My Thin Red Line

About four or five years ago now, I declared victory over my weight — or more precisely, I declared victory over “Ed,” my inner calorie-counting, purge-perfecting zealot, whose fanatical fondness for scales and measures outweighed that of Anubis and Jillian Michaels combined. My celebratory speech at the time, delivered to the captivated (if captive) audience of my weekly support group, was at once vulnerable and triumphant. It trumpeted habits broken and compulsions purged, demons vanquished and dysmorphia reformed. It co-opted the paints of pain and struggle to portrait a woman reborn, freed from the shackles of Paunch Patrol and decidedly abstaining from all future rounds of Survival of the Slimmest.

It was assured. It was elated. It was raw, and not just editorially speaking.

And it was complete and utter bullshit.

Okay, so perhaps that’s taking things a bit far. To lie, one must first make the conscious decision to deceive, and misleading message aside, my premature declaration of triumph was not much of a choice, at least not a conscious one anyway. It was more an act of denial, the deluded address of a girl who had so long denied any issues with disordered eating that, upon finally accepting that maybe she had a teensy, weensy (crippling, pervasive) Fear of the Fat, wanted nothing more than to be on the other side of it. So ever the trusty enabler, my subconscious addressed said want by duping me into believing that healing could be akin to the Sacrament of Penance:

I would piously assume my seat in the confessional, verbally vomit out decades worth of shame and guilt, unequivocally atone for my transgressions, and presto! I would have purged myself of the disease, emerging post-haste a woman whole and holy, with pockets full of health and perhaps a few Hail Mary’s for good, penitent measure.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. My only challenge would be finding the rosary.

Yet recovering from an eating disorder is never that easy, no matter your strength of will or capacity for self-delusion. It is an arduous climb — steep, messy and far from linear — and as I’ve since discovered, it generally unfolds in phases.

So to be sure, by the time I delivered my speech with the conviction of the most pious born-again, I had ascended a considerable distance towards health, having shed some hefty compulsions along the way and arriving the lighter for it. Yet what I’d presumed to be The Final Destination proved more Plateau of Reprieve than true Summit of Recovery. And it has only been many years later that the concealing cloud deck has lifted, and I can finally appreciate just how far I have yet to go.

Phase One: Ed’s Anti-Booty Boot Camp

As a severely self-aware neurotic, I have amassed an impressive array of theories on who or what pulled the trigger on my eating disorder in the first place. Endless years of schoolyard bullying. A long-unacknowledged teenaged sexual assault. One singular case of Ugly Duckling Syndrome. Take your pick, and I’m sure they’d all have at least some trace of gunpowder on their hands.

Yet to this day, I cannot say for certain which of my usual suspects was actually Keyser Söze in disguise. All I do know is that when I first found myself at eighteen, alone in a university dorm and quite suddenly in complete control of all aspects of my life, well — things started to go a bit sideways…

Things truly began in earnest with the casual suggestion that I track my diet as a means of identifying trigger foods for an aptly named irritated bowel. Granted, my naturopath’s intake form hadn’t included checkboxes for such co-morbid conditions as, say, Hyper Perfectionism or Complete Inability to Do Things by Halves, so admittedly, there had been little way for her to predict the consequences of such an innocuous suggestion. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before this little exercise in trigger-food identification morphed into an altogether manic fixation on eating only the “right” kinds of foods, in exactly the “right” quantities. I always ate enough, to be sure; but it was only and ever precisely enough, one side of a perfectly balanced equation of bodily inputs and outputs. In effect, my life became a perverse version of Pac-Man, one where the ghosts are re-imagined as Bulgy, Pudgy, Inches and Chunk, and my mission was to ever so carefully navigate my Pac-Dot consumption to ensure that they never, ever caught up.

In the decade since, I’ve learned that this “Ed” is known as orthorexia nervosa, a disorder characterized by its altogether unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. While not yet formally recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a standalone eating disorder, research is ongoing, as clinicians seek to clarify the dividing lines between it, other eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, and other anxiety-based and obsessive disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As an artsy type whose scholastic focus was anthropology and international affairs as opposed to medicine, I cannot offer anywhere close to a fully informed opinion on whether this condition merits “standalone disorder” status or not. I just know that alongside courses in post-Soviet studies and international relations, I also unconsciously launched my education in what I colloquially refer to as Gullet Guardian Training: a study in the ancient art of regulating all calories that deign enter, exit or even graze your body, as designed by one helluva border control specialist. Like an IDF official — or perhaps Kirstjen Nielsen. And as with all things “school,” I took to my studies with the fervour of the nerdiest nerd.

