Recovery
At the age of 45, I still contemplate my weight, how I look, what size my pants are, and how I compare to the women around me.
Every. Single Day.
And every single day, I come up noticeably short.
Thoughts of inadequacy, being fat, not being acceptable, and feeling ugly run through my brain like a ticker tape on the bottom of the screen during the evening news.
Always there, always reporting – never good.
Eating disorders never fully leave you.
I will be recovering for the rest of my life.
At 5’8” and 155 pounds, no one attributes an eating disorder to me; after all, I am not thin and socially gorgeous, nor am I refusing to eat and exercising like a crazy person.
My arms jiggle when I wave and I am no longer thin. I am very normal.
Even when I didn’t eat and exercised like an insane person, my lowest weight was 129 pounds.
Everyone said I was gorgeous, impressive, and inspirational.
Truthfully, I was out of control, desperate, and I hated myself.
I did fasted cardio every morning at 6:30 am with only black coffee sloshing around my gut. I ran away from my greatest fear – forever being ugly, fat and unacceptable.
After 30 minutes of sprinting on the treadmill, I would consume a few amino acids that I convinced myself were as good as food, and then I proceeded to not eat until 12:00 pm.
I had an eight-hour window to eat in my season of intermittent fasting, when I was at my worst. I usually broke the fast with plain chicken on salad and a bunch of vegetables – no dressing. At 300 calories, it was the bulk of what I would eat that day.
A snack was protein pudding made from protein powder, nut butter, and water with four chocolate chips on top. If I was living on the wild side, a rice cake was also crumbled in.
Then, after work, a heavy lifting session that lasted for at least an hour occurred.
More amino acids were consumed.
Dinner was almost always plain chicken or steamed tilapia with some sort of salt-free spice mix from Costco. I couldn’t afford the fat calories in salmon or steak. If it were a high-carb day, I would eat a small apple or half a cup of rice.
My body temperature tanked. My hair fell out. I became anemic. My period stopped. My brain was fuzzy. I was constantly angry.
As I went from double to single digits in size, from 16 to 12 to 4, I strove to become a size zero. If I could nearly disappear, become as small as possible, a big, fabulous life of happiness, love, and acceptance would follow.
At least, that is the lie I believed.
900 calories a day is impossible to live on.
I irreversibly hurt my health. Secondary Addison’s disease was the first diagnosis handed to me, then the specialists spent time looking for a brain tumour and other terrible diseases. I triggered the dormant Hashimoto’s autoimmune disease in my body and got a lot sicker before I ever got better.
Lying in my bed, alone, unable to work, with a body temperature of 96 degrees, I thought I was dying.
I had to learn to eat to be able to live.
I had to learn to have fat on my body and not nearly kill myself to remove it.
Every single morning, I have to choose to be ok with just eating. Not weighing and measuring my food, tracking my carbs, proteins, and fats, and not writing down how much I weigh first thing in the morning.
15 years into recovery, I can still calculate the calories and macro split of a meal in about 5 seconds. When things are going poorly, I do this more and more throughout the day. It is my own personal canary in the coal mine.
When I was spiraling out of control, I would weigh myself 8-10 times a day, checking to see how much fatter I was getting as the day wore on; poking and prodding the soft parts of my body in the mirror. When I was unhappy with my body, which was most days, I would punish myself by adding in evening cardio and take away food the following day.
The more I suffered and the thinner I got, the more compliments, attention, and notice I received. My reward was acceptance. I felt beautiful, and it was intoxicating.
I live on a mental precipice. I walk the edge every day, trying desperately not to slip off the edge as I travel through life. When people start talking about weight loss, macros, being thinner, fitter, prettier, I usually have to leave the conversation.
In these moments, I feel like an addict who has inadvertently stumbled into a crack den.
Rather than take a deep, momentarily satisfying hit, I close my eyes and quietly back away.