Changing bodies - ED Recovery

In my 20's, I am more conscious than ever of the changes within my body. When I was younger, I thought that my weight would never fluctuate drastically. I never thought about the amount of exercise I did. I never seen it as a chore. I would go swimming every week, play badminton, ride on my bike with the other kids in my street and eat copious amounts of sweets. Naive me thought this would stay like this forever. I am sitting here now looking at the children playing in my street. Not in some sort of creepy way but merely thinking of all the changes they are going to experience and the careless free attitude that they have. They are simply playing on their bikes, not thinking about the need to exercise at all. And why should they? I never even worried about the concept of change at all when I was that age.

There is a quote by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, who said: "Change is the only constant in life." This makes sense now more than ever. In my 20's, I feel that some days things are changing so fast and other days I do not see any change at all. Whether this be in my body or my dreams and goals in life. Change is so scary yet so liberating. The more I think about change, the anxiety creeps up on me. My first experience of significant change was when I moved to Spain for my compulsory year abroad. Of course I experienced change throughout my life: by going to university, by getting part-time jobs and then quitting them weeks later. However, I was never out of the comfort bubble of my own home. I knew that I could always return home to my mum and my bed, they were constants in my life.

But that was going to be pulled away from me. I had to move to Spain. There was no option, otherwise, I drop out of university. In a way, I think it is quite cruel that you have to go a compulsory year abroad but now I have completed it I can understand why they make you do it. I feel that I did not feel I was going my year abroad. I finished my exams in May and almost felt like I was in an empty corridor which led nowhere. I felt I had no real purpose and at a standstill, even though I was going my year abroad. In one aspect, I felt my world was completely out of control as I could not control going my year abroad and on the other hand, I felt I had no idea what to do with my life. This resulted in me being me and regaining control.

Some people regain control of their lives in strange ways. Some people let it consume them resulting in depression or endless anxiety. I had a mixture of both. My way of regaining control was through food. I thought if I controlled that one aspect of my life then it does not matter what is happening in the world around me. I slowly restricted food group after food group. No bread. No pasta. No chocolate. No crisps. No sugar. No cheese. Until I was left with a very sad looking plate of vegetables. I felt I had no goal but to lose weight. What else was I doing with my life at the moment. My own safe haven of my house became hell. I wanted to be out of the house as much as I could. I would spend all day in the gym and avoid any reason to go home and be in reaching distance of the fridge. The one enemy. If someone put a plate of rice or bread in front of me, I would feel a tight grip across my chest. It clung onto me. The anxiety of going abroad had manifested itself surrounding my food.

Eating disorders are the worst. I sometimes wished I had something else rather than my trigger being food. Nobody will realise how difficult it is until you have experienced an ED as food is everywhere. In every shop window and in every social event that you are at. It is always staring at you. Its presence consumed me to an extent. In every social event it involved food. As a society that is how we have been taught to rejoice and treat ourselves. This means that very often an eating disorder manifests itself into loneliness and isolation as you cannot enjoy the spontaneous moments of going out for dinner or having a takeaway. Rather you feel dread and fear. The isolation then manifests itself into depression. And then you are stuck in your room doing your 10th home workout for the day and feeling guilty if you are still for at least an hour.

You can escape free from its grasp. I promise you that. I got to the point where I thought medication would help me but it actually made me worse. I think that I needed to go down to the abyss to claw myself out of the disorder. When you reach a day where your heart is pounding in your chest, you are 7 stone and you think you are going to die, that is when I said to myself, "you have to eat." I decided that 1 week before moving abroad. I came off pills cold turkey 1 week before. The worst and best decision of my life. I know that if I continued to be on them, I would not have went to Spain and would have let my eating disorder consume me. When I got to Spain, my eating habits weirdly normalised. It is weird when you start eating again after an eating disorder as you kind of reach a utopia. You want to eat everything - especially chocolate - and I am positive I was eating about 5000 calories per day. Your hunger then begins to normalise and you gain weight.

THE WEIGHT GAIN. The biggest fear in recovery. I am glad that I lived in a flat in Spain and did not have access to mirrors the same as I would have when I was home. Therefore, I do not think that I noticed my weight gain as much. Also, I did not have scales. Thank god. Of course I noticed it when I no longer was able to fit into my size 6's that I bought and ended up having to buy a whole new wardrobe whilst I was over there. But for every dress size that I went up, the smile on my face grew bigger. I was becoming happier and happier. The first 6 months and even in December were amazing. I felt I was so free.

