A Jumbled Mess of Ideas
scrappybadger May 2nd, 2007
One of my guilty pleasures is watching The View since Rosie has been a co-host (you will, no doubt, hear more about her later), and today they featured a doctor who claims that women with eating disorders begin to form their identity around the disorder. It’s funny because earlier this morning as I was grading student essays, I read a quote in one paper that said eating disorders are often accompanied by obsessive compulsive behavior, anxiety, and perfectionism. Jeez, ain’t it the truth.
I used to, and still often do, call my bulimia my “eating issue.” I told very few people about it, but when I did mention it I always heard a voice in the back of my head telling me that I was too fat for anyone to believe I had an eating disorder. The truly sick women, the ones who really deserved help or even compassion were the thin ones. Who was going to believe that someone my size had a problem with food beyond putting too much of it in my mouth? I figured that calling it an “eating issue” would get around all of that. And, of course, there was a lot of shame in admitting that I actually had a real problem.
I haven’t purged in a long time, but the thoughts are still there. I guess like any other habitual behavior it never really goes away; you just learn to manage it. As weird as it sounds, though, I miss the bulimia. It never made sense to me before, but as I was watching this show today I remembered some things I had read about bulimia several years ago. That information and the quote from my student’s essay helped it all fall into place for me. I used the binging and purging, as so many other women do, to control my body in the hopes that I could control other parts of my life, but I also used it to manage my anxiety and to punish myself for imperfections.
Without cycles of binging and purging that outlet no longer exists. That’s probably part of the reason why my anxiety and OCD tendencies have gotten worse over the years. It’s tiring for everything to feel so big all of the time. I want to be able to eat because I enjoy it, because the food tastes so damn good. Sometimes I can do that, but more often than not, I eat out of depression, anxiety, or guilt. It temporarily distracts me from worrying, but the flip side of that is that it has become so important to me, so necessary, that I rarely put anything in my mouth without worrying about the consequences. It doesn’t help that every single time I turn around someone is screaming about the so-called obesity epidemic or trying to convince the world that you are going to die if you are more than 10 pounds heavier than some arbitrarily contrived “health” chart. So there I was last night about to eat lightly salted sauteed spinach worrying about my blood pressure. A few weeks ago I couldn’t even see a piece of cheese without envisioning my clogged arteries, the high cholesterol literally choking me to death. A few weeks before that I was asking Piig to check my blood sugar, every day convinced that I was in some sugar-induced high. I’m afraid of everything that gets near my mouth no matter how high or low the fat/salt/sugar/fill-in-the-blank content.
I want to eat. I want to like it, and I don’t want to worry every time I raise my fork. I want food to be something I enjoy in life. I don’t want it to be my life.
