It's not me, it's...

...well, I don't know what it is. But the full body mirror and nakedness after a sun bed didn't help. 

I know what it's not though, it's NOT body dysmorphia. You know why? Because I haven't got BDD, never have had.

I know I'm not overweight, I know I am not 'fat. The number on the scale makes sense, I am not 72kgs, so can't LOOK the same as I did I lost weight. I know this. I see a different shape.

I don't want to look like I did at my lowest. I don't want my spine on show, I don't desire arms the size of a child's and I am not too fussed about a thigh gap. I never was.

The problem is I REALLY don't like what I've got. But then again, how many women do? There bits of my body I wish were more toned. There are bits I'd pinch in and curves I'd like to add to. I get that. Most women are unhappy with some part of their bodies (aren't they?)

The issue I have is my fixation with my stomach. I have to admit, I DO prefer the way it looks at closer to my lowest weight than I do right now. I still spend far too long wishing there was a way of NOT starving but having THAT stomach. 

I just DON'T want the protruding pelvis and muscle wastage in my thighs which gave me the midriff I approved of back then. 

It's just so hard when anorexia made me feel confident in a bikini and recovery really doesn't. But the thing I do know is that, it's not real. That confidence isn't me. It's anorexia and that stomach comes with a whole load contracts I'm not willing to sign. 

I just wish I BELIEVED that when I'm stood in front of a full length mirror. And I wish people believed me when I told them this.

Where's the BODY piece of this jigsaw?

So if I told anyone how I felt about my body today, they'd probably tell me the usual 'it's anorexia making you feel that', 'you need to accept yourself, warts and all' 'you're not fat...' Blah, blah, blah.

But I get sick to death of people telling me I don't FEEL fat. I do feel fat, I really do. I also see it. It's real to me. So please, dear GOD can people stop telling me I'm not. I am subjectivity fat, for me.

No, I'm not about to launch a career as a plus-size model (nor am I skeletal enough to strut it down a catwalk at London Fashion Week) but to me, I have lumps, bumps and bulges in more place than I care to have. 

No, thinking this doesn't mean I revert to anorexic behaviours. I haven't skipped my meals or snacks because of my disgust in my own skin today. In fact I faced a fear food I've not had in a very long time. But anyway, you and I both know anorexia's 'ideas' don't help fix anything.

This is where my head gets messiest, where I stop understanding and where despite putting other bits of the puzzle together, there is still a missing jigsaw piece in my recovery.

I poke my stomach or look in the mirror or glance down at my body and I just SIGH. Every single time, I SIGH, I don't know what to do, what to say to people, how to deal with it, how to change it. 

No one else is with me when I try Size 10 jeans on and I pray they're too big, then I have muffin top. No one else is with me when I wake up and already have a bloated round belly resembling someone who's 4 months pregnant. No one is with me when I throw my clothes around my bedroom because every top I try on clings to my stomach. No one is with me when I look at lower weight pictures of myself with rose tinted glasses. No one is with me when I put my running kit on and feel too huge to even run. No one is with me when I endlessly click on dresses on ASOS unable to buy anything because I know it won't look right. No one can hear the constant 'they think I'm too fat' conversations in my head, despite getting on with life (and recovery).

All this. Everyday. I wake up most days and still hope to find the jigsaw piece has turned up. I hope I look in the mirror and think 'Okay, I can deal with that'. Unfortunately, It never turns up.   

I can be SO positive and actually full-on positive sometimes, yet I tell myself such negative things, believe them and think all this at the same time? HOW?

This is the missing piece for me at the moment. I can put together my recovery jigsaw and do my recovery sums. I can see that sticking to my meal plan is a better option than restricting. I fully 100% know that anorexia will never fix this. I also felt awful at my lowest weight, so know losing weight and numbers won't fix it. I know that 1000x sit-ups a day or running every mile I can won't fix it.

So what will? 

My thinking right? Logically, I know that my thinking needs to change, but I can't stop looking at my body for the answers or solutions (or for it to magically change or appear the way I want it to) Nothing anyone says or does CHANGES how I see my body. It just makes me more resentful of it. 

The jigsaw piece I need to find to join this link in my recovery is in the head. But my head is screaming that I'm fat remember, so any suggestions to where the piece is would be more than welcome. 

I really hope I find this piece somewhere soon, it's so frustrating trying to remain positive about the other bits of the puzzle that I've worked hard to put in place, when I can't seem to finish it off. 

I never have liked jigsaws.

