My Eating Disorder Wears Many Masks
Every time I think I’m recovered, I find my eating disorder hiding somewhere new
Every time I think I’m recovered, I find my eating disorder hiding somewhere new
CW: Eating disordered behavior.
My knee is all messed up.
My sister, who is an athletic trainer, says it’s most likely a PCL sprain, the less intense counterpart of an ACL tear. It hurts if I walk or stand for too long. It hurts if I overextend the knee joint. It hurts if I sit in the gargoyle-like, curled up posture that feels most comfortable to my autistic little brain. It hurts if I do anything but keep my knee elevated and ever-so-slightly bent. It’s been hurting for a couple weeks now and I’m starting to flip out.
Every online resource says I shouldn’t run, walk, or use an exercise bike if my PCL is sprained. If I want it to heal, I have to take it easy. That scares me a lot. I need exercise to get out my anxiety. I need long walks or runs to clear my head. It’s a mental health issue, I swear — it’s not anything compulsive or unhealthy, not this time. I just need to get all my frenetic energy out. I need to stay in good mental shape. I need to stay in good physical shape. I need to stay healthy inside and out. I need to keep moving.
Oh, fuck. This isn’t actually about mental health, is it?
It’s my own fault that my knee hurts. I’ve been using a standing desk every day, all day, for well over a year. Some of my other colleagues have desks that can convert from sitting to standing but most of the time, they sit. They only put their desks into standing mode if they need to stretch their legs for a few minutes.
I, on the other hand, deliberately use a desk that can’t change from standing to sitting. All it can do is stand. I don’t want to have the temptation to sit so I stand all day, every day. I thought the standing desk would keep me alert. I hoped it would keep my legs strong and toned and looking…
Oh, shit. This was never actually about strength, was it?
Now, my knee is totally fucked up. From what I can find online, PCL tears often occur during sports but they can also result from gradual strain. Sometimes, a PCL injury can start out so subtly that the patient can’t tell they’re in pain. Then suddenly, it’s too late.
Now that I think back on it, my knee had been hurting for months — but only in a superficial, easy-to-ignore way. Everybody gets little pains here and there. It wasn’t a big deal. It just felt a little tight and tired in the afternoon. In the mornings, I had to stretch a bit to get it to extend.
But that stuff is normal. As you get older, your body starts to hurt a little bit. You have to learn to deal with that. You can’t be a baby about it. If you want to maintain your health and functioning, you have to push through the pain and stay active. If you always stopped and sat down at the slightest bit of pain, you’d become weak. If you sat all day, think of how you’d start to look…
Oh, goddammit. This was never about staying youthful and virile, either, was it?
I guess I really do still have a fucking eating disorder.
My eating disorder has always worked damn hard to convince me that I don’t have an eating disorder. In high school, when I was regularly starving myself, I told myself that my day-long fasts weren’t long enough to count as anorexia. When I exercised for hours each night, hoping to purge every single calorie I had ingested in the past two days, I told myself that my behavior wasn’t disordered because it wasn’t like I was going to succeed. I’d set out to burn 2,000 calories, sure, but I usually failed. A real exercise bulimic wouldn’t fail at their ridiculous and unsafe goals.
My eating disorder has always worked damn hard to convince me that I don’t have an eating disorder.
And sure, I had stopped getting my period — but only for a couple of months! Then I got too hungry and it came back. I wasn’t sick enough, underweight enough, or dedicated enough to really have an eating disorder. I truly believed that. And that line of thinking conspired to make me feel simultaneously better and worse at the same time.
I didn’t have to worry and I didn’t have to change because I wasn’t good enough at being eating disordered to actually be ill. I didn’t need to get better. In fact, I needed to try harder to successfully be sick.
After high school, my eating disorder seemed to get a lot better. I didn’t starve myself anymore. I was too ravenous for that. Instead, I ate and ate and ate, and then exercised to “make up” for it, and then I ate a ton again until I made myself feel nauseated.
I was experiencing something called extreme hunger but I didn’t realize it at the time. When you’re recovering from an eating disorder, it’s common to have a huge appetite because your body is desperate to restore the nutrients it’s been deprived of for so long. Eating disorders damage many of the body’s tissues and once you start to get better, you have to consume a lot of calories to rebuild everything that has broken down. People in eating disorder recovery often require upwards of 3,000 calories per day to return to full health.
But of course, I was still in denial that I’d ever had an eating disorder. I never got to be underweight, after all. I was never hospitalized. I’d only ever gotten a handful of worried comments from friends. In my mind, I’d never gotten sick enough to need to get better. I’d never lost enough weight to deserve to gain any back. Thus, my extreme hunger was suspect, a sign of what an uncontrolled, impulsive creature I really was.
So I exercised. A lot. I spent hours on the exercise bike and hours on the treadmill. I biked all around Columbus, getting lost in neighborhoods so far away that I’d never even heard of them or seen them on a map. Then I’d have to bike back, exhausted and sweaty and starving. I’d collapse on the floor of my dorm and stuff my face with whatever sweet, fatty foods I could find lurking in the refrigerator. The next day, I’d feel guilty about my late-night binge and I’d exercise, setting the whole cycle in motion again.
In my mind, I’d never gotten sick enough to need to get better. I’d never lost enough weight to deserve to gain any back.
During this period of my life, I sincerely believed I was healthy. I had gained weight and muscle (though I felt terrible about both). I was eating. I was fit. Every moment of my day was consumed with thoughts of food and exercise, and I felt guilty about every single thing I did, but that seemed okay to me.
