My Disordered Eating Past

Polly is dead. She committed suicide on February 8, 2008, a likely result of her lifelong struggle with anorexia. I don't know Polly but for some reason the news of her death went through me like a cold shiver, the same way it does any time I hear about a eating disordered woman who loses the battle.

So I did what any intelligent stalker-type does these days: I googled her. I discovered that her death made headlines because she was one of three eating-disordered women profiled in the HBO documentary "Thin" that aired back in 2006. Not watching TV, it has taken me this long to hear about it I suppose. Someone posted the entire documentary (in 11-minute segments) to You Tube. I watched it two nights ago and have been torn up ever since.

I've been mulling it over and trying to think of a way I could post about it - to let you know what an interesting, amazing, inspiring, and yet completely horrifying & depressing show it is - but I couldn't think of an appropriate angle. It just hits too close to home for me. I see myself in every one of the girls profiled.

The Start
I've never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder [edited to add: I have now! Compulsive over-exerciser, that's me!] but there are times in my life where I think I definitely would have qualified for ED-NOS (eating disorder - not otherwise specified). As did far too many of my friends, I flirted with anorexia in high school & college, always managing to keep my weight just on the safe side of things. Always able to pull back when I really really needed to. I never cognizantly thought of the times where I would subsist on a single "fun size" package of candy for an entire day, several days in a row, as "restricting." I just thought it was what girls did to stay thin.

Lots of girls I knew did it or things similar to it. Other waitresses at the restaurant I worked at taught me which foods had the least calories and tricks to make all the decadent food we were surrounded by look unappealing so we wouldn't be tempted to eat it. Our dinner breaks were actually competitions to see who could eat the least actual food. Girls in my gymnastics classes taught me about not eating before a competition (the lower your weight, the higher you fly!) and then using massive doses of caffeine pills to mask the hunger & keep your energy up. Roommates taught me about "saving calories" by restricting all week so you could eat on a date and the guy would think you are one the cool girls who is thin but can eat whatever she wants.

This type of behavior also runs in my family - my grandmother, whom I still adore and think about almost daily despite her being dead for 20 years, was an active bulimic all her adult life. Two cousins were bulimic. Two more spent time in eating disorder clinics. And then of course there was the media - thin movie stars, even thinner fashion models. Even my health teacher encouraged disordered eating by requiring only the girls in class to keep a food journal, a practice I kept up for over ten years after her class ended. (The boys had carte blanche to eat whatever they "needed" to keep up their strength for sports and because they were still growing. Never mind that many of us girls were also in sports and also, duh, still growing.) I was surrounded, almost from birth, by our culture of thin. Every girl I knew was tainted by it.

The Decline
And yet my bouts of bad eating were interspersed with longer ones of health because my body's will to survive and thrive was stronger than my willpower to starve. That is, until I met G. in college. He was my partner on a swing-dance team. He was an amazing dancer and, simultaneously, a sociopath. I saw something good in him and he, likewise, saw something in me: vulnerability. We began to date. The entire time we went out (if you can call it that), he abused me in every way possible. It started out small with little comments about how I was harder to lift than some of the other girls on our team - natural waifs, every last one of them. Then it progressed to screaming vitriol, that I cannot even now bring myself to repeat.

To cope, I did what came naturally - I stopped eating. I pulled out all the tricks I'd ever been taught over the years and combined them with hours of intensely athletic dancing. It worked. G. complimented me on my protruding hipbones. He liked that his hands could almost span my waist. He was happy. I was nearly destroyed. I fainted after a dance performance. I suffered heart palpitations, dizzy spells, nausea & insomnia. He finished the job by sexaully assaulting me. That was the end of my relationship with him, thanks to good friends and family, but the beginning of a kind of self-loathing I had never experienced before.

The Worst of It
After G., my weight went up a bit and stabilized. I met a great man who cared about my mind and my soul and honestly thought I was beautiful regardless of a few pounds up or down. I married him and for a few short years, managed to not think about food or weight at all. The hole in me wasn't gone but at least it was covered up.

That came to an end when G. popped back into my life in the most horrific way possible. At the time, I had assumed that I was the only girl he had abused. Turns out he was a serial molester and had only gotten worse during the intervening years. I was contacted by the police and decided to press charges.

My only experience with our legal system being Law & Order reruns, I was wholly unprepared for the physical and mental nightmare of a sexual assault case. I was also pregnant with my third child. The interstate court case dragged on nine long months, exactly the length of my pregnancy. The longer it went on, the more I deteriorated. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Despite being pregnant, I quickly reached the lowest weight I'd ever been. I thought about suicide every single day. The baby inside me was the only thing that stopped me from actually doing it. G. finally plea-bargained and got a year in prison, with time served. The very next day my son was born. Hale and hearty at ten pounds, he was beautiful child. I was broken.

