Restrictive eating disorders are like a mental autoimmune disease. In the respect that you literally attack yourself.
For years I lived as if my body was the enemy. The enemy, and one that had this secret hidden agenda to do … I don’t know what. Gain weight forever and ever? Turn me into a hopeless couch potato? I don’t know that I ever thought about what exactly I was afraid that by body would try and realistically do should I stop fighting it. But fight it I did — by doing everything and anything to suppress my bodyweight. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust my hunger. This mistrust led to me raging war on my body. I did this by ignoring hunger requests, and exercising excessively despite the nagging exhaustion I felt. I was so used to working in opposition to my biology, that I didn’t even recognize I was doing it.
Doubting and opposing whatever my body was feeling became second nature to me. My legs felt tired? The answer was to walk more rather than take the rest that my body was requesting. I felt hunger? My answer was to not eat, and be angry at my “weakness” for wanting food. (How fucked up is that?).
Yes, I truly would feel anger towards my body should it feel hungry or tired.
My anger would move me to some pretty insane places in my head. I would resent my body for needing things. I would interpret requests for food and rest as disobedience. I would be furious at my urges to binge. I was blind to the now obvious truth that my binges were my innocent body defending itself against my attack of restriction.
Yes, my body binged as a defense mechanism — and I was the one causing that reaction. I was the one causing my binges. It was my actions (restriction, complusive exercise) that forced my body to believe that food was scarce and it had to take all it could when it could. Yet, every time I binged I felt hate and distrust toward my poor, innocent body.
I would further interpret my body’s reactions as some sort of willful attack on me. I felt as if my body was threatening me when it felt hunger or fatigue. In a sense, I guess it was. I see anorexia as a biological response to perceived famine. A migratory response. In that sense, if I was supposed to be migrating, feeling tired and hungry was a threat. So I can cut myself some slack for feeling that way at least. It makes sense from a biological perspective. But everything else about it is fucked up.
Anorexia makes us insane. Truly. It is insanity to reject and be suspicious of hunger signals. It is insanity to despise oneself for feeling tired. It is insanity to declare war on your own body. It is no coincidence that we all do these things when we have the genetics for a restrictive eating disorder.
In recovery, it is vital that we recognise this insanity and work to amend that. So repeat after me: My body is not the enemy. If I am hungry it is because I need food. If I am tired it is because I need to rest.
Of course, your eating disorder will have all sorts of judgement about those statements. Nobody recovered while listening to eating disorder judgement. Get in the habit of ignoring eating disorder judgement. You have already proved that you are very good at ignoring things — like hunger — so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.
You body’s real agenda; to optimise health
Whatever your body is telling you is truth. Your body has no hidden nefarious agenda. Your body has no reason to lie. Your body is innocent in all this. The communications that you get from your body are innocent and truthful.
The only agenda your body has is to survive as long as possible. This is how organisms maximise their ability to pass on genes. Basic biology at it’s most vulgar is reproduction — and that is true even for those of us who choose not to reproduce. The longer you live, the greater the chance of more offspring. Thus, in order to maximise reproductive potential, your body needs to survive as long as possible, and to do this, it needs to optimize one important thing: health.
There you have it. You body’s actual agenda: to optimise health.
And it is honest about it’s intentions to do that. It tells this truth via your hunger (physical or mental) and your desire to rest.
Optimising health is the reason your body wants to gain weight if you are currently at a suppressed bodyweight. It knows it is not at an optimally healthy weight for itself and therefore will fight you in order to gain weight to get to where it is healthiest. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are in a “healthy” weight range according to a BMI chart or not.
Your body knows what weight it needs to be in order to optimise health because it is itself. No books or charts know more about your body than your body does. It doesn’t matter how many opinions you get or doctors you ask, if you body deems a higher weight to be optimally healthy then that is what is optimally healthy.
Don’t like that? Your body doesn’t care. It prioritises health over your opinion. I can’t tell you where your natural, unsuppressed bodyweight will be. (Nor can anyone else by the way, and you don’t need them to anyway, because all you need to do is trust your body and eat and it will take you there.) But I can tell you with confidence, that if you fight your biology you won’t win. But you already know that, don’t you? Because if you were winning, you wouldn’t be reading this blog.
