Anorexia Nearly Swallowed Me Whole, While I Could Barely Eat a Bite
It would try to destroy me for nearly a decade
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It was a profoundly sobering moment, and one I will never forget. It’s as clear in my heart and mind as if it happened this very afternoon.
It was the terrible moment I heard that Karen Carpenter, brilliantly gifted singer and drummer, was dead at 32 years old. After years of battling anorexia, her badly damaged heart had finally given out.
This was the moment when the world first became aware of this deadly disease, and it happened when I was in the throes of my own dangerous dance with that particular devil.
At the time, I was in my early 20s, a divorced mum of two little girls and living in my parents’ basement. I had been thin my whole life, never giving any thought to my weight. But over the previous few years, something more than nature had been keeping me thin. Too thin, in fact.
A sequence of disturbing events had pushed me into a suffocating relationship with food. I was at war with it; food was The Enemy. It felt like a battle of wills: what food demanded of me versus what I wanted for myself. How I wished I never had to eat again. I hated food, hated that I was expected to force it down my throat, whether I wanted it or not — and I really did not.
I had become its hostage, my mind trapped in its death grip. And I had no idea that I was in danger.
Living with anorexia is a special kind of hell. Actually, I should say, “Dying with anorexia…” because that’s the truth of what’s happening every single tormented moment that this monster is chewing on your soul. It’s not only happening physically, but your damaged psyche entices — seduces — you into not allowing yourself the tiniest morsel. Self-denial becomes your superpower.
A soulless killer, anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders, including other eating disorders. The risk of death by suicide among anorexic women is “…as much as 57 times the expected rate of a healthy woman.” And anorexics often choose the most gruesome, lethal methods, leaving no doubt that it was “not simply a cry for help gone wrong” but that they were determined to die. Source
And in case it can’t convince you to deliberately end your life, anorexia has its own methods of getting its way. It attacks “…nearly every system in the human body. Like an aggressive form of cancer, it won’t stop until it wins…” Source
Anorexia has a will of its own. It is a living, breathing, rotting, foul menace that takes up residence deep in your soul. It rips its deadly claws into you and bloody well won’t let go.
It is your master; you are its slave.
The half-pear in the bowl might as well have been a giant, gelatinous cow eye. I had been staring at this miserable villain for an hour. Pacing back and forth across the kitchen, I swear I must have worn a rut in the floor.
Taunting me, the pear dared me to take just one bite, even a little nibble, while everything inside me screamed, “NOOOOO!” My teeth clenched a little harder. My stomach knotted a little tighter. My heart pounded a little faster. My body rebelled as did my mind. No way in hell will that bloody effing half pear pass between these pursed lips.
Every day, every meal, it was the same. This day was no different. Tormented by my thoughts, the same relentless argument was exhausting.
You have to eat.
I can’t. I can’t!You must.
All those calories? No, no, no! I couldn’t.
What about your children?
What about them?
You’re a hypocrite. You cram healthy foods down their throats and tell them how important it is to eat well and look at you, demonizing half a pear.
I had no answer for the sneering voice in my head. I knew it was the truth. But I simply could not eat that vile bit of fruit.
My best bet for choking down some food was to find a distraction, often in the form of ringing one talkative friend or another. By the end of the call, I would discover that I’d managed to eat the small portion of food I’d been attempting to consume.
How I ached for one blessed moment of peace! How desperately I wished I could dig my long nails into my brain and tear out every miserable, tormented syllable about food once and for all.
But there would be no peace for me, not for a long time.
My food nightmare had begun a few years earlier with the birth of my first child and the rapid onset of post-partum psychosis — a rare and little-known mental health emergency that is often missed or misdiagnosed. I’d already been dealing with emetophobia (extreme phobia of vomiting) throughout my teens. Within weeks of giving birth at 18, suddenly I was having bizarre delusions about food. Certain that everything was contaminated or “off” and would make me sick, I ate very little for months.
Every waking minute involved a battle between my irrational fears of being sick and my tormented thoughts about needing to eat. My weight dropped to an alarming point about mid-way through that first year until finally, with the passage of time and moving away from the post-partum period, the symptoms began to subside. As I approached my daughter’s first birthday, the psychotic delusions were slowly decreasing. I appeared to be on my way to a somewhat healthier (albeit minimal) weight.
I thought I was out of the woods. But my toxic relationship with food wasn’t ready to release its death grip just yet.
I couldn’t tell you when I had that first awareness of loving being thin, or how much I enjoyed the sensation of an empty stomach. I didn’t notice when the psychotic delusions had been quietly replaced with a growing desire to be a lot thinner than I already was.
All I knew for sure was that my food nightmare had merely shapeshifted from “I’m terrified I’ll be sick” to “I need to lose weight.” So by the time I was divorced and my girls and I were living with my parents, anorexia had me well and truly in its clutches.
And my mother had me firmly in hers, too.
I should have been used to her insults, constant put-downs, and controlling comments. She had always been this way with me. She had never liked me from the moment I was adopted, so I had left home at 16.
But old habits die hard, especially when they’re rooted in deep-seated beliefs from childhood. Her behaviour toward me cut deeply and left me feeling small and filled with shame for existing. I felt guilty for taking up space on the planet — and in her home — and wished I could disappear.
I tried, tried, tried to please her, hoping she might finally like me a little and ease up on the hurtful comments, but whatever I did, it was always the wrong thing. I’d say black, she’d say white. I’d say, okay, white. She’d say, no, it’s black. No matter what I chose or did or said, I was always dancing to the wrong tune. Being a failure. Hearing how completely pointless I was.
The more controlling and insulting my mother was, the more I loved being excessively thin. And buying smaller clothes. I delighted in wearing the same size as I’d worn when I was about 12 years old.
