9 life lessons I learned fighting anorexia

I held many misconceptions about anorexia until I got it. I thought it was for supermodels and people who didn’t like food. All you had to do was look out for the person with matchstick legs moving a salad leaf round a plate in the pizza restaurant, and then force feed them a sandwich.

And then it happened to me. Long story short, I started losing weight and I couldn’t stop. It wasn't a diet or a life choice or a career move. It was lonely and terrifying.

After ten months of treatment, I’ve just had my last appointment with my incredibly patient clinical psychologist. Throughout this process, I learned a lot about this disease, myself and the complicated relationships we all have with our brains and bodies. Here’s the skinny.   

Translating what it’s like to be you is hard

To shamelessly bastardise a quote from David Foster Wallace, we are all marooned in our own skulls. You can’t climb inside my brain to see what it’s like, and I can’t do that for you. Which means trying to explain why we each think what we do is hard.

Here’s how I would describe my anorexia. So I guess a person without it would think, ‘I like burgers. You like burgers. Let’s go eat burgers and life will be glorious in our juicy, meaty, carb-heavy world of fast food heaven.’ Everything in moderation, right? When anorexia runs this ‘Let’s get burgers’ scenario through its mad machine, the result is that it starts shouting that if you eat one burger tonight, you’ll end up eating three tomorrow and every day for the rest of your life and you will never stop eating, resulting in a waistline to rival the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man. And everyone will hate you and no one will ever love you, even the cats you try to collect will reject you in favour of the bloke down the road who lets them piss on the sofa.

That’s a simplified version. As you go on, the machine gets extended, adding more foods that you can’t eat and more rules and an ever decreasing calorie counter. It also gets a power boost, so it shouts even louder. It’s powered by a lot of things, including body dysmorphia (that’s a whole topic by itself). I’m aware that it’s not me coming up with these thoughts, and it’s not something I built, but it’s something I had to live with and then take apart.

Fighting a mental illness takes courage

Throughout all this, a lot of people have told me that I was brave. I’m not great with compliments, but now I can look back as the version of me who got through it, I’m able to say, fuck, actually, I was brave. Since anorexia convinces you that putting on weight indicates a lack of will power, asking someone to help you stop it makes you feel like a loser who’s giving in.

Fuck that.

A wise man (Dumbledore) said that ‘It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.’ Let alone yourself. Anorexia was the bully cornering me in the toilets and telling me I was worthless, and I was George McFly landing a solid one on its jaw.

Admitting to yourself that you don’t have this in hand is hard. Admitting to other people that you need help is hard. Trusting them to stick around is hard. Getting through every single time you have to eat when something inside you is screaming to stop is hard. No question there are shittier things you can go through, but this was my big battle, my Minas Tirith. And I’m proud of the girl who took it on. She was brave.

It’s OK to trust other people

I’m not one for relying on other people too much. In my head, the anorexia made me proud of my immense will power, but it was embarrassing to admit out loud that I had this thing that makes even the simplest eating situation feel complicated. Also, as a loud and proud feminist, I hated the thought that other women would think I was judging them by the insane standards I held myself to. Why would someone put up with a person so seemingly judgemental and totally neurotic, let alone love them?

None of the people I told pushed me away. No one told me I was weak or pathetic or a terrible person who should stop worrying about my first world problems. Most made the effort to understand that weird machine in my head.

None of you will know what you did for me. Like Buffy and the Scoobies, I was the one fighting the demons every day, but you were the ones sharpening the stakes and hitting the books and giving me CPR. Even when I panicked and stressed and tried to run, you followed me and sat with me on that path to madness and uncertainty until I could get up and walk back. Trusting other people with your weird things, whether it’s small like needing to walk on the right, or big like anorexia, is hard but worth it.

People around you will make mistakes and that’s OK

It’s hard to get your head around what it’s like to have anorexia if you’ve never experienced it. You have to be as patient with the people who are making the effort to muddle their way through and support you as they are with you.

One example is the apparently innocent sentence ‘You look well.’ To an anorexic in recovery, this translates to ‘You’ve put on weight’ which, of course, sets the machine off. I realised I had to take a step back and understand that what they were trying to say was that I’m moving towards being normal instead of this weird skeletal version of me. Which is the point, after all. I learned to remind myself that they’re coming from a different point of view, and once I’d accepted this I started to love hearing this sentence. It reinforced the sense that anorexia is not normal, which is what I needed to help me change my mind. Other stuff is more hurtful, but if you try and explain why something is unhelpful, people will know not to do it again. If they choose to, they’re a dick.

