How to cope when a friend has an ED too.

So, my dilemma is this - I'm recovering from my eating disorder and I think my recover is going so-so so far (which is no small achievement!) but I have a friend with an ED too, and she's struggling. She's not someone I met through a support group or anything. I knew her before either of us had any issues with food and eating. We were at school together from the age of 11, in the same friendhship group and always got on well.

Unfortunately, however, our decent into the dark world of ED coincided. We did an internship at the same place the summer we were both turned 17. My friend (let's call her Jane) had just started the Atkins diet, even though she was slim, healthy and beautiful. I was already starting to worry about my weight and calorie count. I think, on some level, her extreme dieting motivated me to go to take my restrictive eating to another level. By the end of the summer we were both looking noticably unwell. Our weights had plummetted and neither of us could function well in school because we were on such low-calorie diets. However, whereas I managed to drag myself back to weight that was non-anorexic (although still unhealthily low for my height) over the course of the next year or so, Jane just got worse. She ended up in and out of different eating disorders treatment hospitals for the next two years, until something snapped and she found the strength to gain weight, enough weight to convince doctors to discharge her, let her move on with her life and go to university etc.

But, like so many people (including myself) her issues with food and weight were far from over. Three years have now passed since she was finally discharged from hospital, and she still uses her eating as a way to cope with stress, just as I sometimes do. But, whereas I feel I'm making some progress, I think she's going backwards, and I don't think she's committed to complete body-mind recovery in the way I am. The problem is, when I see her, it sometimes destabilises me. I look at her - she is still very beautiful and glamorous - and I wonder whether I might not look better in jeans if my legs were as thin as hers. Its a dangerous path to go down. But what do I do? Do I cut her out of my life completely, after over 10 years of friendship? It seems a shame and, to be honest, I'm not even sure it's an option because we have so many friends in common. I would love to have the strength to continue to be a good friend to her, without letting her issues effect the way I feel about myself, and perhaps I do have the strength to do that....but I'm not sure, and maybe hanging out with her is therefore too much of a risk. I'm really at a loss as to what to do in this situation. If anyone has experienced anything similar, I'd love to hear your stories and if anyone has any wise words, I'd appreciate it.

Calorie counting and coping

Yesterday, I felt like I was doing so well. I’d eaten a snack without agonising over it, eaten a breakfast without weighing the cereal. Then came lunch time. I went out for lunch on my lunch break, went to a salad bar (Tossed) and promptly began to agonise over what to chose. It doesn’t help that each sandwich has a little card next to it with the calorie content. Eventually I chose a feta cheese salad. Choosing feta was brave, and I even had a vinaigrette on it, but it didn’t fill me up. On the way back to work I stopped off at Pret a manger and bought their Love Bar and ate half of it. Back at work I resisted and resisted looking up the calorie content of my lunch on line (both Tossed and Pret have online nutritional info) but after 20 mins I caved. There I was, back to square one, calorie counting. And, what’s more, it was awful! 484 calories! A whole 184 calories outside my comfort zone! I felt like screaming: ‘Will there ever be a day when I can eat a filling meal without agonising over it before and after?’

But then, something interesting happened. It got to 4pm (the time that I’m usually crawling the walls with hunger) and I felt.....fine. I could concentrate on my work without being distracted by a gnawing feeling in my stomach. Even by the time I left work I was still only peckish, not ravenous, which meant I could chose a pre-dinner snack calmly and sensibly. Suddenly a 484 calorie lunch didn’t feel like such a big deal after all. Sometimes, I guess, you have to sit-out the bad feelings in order to get to the point where you feel okay. I suspect that's true for short-term situations but also for longer-term recovery.

I've got the power!

 Personally, I’ve found my eating disorder very disempowering, and I know a lot of other people do to. People who binge often feel that they are at the mercy of their compulsion to eat. As someone who restricts what I eat and when, I’ve come to behave as if the rules I’ve lived by for so long were imposed on me by something separate from me, and more powerful than me. In fact, on a subconscious level, I think I believe that they really are externally imposed rules – as if special food police are ready-and-waiting to arrest me if I dare to eat a BLT or eat my morning snack before 11am. My therapist would call this ‘faulty’ thinking…. most people would call it bonkers. In an effort to unlearn it, I’ve decided to remind myself constantly that I have free choice in everything I do: that I am responsible for me. When I start to feel guilty about ‘breaking’ a rule or start to feel trapped by my rules, I am trying to remember to say to ask myself: ‘what do you chose to do?’ That way, even when I’m making bad choices for myself, at least I’m acknowledging them honestly as my own decisions, reminding myself that I could have made different ones and reinforcing my sense of my own self-determination. 

Interestingly, I've found this empowering not only when making decisions to do with eating, but also in the rest of my life. For example, yesterday I decided not to go out shopping with friends, but to spend the day studying at home instead (I'm taking a correspondence course). I was feeling so sorry for myself that it was distracting me from my work. I kept thinking, 'this is so unfair. My friends can go out and have fun, while I have to work. If I didn't have such pushy parents/ academic insecurities instilled in me by cruel primary school teachers/ such a puritanical drive to 'better myself' etc etc, then I could be having fun too!'. This went on and on until I stepped back and asked myself: 'What do I chose to do? It's not to late to call my friends. I could still go shopping'. I considered, then decided I'd rather get the work out of the way, so I wasn't trying to frantically do it after work over the next week. Decision made. I was able to go back to work feeling like a self-determining, responsible adult (well, for 10 minutes or so at least). 

