Eating Disorder Talk

I’ve made it fairly clear, I think media has a lot to do with females’ body-image issues, but I don’t think the media is to blame for eating disorders. I actually think that eating disorders are a secondary reaction to the saturation of media in first-world countries, a quantifiable mental illness and that few will ever develop one without a predisposition for it. I don’t think you go on a diet to look like Cameron Dias and then, bam, you’ve got an eating disorder. And, I don’t even think that all girls who might look like me and act like me have them.

There is a sub-class of eating disorder sufferers calling themselves ‘pro-ana’. And within this sub-class there is a sub-sub-class, if you will, who many of us lippy ones call ‘wannarexics.’ These are the ones that give media full responsibility because they read magazines and perezhilton and thought, hey, I wanna be this famous and worshipped and being thin, that’s obviously the way. These are the people that truly sick ones sneer towards. In part, because they’re making a mockery of all of our work, but also because, well it’s just so amazingly trashy.

So I thought, you guys get to hear my opinions so often, why not have a celebrity from the most newly-popular media medium, the blogosphere, give her comments, too? This woman has been interviewed here before, she’s been blogging for eight years, she’s ranked barely over 25,000 on technorati (ED Talk is ranked at 65,568) and 400,000 on Alexa (ED Talk: 8,190,059), has won numerous awards for blogging and is a published book writer.

All accomplished by her 24^th year.

On Saturday, I delved into Heidi’s past - what led her to disordered eating and what disordered eating was for her. Today, we learn how she’s doing nowadays.

Her life has led to some physical problems: migraine headaches, depression and anxiety, ulcers, esophageal bleeding, dental damage, scarring on her hands. Maybe worst of all has been the loss of friendships.

She talks of not wanting her family and friends to know about her history, and her current struggle with it, because she wants to protect them from it. She worries that her mom’s heart would break. That someone would try to save her. And she doesn’t want to be saved.

“I wish I could say that I was doing great, fine being at the weight I am, and didn’t care. But that’s a big fat lie.

“I have a hard time admitting to anyone that I’m settling back into old habits. I’m tempted to NOT tell you the truth because putting it in print scares me and makes me worried someone is going to try and ‘heal’ me again.

”No one sees what I do and don’t do. I live alone. I can run until I literally trip and fall down, come home, shower and then do Pilates (on the floor) until I’m so light-headed I can’t see the DVD. My left knee? Bruised beyond belief right now from falling down running. My right knee? Small fracture in the kneecap from falling down running.

“Today? I’ve had a diet coke and four beers.”

She’s not ashamed of it, she accepts that it’s a part of her, but she knows that there are people in her immediate circle who deny or are unaware of her eating disorder. There’s a mental dichotomy about this for her:

“I’m still very bitter about them not doing anything about it.”

Intimate relationships are a little shallower than you’d think. She has very few people that she’s honest with about her feelings and her past – she married her high school sweetheart in part, because he knew everything and she’s too scared to allow someone else to be that close now that she’s divorced. So she doesn’t date. And new friends, they know the Heidi she wants them to.

Heidi doesn’t want to be saved. She wants to get back to her ideal of 110 pounds and when questioned if she would be able to stop then, she responded honestly that she’s be curious to know how low she could go. She thinks that if she quit her four days a week alcohol buzz, she’d drop another 15 pounds from her current weight.

“I am easily triggered … and part of me worries that once I start school with a bunch of 18-year-olds I’ll be INSANELY triggered. And part of me is looking forward to that.

“I don’t know, anymore, if I have a ‘this is too far’ switch. I didn’t before … nothing was stopping me from where I was then … I don’t know if there’s anything to stop me now.”

The lowest she’s gone before? 101 pounds. Her highest? 144 pounds.

“I started purging the day I saw that because once I would have hit 145, that’s almost 150 which is almost 200.”

She’s living a double life and it must be exhausting because her private life is enough to drive me into bed, just thinking about it.

Routine is paramount to Heidi’s life. She wakes up at 5am every workday. IF she sleeps in, it’s until 6:30 and the guilt she feels is staggering. She has exact routine for getting ready to go to work. She drinks a black coffee with low-calorie sugar alternative. Then she heads to work. There, she spends her day finding reasons to walk, stand, sit down, squat and just generally move to burn extra calories. After work she goes to dance class and on days that she doesn’t, runs until the point of collapse. IF she still has the energy after than, she does a ballet routine until she’s completely physically exhausted. Later, she‘ll clean her house and then blog.

