Common Misconceptions About Anorexia Explained
Another installment in a mental health series on anxiety, depression, eating disorders and OCD.
“She’s so skinny, she’s like — anorexic”, “she has no meat on her bones”, “you could use a cheeseburger, honey”, “she has so much self-control, I could never do that”, “is being skinny that important to you?” Ever heard these comments? Ever said or thought these comments? Well, for someone who actually has an eating disorder, these words are like a knife. Eating disorders are one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses out there. So, let’s start talking about what anorexia really is.
There is a lot of psychology and neuroscience behind why eating disorders are so insidious. If you take the time to understand the science of it, it really does make a lot of sense. However, I want to give you insight that will help you understand from a different perspective; a personal perspective, that is still hard for me to even recall. A perspective of someone who was days away from dying from an eating disorder.
“I am terrified of food. Food absolutely terrifies me.” This was my reality. After years of fighting myself, fighting with food, fighting with my therapist, and fighting with life, I had come to the unimaginable, completely broken place of being terrified of the thing that helps give me life. What if I told you there was a huge spider on the floor in front of us?
A dangerous one that we should be terrified of, but you are looking at the floor and there is no spider. With good reason, you might think I am crazy. Yet, I continue to insist there is a deadly spider right in front of us. You would probably tell me there is no spider and you would be right. There isn’t a spider in front of us, nothing is threatening our lives, we have no reason to be terrified. I believe you.
I believe that you don’t see a spider and if we brought 10 other people into the room they would not see one either. There is no spider in reality, but please understand that I truly see a spider. In order for me to move on and survive, I have to believe that I do not see something the way it really is. That it is okay for me to trust you when you say it’s not there — even though I am always staring at it. That is one of the hardest things someone has to do.
When we are starved, food is not just food for us. It becomes our fixation because our body is screaming to us all day, every day, that it needs food. We fight against our biological nature to survive in order to feel in control. Those kids in school reject me and the guy I like doesn’t care about me and there is not one thing I can do about it. I can’t make them want to be my friend and I can’t make him love me if he doesn’t.
At the very least, though, I can manage to deny myself any food for ______ amount of time. That is something I can do. I don’t like myself and I despise the way that I look, I don’t know how to change that or be who I want to be, but I know that I can successfully keep myself thin.
That is something I can do. I don’t want to feel how lonely I am and how sad I am about my circumstances, but I know that I can meticulously control my food intake and workout routine for the next week so that I don’t have to think about those things. That is something I can do. These are some of the biggest factors that drive eating disorders. Let alone the fact that we are usually the perfectionistic, task-oriented, people-pleasing ones of the population.
After a while, it becomes a competition against yourself and you realize that you have made food your enemy and hunger your friend. You have made restricting your job and freedom your long-awaited-but-never-achievable vacation. It’s not that we don’t want to hang out with you, it’s not that we hate family dinner because the company sucks.
It’s that while you enjoy your time, we can’t think straight because the anxiety is screaming in our head. It’s that while you have your favorite meal surrounded by people you love, I am standing in a battleground that I can’t fight my way out of. We don’t want to push people away, we just don’t want you to know how deeply we are hurting. We don’t want to miss out on the great memories that are being made, we just can’t handle the war we have to go through in order to do so.
It doesn’t make sense. Doing things over and over that you know can kill you, when you’re not trying to die. Here’s the thing, we can’t stop until we are ready to stop. Until we are ready to surrender and get help, we are addicted to the highs that come from our disordered behaviors. The scale gets to __ lbs, the daily intake is only ____ amount, another day goes by without food, etc. Just think about someone using drugs.
Eating disorders have a component of addiction (again, remember that we tend to be competitive and perfectionistic) and how hard is it for people addicted to drugs or alcohol to get sober? Very hard. Eating disorders are no exception. We are not wrapped up in vanity and superficial things, we are broken inside and just trying to stop feeling like it.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses that require professional help. Want to know the twisted part about it? I tried to get help from treatment facilities but after multiple evaluations, all of the ones near me determined I was too sick to go there. They could not take care of me. So, I went to a hospital ER trying to get admitted so that I could get help for my eating disorder and medical attention, but because of my BMI they said I was not sick enough to be admitted.
So, I went home. 8 days later I walked into that same ER and was told that I could not go home because I was in a critical health state. Eating disorders are not a matter of physical appearance or BMI. They are a mental illness that sometimes produce physical symptoms, but mainly produce behavioral and mental symptoms. Let’s take away the stigma and clear up the misunderstanding that surrounds eating disorders.
What are your questions about eating disorders? Share them with me to be answered in the next article!
