How did it come to this? The history/story of my Eating Disorder thus far.

The first stirrings of something being amiss began when I was around 6 years old. I suffered from a childhood Anxiety Disorder and this, coupled with other issues such as family problems and bullying (NB I do not believe my family is in anyway shape or form the cause of my Anorexia, I will explain what I feel is the cause of my Eating Disorder in a later post) lead to my feeling very overwhelmed, "large" and conspicuous in the face of it all. I began to feel as if I just wanted to shrink away, to make myself very tiny so that the anxiety and all the other bad things wouldn't be able to find me (how innocent and childish it all sounds now).

The behaviours began 2 years later at the age of 8. Initially they were not in response to any body image issues, mainly because at that age most children do not have the cognitive awareness to always realise that I desire outcome A therefore if I do behaviour B it will lead to that outcome. Indeed up until the age of around 10 the eating behaviours and the feelings of being too large ("fat") and wanting to shrink to be smaller ("lose weight") were two completely separate issues. The behaviours themselves actually started out as a child's talisman game of sorts, the type of game where "if I make it to the corner before the lights change, so and so will be nice to me at school today" except for me it was "if I eat 3 bites of this, 2 bites of that and don't eat something else at all then I will be "safe"" . Within a very short period of time I realised that food restriction has/had a rather interesting and paradoxical effect on me. Instead of it being something that was unpleasant and to be avoided at all costs, I found that restricting food actually had an exceedingly pleasant effect on me, it made me feel very calm and grounded. As you can imagine for someone who already suffered from frequent bouts of anxiety at the time this seemed like an "answer" to all my problems. To my child's brain it was simple really if you're stressed and/or anxious then restrict food and you will feel better. Very rapidly food restriction became my standard response to any and all stress and anxiety in my life, but soon it also began to take on a life of it's own. What was initially something which happened as a response to stress, became more and more compulsive. I began to feel as if I "couldn't" eat normally and if I dared to disobey then I had to suffer the consequences. Playtime instead of being fun and carefree became endless rounds of compensatory exercise and if I ate over a certain amount of food in a day then I had to be punished in someway, for example with even harsher food restrictions for the next few days or not allowing myself to do something I enjoyed.

At the age of 10 the body image issues (feeling too large, as if I took up too much space, wanting to shrink, lose weight, be thinner/smaller) and the behaviours came together and from that time onwards the disorder took on the added dimension of active weight control and a means to achieving a certain desired - albeit unhealthy - outcome (ie to become smaller/shrink myself down). Prior to this age, most likely due to as I mentioned my cognitive development at the time, if anyone had asked me "why aren't you eating properly" they would not have received a response such as "because I feel fat" or "because I want to lose weight and be smaller", instead they would've heard something along the lines of "because it makes me feel safe" or "because I feel calm when I don't eat". This is actually something that people should be aware of when dealing with childhood onset of Anorexia Nervosa, below a certain threshold of age it does not usually present as the typical case where the sufferer claims to feel "too fat" and voices a distinct desire to control their food intake in order to affect weight loss.

Fast forward to age 16. The preceding years had been taken up with an ever increasing obsession regarding food, dieting, exercise and anything on Anorexia Nervosa I could get my hands on at that time. Anorexia was a subject that fascinated me and I felt a real sense of kinship, of kindred spirit, with sufferers of the illness not realising, or rather not being willing to accept, that I was a sufferer myself. By age 16 the restrictive form of the illness had given way to the purging subtype and for the first time I began to accept that maybe I really did have a problem that I needed to address. I had had thoughts that perhaps something was quite right prior to this, from about the age of 12, but denial was a strong point in my illness and I always ended up "talking" myself out of any notions of there being a problem...."I don't have a problem I'm just on a health kick", "I don't have a problem, I'm just watching my weight", "I don't have a problem I'm just not a big eater" and so on and so forth. Finally though my wall of denial was broken for long enough that I accepted that yes I did have a problem and yes I needed help with it. So I made an appointment with a General Practitioner and set about trying to get some help for myself (bear in mind that by this stage I had already had 8 years of an active Eating Disorder...more than 7 years is considered a chronic form of the illness).

