My Anorexia Story told in sketches

For as long as I can remember, I have always had issues with food.  As a baby, as soon as I moved on to solid foods, I began refusing food, would push it off tables and became distressed at the sight of certain foods. This continued into my toddler years.  I had a very limited range of foods I would eat, if other foods were introduced, I would refuse food altogether, often for days.  My mum took me to see the GP on a number of occasions, no physical explanation could be found for my refusal to eat certain foods and it was put down to be a developmental phase.  My diet, however, continued to be just as limited throughout the whole of my life.  I would describe my diet as mainly plain or sweet.  I eat different types of flat bread, some cereals with milk, smooth yogurts, most fruits, roast potatoes, plain pasta, red meat and chicken (although not off the bone), cheese and tomato pizza, plain noodles and curries of a certain brand.  I have fears of certain foods touching.  I have an extreme phobia of the sight and smell of the following foods - egg, all seafoods, all vegetables apart from roast potato, mashed potato, baked beans, butter, coleslaw, couscous, soups and many more.

I introduce my anorexia story in this way because I think it is important to note that I had issues with food that predated my restrictive eating.  A while ago, I put together my anorexia story in an old diary through a series of sketches.  I suppose I did it to try and process the part of my life I often try to deny and conceal.  I always found it helpful to hear the stories of other sufferers as it can be so easy when suffering from a mental health problem to feel incredibly isolated and cut off from other people. For that reason, I would like to share mine.  

There are so many myths and misconceptions surrounding anorexia.  Anorexia is widely held to be an illness that predominantly affects adolescent girls.  However, in recent years there have been cases of children suffering from anorexia earlier and earlier.  As strange as it may sound, I can pin down the start of my anorexia to an exact moment.  My parents had a very strained and difficult relationship.  My father was and is to this day an alcoholic.  He is aggressive, controlling, manipulative and was emotionally abusive towards my mum.  As a child, I was very conscious and aware of the fact that I was witnessing their relationship break down.  I remember one day, I was sitting at the dining table in the aftermath of one of their many arguments and felt completely consumed by the tension in the room.  My dad was sat in the corner in his chair with beer cans piled around him, swigging furiously at a bottle.  My mum put my dinner down in front of me and then stood facing the wall with tears running down her face.  As I watched her standing there, I felt as though I wasn't looking at a person at all.  It was as though I was looking at a shadow on the wall, for she had become a shadow of the person she once was.  What struck me about this whole troubling yet familiar situation was that so much of what was happening in that room was beyond my control.  I felt a chaotic misery surround me and felt powerless to stop it.  As I looked at the burger that had been placed in front of me, it dawned upon me that I could not control anything that was happening in the room other than the amount of the burger I ate.  I ate half the burger, I knew no one would notice and they didn't.

I look upon that day as the first time I consciously decided to restrict the quantity of food I ate and hence I see it is when my anorexia began.  I was 7 years old.  I didn't know what anorexia was, I didn't know what a calorie was but I did have a basic idea that if I ate less I would lose weight and to me being lighter was closer to being invisible.  I wanted to disappear from everything.  From that day onwards, I made increasing attempts to cut down the amount of food I ate and then burn it off using exercise.  I often think that because I developed so many of my behaviours so young, they became almost second nature to me and I can carry them out on a subconscious level.  There are so many reasons why a person can develop an eating disorder.  I always think it is important to recognise that people do not develop anorexia in isolation, it is usually the product of home issues and developed alongside other mental health problems.  Below I have listed just some of the issues surrounding my anorexia...

It wasn't until I was 13 years old that I was diagnosed and treated for anorexia.  My parents separated when I was 8 years old and shortly after, my dad met my stepmum.  My stepmum had always been concerned about how underweight I appeared compared to her daughter who is the same age as me.  She and my dad nagged me for years to confront the issue.  For various reasons, I had grown up to believe that if I was the perfect daughter, my dad would love me more than he loved alcohol.  I saw giving in and agreeing to go to the doctors as being a way of pleasing him and making him better.  So reluctantly, at the age of 13, I agreed to be taken to see a GP.  I honestly thought that it would just be a case of being told to put on a little bit of weight and being packed off home.  Never did I imagine that I would be told I had a BMI of 13 and be referred to CAMHS (The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service).  Throughout my treatment for anorexia, I was in complete denial about having an eating disorder, even when I was diagnosed.

I could write so much about my treatment under CAMHS and will do so at a later date.  In brief, I was seen by a child psychiatrist for 2 years until my mum pulled me out of the service as she felt it was in fact having a detrimental impact on my mental health.  I think it is important to recognise that anorexia nervosa is a mental illness, weight loss is just a physical consequence.  In my experience, a lot of the treatment put in place by the mental health services for anorexia sufferers, tends to focus too heavily on treating the physical symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes and thought processes of the mental illness.  In my mind, the treatment I received under CAMHS largely considered of manipulating me into gaining weight by using threats.  I was frequently told by the psychiatrist that I was going to die, would never have children, would be taken out of school, put into inpatient care and that I should think about the pain and suffering I was causing to my family.  Essentially, this served to increase my self blame and guilt, of which I already had plenty.  I put on weight fairly consistently over my time at CAMHS but I was left with a body that I was not prepared for coping with mentally.  These pages of my diary show some of my feelings towards my initial GP appointment and some aspects of the beginning of my treatment under CAMHS. 