It’s crazy that you described eating disorders as “mental autoimmune diseases” – I’ve been thinking lately about how that’s exactly what they are. I personally deal with multiple autoimmune diseases along with disordered eating, and I think the possible connections between them are interesting.
Same here! its almost like we’ve trained our bodies to attack………. I have coeliac disease and wonder if i taught my body that gluten was the enemy by eating then purging mostly wheat based foods.
Wow. What a powerful blog post. This has been on my mind a lot since reading it. I’ve been trying to mold my body into what the media seems pretty and healthy for over 32 years. This piece is profound. Thanks Tabitha
How do you know that a person won’t continue gaining and gaining and gaining and never stop if they eat too much??
I almost got close to recovery the first time I attempted it. Of course my eating disorder team thought it was abhorrent that I should eat more than my meal plan which was a certain amount of calories that I won’t mention here but on reflection was very low considering the state of my health.
I couldn’t stick to it, I was literally starving and ended up eating huge amounts of food, I was terrified and told to stop but I was also angry with my eating disorder and I just gave in and carried on in the end, every day I would eat boxes of cereal, cakes, chocolate and everything else I could lay my hands on.
I thought it would never stop, it wasn’t easy but it did stop and I wasn’t even close to being overweight whatever that means.
I had a few blissful months of not counting calories and finally eating when I was hungry which by that point was nowhere near as often as before and I ate enough food but not the huge amounts my body had previously needed.
I don’t know what caused my relapse but when I began my second recovery I was instantly hungry all of the time, it shocked me because the first time I didn’t have excessive hunger immediately.
I walked into my house one night, opened the cupboards and the fridge and ate everything I could, I was on the waiting list for treatment again but I knew somehow that if I had waited another few weeks I wouldn’t have made it, I was terribly unwell.
Of course I was aware that I was risking the possibility of refeeding syndrome which I am in no way trying to belittle but my view was that I was fighting back and I made sure that I promptly sought medical advice and had blood tests done.
I attended my appointment at the clinic having been assured that I was by that time out of the risk for refeeding syndrome and was promptly told off like a child and given another calorie controlled meal plan, when I gained weight and became upset my therapist offered to help me lose it, yes he actually offered to help his anorexic, emaciated patient to lose weight!
I then saw the dietician who set me a recovery target weight and obviously BMI which was considerably lower than the first time and then she told me that she felt at her best at the higher end of the BMI chart, well what made her think I was going to be any different then? She had a list of every weight I’d ever been even prior to my eating disorder and yet wanted me to recover and maintain at a weight that I have never naturally been in my life.
I walked out of there one day and never went back, I’d asked for a new therapist and initially they agreed but then said no so I was left to get on with it really.
I did manage to increase my body weight but I am certainly not recovered, I just flag up as a healthy weight on a chart but only because I’m in this awful cycle of restricting and binging.
I read this blog and watch the YouTube videos and despite not being able to break the cycle myself it’s all true, I feel like taking it all into that clinic and making them read and watch it all but they won’t see me now because I’m not ‘underweight’ anymore.
It’s a tough battle, very tough battle indeed but I know it can be done because I had those few months before that I spoke about earlier and I am trying so hard to focus on that time in my life again but I don’t want a few months of it, I want a full and lasting recovery.
I just want to say to anyone who may read this that not only is my own experience of professional help not necessarily going to be that bad for everyone but that as someone who has felt that recovery albeit not fully or for long enough trust me it was absolutely amazing, no more excessive hunger, freedom from the restraints of restrictive eating and being able to actually think about other things in life that interest me.
I was once again a person and all because I allowed my body to take over and do the job of healing itself without standing in it’s way or fighting it.
Apologies for the extremely long post and I must now kindly remind myself to grow a pair, take my own advice and do it again because I know I’m the only person who can but thank you Tabitha for helping me to realise the truth and for being literally the only person who I have ever known to make so much sense of what anorexia is and what is required to overcome it, I find the honesty very helpful and that is something I needed from the start as an adult who was once so committed to full recovery and hopes so much to achieve it properly.
This blog post is right on. Thank you for giving me the words to describe and understand this phenomenon.