To say that the appointment didn't go well would be the absolute epitome of the word understatement. I sat in front of this man, at 5'7 weighing 42 kilos, and poured my heart out, I told him how terrified I was of eating, how not eating made me feel safe and calm, how I still felt fat despite my low weight, that indeed I desperately wanted to lose more weight. I laid all my cards on the table and was greeted with (paraphrased) "I wouldn't worry about it too much, all teenage girls go through a phase like this, you're not that thin and you haven't lost your period (NB I have never ceased menstruating in 27 years of illness and that includes at weights well into the emaciated range) so I think you're fine". Needless to say I did not try and seek help again for quite sometime after this first initial disastrous attempt to reach out. Indeed it wasn't until my illness had quite literally become life threatening (due to sever electrolyte imbalances from laxative abuse causing cardiac arrhythmia) that once again I reached out for help.

Around the age of 18 I entered into an outpatient treatment program and began attending a local support group for sufferers of Anorexia and other Eating Disorders. With the help of the support program and the limited sessions as an outpatient that I attended I managed to cease the binging and purging behaviour, although the restrictive behaviours remained a problem for me. Of course my response to this, as was my tendency, was to fall back into the seemingly safe and happy land of denial. I stopped treatment and stopped attending the support group because in my mind I firmly believed that once I "grew up", once I had my own place and my own adult responsibilities to worry about this Anorexia nonsense would somehow just miraculously go away. Obviously I was very wrong on that point and obviously it didn't.

By my early 20's I continued to struggle with the compulsion to restrict food along with the other Anorexic obsessions such as weight and the "desire/urge" to be ever thinner. Then I began using various chemical substances, Ecstasy, Acid, Speed, Pills, anything and everything I could find that would alter my consciousness in some way. I used and abused drugs for several years, culminating in an addiction to Heroin that I battled for 2 years to overcome. During this entire time I (wrongly) believed myself to be recovered from my Eating Disorder. Let's see just how recovered I really was...I still could not deal with being a normal weight or indeed being above a certain threshold of weight, I still struggled with the ability to eat normal regular meals and the drugs themselves had partly become just another method in my weight control repertoire. All the drugs managed to was to cover up the issues and push them sufficiently enough from the forefront of my mind that it allowed me to slip almost imperceptibly once more into a state of denial. The fact that during my battle with Heroin addiction a 2 kilo weight gain had me immediately reaching for a syringe full of the stuff to immediately shoot into my veins with the knowledge that it would make me violently ill and therefore hopefully register a loss of weight on the scale (and that indeed if I was honest with myself at the time, my use of Heroin was in part simply an alternative method of purging) probably should have given me some idea that perhaps I wasn't quite as "recovered" as I imagined myself to be, but denial is a funny and powerful thing sometimes. By the age of 30 I had managed to overcome my drug problem and win the battle against addiction. And forthwith, as if within a vacuum that had been left behind after the battle with drugs was over, promptly and completely "relapsed" straight back into full blown (restrictive subtype) Anorexia Nervosa.

This brings us to the present day. At the age of 31 with the help, support and encouragement of my ever patient and most loving Husband and an online support group for sufferers of Eating Disorders that I am a member of (whose name/URL will remain anonymous out of respect for the privacy of fellow members), after many years spent struggling with this illness and more years than I care to remember spent living in a world of denial, I finally began to walk along the road called Recovery. It has not been easy, there has been many a slip up, detour and even a couple of relapses along the way, but I continue to plod along, placing one foot in front of the other, taking it one day, one meal at a time and trying to remain focused on the path ahead. Currently I am partly weight restored, still technically underweight but at a safe (although obviously not desirable) level and managing (on most days) to maintain a reasonable level of nutrition. Statistically speaking, having developed my Eating Disorder during the childhood years and having a chronic form of the illness for more than 25 years, the chances of my actually making a full recovery are not that good, but the battle continues....as a very wise friend of mine once quoted to me "shoot for the moon, even if you miss you'll still land amongst the stars".