Although I do warn you that recovery is not just a limited process, it is life long. Something I have to keep reminding myself when the voice creeps in. I found in January to be the toughest, the time when the diet culture flourishes. The diet pills are posted all over instagram by celebrities as well as slimming drinks that are filled with laxatives. I did feel the thoughts creeping up on me but I simply pushed them to the back of my head. I have had relapses since lockdown, but, I do feel more able to push the thoughts to the back of my head which is a positive. I think I had this experience that recovery would last 2 months and then that is it, I would be fine. That the thoughts would go completely. Whilst for some people, that can be the case and I was at a point where food was not an issue but the minute you skip a meal I began to realise how easy it is to get into old habits.

I have accepted now that the thoughts are going to be there. The minute I listen to them is when they are going to gain control. I have control however to not listen to them. In lockdown, I felt I have relapsed a bit but nowhere near as bad.  I have went from restricting to not restricting then now back to restricting not as much. And that is okay. I will always be in recovery and that is something I am going to have to accept about my mental health. Some days I can eat bread and feel fine. Some days I have the fear that the whole world will fall apart if I have bread. It is normal that in lockdown, the latter has become more common but that is fine. For anyone in recovery, please learn to be kinder to yourself as I know that I am trying to be.

I would like to conclude this blog post by saying that I have had it written for a while in my drafts and have slowly added bits to it and taken out bits as I have went through lockdown and thought about my journey. As life has returned to a somewhat new normality now, my anxiety has gotten greater. I have embraced going out to eat twice since coming out of lockdown but I had to mentally prepare myself before and go with people who I felt comfortable with incase I did freak out. Thankfully I never which shows you that if you are in a similar situation like me that you do have control over this. 

I have basically decided this week that I am going to fully embrace recovery again. I have been tip toeing in and out of it throughout lockdown, convincing myself that I am fine but then doing compensatory behaviour like exercising way too much and hardly eating. I am fed up of it ruining my life and the experiences with my loved ones that I am missing out on. I am fed up of it ruining my relationships and me being moody constantly. I am fed up of going out for dinner being a complete mental maze when in Spain it was something so normal. It shows you that mental illnesses like eating disorders have nothing to do with the food itself but the external factors. 

I have realised that where I will be a year from now will be a reflection of the choices that I choose to make right now. This week I have decided that I am choosing recovery. I am choosing to live and not harm my body anymore. I want to focus more on the shape of my mind than the shape of my body and how much I weigh. I am reading a book which is helping me on this journey that I am going to embrace yet again. It is called "Just Eat It" by Laura Thompson and I highly recommend it for anyone who suffers with even a difficult relationship with food. 

The book advocates intuitive eating. Intuitive eating was a model developed in 1995 by two Registered Dietitians based in the US, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. These two pioneers proposed an intervention to help their patients get off the dieting merry-go-round once and for all. They developed an intervention that was designed to help people move away from external regulation of food intake such as diet plans and food rules and towards internal regulation based on physical hunger, satisfaction and satiety. I have decided I want to implement this model in my own life. 

If you, like myself, want to implement this then the book talks about the development of ten principles in order to build your intervention:

1. Reject the Diet Mentality 

2. Honour Your Hunger

3. Challenge the Food Police 

4. Make Peace with Food 

5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor 

6. Respect Your Fullness

7. Honour Your Feelings Without Using Food 

8. Respect Your Body 

9. Exercise - Feel the Difference

10. Honour Your Health with Gentle Nutrition 

The benefits of this approach are numerous. It has been attributed to increased: 

• blood glucose control 
• mental health 
• physical flexibility 
• body appreciation and satisfaction
• interoceptive awareness and responsiveness
• proactive coping 
• positive emotional functioning 
• life satisfaction 
• unconditional self-regard and optimism 
• greater motivation to exercise for enjoyment rather than guilt or appearance 
• dietary variety 
• HDL 'good cholesterol'

Recognising, understanding and acting on internal cues is fundamental to the Intuitive Eating (IE) process. These cues are biological, emotional and states such as sleepiness. Dieting, food rules and restrictions move us away from the internal experience of our bodies and disconnect us from these physical sensations. Through IE, you learn to get back in touch with the signals your body is sending. I know that it is going to take time for me to completely be an expert at IE as I have only just decided to embrace the process and my hunger cues will have to regulate. 

I fell victim to diet culture through my eating disorder. Diet culture is constantly teaching us that we are not good enough and that we need to control our bodies through rigid dieting and over exercising. It teaches us that we will be cooler or more successful if we force ourselves to look a certain way. But that comes at a huge cost for our mental health and relationship with food. And for me it is not worth it. Diet culture teaches us to conform, to monitor and manage our body and with the work of perfecting, refining, gains, body goals and whatever other bullshit. It teaches us disordered eating is the norm. 