There are heroes in the NHS

Anorexia is an illness. It’s not an emotional state. It’s not something you choose. It’s not a phase. It needs a tailored and planned out treatment, like any other disease. The shame around mental illness makes it hard to find the courage to ask for help. The first time I told a GP that I was losing weight was at an appointment for something unrelated. Sitting in that chair, in the comforting clinical anonymity of a surgery, I suddenly blurted out that I had been deliberately not eating enough. When I told her it was because of stress, she calmly told me to join an art class. There was one down the road. Get out and make some friends and you’ll be fine.

So that was fun.

Luckily, just hearing my own voice saying this out loud gave the part of me who could see where this was all leading the power to shout back. It’s the first time I said no to the bully. I went back and I found the GP who would save my life. At the moment when I needed it most, the NHS stepped up (in a way). She listened to me describe what I was doing to myself, just as you would listen to someone telling you their physical symptoms. She made me do blood tests and come back just to talk about how I was doing, and to keep an eye on my ever plummeting weight. She treated it like a medical condition, not just some stupid shallow problem I would grow out of. I will always be grateful to the stranger who saved me.

The NHS needs to change how it treats mental health

Both of us knew that these visits were like putting a plaster on a wound that’s bleeding out. What I needed was counselling. Ultimately, it would have taken about a year from when I was diagnosed to getting to see an actual NHS counsellor who leads you through the ‘refeeding’ process (that phrase always made me feel like a cow waiting to end up in a Big Mac) and all the CBT. When you’re losing 2lbs a week, this is not time you have. I read a news piece that said more people are dying of eating disorders because they’re not getting treatment in time, to which my response is a loud and angry ‘Duh’. I was lucky enough that my parents were willing and able to pay for private treatment. And it’s infuriating that other people who don’t have that support are stuck with this system.

Your body is strange and amazing

The recovery process is a weird and terrifying and wonderful journey through how your body can adapt to look after you. From a totally cold scientific view, it’s actually very interesting. When you deny your body food, it goes into this weird setting called starvation mode that changes how you respond to things. Some stuff makes sense: your body’s priority is to keep your heart beating and your brain ticking and your muscles happy, so when you’re not getting much energy it’s going to use every crumb to focus on these, and be damned other stuff, like hair, hormones, bones and less important organs. The funny thing is that you don’t realise how shitty and worn down you feel until you start eating more. One day you stand up and the world doesn’t spin and it’s a revelation.

Other stuff that happens is totally random and seemingly unrelated. Scientists at the University of Minnesota did some studies on conscientious objectors in the '40s to find out about starvation and refeeding. Turns out not everyone in Minnesota is nice. It was weird to read about things and think ‘Oh that’s why I do that!’ For example, needing food to be very hot. Like burn-your-tongue-and-fan-your-mouth-like-an-idiot hot. And developing the urge to hoard things, like clothes and books and DVDs (yes, I will happily blame that on my eating disorder.) And when you do let yourself eat, you can’t stop. I would be so full I felt sick but still keep going. And that’s totally normal.

It’s hard adapting to your new body

When you first start putting on weight, your poor body doesn’t really know what to do with it, so it basically shoves it around all your organs, which are centred in your torso area. Sadly, this is the bit I get fixated on. Looking in the mirror and seeing your once concave stomach look huge and bloated can trigger that anorexic machine to go into overdrive and tell you to stop, stop now. This is why constant support, an objective voice, is so important. If you keep going, keep eating, keep listening to your therapist, your body will realise, ‘Oh, OK, that wasn’t a one-off burst of energy that we needed to store for All Of Time, we can start working with this extra bit of Us’ and it will move it to other places.

Like your boobs.

I’d pretty much bid mine farewell, and then suddenly, running across the street to catch a bus, I felt this vaguely familiar jiggle of protest. It was like an invitation back to the club of bras and curves and looking like a healthy adult woman. It was something to focus on when I was staring at the newly emerging bits of me. Putting on that much weight often makes you feel like an overstuffed sausage, so finding little glimmers and positives among that misery really helps.

Look for the humour in every situation

It’s a very heavy topic…

… Groan.

But seriously, the thoughts anorexia produces are so ridiculous you have to laugh sometimes. It’s probably not a good idea to initiate the joke, since you might not know how the person is feeling about it all at that moment. Thoughts on your weight change like the British weather – from sunshine to showers with no warning. My own sense of humour got me through some of my toughest challenges, and while people struggle when I break out these slightly sick jokes at times, I actually love it when they take my lead and join in. Learning to laugh puts things in perspective and reminds you that there are more important things going on than the calorie content of a muffin.

I wrote this to be read, so please share if you feel like it.

I never thought this would be something I would have to face all day, every day. I didn’t see it coming the first time, so I won’t pretend to be able to predict the future and say it’s never coming back, hand me that burger so I may toast my resounding and permanent victory over this weird machine. Truthfully, it will probably be something I have to keep dealing with. But I have the tools and the team and the life lessons behind me, so I’ll be ready to take it on and win again.