At a lunch to welcome some new employees on Tuesday, one of my coworkers decided that it would be a fabulous idea if we started an Exercise Club. The five of us would keep track of how much we exercise, and how much weight we lose, and email each other every Monday. The idea would be to keep each other on track, and encourage each other. It's not a bad idea. I just have no interest in doing it. The problem is, I had just been talking with my friend (and across-the-hall officemate) about how that day marked the beginning of my fall commitment to being healthy. No more school and general summer craziness getting in the way. I was going to the gym, and getting back in shape. No more excuses. So I couldn't exactly say "no thanks, I'm not into that sort of thing". Plus, this is way better than getting sucked into the Holiday Gift Exchange madness, where you have to get your secret buddy candles and stationary and candy and sneak it into their mailbox every single day during December. And then bring them a big gift on the last day of work before the holidays, and "reveal" your identity. At least this is just emails. Not a whole month of pretending I care about making up poems that give hints at my identity, but just enough, not so much that they could actually guess who I am. Unless, of course, someone saw me putting their daily gift into their office or mailbox. Then you're busted. So you usually have to get someone to deliver it for you, to throw people off track. And also to write your notes for you, so they can't identify your handwriting.
Do you think I'm exaggerating? For once, I'm not. At all. So you can see why a simple weekly email chain is much, much better.
But still, I don't want to do it. I'm sure they're wondering why I'm being resistant, but I really hope the whole idea just gets forgotten. It's true, I am planning to go to the gym regularly. I would like to lose 10 pounds. But what I don't want is anyone "motivating" me, or trying to guilt me into working out more. And the reason is, on days where I've planned to go to the gym, but then decide to screw it and go home and watch TV at 5 o'clock instead, I give myself a pat on the back. I am so happy that I can do that now, without obsessing over all the calories that I didn't burn and having a bottle of water for dinner.
I used to have an eating disorder. It's not a secret, but it's not something I tell people either. "Hi! My name is Jennifer, and I used to make myself throw up. It's nice to meet you," is not really a great way to greet people, I'm afraid. And that part of my life is behind me now. I no longer think about it on a daily, or even monthly basis. Except when people try to get me to join Exercise Clubs, or to go on diets with them. Then I think about it a lot.
I've never told a lot of my close friends that I actually had an eating disorder, and was hospitalized, went to therapy, and all that jazz. I'm pretty sure that everyone knew that I was too thin, and was worried about me, but at the time I was so ashamed. Well, at first I was actually delusional, and thought that no one had noticed. And then, when I started recovering, I was so, so embarrassed. I didn't want anyone to know what I had done to myself. I didn't want anyone to know that I had no idea why I couldn't bring myself to eat enough. I didn't want everyone to know I was crazy.
Of course, I had to tell some people. I had to tell my coach that I wasn't coming back for preseason because I was enrolled in a hospital program. I had to tell my adviser at school that I needed her to find me a therapist in Baltimore. I had to tell my friends at school that I'd lost 30 more pounds over the summer. And of course, my family knew, and was scared out of their minds. But I didn't tell anyone else.
Thinking about that time makes me sick to my stomach. I went back to school at the end of the summer. I had to drop a class, take a light courseload, go to a support group every week, and work harder than I'd ever worked at anything to stop myself from slipping back into the comfort of starving myself. I had to take force myself to eat, to listen to my own horrible thoughts about what a fat, stupid, worthless person I was, and to stop myself from throwing up everything I ate. I had to try to go back to my team and run every day without calculating how many calories I was burning. I had to eat the foods I'd always eaten without keeping the mental tally of how many calories I'd eaten that day. I had to make up excuses for why I wasn't racing that season when I didn't feel like baring my soul to every person that asked. I lied to my roommate about where I'd been when I went to see my therapist. I vacillated between keeping my had a dirty little secret and letting people I barely knew in on my deepest personal problems. As awful as all that sounds, I was so, so lucky. I didn't have to drop out of school. I didn't have to be hospitalized full time. I didn't die. None of those things were a given, and I went to bed every night terrified that tomorrow would be the day that I would break and everything would come crashing back down.
Those weren't irrational fears. At the support group that I went to at a local hospital once a week, I saw plenty of people who'd been hospitalized once, twice, ten times. People who has suffered for decades. It wasn't just their stories that were so scary. It was seeing them, as they'd talk about their problems, and come back week after week looking a little bit better, their clothes a little less saggy and their faces less hollow. Then, they'd start to decline again. For 98% of those people, it was a cycle, and either they couldn't break free from it, or they just didn't want to.