I have decided that I want to live a way where I am liberated from food and body preoccupation. A way in which my time and energy is not squandered on chasing a narrow idea of what I should be. I ask myself, what is the worst that can happen if I say 'Fuck you' to diet culture? Who would I be if I did not define myself by how many workouts I done or clean I ate? What is my identity outside of the healthy one? 

I want to develop my politics, make noise, get angry, stand up for what I believe in and be fucking brilliant. Not at boring squats and meal prep but living my life to the fullest. Do I want to be remembered for having abs or for how thin I am? Or do I want to remembered for my fire and passion? Anyone who wants to embrace this journey of intuitive eating has everything they need right now to achieve their dreams, not two dress sizes, not a juice cleanse or Paleo diet. 

The best person to make your food choices is you, not the voice of a diet culture. We internalise the idea that we don't know how much is the appropriate amount of food to eat or what we're doing. This heightened attention to food intake creates a cognitive boundary that interferes with a more intuitive regulation of food intake. It moves us away from our own hunger and fullness cues and instead creates a preoccupation with psychological, cultural or social signs to eat. We are consumed about 'right' and 'wrong' foods that leads to anxiety, stress and guilt. It removes any sense of pleasure. We have to kick diet culture away. Get rid of diet buzzwords like:

• Cheat meal 
• Sugar free 
• Diet
• Clean Eating 
• Meal PLan 
• Gluten free when not coeliac
• Intermittent fasting 
• Low Fat
• Low Carb 
• Cleans
• Unprocessed 
• Restrict
• Syns
• Calorie Counting 
• Health Kick 
• Juice Cleanses 
• Rest Plans
• Detox
• Dairy-free (without allergy) 

The psychological, physiological and social stress of diets and the pursuit of weight loss outweigh the benefits. Over 20 years ago, researchers reviewed the 'adverse medical, metabolic and psychological health outcomes linked to weight cycling'. They found that weight cycling is associate with higher mortality, higher risk of osteoporotic fractures and gallstone attacks, loss of muscle tissue, hypertension and chronic inflammation. Not to mention disordered eating, lower self-esteem and self-worth, and more emotional distress. Restriction and deprivation of food will backfire in one or more of the following ways: 

• food obsessions and food preoccupation 
• Eating past the point of comfortable fullness
• Eating bad foods with a sense of urgency 
• Binge eating 
• Trying to compensate for eating bad foods
• Feeling a sense of guilt, shame or anxiety about eating bad foods 
• Perpetuating the binge/restrict cycle 
• Generally feeling weird around good 
• Having no mental bandwidth left to think about and focus on more important shit than food 

I have accepted the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect diet. You could have the healthiest diet ever but if you don't have a healthy relationship with food then it is not healthy. A recent meta-analysis suggests that anxiety can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. If you have food rules that make you feel anxious, then it is probably not good for you. An intuitive eating mindset can help this and is one that I am going to embrace. To tell ourselves that we deserve to enjoy eating without guilt, we need to eat to survive regardless of exercise and there is no such thing as the perfect diet. 

There are so many foods which feed into diet culture: 'healthy alternative' foods, rice cakes, zero calorie noodles, 0% fat yoghurt, sweet potato brownies or almond butter instead of real butter. Call out the diet culture bullshit. I think I am going to find the diet culture aspect the hardest not on social media but in society. The fact is that diet chat is everywhere but how do we handle people in real life who won't shut up about their new diet? The book offered handy tips for this: 

1. Flat out ignore it, pretend like you did not hear it and carry on the conversation with something relevant and interesting. 

2. Tell them all the reasons why diets don't work - that dieting slows down the metabolism so they have to eat even less to maintain their new weight. Or remind them that all the weight will pile back on, just don't be a dick about saying that. 

3. Stop them in their tracks. Hit them with a comment about how you're enjoying an intuitive eating book and it helps you tune in to your body's natural hunger and satiety cues and allows you to have a healthy relationship with food. 

4. Tell them to STFU: this takes a bit of cojones but politely ask them to keep their diet chat to themselves as it's derailing your own efforts to move away from diet and towards intuitive eating. 

I am making a promise to myself this week and the rest of my life to prioritise my mental health. I have to accept that people are going to have diet talk but I can easily walk away for some breathing space, go to the bathroom take a walk or go get a coffee. I do not have to listen to it. With intuitive eating, you cannot do anything wrong unless you use the process to lose weight. 

I have made a promise to myself this week to exercise more self-compassion to myself as life is hard enough without the voice in my head criticising me. I am not going to stress myself out if I do resort to eating disorder behaviours one day but I know that I have power to not let the voice control my whole life. Don't berate yourself for eating too much chocolate as it is going to be normal at the start of this process because you have deprived yourself of it for so long. I know that it is going to feel scary but I'd rather do that and live a fulfilling life than merely exist.