I had zero self-esteem. I absolutely hated myself and had nothing resembling any sense of confidence. My former husband had long since left the province and I was an anxious, dependent mess. I’d never had to live on my own and support myself, and now I had the massive responsibility of supporting my children, too.
I knew only one thing for sure: I had to get out of that house.
I was self-employed, working from home typing Court transcripts. As a high school dropout with no work experience, it was perfect and meant I didn’t need to worry about child care. But it was unpredictable work, and along with a historic recession, I wasn’t earning enough to move out. And I was in no fit state to cope with the frequent verbal abuse and personal attacks by my mother. I didn’t think I could hate myself any more than I already did. Somehow, I kept finding new lows. And so did my weight.
Mealtimes were always a challenge, especially if my parents were around. I had to be a moving target, finding or making excuses as to why I wasn’t eating. Cutting up the little ones’ food, getting this or that, running to another room for a non-existent “something,” saying I’d had a late lunch, or I’d eat later, getting the girls a drink … on and on it went, as if I was actually fooling anyone other than myself.
Day and night, the push-me-pull-you battle about have-to-eat-cannot-eat-have-to-eat-cannot-eat ripped through my head like a swarm of angry wasps. If I managed to choke down a small amount of food, I was as guilt-ridden for it as I was relieved. One more tortured meal behind me. And in seconds, I was already dreading the next.
Weirdly, as much as I did not want to eat, I could not get enough of cooking for others. I had begun collecting cookbooks, poring over recipes, watching cooking shows, and planning elaborate dinner parties. It gave me no end of pleasure to prepare wonderful multi-course meals for family and friends. And keeping myself so busy being an excellent hostess I could avoid eating.
Since before I moved back home, a doctor had been treating my daughter for “the worst case of ADHD” he had ever seen during his career in this specialty. He didn’t usually do much besides shove pills down her throat (how I wish I’d known about alternatives back then) and let me ramble on about the miserable family dynamics at home.
One day while I was mid-ramble, he offered the startling diagnosis of anorexia. I didn’t take it seriously. Until I heard the sobering news about Karen Carpenter.
I found a brilliant book called The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa by Hilde Bruch, a German-born American psychiatrist and pioneer in eating disorders. Within the pages of this book were detailed accounts of this incredibly complex illness as Bruch shared stories of patients and their families. Their stories unveiled many truths about the hows and whys of anorexia and what can be done to help.
Time and time again, I saw myself within those pages. First, it was in understanding that anorexia is not an individual illness; it is a family illness — as with all eating disorders — and the patient is the scapegoat. As the youngest and most vulnerable in my family, that was definitely my role. I took the emotional hits for the others who refused to acknowledge their failings, disappointments, and their inability to express anger toward each other. They took it out on me in various kinds of abuse.
Other common feelings that fit for me were feeling small, wanting to disappear, and being so full of feelings there was no room for food. Also bonding issues leading to fears of abandonment or rejection and never feeling “good enough.” This can make anorexics believe that unless they’re perfect (impossible), they’re unworthy of love and acceptance.
I even learned that my love of cooking for others was not so weird after all:
“For people with anorexia nervosa, which has restriction at its core, this preoccupation can manifest itself in a strange desire to be near the very thing that is being avoided. Those suffering from anorexia are often obsessed with food — collecting recipes, reading articles, watching cookery shows, cooking for others and preparing meals that they themselves will not eat.” TheConversation.com
A main theme is the feeling of not having any control. My mother had always treated me like an incapable child and would belittle me for even hinting at standing up for myself. I felt powerless. She had more control over my life than I did — to the point where she played a huge role in my ending up being married six times.
But one thing anorexics can control is what they eat. Self-denial can compensate for seeing themselves as failures in other areas, especially given that many people struggle to lose weight or to stick to a diet. I remember loving saying “no” to food, loving the feeling of being hungry, feeling empty. It made me feel thinner. It made me feel powerful. I might have been a dismal failure in every aspect of life, especially as a daughter, but by God, I was strong. I could do what so many others could not.
Around the time that I read The Golden Cage, my daughter’s doctor said something that changed everything. I was talking — again — about my frustrations with my mother. He said, “You’ll never please her so you might as well stop trying.”
How many times had I said that to myself out of frustration? Yet it had never occurred to me that I could actually do it. Until that moment.
I left his office that day feeling like something had shifted. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew I would never be the same.
As it happened, that one statement changed more than I could have imagined. Along with The Golden Cage, that statement helped me understand myself and what had been happening to me. The issues of control, abandonment, rejection, impossibly striving to be perfect so my mother would like me — one after another, many pieces of a painful puzzle began coming together. I was finally making sense of my suffering.
I was beginning to heal.
I worked on changing my thoughts. I was changing how I viewed my mother and more importantly, how I viewed myself. I was taking control of my life, and realising I might be a decent, capable human being after all.
Within a few short months, I had stopped obsessing about my weight. I was eating more normally. And as quietly as my anorexia nightmare had slid into my life and done its best to destroy me, it had just as quietly vanished.
It would take a long time to heal the longstanding deep wounds from years of fear, abuse and violation that were at the core of all of this. But given the emotional wreck that I had been in the not-too-distant past, I had already improved dramatically. And if I was lucky, I wouldn’t be one of the 10% of anorexics who die within 10 years of getting the disease, or the 20% who die after 20 years from such complications as heart issues, endocrine disorders, or suicide. (Source)
I had wasted too many years already. I had a lot of catching up to do. My mother had stolen enough of my joy. It was time to stand up for myself. Time to believe I could be happy.
Time to believe I deserved to be alive.
Read My Tormented Journey Into Post-Partum Psychosis, where my anorexia hell began
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