The Very Bad Word

Today, my psychologist said a Very Bad Word.  It had to do with my eating habits, my weight, my body image, my mental health and my self-perceptions.

If you have seen me lately, you know that I’m almost the biggest I’ve ever been.  I’m five-foot-seven and a little under 155 kgs.  I have a stomach, which I never had until about five or six years ago, and something like four chins.  My arm-flaps could knock down a footballer.  If that shocks you — well, I don’t blame you.  It shocks me, too.

You’ve probably guessed by now that the Very Bad Word starts with an F and ends with an AT.  

But you’re wrong.

In fact, the word “fat” wouldn’t have disturbed me at all.  I use it to describe myself.  It’s become a neutral term:  short, tall, fat, thin . . .  No, this word starts with an A.  

My psychologist and I were talking about my stomach pain, which has been hanging around for weeks, but was annoying me towards the end of our session.  She casually said to me, “Every one of the people I see with anorexia has stomach pain when they start eating again.”  

Anorexia.

It felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard the Very Bad Word from a therapist or clinician.  In fact, the last ten weeks have been all about moving towards an official diagnosis from a preliminary diagnosis of atypical anorexia with a sub-set of binge eating.  I’ve been attending art classes for people with eating disorders.  I’ve been through an eight-week counselling programme.  This was my third session with a specialist eating-disorder psychologist.  So it’s not as if it were a surprise for the word to come up, but it was still a shock.

I don’t think I’ve fully come to terms with it yet.  The treatment, I’ve been told, will take a while — probably two years to really see a difference — but it seems that letting the diagnosis sink in also takes a while.  

I’ve done studies on anorexia at school and at uni.  That’s other people.  Anorexic people are skinny and they count calories and they think they look fat even when their rib cages are sticking out and their thigh gaps are the size of the Grand Canyon.  That’s how that works.  Right?

Apparently not.  One of the best-kept secrets of the diet and medical industries is that atypical anorexia is actually more like typical anorexia.  According to the estimates I’ve seen, anywhere from 30% to 60% of people (women, particularly) with eating disorders are “overweight” or “obese”.  But we don’t count because, when we lose weight using the same behaviours that people with typical anorexia employ, we’re praised for “getting healthier”. 

I’ve been wondering why the word being applied to me today bothered me so much.  

It does explain a few things, like the chunks of hair that fall out of my head every day, and the cystic acne that still plagues me at the age of 42, my body’s low-responsiveness to depression and anxiety medications, and likely even some of the depression and anxiety itself, which I’ve learned can be hunger signals manifesting themselves.  It also helps explain the weight.  While I put it on because of a certain medication mixed with a particularly bad time with my mental health and having to move back to Australia from the UK when I didn’t really want to, it stays on, I’m told, because of the food restriction.  That’s why I can drink, on doctor’s orders, meal-replacement shakes for weeks and barely lose anything.  My body is constantly in starvation mode, and it holds on to every single molecule it can get, because it doesn’t know when the next meal is coming.  The body is pretty darn smart.  It’s likely that I have largely been living on milk for decades.  I crave it because it’s keeping me alive and it’s soothing.

I think the reason it’s hard for my brain to compute all this is the same reason I have the illness in the first place:  I’ve spent 42 years in a world that’s told me I’m too big (in more ways than one), that attaches moral judgements to “good” and “bad” food, that celebrates diets and thinness as “health”, that discounts people who don’t fit the mould, that tells fat people they’re greedy and lazy and makes no accommodation for us (just this weekend I was told Bonza airline won’t let me buy two seats) — the world in which I walk down the street, catch sight of someone in a shop window and think, “Oh, that poor woman”, before realising she’s me.  I’m still telling myself I eat too much.  I’m still telling myself I’m unacceptable.  I’m still telling myself I have no self-control.

Of course, the causes of anorexia in any one person are numerous.  It’s not just that I grew up on stage in the 80s and 90s, when Kate Moss and Heroin Chic ruled the catwalks.  It’s not just that everyone around me, all my life, seemed to be on a diet, or cutting out dairy and wheat, or whatever the latest fad was, or talking about how they ate “so bad” today. 

It’s also that I’ve been in pain my whole life from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, so I’ve dissociated from my own body to mask the pain, thus inadvertently dulling the other signals, too, like needing to go to the toilet or — you know — needing to eat.

It’s also that I hit puberty before my peers and I was taller than almost all of them.

It’s also that I have never found a group of friends who like the same (admittedly very wide) range of things as I do and with whom I feel completely comfortable and in my element.

It’s also that I was constantly told I couldn’t be a professional dancer because I was too tall and too muscular.

It’s also that my ballet costumes always had to be two sizes bigger than everyone else’s.  And I always had to play the boy.

It’s also that I can’t dress as “me”, because I have to wear whatever I can get hold of that fits.

It’s also that it’s a genuine effort to eat, because it’s exhausting and it hurts.

It’s also that I was never a “girly” girl, but preferred to hang out with my male friends, who mostly saw me as a little sister or “one of the guys”.

It’s also that I’ve never been asked out on a date, so I never got to marry or have kids.

I’ve never fitted, and my body doesn’t, either.  It doesn’t fit the “healthy” image or the “anorexic” image in most people’s minds.  In my own mind.

I’m in that strange place where my conscious mind knows the facts about eating disorders and health, but my subconscious hasn’t taken hold of them yet.  That’s where the work comes in, I suppose.

This week I start the process of reprogramming my brain.  Thank God He made our brains plastic.  It involves lots and lots and lots . . . and lots . . . of repetition, which I know I will find hard, but also involves sparkly Play-Doh, so it’s not all bad.