Explaining Ana ...
I wanted to write a few things down and hopefully clear your confusion even if just a little.
This eating disorder isn’t new to me but it is to you and I can fully understand why you don’t get it. I mean no one really “gets” and you can’t get it unless you’ve lived it.
It’s not about food, well it wasn’t to start with, it’s about control. When things aren’t going well/are out of balance in my life, I’ve needed to feel like I am in control of something. I want to feel good about myself, like myself, be happy with who I am.
I don’t know when it started or how or why…. But it’s triggered by different things and different stressors and now it’s just a habit and my life.
I remember in high school, I was always the one people would come to if they wanted advice on food, how to eat healthy, what to eat, calories, fat, exercise …..
When you and mum broke up, my car accident and other things happened – controlling my food, counting my calories and having something to focus on rather than the cr*ppy stuff and the emotions behind events made me feel better and made me feel good about myself.
Moving to the UK and living with Kelly and co. was the best thing I did – before I went away I was losing weight and struggling but I didn’t realise I had a problem, Kelly helped me realise that i did in fact have a problem and she helped me re-focus my attention away from calories and weight and onto traveling. Those 2 years while I was away, Kelly helped me so much – don’t know how exactly, can’t pin point what she did or how but it helped me to re-create myself and my identity as a traveller and I was doing so well, then coming home and finding everything the same I lost that feeling and struggled to settle back in.
My friends were all different, everything was changing and it was hard… so I started counting calories again, knowing full well what I was doing wasn’t right and that what I was doing was disordered but it made me feel better about myself and made it easier to cope with everything on a day to day basis. And I thought I could stay on top of it.
I go in cycles – I restrict for a while, then hit breaking point and start eating again and that then leads to purging my food and then I feel worse about myself and I self-harm, but then I hate that so much so start to try and get better and gain weight but hate myself so start restricting again.
After a visit to hospital one night last February I was referred to Manukau mental health team where they initially diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder because of the fact I self-harmed, had trouble with relationships and had such extremities of emotions… I was under the team in Manukau and was doing the DBT therapy and going to a group on Wednesday afternoons and starting to see an improvement in the managing emotions and relationships but not so much in the eating …… then I moved to town and was transferred to the Taylor centre where I carried on the DBT therapy… having group on Tuesday mornings and one on one with a psychologist every week to teach me how to manage my emotions and not run from them. During this time the “professionals” all decided that the eating disorder was a result of the BPD (borderline personality) and that if they treated the BPD the eating would improve.
Then I broke my arm – which I think has triggered the big relapse. I was focused solely on squash and doing so well, and breaking my arm put a damper on everything… Now they think the BPD is in fact a result of the eating disorder and so I have been referred on to REDS (regional eating disorder service) to get serious help with ONLY the eating disorder and hopefully life will be normal.
I had been doing so well this year, eating ok but not liking myself at all and now that I have lost weight I feel good, I am liking myself more when I am losing weight, yet I never feel thin.
I have managed to hide this very well from a lot of people for a number of years.
This is no-one’s fault but telling me to eat something isn’t helping – it’s like telling someone with depression to cheer up, or someone with a broken arm to harden up. It feels like an addiction sometimes, I am addicted to losing weight!
This is a mental illness and I have to work through things one step at a time and hopefully this referral with REDS is the start of the recovery process.
I hope this sheds some light for you…. I wanted to try and explain this in person but I know that I would probably just end up crying and not saying what I wanted to say.
I will be ok, I always am
Lots of love
Amz
I wanted to write a few things down and hopefully clear your confusion even if just a little.
This eating disorder isn’t new to me but it is to you and I can fully understand why you don’t get it. I mean no one really “gets” and you can’t get it unless you’ve lived it.
It’s not about food, well it wasn’t to start with, it’s about control. When things aren’t going well/are out of balance in my life, I’ve needed to feel like I am in control of something. I want to feel good about myself, like myself, be happy with who I am.
I don’t know when it started or how or why…. But it’s triggered by different things and different stressors and now it’s just a habit and my life.
I remember in high school, I was always the one people would come to if they wanted advice on food, how to eat healthy, what to eat, calories, fat, exercise …..
When you and mum broke up, my car accident and other things happened – controlling my food, counting my calories and having something to focus on rather than the cr*ppy stuff and the emotions behind events made me feel better and made me feel good about myself.
Moving to the UK and living with Kelly and co. was the best thing I did – before I went away I was losing weight and struggling but I didn’t realise I had a problem, Kelly helped me realise that i did in fact have a problem and she helped me re-focus my attention away from calories and weight and onto traveling. Those 2 years while I was away, Kelly helped me so much – don’t know how exactly, can’t pin point what she did or how but it helped me to re-create myself and my identity as a traveller and I was doing so well, then coming home and finding everything the same I lost that feeling and struggled to settle back in.
My friends were all different, everything was changing and it was hard… so I started counting calories again, knowing full well what I was doing wasn’t right and that what I was doing was disordered but it made me feel better about myself and made it easier to cope with everything on a day to day basis. And I thought I could stay on top of it.
I go in cycles – I restrict for a while, then hit breaking point and start eating again and that then leads to purging my food and then I feel worse about myself and I self-harm, but then I hate that so much so start to try and get better and gain weight but hate myself so start restricting again.
After a visit to hospital one night last February I was referred to Manukau mental health team where they initially diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder because of the fact I self-harmed, had trouble with relationships and had such extremities of emotions… I was under the team in Manukau and was doing the DBT therapy and going to a group on Wednesday afternoons and starting to see an improvement in the managing emotions and relationships but not so much in the eating …… then I moved to town and was transferred to the Taylor centre where I carried on the DBT therapy… having group on Tuesday mornings and one on one with a psychologist every week to teach me how to manage my emotions and not run from them. During this time the “professionals” all decided that the eating disorder was a result of the BPD (borderline personality) and that if they treated the BPD the eating would improve.
Then I broke my arm – which I think has triggered the big relapse. I was focused solely on squash and doing so well, and breaking my arm put a damper on everything… Now they think the BPD is in fact a result of the eating disorder and so I have been referred on to REDS (regional eating disorder service) to get serious help with ONLY the eating disorder and hopefully life will be normal.
I have an immense fear of gaining weight … as I say it never started out being about the weight and how I looked but now it is. I only wanted to feel good and be in control of my life and now the eating, the fear, the need to be thin, but feeling so fat and disgusting controls me. It’s a little voice in my head that as much as I hate it, I also love it. It feels like a friend to me in a world of madness sometimes. When things go wrong I know I have something to fall back on and rely on to make me feel good, yet also feel worse.
I had been doing so well this year, eating ok but not liking myself at all and now that I have lost weight I feel good, I am liking myself more when I am losing weight, yet I never feel thin.
I have managed to hide this very well from a lot of people for a number of years.
This is no-one’s fault but telling me to eat something isn’t helping – it’s like telling someone with depression to cheer up, or someone with a broken arm to harden up. It feels like an addiction sometimes, I am addicted to losing weight!
This is a mental illness and I have to work through things one step at a time and hopefully this referral with REDS is the start of the recovery process.
I hope this sheds some light for you…. I wanted to try and explain this in person but I know that I would probably just end up crying and not saying what I wanted to say.
I will be ok, I always am
Lots of love
Amz
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