At that time, I couldn't imagine a day where I would be able to live without counting calories. Even when I was eating enough and gaining weight, my thoughts were dominated every second of every day by how much I'd eaten and how much I'd exercised (or not exercised). I told my therapist once that I understood why they called it Anorexia Nervosa, because I'd never experienced such all-consuming worry before I'd started to starve myself. She thought I was trying to make some sort of joke, but I was dead serious. She'd tell me that it was possible to recover from this, but it was hard. And in reality, not too many people did, so I shouldn't feel discouraged every time that I felt like I just couldn't do it.
One thing I had working in my favor: I was born about the most willful person in the world. If you tell me I can't do something, I will do it just to prove you wrong. While this can be really damn annoying, and is probably the reason I was able to succeed at having an eating disorder in the first place (if that makes any sense at all), it's also been quite helpful for some things. Like, buying a house when I was 22. Or taking eight graduate credits while working full time. And most importantly, beating a mental illness that I'd built from the ground up for myself.
The thing that really scared me into the "I'm going to beat this, and I don't care if there's a 2% chance that I will actually succeed" mindset was the permanent damage I was doing to my body. Somehow, weight always seems like a temporary thing, and that's what's so frustrating about it. No matter how healthy you eat and how much you work out today, you can undo it all tomorrow if you go out and eat a Dairy Queen Blizzard. It was that kind of frustration that led me down the eating disorder path in the first place, and I always figured it worked the same way in reverse. Even if I was frighteningly thin now, I could always just gain the weight back later, and everything would be just fine.
And then I woke up. And learned that I was probably going to have osteoporosis when I was 35 if I kept this up. Maybe a heart attack too, if I was really lucky, because did you know that your heart needs energy to keep beating? And that this energy comes from food? And to get it, you have to put the food in your mouth and swallow? These are things that don't register when you have an eating disorder. On top of that, I'd probably ruined the perfect set of teeth I'd been born with from the period where I vomited every single day. Oh, and I might never be able to have children because I'd fucked up my metabolism so much that I hadn't had my period in two years.
That last thing is what really did it. I knew I was nowhere near ready to have kids. But the thought that one day, when I was all grown up and married, I would not be able to have a child, made me want to slap myself in the face. I knew that my mother had had a hard time conceiving me, and that genetics were probably already conspiring to give me a hard time. I would never be able to forgive myself if I couldn't have kids because I was stupid, self-absorbed, and too weak to stand up to my own crazy brain when I was 19 years old.
When I started this post, I never intended it to be How I Stopped Starving Myself: A Brief History. My life from 19 on was spent working on it. It's too much to go into in a forum like this, and I don't even want to remember that whole saga. It was so hard, and it took so long. And yet, it took a lot less time for me to get to a point where I could honestly say "I'm recovered" than it does for most people. I was so lucky. My point is, 6 years later I can say that I cannot remember the last time I made myself throw up. For years after I was "recovered", I'd still have a brief moment or day of weakness, usually when I was really nervous about something. I'd binge, feel guilty, and throwing up made me feel better. Every time I'd do it, I'd remember the first time, when I was over a toilet in my freshman dorm, telling myself that this might not be a good idea. Then I'd brush my teeth, drink some water, and feel a lot better about whatever it was that was bothering me. Eventually I realized that was what I was doing, and I started to be able to predict when it was going to happen. When I was getting ready to move. Right before graduation from college. After I'd had a big fight with a friend. And eventually, I was able to see it coming, and stop it from happening. I tried not to let those little relapses bother me too much, because I had come to accept my eating disorder as part of me, and more importantly, as part of my past. They were reminders of what I went through, and how hard it had been to climb out of that hell, and how easy it would be to slip back. As awful as it all was, it's not something I want to forget. Ever.
I'm fine now. I eat pizza and burgers, french fries, peanut butter, and ice cream. Some people may not think that's very healthy, but for me, it is. I could use to lose a few pounds. Every once in awhile, I'll feel all motivated, and promise that I'm going to go to the gym more often, stop eating so much candy, and get more fruits and veggies. It will last for awhile, like last summer when I got my new gym membership and lost 8 pounds. And then, slowly, I'll stop going to the gym. Joel and I will go out to dinner and order appetizers and dessert. And I'll forget that I was supposed to be "eating healthy". And while it may sound crazy to every normal person in the world, I am so grateful for that. I'm so happy that I can skip the gym and revel in the extra free time, wasting it watching Seventh Heaven reruns or washing the kitchen floor. It's not a failure of will for me. It's exactly the opposite.
And that, dear coworkers, is why I do not want to participate in your exercise club. I like falling off the bandwagon, so to speak. I am happy that I went through the hell that I did, because it saved me from spending my life as a slave to our culture of I-just-want-to-lose-five-more-pounds. And I don't need --or want -- you to make me feel guilty about it. There is no possible way that you can lay more guilt on me than I am capable of inflicting on myself. I think I'll keep my few extra pounds and my size six jeans, thank you very much.