My eating disorder got bad again when I was in graduate school. I had a boyfriend who was obsessed with his own weight, and who dealt with his own insecurities by policing how I ate and exercised. He threw me back into bad patterns. I’d subsist on coffee and little else. I stopped exercising because I discovered that if I didn’t move my body very much, I wouldn’t notice feelings of hunger.
Then we broke up because he was abusive in dozens of other ways, on top of the body shaming and calorie counting. I told myself that he was to blame for my backslide, and that I was fine, deep down. I could go back to being healthy. Really, I’d be alright. I was already alright. There was nothing to worry about.
I started exercising again, and eating. I told myself that this meant I was recovered again. But now there were all kinds of strange rules; my eating disorder had mutated at some point during my recovery journey. It learned that if it masqueraded as guidelines for how to be “healthy” and “balanced,” it could slip into my life through the back door, and then slowly take full control of everything I did, ate, and thought about.
The rules could not be broken. I had to walk five miles every day, no matter what. If I had to travel or work all day, I’d wake up at dawn to make sure I got my miles in. It didn’t matter what the weather was like, and it didn’t matter how I felt. I went on long, snowy walks in the dead of night, even when I had the flu.
The rules were also concerned with frugality and thrift. I didn’t let myself waste money on restaurant meals. If I had dinner plans with a friend, I’d only allow myself to buy something light, small, and cheap. Often, I’d only get a drink. I told my dining companions that I was sorry, that it was rude of me but I’d just eaten. I marveled at my own good judgement and discipline.
There were rules about which groceries I could buy and when I could buy them. I only kept “safe” foods in my tiny studio apartment: apples, carrots and dip, popcorn, yogurt, cereal, nuts, and other light, morally righteous things. I had a rule that said I couldn’t buy any new food until I’d finished every scrap of food already in my house. Some days, that meant eating nothing but popcorn, or nothing but broccoli, no matter how much my stomach gurgled and cried out for more.
I started getting sick a lot more. I started feeling really damn tired. But I ignored it because there was no way I could be doing any harm to myself. I was following entirely reasonable, moderate rules.
Then I got really sick — heart murmur and anemia sick, fevers-every-single-night sick, sick for months. I was echocardiogram and blood tests sick and the doctors never figured out what it was. They wondered aloud why my body wasn’t getting enough iron, if there was some damage to my tissues that was making it leak out somewhere.
I knew by then what was going on: I wasn’t losing iron, I just wasn’t taking any in. I had to admit, after months of being too weak to walk, that my under eating and overexercising was to blame. So I changed my habits but only because I had to. I quietly increased my calorie intake, stopped exercising so hard, and feigned surprise at my hematologist’s office when my red blood cell count slowly began to creep back up.
For a year or two, I never told a soul that my illness was self-inflicted. The eating disorder was still there, buried deep inside me, waiting for another opportunity to come out wearing a new face. If I told people that it existed, this would threaten its hold on me. It was much better to chalk up my months-long sickness up to a totally random, scary fluke, or something that would obviously never come back again.
It has been about five years since that massive health scare, and I’ve been telling myself this whole time that I’m better. I’m just now realizing that’s a sign of just how sick I’ve been.
My eating disorder knows exactly how to speak in my own voice. It can take my own, real values, and warp them into something that tells me to do myself harm. Whenever I discover the damaging influence my eating disorder is having on my life, it drops its old mask and takes up a new one.
My eating disorder says I’m not sick enough. And then it says it cares about me getting exercise. Then it claims to be concerned about frugality. Then it claims to care about me striking the right “balance” between exercise and food. And then, when it gets caught yet again, it says that if I’m going to be working an office job, the least I could do is stand at my desk.
Recovering from an eating disorder is like the final, jump-scare moment of a cheap horror movie.
I fall for it every time, hook, line, and sinker. I accept every bad-faith treaty it offers. I follow every new set of rules. I keep thinking I’ve found a way to be a person with an eating disorder who does not have an eating disorder. I keep wanting to punish myself and deny myself things, without reaping any consequences for it. Congratulations: I’ve played myself.
I really thought that fucking standing desk was gonna work. It was the perfect compromise. Yet here I am, a year into using it, barely able to walk without limping.
Recovering from an eating disorder is like the final, jump-scare moment of a cheap horror movie. The villain is dead. Surprise! No, he’s not. Okay, now he’s really gone. Gotcha! He’s still alive. Okay, now you’re safe. Psych!
The more I become committed to health — real health — the more I notice how sick I truly am. I still ignore my body’s needs, especially its feelings of hunger and pain. I still regularly go all morning without eating. I still feel guilty spending money on food. When I don’t exercise, I still feel antsy and anxious, and I fret about how being sedentary will alter the body I’ve worked so hard to make peace with. I keep making forward strides, eating more and better, damaging myself less, and invariably finding that some of my steps “forward” were actually steps back into the abyss.
I want to be well but I don’t know what wellness really looks like, because my disorder has worn the mask of health for the entire time that I’ve been sick.
I keep hoping that someday, my eating disorder will drop its final mask. But maybe that kind of thinking is part of the problem. There is no exorcising this demon and no driving it away because it’s not really a demon — it’s me. The call is coming from inside the house. My eating disorder has fundamentally altered how I think, feel, and relate to my body, as well as how I deny my own limitations and faults. It’s deeply embedded into every facet of my being and I’ll have to make peace with that — and with myself — if I’m ever going to actually be well.