Oh, My, Bod.

I’d like to believe I was immune to society’s pressure to look a certain way; I have attempted to convince myself I was for years. But when it boils down to it, something out there has contributed to the way in which I see myself when I look in the mirror. There must have been messages out there that gave me something to judge myself by? Perhaps it’s the constant comparing, the inability to take compliments and my on-going obsession over my ‘worst’ bits that skew what I see? Or perhaps, I need to admit, it’s actually ALL of the above?

Although my disordering eating started BEFORE I placed as much emphasis on ‘how I looked’ (a mix of OCD, anxiety and emetaphobia as a child) my desire to achieve what I see ‘perfection’ in the mirror has most definitely been a factor in developing Anorexia Nervosa.

In my eyes, people around me, whether we’re talking about models, celebrities, friends or strangers has always been prettier, thinner, better dressed, less cellulite, got better hair (you get the picture) than me.  My obsession with comparing my body to others, usually unfavourably, drove me crazy. I believed that being the thinnest, the most ‘in control’ of my body would help me stop comparing and start accepting my body, because it would be perfect. I spent (and still spend) a lot time WISHING my body was different, teeth whiter, hair blonder, tummy flatter, and a lot of time moaning about these things to friends, again and again.

Don’t get me started on compliments. Compliments have equalled lies in my eyes. I don’t see how people could think I was attractive, how they might actually like my lumps and bumps? Weird. I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t feel it. This is the most destructive bit, I don’t feel it, so everyone else it wrong, they’re lying to me. I realise this has to change, it's not a fair trial if I discard evidence is it? I'd make a really bad lawyer. 

I didn’t know what weight would make me happy, what measurements would make me ‘perfect’ and what at all would improve what I saw in the mirror. What do Victoria’s Secrets weigh and measure is a question I have often asked.  Of course, whatever goal I set, it moved when I got there because I wasn’t happy, yes, a lower weight MIGHT equal perfect and therefor happiness.  

Even before my obsession with the numbers on the scales in more recent years, I suppose I used society’s notion of the ‘perfect body’ as my scale as I was growing up.  I wanted to be top of the scale, but not knowing where I was starting from made that a little tricky.

Of course, like I said, it’s not the only thing that led to my eating disorder, but I do think it plays a large part in halting my recovery. With the help of my therapist and dietician I can start to restore weight and health, start eating a more nutritional diet and working a way out of the control of AN, but it’s me that has to start accepting my body to move forwards.

However, developing a less discorded picture of my own body is proving difficult when every women I know moans about their body, wants to change numerous things, is making 2012 the year they stick to Weight Watchers or getting their teeth whitened. No body seems satisfued with what they've got. But I seem to take that to the extreme, sub consciously/  Plus, those VS models are still there, looking sort of, well, perfect aren’t they?

So where I don’t feel Body Image is ALWAYS directly linked with eating disorders, and no, not EVERY women who has issues with body image (name me a women that doesn’t, hard huh?) DEVELOPS an eating disorder, when both eating and body image are both disordered, it can be a long, hard road to improve your relationship with food and to accept your body for what it is, imperfections and all. I should know. I’m trying now.

Standing Still equals Staying Ill

One of the hardest things I am learning to accept in recovery is the concept of continual CHANGE and the constant moves FORWARD that are essential in putting space between myself and my eating disorder. 

There is no time to sit still, no chance to catch your breath sometimes, but I suppose I can save that for when Ana gives up trying to convince me her life is happier and more fulfilled. I already know she's an expert liar, I just wish she'd give up trying to fool me. 

There's been a lot of change recently. CHANGES in my WEIGHT, CHANGES in my BODY, CHANGES to my MEAL PLANS and the most exciting is CHANGES in my THOUGHTS towards recovery...

The most relevant quote here would be “DO IT NOW; DON’T PUT THINGS OFF. IF NOT NOW, WHEN?” this can be applied to food, weight and recovery in general. 

I am still struggling with the weekly-WI's but my NEW theory. It's like getting waxed, the outcome will be worth it eventually, but my gosh it hurts. Doing it slowly and putting pulling off the little strips makes it feel 10 x worse than if you just GO for it and rip it off. So, prolonging the fact that to recover I have no choice to gain weight or not, recovery requires it. So I need to just DO IT, restore my weight to a healthy number and work with my team to help my head catch up. 