“Writing is an escape for me … I can ignore the growling stomach and I just zone out while I write.”

She’s usually in bed by 10pm and then wakes the next morning to repeat the entire process. On weekends, she makes an extra effort to socialize with friends and family. She spends time working on blogs, cleaning, puzzles, on novels and on crafts. She admits to living in a state of total exhaustion, but if she isn’t always on the go, she’s been known to cry.

Recently, she quit her job because she’ll be returning to full-time education. Her last day, she cried in her car because she felt she had nothing to get up to on Monday morning, an ENTIRE WEEK with nothing that HAS to be done.

“I’m all about routines. When things are thrown off, I’m known to be incredibly upset all day long.”

She’s obsessive about controlling situations and has incredibly high expectations of herself. Those sometimes extend to other people, but she tends to take the reins and not allow people to help her because she knows she’ll do it better her own way.

Tired? Me, too.

Heidi is a 25-year old girl. She allowed me to interview her and this two-part series is the result of her honesty and candidness. Today, I’ll cover what led her to present day’s habits. Please revisit on Monday when I describe how Heidi’s life today is affected by her history with disordered eating.

When I asked her to describe her history with disordered eating, she burst into laughter. She’s been diagnosed with multiple eating disorders over her short lifetime. After living with it for seven years, she was pronounced anorexic at 18. Then, she was a college freshman and her roommate made her a doctor’s appointment to get assessed. In hindsight, she describes her lifestyle then as an eight on the anorexic 1-10 scale – she over-exercised, fasted and played with her food, instead of eating it.

Four years later, Heidi was diagnosed as bulimarexic, falling into a habit that many closeted-anorexics do: eating socially and purging immediately afterwards, but mainly restricting and exerting energy to eliminate calories consumed. This was to allow the image of being “fine.” In fact, during her adolescent years, she says that the only time she would eat was during family dinners.

At the time, she was treated for another condition related to her eating disorder and her physician prescribed a medication that caused her to gain twenty pounds. She’s not happy that she still can’t drop all of the weight from the medication, but credits her doctor for saving her life.

Heidi grew up in a low-income family without religious participation – attending church was her escape. Her family has it’s own problems: parents who indulge excessively in marijuana and her sister is an avid speed user. Growing up, she felt she was the family mediator and that she couldn’t let on that she had any problems of her own. Because of this, she suffered understandable anxiety from an early age. Symptomatically, she’d fast during anxious moments from fifth grade until recently. Then she started getting compliments on her weight loss and the path was taken.

She doesn’t feel like she fits in with her family. She’s the only one in the family with high school and university degrees. She earned full scholarships for her freshman and sophomore years of university due in part to her activity in high school extra-curricular programs and having a nearly perfect GPA – she was even one person away from the top 5% of her graduating class. She went on a mission with her church. She avoided drugs and alcohol until early adulthood. She calls herself the “white sheep” of her family.

Add to that the lack of family resemblance. She’s a slightly over-average 5’6” when the rest of her family towers at 5’8”, 5’11” and 6’1”. She wishes she had her mother’s bone structure but inherited her father’s instead.

Please come back on Monday for more of Heidi’s struggle.

Sarah of Mental & Emotional Health posed me some questions after we bonded via our blog’s comments. I answered them as honestly and wryly as possible. Part one of the interview can be found here. Part two will be up tomorrow.

Enjoy and feel free to mock me. Or just leave a comment for Sarah. She deserves it!

Popular blogger Lauren lives in Toronto and is often better known as Raymi the Minx. Since 2000, she’s been blogging several times a day with a raw and sarcastic wit that is hard to find in twenty-somethings. She also contributes articles on Rocketpack. In 2005, Raymi self-published Marketable Depression, chronicling her treatment and misadventures through bipolar disorder – a book widely reviewed (even I did!) in the blogsphere.