The court case ended, everyone assumed I would feel empowered and vindicated and quickly ease back into my old perfect life as wife, teacher & mother. I think they assumed that because that is what they so desperately wanted for me. What did I want for me? I wanted desperately to finally heal. I thought being healthy physically would help me mentally. But this time my disordered eating snuck up on me as my quest for ultimate health devolved into Orthorexia, a newly coined term for people who restrict their food based on health reasons as opposed to wanting to be thin. In fact, I'm told it's the new "in" eating disorder in the Hollywood set. Yay, me.

I saw a therapist (who was tainted for me by the fact that G. was court-ordered to pay for her services) who was pretty good at helping me work through my damage from the abusive relationship. But when it came to my disordered eating, she was worse than unhelpful. She wanted tips. Every week as I shrunk before her very eyes she would ask in awe how I did it. Somewhat overweight herself, she pressed until I actually gave her a how-to, which she then promised to implement. At last we both realized that she had problems with her self image & eating and that our relationship had moved far from therapeutic. So I stopped seeing her. But I still hurt.

The End
I wish I could say that there was some huge life-changing moment that made me leave my disordered behaviors behind. But let's face it, you read my blog, you know I still straddle that line at times. Although these days I trend more towards orthorexia than anorexia [edited to add: actually these days it's crazy amounts of exercise]. Which is why "Thin" was such a powerful documentary for me. I'm at a healthy weight. I'm healthier mentally than I've been in years. And yet I still see myself in so many of their mannerisms. The way Alisa obsessively tried on outfit after outfit, sometimes for hours a day, looking for one that didn't make her look fat (not realizing that the fat was all in her head and not in her clothes). The way that Shelly (the girl pictured above in the Thin promo) talked about what her control over food meant to her and how it played out in her family. The way that Polly went to the ED clinic to heal and instead just found something else to rebel against.

I'm not saying that I have an eating disorder now. I am saying that the potential for one lives inside me. Which is why I suppose I am telling you all this. It's my was of staying accountable.

Because Polly is dead.

This post sound familiar? Fridays are greatest hits day here at GFE. This post originally ran 2/2008. I chose this one to repost today mostly because I think I need to hear it again right now.

Skinny Vs. Strong - Who Wins?

In a cage fight between skinny & strong who will win? On the left we have Jaslene Gonzales, winner of America's Next Top Model, Cycle Whatever. On the right we have an unnamed CrossFit woman. What's your call?

CrossFit chick, hands-down. Maybe in a bar fight and if Jaslene had a broken bottle. And the element of surprise. Then... Okay, not even then. CrossFit chick takes it in every scenario I can think up.


Never Thin Enough
Andrea Muizelaar, winner of Canada's Next Top Model, Cycle Infinite Winter, found this out the hard way. You may remember her from 2006 when she did what many would consider the unthinkable: she walked away from her title and modeling contracts because even as an emaciated anorexic, she was still told she wasn't thin enough.

One art director told her not to waste her money on a personal trainer, "This is real world," she was told. "It's long and lean that sells, not long, lean and muscular." Comments like that came all the time. "I was told in my skinniest stage: 'You gotta tone up your stomach; it's a little too big'," she said. She adds that she was so malnourished that her toenails were falling off (now that's high fashion!) and she was so weak that opening a heavy door was nearly impossible. (source)

At last she decided to choose her health over her modeling career and she scrapped it all, heading back home to her small home town in Canada where she got a job at a bank and enrolled in college.


















Here she is (left) at the height of her modeling days. Here she is (right) today.

Finally Strong Enough
Her new healthy lifestyle was recently put to the test. On a cruise with a friend to the Caribbean, they were accosted by armed thieves. Her friend had a knife put to his throat and was knocked almost unconscious. Andrea managed to fight off her attackers, kicking, screaming and scratching. She escaped and ran to a nearby village to get help. Her friend was quickly found and, save for a concussion for her friend and lots of bruises and cuts on Andrea, both came out of it unhurt. (Incidentally, the villagers who came to her rescue were described as "several burly women with baseball bats." How awesome is that?!?!)

Imagine - going from being too frail to open a door to being strong enough to kick your way free from armed attackers. "If this had happened when I was [a] Top Model..., I would probably be a lot more messed up than I am right now," Andrea concluded.

Training For Thin Vs Training For Strong
When put in that light, every woman I know would say that of course she would rather be strong than skinny. The irony, however, is that most women train exactly the opposite (as Andrew once accused me of doing although hopefully we've worked that miscommunication out). Their entire focus is on skinnifying - read: endless calorie burning - instead of building muscle.

Now, nobody wants to look like the 1976 East German Women's Swim Team. Not even the East German swim team wants to look like the East German swim team. But your end goal definitely determines the type of training and nutrition program you use. The difference is between seeing food as evil vs. seeing food as fuel. The difference is heavy functional lifting vs. endless reps with a 3-lb dumbbell. The difference is deciding that what our bodies can do is more important than how they look.