Finally, I have restored enough weight to PROVE to my team and to ME that I can do this. The trend has completed  a 360 and is now pointing in the right direction (away from Ana!) Although I am under NO illusion that there is a LONG old road ahead of me, it feels good to be making progress and for my hard work with food to be paying off health-wise. It's taken me 6 months of intense work with my Team at the EDU to get my weight back above my admission weight. But I have done it. Something else I've learnt in the last four weeks? They weren't lying, even little steps out of a 'dangerous' BMI make you feel so much more ALIVE and it DOES make everything a little less, well,  blurred. 

Same with food. I am learning to accept that there would NEVER be a right time for me to eat certain foods in Ana’s world. I would go FOREVER without another bite if she had a say right?

So every challenge, every new meal, every new food and every construct, rule I break and lie I see,  is me turning my back on my disordered behaviours in my disordered world. The more times I can turn my back, the more times I can disobey Ana, the closer a full recovery gets. 

This concept is helping me face challenges head on and realise that I shouldn't feel guilty or like I am 'messing everything up' because I'm not. I am fixing things the only plan I am messing up is HERS for MY life. And what was that plan? It was to strip me of everything, including life itself. 

‘THE LONGER I SEE AND ACCPET MY BODY THE WAY IT IS, THE MORE ‘NORMAL’ IT BECOMES’

Another reason to keep moving, to keep restoring weight and accept the changes in my body HOWEVER hard it is to do...

I was reminded by Mrs W recently that when she first assessed me I said that I ‘knew my legs were too skinny and I don’t want them to be’ This was a massive wake-up call too because now I think they look FAT and I don’t like them getting bigger. It reminded me that it is EASY to accept a body that isn’t healthy, one I never thought Id have, easy to stand still and avoid CHANGE. 

It’s a body that I’ve got used to seeing and one Ana has convinced me is BETTER or more PERFECT than the one I’ll have if I am Weight Restored, even if it isn’t healthy.The age old Ana lie that I often believe is "I’m not THAT skinny anyway" I can see how easy it could be to get caught here if I am here too long.

I need to remind myself  on a daily basis that my body IS going to have to CHANGE it HAS to if my life is going to CHANGE and if I want to make a run for it from Ana. The sooner I can really ‘feel’ like it is getting better, the sooner I can get used to a new, healthier body and work towards reducing the negativity about it. 

Without accepting the CHANGE in my body, I wont be able to CHANGE my life from one controlled by food and Ana to one that I control and one in which I start to regain parts of my life that my eating disorder has slowly taken from me....

Now, if none of that is reason to keep moving, I don't know what is......as they say, no rest for the wicked! 

Body Checks: The New Calorie Counting

Body image, BDD, weight restoration, hatred of 'hippo pictures'......there seems to be a new theme of posts appearing that are moving away from the eating, from the calories and from the food.

This is another layer of my eating disorder being stripped bare and laid out for me to try and get my head round. Hang in there with me, I'm warning you, this one could take a while.........

So, I was sat in my therapist's office on Friday, holding my favourite pink cushion to my stomach, legs twisted and crossed up a blanket (it was EVEN cold on the ward, yes!) and sitting with my arm crossed across my chest, holding on to my cold, hard shoulder bone, you know checking it was still there.

I was brought out of my, "is there more fat on this, do my thighs look chubby today, I can feel my stomach fat, my leggings are digging in" thoughts by Mrs W announcing that she was going to start some work on 'BODY IMAGE' with me to work on my BDD and resistance to weight restoration.

Starting with telling me about the new 'Body Check' journal I have to keep.

Me? Body Check? I automatically wondered why I was having to do that "I don't do that, I don't body check" Unless of course, she's talking about taking pictures of my body or obsessing about old pictures or poking my fat stomach? Oh, those body checks. Right, here goes...

I suppose it was easier to ignore or not notice the checking and my body in general as much when my preoccupation was fully on food and calories. But recently, as my MPs are settling in, and food is out of my control, as I am gaining weight,  these body thoughts are creeping in more and more...they warned me. 

It just shows my inability to think about anything else to do with my ED when I was still restricting, when my whole life was consumed with the eating side of anorexia, the calories, the portions, the scales, the weighing of food, the starving. When I thought I wasn’t REALLY AN, it ‘was just about the food’ that I am just being a fussy eater.  I am realising now, it might not be that, I might be AN! It also reminds me how deep rooted these thoughts are. This plus the general confidence and body image side of things has taken priority over every other single aspect of my life. 

