We all know anorexia is a terrible condition, but can someone stumble into it without knowing? Read on for my experience as an accidental anorexic.
I know what you’re thinking: accidental anorexic? How does that work?
For those who have been living under a rock for the last 30 years, anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder where the sufferer forgoes eating, in order to maintain or obtain a slimmer figure. This may involve strict calorie counting, body dysmorphia, outright refusal to eat, and the intense fear of weight gain.
While I’m not making light of what I personally know to be a horrible condition, I just never knew how I’d stumbled into having it.
I am not the type of person who shies away from food. I love food. Before all of this happened, I ate way too much of it, and I sometimes still do. I was also very anti-eating disorder and did not think you had to be skinny to be cool or pretty. Admittedly, when I was in my teens, I was quite small in both height and weight. Then I began to put on the pounds due to the threefold charm of:
#1 Going off the pill and messing up my hormones because…
#2 I just got dumped by my 3-year long-term boyfriend and…
#3 I started a new job at an old fashioned 1950s diner with all the free ice cream I could eat – which goes way too well with #2, as it turns out.
It started when I turned 21
I was never the girl who thought about weight, and I was never the girl who got depressed, not even about big events in life. In fact, I was so oblivious to it that it took a friend of mine at the time to tell me that I looked “way better” with weight on to make me realize I’d gained any weight at all.
Regardless, I continued on this way until I slowly became depressed. Was I depressed because of my body? No, it was more a reflection of where I thought I would be at that stage in my life versus where I actually was. I had no job, no man for at least 2+ years at this point, and a slew of men I had no interest in were pursuing me to the point of being obnoxious.
Eventually my depression took over, and while I can’t pinpoint the moment it started, I do distinctly remember sitting on a bench at the mall with my male best friend and looking at all of the skinny girls walking by in their knee-high boots and body-hugging tops and realizing I was no longer the “hot girl” I was in high-school.
Doing it the healthy way
I began running on the treadmill in my basement for an hour every night, while reading fantasy books out loud in a fake British accent. Don’t judge. This lasted continuously for the next couple months until I dropped about a dress size or two. I was excited, but it was a slow-go.
Depression takes over
Despite never having experienced proper depression, even post-breakup with my long-term boyfriend, this sickness took over until I no longer desired to get up and leave my bed. I felt like a failure in life, in my spirituality, and to my parents.
Depression, I learned, makes you a very selfish person. Suddenly, I realized how when speaking to my friends and family, all I seemed to talk about were my problems and emotional downfalls. In fact, the only person I communicated with properly was my male best friend. [Read: 5 ways volunteer work can help hear depression]
Accidental anorexia
Soon I turned 22, and over a handful of months, I had stopped eating. It was a strange form of anorexia, as I hadn’t set out to stop eating, I hadn’t decided to lose weight in an unhealthy manner, nor did I feel I was making a desperate attempt to control something in my life.
As mentioned, the only time I lit up was around my entirely platonic friendship with my male best friend. We saw each other twice a week. It was the only time I’d eat, and he was the only person who could get me to eat, even if it was a minimal amount. We began walking long distances together. At the end of our hangouts, I would never want to leave, staying over at his house until we were both falling asleep and then making the 2-hour walk home at 4am.
With my newly acquired eating problem and accumulated 8 hours a month of intense walking home from my friend’s and however many hours of treadmill walks at night, I was dropping weight like anvils. I went from a size 11 to a size 3 within three or four months. I realized this was becoming a problem when my mother took me shopping one week to replace my pants with a size 8, and then within 2-weeks we returned to the same store to get me new pants in a size 6. This was happening way too fast.
At the time, I was living with my parents and they insisted that I start taking the nutritional daily drink “Boost.” This chocolate drink contains 26 vitamins, fiber, protein, calcium and antioxidants. At the time I was drinking it, one bottle of Boost was only 240 calories. My parents were well aware that I wasn’t eating, and it was crushing them. But I was a 20+ year old woman, and there was nothing they could do to help me but wait for my depression to ease out. My parents insisted I drink at least two shakes a day, meaning my daily intake of calories was a mere 480 a day, if that.
I decided to call my family doctor. Despite being depressed and slightly self-involved, I knew I was being ridiculous. Sure, I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, but did that mean I had to crush my future? I attended my appointment and told him blatantly what was going on. He told me I didn’t seem to be the type to be clinically depressed, that I’d always been a girl with a great head on my shoulders and insisted I would get over this bout myself.
I told him how quickly I’d lost the weight. He said I looked good and needed to lose weight to begin with, but that I shouldn’t have done it the way that I did. He told me to start eating small snacks, a few times a day. An apple slice with peanut butter, a banana, carrots, organic fruits and vegetables, nothing heavy. He also warned me not to go below 115 lbs, and then he sent me on my merry way. A strange visit, indeed.
