to lose weight, even if that wasn’t the original intention. I liked the feeling. Weight loss quickly became a top priority.
In my last year of undergrad I unexpectedly lost my grandfather, whom I was very close too, and severely injured my ankle. I stopped training and ate to comfort myself. During that time I gained back what I had lost and more.
In 2002, at the beginning of my master’s degree, I started researching nutrition and different types of diets. I began to restrict the types of food I was eating on a daily basis. I got a gym membership, started working out, and walked 25 minutes each way to school and back. I got the results I wanted and before I got married at the end of 2003, I had lost 20 pounds. I was the thinnest I had been since I was 14 years old. But I still didn’t think I was thin enough.
In the first year of marriage, I met my in-laws for the first time, graduated with my Master’s Degree, started a new job, helped my new husband become a Canadian Resident, and moved to two different apartments. It was a stressful year, I went to the gym sporadically, and now drove to work instead of walking. As a result I gained back all the weight I lost in the two previous years.
At the beginning of 2006 I was distraught. I deeply hated my body and I felt like a huge failure. I decided to take my health and my weight into my own hands (or so I thought). I starting using online calorie tracking tools to control my diet and I went back to the gym in full force. I started at 1800 calories a day and slowly dropped it over a year to continue getting the results I wanted.
By May of 2007 I was only eating 1500 calories a day. I weighed myself twice a day, I had spreadsheets that tracked my weight, and I did high intensity workouts 6 out of 7 days of the week. I had lost about 35 pounds and was 10 pounds lighter than I had been at my wedding. You would think I would be happy about this. I was not. I needed more. Could I lose another 5 or 10? Maybe then I would be satisfied.
Every time I stepped on the scale I would be either elated or depressed. If it went down I was going to have a good day. If it went up, even by half a pound, my day was ruined.
In 2007 my husband and I started to try for a baby. But wouldn’t you know my menstrual cycle just up and disappeared?! This, as it turns out, is a common side effect for women who are not getting enough fat and nutrition in their diet. My diet combined with coming off the pill after seven years were a bad mix. Overall, it took nine months and one epic trip to Paris, where I gained 8 pounds in 10 days eating all the amazing fatty food there, for my cycle to return. We conceived a daughter a few months after that trip.
My pregnancy was hard, I was nauseous for the full 9.5 months (yes that long, my darling daughter was 10 days late) and only got relief from it when I ate. The nausea and the stress of complications contributed to gaining 50 pounds during the pregnancy.
After I had my daughter I was desperate to lose the weight I had gained. I found I had trouble counting calories and sticking to a diet, especially while nursing. So I started running. Before her first birthday I ran a half-marathon and lost all the pregnancy weight.
As excited as I was to return to work after my year off, it was incredibly stressful. Over the next two years I found I couldn’t manage counting calories or exercising to the level I had done pre-pregnancy. I was slowly and horrifyingly gaining weight and with it, falling into a deep depression.
I started my path to recovery in 2011, when I was finally diagnosed with depression. I began taking medication and practicing cognitive and dialectical behaviour therapy. While it did help my depression the voices in my head telling me I needed to be thinner never went away. The problem was, I found it hard to stick to any kind of “healthy” diet, wasn’t motivated to exercise, was dealing with significant back pain, and hated my body and myself for not being able to control all those things.
My doctor finally referred me to a mental health nurse practitioner in the spring of 2014. Together we started digging into why I still felt so low despite the therapy and medication. She was the first person to recognize that my eating and exercise habits, as well as negative body image and self talk, could be symptoms of an eating disorder. She referred me to the local eating disorder clinic. I was assessed in November of 2014 and in their professional opinion I suffered from OSFED. When the dietitian there told me I might need to gain weight to recover I was terrified and distraught. I couldn’t conceive a future in which gaining weight would be ok.
Since that day in November of 2014, I have been working toward recovery as an outpatient in an eating disorders program through the Canadian Mental Health Association. Each patient has a primary therapist, a dietician, and registered nurse as resources for recovery. The main therapy happens through a series of 8–12 weekly 2 hours sessions with 5–15 other people also trying to work through their eating disorder.
I went to over 50 of these group meetings over the last two years. I did the homework and challenged my core beliefs. It was hard work and I learned a lot from the amazing women and men who were going through the same journey as myself. I was no longer alone.
All that work has paid off. I now stand as someone who has recovered from an eating disorder. If you told me that was possible two years ago, I would not have believed you. I could not conceivably see the day I would not hate my body and want to be thinner.
I have learned to love my body, and keep working on it every day. Food no longer has power over me. If I feel like a cookie I will eat it and enjoy it. Best of all I have no idea of what I weigh. I haven’t stepped on a scale since April of this year and I have no plans on doing so anytime soon.
This post is the beginning. Over the next few months I am going to write about what I learned during my struggle for recovery. I strongly believe that these ideas will help change other women’s perceptions of themselves, food, and exercise. Not just those of us who have had an eating disorder.