It wasn’t long before I decided to complement my specialization in bodily inputs with another major in bodily outputs. This condition is referred to as anorexia athletica in the literature, and is best identified in the wild by an uncharacteristic obsession with physical exercise. As with orthorexia nervosa, it is not yet formally recognized, and again, it is not my intent to debate the relative merits of such a designation. All I know is that within a matter of months, what started as an innocuous interest in being fit morphed into a decidedly noxious obsession with working out, my progress closely monitored by a dedicated detachment of mental drill sergeants who happily assumed rank alongside my Gullet Guardians in the unremitting Battle of the Bulge.

Because, let’s be honest: I wasn’t spending what effectively became all of my free time sweating bucket after bottomless bucket just to “be healthy” or to “decompress” from the stresses of pursuing a modern-day postsecondary education. And it certainly wasn’t to achieve “balance” — or if so, it was far more parody than success. No, those hours spent endlessly pounding pavement and pumping iron was all part of a consciously unacknowledged redundancy plan, a purge designed to guarantee that whatever clever calories managed to circumvent the Gullet Guardians’ blockade would never enjoy a flicker of a hope of sticking around — or even worse, taking up space.

So it was that, in very little time, my little two-faced Ed came to rule my life. I tracked the movements of every grape. I denied entry to dessert. I so carefully portioned my Easter chocolate that I could have hidden the same eggs, three years running. And alongside this practice in caloric isolationism, I militantly perspired, spending hour upon focused hour spinning before work, blasting through lunchtime 5Ks and then jogging home, only to bang out a nightly HIIT TRX session — because you could never be too vigilant.

This was war, after all.

Of course, as time progressed, and routine bred compulsion, and compulsion obsession, I knew — deep down, at least. I knew that this had progressed light-years beyond some glibly named “borderline” obsession. I knew it wasn’t healthy. I knew it needed to stop. I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew.

Yet as anyone who’s ever trained under Ed will confirm, securing your discharge from an eating disorder is a damned hard thing to do. The pull is relentless, and not just because the habits you’ve amassed over all those months and years of training have become such staunch allies in your fight to maintain control, or self-soothe, or secure an identity.

Just as poignantly, we live in a culture that privileges a very narrow definition of beauty, where both social and asocial media alike routinely affirm even Ed’s most radical teachings on everything from “clean eating” to “being strong” as not only good and right, but a viable path to winning at the Game of Life. In such a world, your weight, fat percentage and degree of facial symmetry are not simple numbers; they’re currency, legal tender with which to buy your personal worth.

And against such forces, what’s a lone recruit to do?

Phase Two: Operation Ruinous Rescue

As it turns out, the answer was rather simple: trust the universe. Or more precisely, trust in the universe’s salvation complex and its dedication to sabotaging even your most ardent efforts at self-destruction — even if it means counter-intuitively accelerating that whole “destruction” part.

Think of it as a Trump-Kim summit — if accelerating nuclear annihilation were a positive thing. Oh, and admittedly with less global fanfare. Definitely fewer dictators. But that’s beside the point.

The point is, after years of firing warning shots across my bow in an attempt to alert me to my impending Ed-spurred doom, the universe abandoned all subtlety one night in 2011, and fired directly into said bow instead, launching a counteroffensive that could only have been inspired by the proverb, “To piece oneself together, one must firstly fall apart.” The chosen ammunition? Oh, nothing major — just suddenly shutting down my airway one night while I was in India conducting my Master’s field research, and then over the course of my next few ICU-bound days, convincing me beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was going to die.

Hat, tipped; well played, universe. You have my undivided attention.

Eventually, the Indian medical profession diagnosed what was actually ailing me, and a second round of hospitalization eradicated the infections — right alongside whatever good intestinal bacteria I had had to my name. And from this whole mess I emerged: a walking skeleton with a Master’s thesis yet to write, some phenomenal PTSD to conquer, and — drum roll, please — zero digestive ability to come by.

Notably, it was this latter sad fact that actually proved the proverbial pile of poop concealing a long-wished-for pony when it came to Ed. For as my ravaged insides now transformed anything I ate into foetal-position-inducing, ticking time bombs of pain, I somehow miraculously lost all fucks about tracking the cleanliness of this altogether different enemy.

Whodda thunk?

So I’ll concede that I continued my input calculations in the weeks that followed my return to Canadian soil. But my mission objective had shifted rather dramatically, from keeping me “perkily and perfectly fat-free!” to just bloody keeping me alive. And as time passed, even those mental gymnastics went the way of ski ballet as the evidence piled up that no diet would reverse my excommunication from the Church of Digestive Bliss, and that I should probably just accept my fate of eternal digestive damnation.