Let me know what mind-tricks have you found helpful to reclaim power from your eating disorder.  

Ps. I find this trick works best if you have Snap!'s 'The Power' playing in your head at the same time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BRv9wGf5pk

Eating Disorder recovery - the alternative gap year trip

So, I know I sounded all but defeated in my last post. Well, the good (or bad?) news is, apparently, that's a normal part of recovery. According to the psychologist and ED specialist Glenn Waller, recovery from an eating disorder can be likened to a long-trek across the coastline of South America. When we start treatment, we usually think we've hit rock bottom and that things will improve smoothly now that we've sought help, but then we realize we're in southern Chile baby, and things start to get really tough as we confront everything in our lives without having our eating disorder to plaster over the pain. It's only after a long time that the positive changes will become obvious and we'll start to see the top-most tip is we make our way up through Brazil.  

I don't know if Glenn's predictions of eventual improvement will prove true for me. But I do know that its helpful to believe that they will. And I really do believe its worth believing anything that will help you recover. As I wait to find out for sure, I guess all I can do it buckle down and keep eating. 

A whinge for a rainy day

I have to confess to being on a bit of a downer today. This recovery thing is definitely not all smooth sailing and sunny skies. Not being hungry and not obsessively counting calories frees up a hell of a lot a head space to take a long hard look at your life and, frankly, I'm not sure I like what I see. At school, I was a straight-A student, the lead part in plays, editor of the magazine, head girl etc etc. People predicted good things for me and, to be honest, I did too. My struggles with eating should perhaps have been a hint that being a high-flyer was taking its emotional toll, but I believed I was a sharp, committed, ambitious person who would go far. Since graduating, however, my attempts at a career have been little short of pathetic. I find it hard to commit to whatever I'm doing. Whenever I get anywhere along one path, I become anxious that it won't work out or that it's not the right thing for me. I'm not sure if this has had anything to do with my eating, although I have heard a few other people with EDs mention that they too struggle with indecisiveness. Any thoughts?

Is there a genetic component to EDs?

In her comment on my post 'Why I chose hunger', Renee pointed out that I hadn't mentioned genetics in my post. The issue of whether there's a genetic component to eating disorders is one I personally find pretty interesting and am undecided on. 


 I think it's pretty much an established statistic that people with a first degree relative with an ED are more likely to develop one themselves than people without. However, since family members tend to share the same environment and tend to influence one another, we can't be certain whether EDs run in families as a result of nature or nurture. Studies which compare the prevalence of EDs in genetically identical twins (monozygotic) verses non-identical (dizygotic) twins are a bit more helpful. In my research of my problem, I came across a study by Holland & Kendler which took a whole bunch of anorexics who happened to be twins and checked whether their twin hand an eating disorder too. They found that, where one a twin has anorexia nervosa, there's a 55% chance that her twin also does if her twin is identical, but only a 7% chance if her twin is non-identical. This does seem to suggest there's a genetic component involved. Some researchers even think they're getting closer to identifying a gene that might make carriers more vulnerable to anorexia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC384957/ 


My real difficulty with the genetic theory is not really evidence, though, so much as whether its helpful to my recovery. For me personally, focusing on the genetic arguments doesn't motivate me to work on recovery. Instead, it leaves me feeling hopeless - like a victim of my genes. After all, you can't change your genes. So, I prefer to remember that 45% anorexic girls in Holland & Kendler's study, had a genetically identical twins who hadn't followed their sisters along the self-starvation road. How inspiring is that?! Imagine having a twin who looks exactly like you and thinks they're fat and refuses to eat, and yet finding the strength to just soldier on, stay healthy, and ignore the pressure to diet. What that tells me is that we can over-ride the power of any genetic pre-disposition we may or may not have, if we stay strong. That's what I want to do, so that's what I chose to focus on. 

The Conflict.

One of the worst things about my current state as a ‘recovering’ under-eater/anorexic/whatever, is the indecisiveness that overwhelms me on a daily basis. I spend literally hours each day trying to decide what to eat. Some people suggest that eating disorders leave us disconnected from our bodily desires, making it difficult for those in recovery to know what they want or need to eat. But I think for me, it's chiefly because I’m still conflicted about what to eat now that I’m trying to fully recover. I’m constantly torn between the wish to eat what I feel psychologically comfortable eating (ie. what I know won’t send me into ‘Oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-wake-up-a-whale-mode') and the wish to eat what I crave or what I know will keep me energised for the next few hours. On a wider level, I’m conflicted between my nice, predictable eating disorder rules and the ‘great-unknown’ of spontaneous, unrestricted eating.  

In her book ‘Goodbye Ed, Hello Me’ Jenni Schaefer talks about how import it is to let go of all of your restrictive eating patterns and allow your body to find its natural weight. She uses the metaphor of parachuting off a mountain. The problem is, even though I definitely want to get the hell off the mountain, I still can’t trust that my parachute will open. But perhaps the alternative, continuing restricting, is even more dangerous? I’ve been doing it for years – keeping my weight just below normal. Sometimes it feels okay for a period, but at other times it makes me uptight, disconnected from life and preoccupied with food and weight. In the long-term, it risks my health and has probably contributed to some of my relapses. But committing to letting go completely still feels like a big ask.