Realistically, the body checking started a LONG time BEFORE the starvation, it's these checks that led me to 'give in' and listen to my ED thoughts and change what I was checking. Am I just vain? Do vain people do this? Why do I do this? (I'd like to add here that I think this is where people think AN sufffers are just self obbsessed and vain and that is all it is - I don't think they consider that we use this as ammunition to HATE ourselves and drive me to starve)  I have always poked, prodded, taken photos to beat myself up about, spent hours, days even, in front of the mirror, hating every inch of my fat, ugly, disguising body. Hours of my life spent in the gym, in the swimming pool, distracted all the time by my fat. Self hate is so deep rooted in me that I don't even know what I look like any more. I have called myself a barrel, podgeo and a hippo for as long as I remember - and ALWAYS CHECKED for the bits of my body that confirm these nicknames. I still do. 

Now in recovery, after destroying my body to stop these daily, hourly, minute by minute checks I am worried about how much is going to come out from this body checking diary thing because today I haven’t recorded it all but it's constant. 

Every time I go to the toilet I hold my stomach and hope it goes down when I pee. I poke my belly and look at my fat belly button and when I pull my leggings or jeans back up I look at how my stomach looks In what I am wearing. I check my hip bones, front and back, I spin around to check how my butt is growing. When I am talking to friends or in sessions I cover my stomach with cushions and clothes and play with my shoulders and collar bone more than I realised I do. I notice when I was sat in Costa that I often sit up straight and feel my spine and hip bones from the back and although I said to Mrs. W that I didn’t think my legs bothered me I noticed how much I touch my knees and feel the tendons and ligaments behind the knee a lot and obsess with out my thighs look all squished and fat when I'm sitting down.

I also need to be HONEST with myself here, because I feel guilty because I know I take more picture’s of my body than I let on to Mrs. W too. It might not be a lot compared to how many I used to take when I was losing weight, but I know I take more pictures that other people probably do. To ‘check’ what I look like. But I suppose more than that I spend a long time looking back at old photographs, ones I took of myself specifically because of my ED, for my own thinspro for my ED and weight loss and also looking at pictures of days out before and during losing weight to try and figure out what I think about my body.

To put it in perspective, I don’t actually have enough space in my journal or time to write them all down. To write how often I look at my stomach, or glance in the mirror and tell myself I look awful and ugly or think about how thin my hair looks, the condition of my skin all my fat and everything. Every time I look in the mirror I give myself some sort of grief about how I look or I worry about how I look. Too fat but too ill as well and you know, not perfect. NBD right?

It's these new NBD moments of checking my body, always, always the bits I hate the most, which keep the spiral of self-hate alive. They are the NBD moments that make gaining weight scary, they are the checks that my ED drives my to do. They are the check, the preoccupation and the obbsession which should tell me I'm still battling AN, despite eating. The Body Check NBDs are the biggest NBDs now and this is where the real hard work starts. 

Anyway, I need to remember that every time I go looking for the bits I hate I figure out the same thing, I hate it. Not really a productive way to spend my life is it? I know the answer. 

A picture speaks a thousand words...

..but it doesn't tell you what's going on behind the eyes

and those words could very well be lies.

So before you see what you think you see,

Close your eyes and listen to me. 

I did promise myself I would stop looking back, stop being overly reminiscent, dragging up the past. I promise, I'm slowly learning there is no need. There is only a need to look (and move) forward in recovery. 

However, when talking about 'goal weights' and goals in general I needed to take a look back and think about times when I have perhaps been 'happier' with my body, my weight, myself. Cue plugging in my external hard drive and opening up a folder in Pictures labelled - Ana & Me. 

It's not a folder I wanted to open this early in my recovery, it's full of weight loss pictures, thinspro, pictures of food (lack of food) and my old journals. It could have been a trigger, it could have pushed me back to her life, rules and made me go backwards. 

The reason to this crazy behaviour was something Mrs W and I spoke about last week. How would I feel about setting my old UGW as my target for restoration now? Would it feel different now I am not on a one-track mission to create 'Anorexia's perfect body' would it be the ultimate kick in the bitches teeth to make that my first recovery goal? (Yes, I still need to restore to G1)

Well, I opened up the folder 'UGW Reached' and you know what my first reaction was? Oh, I look really fat. FAT, yes, FAT. I looked straight at my stomach, my thighs, my sides. (N.B my weight plummeted past my original UGW earlier in the summer) No, that weight wouldn't make me happy. I hate that picture. I hate all these pictures. Every picture documenting my fight with AN, every new bone showing, every pound lost, every half pound loss. A set of pictures illustrating my spiralling mental health, the shut down of my life and my pain. But I can't stop looking and looking and looking.