See what I meant about that whole “destruction-acceleration” thing?

Admittedly, it took longer to drop the outputs side of my wee Ed-based equation. In fact, the universe’s little one-two combo initially encouraged a doubling down on the workout front, as I railed against a residual feeling of pervasive weakness. Having burst from the womb a staunchly stubborn and strong-willed spirit, I downright refused to accept myself as feeble or frail; the concept refused to compute, the cognitive dissonance too disorienting to accept.

Yet if I’m being honest, that was but one facet, and a minor one at that. At its core, much of my knee-jerk response stemmed from a primal need to maintain at least a semblance of control over a body and a life beyond it. The fact was, my infections and series of hospital stints had robbed me of all sense of physical integrity, and trust me: there is no more helpless a feeling than being held hostage by your own bruised and broken body.

So to combat this powerlessness if nothing else, I clung desperately to whatever once delivered peace of mind. This included repurposing the weapons I’d so skilfully wielded in my long-fought Battle of the Bulge, in a misguided attempt to rebuild my physical strength and, through some deluded, hopeful extension, my life. After all, if the doctors maintained that despite my daily symptoms, there was nothing measurably wrong with me, it must simply be a matter of mind over malady — right?

Well, wrong. Instead, as it turns out, when nothing you eat hangs around long enough to offer nutrition let alone excess poundage, you will quickly find yourself hard-pressed to locate the energy with which to burn all that (again, non-existent) excess fuel.

Huh. Go figure.

Phase Three: Freedom in Disguise

So it was by this winding road of progressively worsening health that I eventually found myself atop that Ed-related plateau referenced earlier: not as a result of some “conscious uncoupling,” Gwyneth-style or otherwise, but via a gradual if predictable faltering in the face of a greater malady.

And as this new, non-Ed-centric life settled about me, it seemed at the time that that was, well — that. Matter, adjourned. Battle, won. War, over. And heck, all it took was the universe indiscriminately carpet-bombing my insides and torturing me into believing that I was going to die over the course of three solid days.

Easy peasy, indeed! Now where’s that bloody rosary…

Admittedly, it was only at this point that I even considered possibly admitting that I’d had any Ed-related issues in the first place. I suspect that this newfound confidence was correlated with the unwavering conviction that said problem was in my rear-view. As a strident perfectionist, I abhorred (abhor?) the possibility of even minor flaws in my operating system, agile development be damned! Yet glitches of yesteryear, long since patched? That’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

So buoyed by my newfound comfort with this problem-that-was-no-longer-a-problem-and-thus-was-something-I-could-safely-admit, I joined a support group for women with eating disorders. All joking aside, I cannot express how affirming it is to walk into a roomful of strangers, dragging what you assume to be your own unique brand of crazy, only to dump everything out on the table and the sole response to be “Yeah, me too”. In fact, it was this time more than anything I’ve experienced before or since that proved the deep benefits of being seen and heard for all that you are, even when at your most upside-down.

These meetings also gave me the framework to finally understand and, through understanding, articulate just how sick I had been and just how far I had come. This ultimately culminated in that little victory speech mentioned at the beginning of this post. For after fully scrutinizing that problem-that-was-no-longer-a-problem-but-had-clearly-been-a-problem-so-I-probably-should-stop-pretending-that-it-wasn’t, I sincerely believed that I’d won: I had been to Hell and back, sure, and sported the charred skin and singed hair to prove it, but Satan’s lair had long since frozen over, and that meant that I was free. And upon reaching this realization, my sole desire was to bolster my sisters-in-arms by sharing said triumph and proving that victory was indeed possible — and so to never, ever give up the fight.

In hindsight, though, I realize that the most telling element in my little Sermon from my “Ed-ified” Mount was not its William Wallce-esque refrain of freedom for all. Instead, it was its concluding phrase, which reads as follows:

“And I haven’t gained a single ounce of that fat over which I’d spent so much time agonizing.”

Ah. As the Bard would say, there’s the rub.

Namely, my digestive issues by this time had become so refractory that my bowels seemed hell-bent on proving their candidacy for the “Fastest Waterslides in the World” club. When I’d first returned from India, I’d sought out all manner of treatment under the conventional and alternative suns; yet nothing worked, everything hurt, and time from food-entry to food-exit only accelerated. So in the interest of maintaining whatever remained of my sanity, I had eventually conceded defeat: if you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, then what’s the bloody point in trying? I began consuming whatever I wished. I emulated the sloth in my level of activity. And not once did I worry about my litheness of physique, for with waterslides for bowels, heck! It was physically impossible for me to gain an ounce.

