Eating disorders and AS

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Self absorbtion/ thanks for listening

Yesterday I looked up charts online to see what a healthy body mass index would be. They say I'm only fifteen pounds away from a healthy hight weight ratio. I could have sworn that it's moved since I last checked; I've had a goal weight of 155 for basically as long as I can remember, but now it says that even at 5'7 I'm not "healthy" till I hit the 140s.

This comes up, you see, because I've lost some weight again, accidentally, which seems to be the only way it ever happens. In general I've tried to live by three rules about food, listed here in order from most frequently to least frequently broken:

1. Don't eat crap

2. Eat

3. No throwing up.

These, I would have thought, were good rules, suitable to my obsession with health and my need for my body to perform as a dancer.

I'm mad, though, I feel betrayed- it seems to me that perhaps these rules weren't such decent guidelines after all. I didn't believe the scale the first time it told me I had lost ten pounds, that I was that much closer to being "healthy," because I associate health with following those rules, and lately I've been bothering less and less with number two.

I have fought with this before- but never so obviously.

No logic, I understand, but there it is. I've been subsisting on about 1700 calories a day less than what's reccomended for my age and activity level, somewhere around a thousand calories a day. Thirty percent below what's considered a starvation diet, if you're counting, and we all know I'm counting. I begin to see the appeal of this lifestyle, because at the moment it's not even hard; I eat enough to not be dizzy, or almost, and the hunger becomes a dull, safe emptiness that I carry with me comfortably. I can even see how so many people say it makes them feel safe, feel in control, feel good, virtuous, pure. After little more than a week, I become full quite easily, and three hundred fifty calories at once makes me nauseated.

Without excess.

And, after all, so far this is only making me more healthy. That is what the doctors say.

I wonder how many women wouldn't become anorexic if anyone knew how to respond to a post like this, if a post like this weren't so universally treated as a cry for attention, rather than an honest attempt to discuss the complexities and injustices involved. We need, as a culture, to quit forbidding real discussion by those to whom a subject is personal, who'se objectivity is so obviously compromised.

I'm not looking for people to tell me I need to eat.

Not to state the obvious, but it's not going to help; I know I should eat. I get the feeling most of us know we should eat; that's not what it's about. And I will eat; somehow I will, I'll find a balance between these contradictory rules and the bizzare dictates of my own physiology.

And meanwhile, I'll try to be angry.

Angry that I have to let my goal weight move, that I feel deeply the impulse to just keep going with this until I'm small enough for ballet.

Angry that there is no f*****g "small enough for ballet."

Angry that two and a half mellenia of western medicine can't give me anything like a straight answer about how I should choose to eat.

Angry that I have a goal weight.

But mostly, I'll be trying to convince myself to want to eat- to want to relinquish the emptiness that matches me so well- and I will be abandoning this peacefull and destructive silence.

Don't adjust


Today I spent several hours talking to a boy who had previously been only a passing aquaintance, name of Greg. He's a commie, an anarchist, and a philosopher, a highly functional drunk with beautiful brown eyes.

I don't expect anything to come of it, though I am attracted to him, but today's conversations were satiating, interesting, and most desperately usefull. We talked about language and communication and reality, about culture and to a lesser degree music. At the end we talked a little about past relationships, and at the beginning, as well as the end, we talked a little about food.

I mentioned, as I casually have to various people for the past several days, that I haven't been eating- but then more than that. . . I wanted to know what he would think. I told him matter-of-fact-ly about how it had just come up, how it doesn't technically meet the diagnostic criteria, how I had only eaten 600 calories so far but I really should get to African.

He said yes I had an eating disorder; any thing I have to define with a "technically" should be obvious that way. He asked if I have big issues with body image; he listened, he laughed when I mentioned stress and told me that was his next question. . . was I under any extreme phychological stress?

Uh, well, er, um, yes, actually. Come to think of it.

Interspersed with all this were bits and pieces of normal conversation, he didn't freak out or over-react but he didn't fail to react, and I felt. . . thank you God, having already thanked Greg- I felt listened to. I felt as if I had connected to another human being, just as if I had talked, and I was hungry for it, I hadn't had that feeling for the longest time. He asked me what Liked to eat, and I flippantly said chocolate.

He said, eat breakfast. Get a good multivit and eat a chocolate bar for brekkie, and break another one into pieces if you have to to eat throughout the day so your body doesn't think it's starved. He was headed home, hours after he had planned to, had organic tofu nuggets waiting for him, and was willing to give me a ride or whatever if I'd like to follow so we could keep talking. Ever so casual, and I didn't notice till well after he'd gone- he was going to feed me.

Oh.

The significance of this act is impossible to convey, providing you already don't understand. There is something about the provided nourishment, the acknowledgement of truth when truth was so badly needed. It was a quiet, unattached offering to my body of nourishment and comfort that I had somehow, convolutedly decided it could no longer have.

I went to the locker room to change for African (dance class) and somewhat wanted to cry; it was pounding me on the back, waving it's arms on my face, somehow I had been made a little more ready but still clearly forced to admit to the facts written on the wall. It was five days ago that I first noticed that I really have to eat, that I admitted to myself that I really had to make a change. Out of those days, only once, yesterday, did I break 1200 calories- and I had been preparing to go dance for another hour and then go home and sleep, this time on about 600. It came so quick, but I can no longer deny the problem is real, not a fluke, a real problem. I walked shivering to my car, considering my options, and drove numbly to fresh food junkies. Something broke inside me when I realized that I couldn't go in, that no matter what the food was I had in front of me there would be something too wrong, something not good enough so I wouldn't, couldn't eat it.

I went home and, at some point, ate.

I also asked my older sister for help. I told her that I didn't know exactly what I would most really need, but I that this was something I needed to fix. Something I think she could help me fix. Nancy feeds people. Sometimes it might be I will need to be fed.

One other thing with Greg that was- well, that was a something- was the way he reacted when I told him about crying all the time in high school. I was trying to help him understand my friend Melissa, who he'd alienated in about two seconds with his most unfollowable academic language, and who I'd like, at some point, for him to actually meet. Not a high priority, but. . . anyway, I was trying to describe how it can be hard to break out of the world you were raised in, and I told him about the days- though it was more like weeks, really- when I would go from class to class and keep on crying, always sure it was about to stop. Wrong, generally. I'm not sure that he quite accepted it all the way, the point I was trying to make, but he did have, seem to have, a certian strong and clean respect for my experience.

He's the first person I've ever told who clearly and completely seems to believe that my depression is not an unreasonable response to this ugly, unreasonable world- that it is, in fact, the only reasonable response that is or has been possible. In paraphrase of Ariel Gore, to "adjust" myself, to attempt to adjust to this world and this system- that could very possibly be the real problem. He doesn't see me as the thing that is sick. For real. How very, very new. Strange. Different. Unnerving somehow, inside. Deep, in a non slang related way. I am not the part that's sick; I could be not the part that's sick. I would like it, if I dared.

It's so strange, to be perceved as whole, or as anything like it. It's a strange feeling, but one I already think I could grow to like. It's strange, but however uncertianly, I believe I already have come to like it. It's something I hope I may not grow addicted to. Not the piece that is sick. It could be hard to find a source.

I struggled with eating disorders for over a decade. In hindsight I realize that it was the only way I could communicate. It was sort of (1) I'm punishing myself enough already, so world, you can stop and (2) it was a way to make my inner struggle tangible, visible to others, when I could not communicate it otherwise.

I would also think that the torture many of us faced at the hands of our peers would make us more prone, not less. While society says anorexia is about fashion, it isn't. It was never, for me, about looking beautiful or fitting in (no pun intended).