I had to snap out of it, close the folder and rethink this idea... 

The next thing I did was look at old pictures, of happy times, from uni, from London, pictures of times when my mind told me I was fat, but I was happy enough in other areas of my life to tell Ana to zip it and leave me alone. Cue another set of emotions... 

On the outside I look happy, I am smiling, I am with friends, I am even eating cake and sweets and chips in some, but this is what I mean. These pictures hurt EVEN more than the 'Ana and Me' ones, because I don't look back and think of the fun, I look back and see FAT. I see the pain behind my eyes, I see my imperfections and I see all the things I used as ammunition to allow my fall to Ana. 

I saw one photo this morning and had to burn it. It was horrific and the abuse my ED launched at my when I saw it hurt. Instead of seeing me at my nieces 2nd birthday, I saw fat, I saw hippo, I wondered why noone told me to lose weight, I wondered how the guy I was seeing at the time EVER found me attractive. I hated it. So I burned it. 

So, there isn't get a conclusion to this, I don't know how I feel or how much a photograph really proves about happiness, I think it might even say less than the scales, in my eyes at least.

I just need to stop looking back at photo's and memories at the moment. Maybe I'll open up (and burn) more when the time feels right. 

Body Gossiping about Body Image...

As part of Body Gossip's Body Image Advent I have been thinking about my own issues surrounding my ED and my Body Image.....

I’d like to believe I was immune to society’s pressure to look a certain way; I have attempted to convince myself I was for years. But when it boils down to it, something out there has contributed to the way in which I see myself when I look in the mirror. Perhaps it’s the constant comparing, the inability to take compliments and my on-going obsession over my ‘worst’ bits that skew what I see? Or perhaps, I need to admit, it’s actually ALL of the above?

Although my disordering eating started BEFORE I placed as much emphasis on ‘how I looked’ (a mix of OCD and emetaphobia as a child) my desire to achieve what I see ‘perfection’ has most definitely been a factor in developing Anorexia Nervosa.

In my eyes, people around me, whether we’re talking about models, celebrities, friends or strangers, they have always been prettier, thinner, better dressed, got less cellulite and have better hair (you get the picture) than me.  My obsession with comparing my body to others, usually unfavourably, drove me crazy. I believed that being the thinnest, the most ‘in control’ of my body would help me stop comparing and start accepting my body, because it would be perfect. I spent (and still spend) a lot time WISHING my body was different, teeth whiter, hair blonder, tummy flatter, and a lot of time moaning about these things to friends, again and again.

 I didn’t know what weight would make me happy, what measurements would make me ‘perfect’ and what at all would improve what I saw in the mirror. What do Victoria’s Secrets weigh and measure is a question I have often asked.  Of course, whatever goal I set, it moved when I got there because I wasn’t happy, yes, a lower weight MIGHT equal perfect and therefor happiness. I hate to admit it, but even before my obsession with the numbers on the scales in more recent years, I suppose I used society’s notion of the ‘perfect body’ as my scale as I was growing up.  I wanted to be top of the scale, but not knowing where I was starting from made that a little tricky.

 I could reel off to you all the things I HATE about my body, all the things I hated at a heavier weight too (they are the same by the way) You could try and tell me differently, you could attempt to give me a compliment, but it's falling on deaf ears. If I can't see it, you MUST be lying. I still do. I don't feel I look like I have an ED, I don't look anorexic? Emaciated? Why would she use that adjective for me? I'm not the 'E' word, I'm just a bit thinner that before? This is BDD. This is how I think.

Of course, like I said, my BDD not the only thing that has led to my eating disorder, but I do think it plays a large part in halting my recovery. With the help of my therapist and dietician I can start to restore weight and health, start eating a more nutritional diet and working a way out of the control of AN, but it’s me that has to start accepting my body to move forwards. 

However, developing a less discorded picture of my own body is proving difficult when every women I know moans about their body, wants to change numerous things, is making 2012 the year they stick to Weight Watchers or getting their teeth whitened. Plus, those VS models are still there aren’t they?

So where I don’t feel Body Image is ALWAYS directly linked with eating disorders, and not EVERY women who has issues with body image DEVELOPS an eating disorder, when both eating and body image are both disordered, it can be a long, hard road to improve your relationship with food and to accept your body for what it is, imperfections and all. I should know. I’m trying now.