And it was this context from which I pronounced myself “fully Ed cured” — and obviously, no longer in need of Ed-related support, group-based or otherwise. It was a thing of the past, a glitch long patched, a distant and fading memory.

That was, up until one day, years later, when blood started showing up to my ceramic bowl party. I began missing so much work that I seriously contemplated relocating my cubicle to the lavatory. It would take me several false starts to make and then to eat my breakfast each morning due to nature’s repeated crank calls (immature little prick). Eventually, I decided to give conventional medicine one last kick at the can (pun, intended), prompting a second foray into the medical system whose twists and turns far exceed the limits of this already overlong post. Moral of the story was, my established pattern of treatment failure and continued pain held — right up to the morning a few months back when, within days of becoming a lab rat in a cutting-edge study in fecal microbiota transplantation, everything changed — and I rather suddenly and dramatically began to heal.

And by heal, I mean, heal — as in, fully and completely. I am not overstating things when I say I have experienced nothing short of a miracle.

Yet this healing has come at an unforeseen cost. For in this newfound space of reclaimed wellness, my veil of delusions likewise suddenly lifted, and I can finally see my “long-defeated” Ed for what he actually was: an ugly mental possum playing dead, lying in wait for some future day of reckoning.

Some day like today.

So this is why I have had to call bullshit on my triumph-declaring self of old: because as my body starts to heal, and weight gain re-emerges as a distinct (and altogether healthy) possibility, I can now feel how easy it would be to slip back into them ol’ Ed habits. I can feel the ancient fears resurfacing, along with the compulsive urge to scour my body for that extra ounce of fat that must have materialized in the last two minutes… or last minute… or last thirty seconds. I can hear the whispered calls of the Gullet Guardians and their drill-sergeants-in-arms, insisting that that tiny belly roll is not actually a skin barrier needed to keep my internal organs, well, internal, but some unsightly fat that demands vanquishing. And worst of all is that giving in to these distorted beliefs and their complementary compulsions would feel so deeply and fully familiar as to feel sickly and strangely safe — a process not unlike coming home.

Phase Four: Baptism by Fire

Yet in the face of this cloying familiarity, I have also found a sliver of hope, one rooted in the fact that there is something else growing in time with Ed’s inner call: a nascent but scorching ball of purest rage.

It is a wrath born of witnessing loved ones continually tear themselves down for not being thin enough, fit enough, tight enough, whatever enough, and thus through some sick implied logic, not loveable enough. It is a fury rooted in the pain of watching friends and family alike shame their bodies day in and day out, only to look back in longing and berate themselves for not celebrating what they once had — only to repeat the whole bloody cycle without missing a damned beat. It is a storm brewed in knowing all-too-intimately the pain of self-loathing so many of us experience, both at our own hands as much as those of a society that constructs the building blocks of an artificial beauty in an Adobe Photoshop window.

At this time, this core of rage is admittedly tiny. But I assure you, it’s growing — so I’m taking comfort in its warmth.

So this is where I am right now, even as I type these words — a messy work-in-progress, caught halfway between the readily crippling fears of old, and the ever-growing, blood-boiling rage of new. And as I find myself treading this thin red line between relapse and recovery, I must acknowledge with eyes wide open that I don’t know where it will lead. Maybe that’s why this post was so hard to write — not just because its subject was so raw, but because it is that much easier to write a story whose ending is certain, and that much harder when its final arc defies definition.

Yet write it I am, not because I have a solution or some prettily packaged story, but precisely because I don’t. Instead, I am choosing to honour my commitment to speak openly about the sideways areas of my life, in the hope that doing so might make one other person feel that much less alone.

So to all of you who are struggling with one version of Ed or the other, to one extent or the other, I only have this to say: I see you. I know your pain. I’ve fought your battles. I’ve used every one of your excuses. I’ve wept every one of your tears. And I know that there is life beyond these obsessions, for all of us. To be sure, we may stumble along the way. We may scream, break down, take twenty steps backwards before moving steadily on. We may even find ourselves taking extended, unintended reprieves on a variety of plateaus along the way before finally reaching that summit.

But summit we shall. All of us. Together.

Except this time, fuck the rosary. A dear friend once counselled that the proper response to injustice is neither sadness, nor pious resignation; it is anger, a rage so strong that it compels you to effect change. For anger when properly rooted and correctly channelled is a decidedly productive force, and only more so when it is shared, a handful of tiny furies united in a singular pyre capable of blazing a better path for all.

So again I say, fuck the rosary. This time up the mountainside, I’m carrying one big-ass walking stick — and a galloon or two of gasoline, just in case our little pyre needs some tending along the way.

My only question is: who’s with me?

Originally published at wingingitsortof.wordpress.com on August 24, 2018.