On her site, she often posts photos of “forbidden” food and talks of weight loss strategies. She is open about days when she feels depressed, angry and fat, to the point of brutal honesty sometimes – a fresh take from the piteous posts that you find on so many blogs that talk of depression. Here is Lauren’s response to Eating Disorder Talk’s questions:

Q. Why did you start blogging and why continue it?
A. Cos [sic] I loved writing and I loved attention. And I still do.

Q. Are you currently on a diet?
A. My own fucked up one, yes.

Q. To be as close to perfect as you think is attainable, how much weight would you need to lose? (how much have you lost already?)
A. I’ve lost twenty pounds, I think I need fifteen more off, then I’m good. But then a monkey in my brain will push it for five more; the skinnier you get, the crazier you are – so you have to be careful.

Q. Feel brave enough to give out your stats?
A. 5’8 and I am not revealing my weight until I am at my “target” so everyone’s mind will be blown. People think I am less than I am cos [sic] they forget to consider my height.

Q. Do you ever worry about being a trigger for girls who read your blog – your confidence, food descriptions and talk of losing weight?
A. I’ve received emails from nine year olds saying they want to be me and I kinda laugh it off to be in denial about how crazy that is. When the 13 yr olds write me, I post it and say this is scary. I have in the past written a post saying I don’t want your daughters to be like me, in terms of drinking or whatever. And to late 20-30 yr olds, like, “Haha look how fucking desperate and crazy I am?” They can get their warped body images from Shape and Maxim magazine anyway.

Q. Why do you put so many (often very rich) food pictures on your blog while also writing about dieting?
A. The rich foods that are taken at restaurants are usually what Fil orders and it’s to assuage my desire and yearning to eat it, it’s also blog content to drive people bananas. When I have a craving for hamburgers I search out 30 pictures on Google of the greasiest, cheesiest ones I can find cos [sic] I know I won’t go out and get one.

Q. What’s the difference between an extreme diet and an eating disorder?
A. Eating disorder is Tracey Gold from Growing Pains making the show end cos [sic] she was skeletor, and then she did that made for tv movie about a girl with anorexia. Extreme diet is people in Hollywood jogging in the heat? Or people who talk about their diets all the time.

Q. Do you now have, or have you ever had an eating disorder?
A. Well I guess so, I’m binge-eating I think, starve myself, then eat once a day and I constantly think about my body. At nite [sic] I think about being skinnier and posing in outfits; fuck world peace, I need to look like Kate Moss.

Q. What disorders (psychological) have you been diagnosed with?
A. Bipolar mood disorder, depression.

Q. How do you really feel about the usual spots that women hate on themselves?
A. I hate my upper arms the most and all my fat resides in my middle area. Women either have their fat sit above or below waist. Below, have cankles and big asses; like me, have skinnier legs but bigger middles. I think I’d be pretty depressed if I had cankles. I know I would be.

Q. Have you ever consciously wanted an eating disorder?
A. No, I think people who have severe ones are mentally ill. I have other shit in my life to focus on other than DYING or being sent away to one of those anorexic safe homes.

Q. Have you closely known anyone who has had one?
A. My friend. She barf[s] up her food but I have never seen her, so it’s like it doesn’t happen. Unfortunately, these days it’s kinda [sic] like, “whatevs [sic]. No one cares because skinny is SO in, like never before, so it’s almost encouraged?”

Q. If you knew someone close to you was in crisis with their eating disorder, what would you do?
A. Tell them if they don’t get help I am telling their mom and talk shit about them on my blog, and grab their wrists firmly and give their head a shake. I can be pretty aggressive. Oh, drunk crying works too: say a bunch of manipulative, sappy shit, then Fil steps in and gives his intelligent, makes sense Fil speech and off they go to help.

Q. If you could go on a strict vegan diet and drop weight faster than you could put it back on, would you?
A. Based on principal, no. Aside from that, I do not have the willpower, nor desire. I enjoy life too much. I mean, I like to enjoy my life while I’m living it, not suffer, eating twigs and leaves.

Q. Name five celebrities you suspect.
A. That one Olsen twin, Angelina Jolie, Posh Spice, Nicole Richie, Hilary Duff.

Q. How long did it take you to write the “How I lost 20lbs” post?
A. I don’t keep track of time when I blog, I am like, in the zone. I think altogether an hour when you factor in editing and fine-tuning but I write pretty manically off the top of my head so…