As I have said, I have always had an element of denial surrounding my eating disorder.  Anorexia can feed so many delusions and I believe that is what becomes so dangerous about it.  To give an example, when I got home from school, my stepmum would always ask me if I had eaten all my lunch.  I would say I had. The reality was that I would have taken a couple of bites of something, convinced myself I had eaten most of it and threw the rest away.  In my head, I believed I had truthfully eaten all my lunch.  In the two pages of my diary below, I show how I feel so conflicted when looking back on my suffering with anorexia in my teenage years.  Something that has always confused me is that despite the fact that I was at a dangerously low weight while at school, none of my teachers ever questioned me or my parents about it.  When I was working in a secondary school, I was always very conscious to keep a lookout for the signs that students may have been suffering from an eating disorder.  One side of me looks back on the time when I was at my lowest weight as the 'good old days' but I see that those were the lies that my anorexia fed me.  On the flip side, I have brief memories of how awful it is to feel on the verge of fainting all the time, how it hurt to lay down, how I felt so cold all the time, how my hair fell out and how it made me cold, heartless and emotionally numb.

As well as anorexia, I also suffer from body dysmorphic disorder.  I have a distorted perception of my body image.  When I look in the mirror, I am quite sure that I don't see what everyone else sees.  I see myself as being bigger than I am and that perception can change quite dramatically according to the amount I've eaten.  I recall puzzling my art teacher at school because of it.  I've always been able to draw portraits of other people fairly accurately and in proportion.  Once I had to do a self-portrait in one of my art lessons.  When my art teacher looked at it, she stared in confusion.  She said that it did look like me but it was as though I had drawn a wider and broader version of myself.  The drawing below shows some of the confusion I felt when looking in the mirror.  I think there was a large part of my anorexia that was about not wanting to grow up.  It was almost as though I wanted to stop time and have a chance to attempt to put things right in my life.

To this day, I have never been able to say that I am in recovery from anorexia.  I felt pressurised into gaining weight and made the decision to do so largely because I could not bear to see the pain and suffering I put my family through.  It had always been my hope that if I did as he wanted and put on weight, my dad would stop drinking.  He didn't, of course.  If anything his drinking got a lot worse during the time I was treated under CAMHS and a part of me blamed myself for a very long time.  I would sit in the pub with my dad and strangers would ask me why I was killing myself and worse, they would ask me, "How can you do this to your dad?"  As if I didn't blame myself enough already!  I now know that I shouldn't blame myself for my dad's drinking becoming worse but I have to remind myself a lot.  At the end of the day, I was ill, I still am.  His drinking formed part of the environmental context in which I developed anorexia.  He should have realised that was the time when I needed him to be there for me most and to be a responsible parent.  

In terms of what happened with my anorexia after leaving CAMHS, it was a long ride.  I went on to reach a borderline healthy weight but that is by no means the end of the story.  If anything, I would say that it is more of a battle to eat now than it was when I was at a lower weight.  I went through various phases of disordered eating over the years, from cycles of bingeing and restriction, to hugely over exercising and going through bouts of severe restriction.  When I later accessed the adult mental health services, it became clear that my eating disorder was still a huge problem and is very unresolved.  When I went through a bout of severe restriction, I tried to seek help from specialised eating disorder services in my local area but they would not accept me for treatment because they claimed my BMI was too high.  I find it extremely frustrating that so many of the eating disorder services under the NHS in the UK work to restrictions of low BMI.  Anorexia is a mental health problem.   Telling an anorexia sufferer that their BMI if too high for them to get help for their eating disorder is like telling them to listen to the voice in their head that is telling them they are too fat!  I found it particularly frustrating because at that point in my life, I was probably in the best possible mindset to engage with treatment and to tackle my problem.  All the time I was offered help under CAMHS, I was in complete denial and it did inevitably affect my engagement with the service.  Here are some of my more recent reflections on my illness...

My current 'strategy' with regards to my eating disorder is that I just try to keep a lid on it.  I restrict and have disordered behaviours but I do my best not to let it escalate to such an extreme and dangerous level.  I am well aware that this is not really a strategy at all, more a safety behaviour.  It is certainly not the way I'd like my life to be or an approach I'd recommend for anyone to take.  As desperate as I am to rid myself of this problem that has haunted me for over 16 years of my life, I know that I'm not ready or able to fully recover yet.  I believe that in order to overcome anorexia, I have to first address the traumatic experiences that underlie my development of the illness (something I have not really spoken about in this post).

If I was to list all the ways in which anorexia has affected my life, I could go on for days. There is so much I could discuss and I do plan to write more posts related to eating disorders but probably with more of a constructive and pro-recovery focus.  I sincerely apologise if you are an anorexia sufferer and have found my story triggering.  I would not wish my eating disorder upon my worst enemy and I am absolutely determined not to let it have such a hold on me forever.  For much of my life, I never talked about my eating disorder to anyone and when you isolate yourself, that's when the negative voice in your head gets stronger and you are more vulnerable to give in to its demands.  If I was to offer any small piece of advice or message of support I would say that if you are suffering from an eating disorder, don't make the mistakes that I did and don't fight your battle alone.