I'm a girl. In our society, even. Believe me, I feel the thin pressure as much as anyone. We are told over and over again that our looks are our power and we are only as good as our last Botox treatment. But I, and I believe most of you too, don't totally buy that message. We buy People but we also get Women's Health. We lift weights because muscle is more compact than fat and will help us fit in our jeans better but we also get a little thrill every time we go to put up our ponytail and a bicep pops out. It's that balance that I'm always looking for, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not.

But I'm telling you, if comes down to wearing a size zero or being able to kick some bad-guy booty in a knife fight - at the very least I'm coming out of that with a chunk of somebody's ear. Now, if someone can please tell me where I can sign up for Krav Maga I'll be set.

PS> Lifting heavy will NOT make you look like a dude. Unless you are a dude. In which case, you probably should take the lipstick off. At least on the weight floor.

Thursdays are Greatest Hits days here at GFE. This post originally ran March 2008.

How To Think Like A Thin Person

See this person? They are not normal either. Inside I am Hello Kitty Storm Trooper too.

Tell me truthfully: Do you think that thin people actually think differently than heavier folks? (Avoiding for a moment the very real point that thinness does not necessarily bring happiness as evidenced by this Special K survey where the top 4 happiest - both with their looks and their lives - groups of women were sizes 10, 8, 6 and 12 respectively.)

I like to watch people eat. I stare. I'll admit it gets awkward occasionally. But, contrary to what they often think, I'm not mentally tallying the calorie count of their food or passing judgment about what put on their plate. What I'm doing is studying them. I'm trying to figure out how normal people act around food so that perhaps if I act like them, I'll eventually be normal too. So do thin people think differently? For myself, I don't know. What I do know is that for whatever reason many people of all sizes have a much happier relationship with food than I do. And I'm guessing that it might have to do with how they think.

Dr. Judith Beck agrees with me. Her father, the late great Dr. Aaron Beck, pioneered the field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Any of you who have e-mailed me for advice about your own issues with food and/or compulsive exercise (despite the fact that I am not qualified to give anyone advice about anything, bless your hearts) probably got to hear a lot more than you wanted to know about CBT. I love it. I credit Dr. Beck the elder with helping me pull out of a serious depressive episode my freshman year of college. And now his daughter has adapted CBT principles to weight loss.

The basic premise of CBT is that to change your actions, you need to change your cognitions, or thoughts. You know the old saw about if you are unhappy then smile until you feel happy? It's sort of the same. You practice thinking and writing (there's lots and lots of writing involved in CBT) the thoughts you want to have and replacing your old destructive thoughts with the new ones. I'm not going to lie to you, it's a little labor intensive at first but it does get better until at last the new thoughts are habitual. I know it all sounds a little hokey but there is a substantial body of research to support it.

A few years ago Dr. Judith Beck came out with a neon pink - 'cause women love pink, get it? - little hardcover by the name of "The Beck Diet Solution." I was immediately skeptical as I am of anything using the four-letter D word but hey, I was in Barnes and Noble and you all already know about my dirty little secret about that store. So I read it. And then... I bought it. I think the Barnes and Noble sales person actually fainted when he rung me up. I loved it. It turns out that Dr. Beck was promoting a way to never diet again. At least in terms of highly restrictive food plans that cut severe calories or restrict whole food groups. In fact, it wasn't about dieting at all but rather about how to change your thought patterns to "think like a thin person."

She immediately dispelled the favorite myth of dieters everywhere that nobody has to watch what they eat except the poor sap on a diet. She contends that thin people are actually very careful with what they eat; they just don't think about it in terms of deprivation. Like I said earlier, I don't actually know how non-disordered eaters think. So I'll have to take Dr. Beck's word for it. But I would like to find out!

Dr. Beck has since come out with a sequel to her Diet Solution called The Complete Beck Diet for Life. This incorporates all the same skills as in the first book but adds a little more direction. The new book includes actual recipes and tips for maintaining your weight. All in all it is one of the most sane "diet" books I have ever read. And the best part is that you don't need any equipment fancier than a pencil and paper to do it!

That and you have to really decide that you want to do it. Trust me: at first you will think "I don't need to do all this writing nonsense; let's get to the good stuff!" This doesn't work. The whole point of CBT is that you have to ingrain it your brain through repetition. So skipping the repetition is like wearing Lindsay Lohan's "presidential" leggings and thinking that automatically entitles you to a Washington D.C. internship.

Tuesday's Great Fitness Experiment Giveway
What do you think? Do thin people think about food differently than not-thin people? Have any of you switched from one mindset to the other? Anyone stuck in a particular mindset? Leave me a comment on your take and you will be entered to win your very own copy of Dr. Beck's new book!

PS> For an awesome interview with Dr. Beck about her book, head over to Cranky Fitness!