Things I didn’t know happened when you suffer from anorexia
I hadn’t set out to have an eating disorder, but soon I came to know there are severe psychological and physical repercussions from not eating. The following are things I didn’t know happened when you go through anorexia.
#1 Your problems don’t go away just because you’re skinny. When I was depressed at a size 14, I thought that everything I disliked about myself would disappear if I could just be skinny. It didn’t. In fact, I was so blinded about my body that my mind refused to believe I’d even become a size 3.
Even as I threw extra-small t-shirts into my shopping cart I would often scoff and think: “*This* is the size you are when you become an extra-small?” I felt no different, despite my weight loss. My problems were still as real as they were months ago.
#2 You feel hollow. I am not speaking emotionally, but rather, my chest and lungs often felt hollow, heavy, crushed, like I couldn’t breathe or that if I did, my whole chest would collapse.
#3 You don’t get hunger pangs. Or at least, I didn’t. Perhaps because mine was so deeply associated with depression, I simply didn’t receive the bodily urge to eat any longer.
#4 You shake, all the time. In my case, this was obviously not from feeling hungry, but rather from being malnourished. I shook frequently, but was lucky enough not to have lost my hair or the strength of my nails.
#5 It will affect your skin. My skin became brash, rough to the touch, and dry. It took years post-ordeal to get my skin back to proper health.
#6 Your stomach shrinks, and it really sucks. After not eating for so long, your stomach begins to shrink. When I started trying to eat again, I would get very ill if I had more than just a few crackers. Your stomach will need time to expand when you begin eating again, so be patient.
#7 This ordeal messes with your breath and your bowels. Expect to have horrific breath when you stop eating. Gum became my new best friend. Also, not eating and then making the road back to a healthy diet meant hell for my bowels. It is very hard on your digestive system to go through this.
#8 It affects everyone who knows you. Anyone close to you who loves you will be going through this nightmare right alongside with you, so go easy on them.
#9 People notice, a lot. Going to social events post-weight loss elicited a lot of comments. Many were compliments: people asking how I was dropping weight so quickly and telling me how great I looked. There’s no small amount of embarrassment or shame that creeps in when you accept congratulations for something so dangerously unhealthy.
Overcoming my depression
After about 7 months of surviving on “Boost” and shrinking down to a size 3, dropping a whopping 70ish pounds in a small amount of time, I finally began recovering from my depression. How did I overcome it? To be honest, I simply became sick of being depressed. It no longer thrilled me to live in misery, and for the first time in a long time, I felt great.
Within two months of recovering and getting back into a healthy lifestyle, I met my now-husband. I was 23. I had a promising writing career ahead of me. My family and I resumed a loving and supportive relationship with my brother and my parents, and I was finally where I wanted to be.
I hadn’t told my new boyfriend about my issues, but before long, things cropped up that tipped him off. I was still not able to eat normal meals, making going out on those first few months of dinner dates very awkward. Indeed, he thought I was “salad-loving-girl.” One night, I began profusely shaking, and he brought me a drink of orange juice. I drank it, and before long I stopped shaking.
“Did you even eat today?”
The jig was up. I told him no, and he gently told me to be more careful about skipping meals. He politely avoided the conversation for a year, until I was ready to tell him. Surprisingly, it’s not easy to tell your boyfriend you used to be a size 14, especially when you didn’t lose the weight in a healthy way that would otherwise be a congratulatory success. [Read: 5 ways volunteering can help you deal with depression]
If you are depressed
Since this ordeal I’ve become a much more empathetic person. No longer do I think that people who have eating disorders are just flaky teenage girls simply looking for attention. While my experience with not eating may not be “officially” labelled anorexia, I can tell you that not eating really sucks.
I have since evened out at a size 5, and I work out casually at home on an “every-other-day” basis. It always fills me with a small amount of shame when I enjoy my figure. After all, I got it in such a terrible and accidental way, and yet now I benefit socially from being tiny.
If you are suffering from depression or anorexia I encourage you to see your doctor. I believe that you cannot overcome an issue unless you truly want to. So even if you are not ready or able to come out of your depression, your doctor can recommend small eating plans, as well as vitamins and supplements you can take along the way to keep your body safe and healthy during the ordeal.
Also, make sure you keep your best friend and family close to you at all times during your depression or disorder. Having someone you love around will keep you sane.
[Read: Why we need to break down the stigma of mental illness]
Anorexia isn’t a glamorously easy way to start dropping pounds like a fiend. It’s a seriously dangerous eating disorder that can wreak havoc on your life and the lives of those close to you. Seek help from a professional when you feel like you may be showing signs of anorexia.
