My Journey to Recovery from Anorexia

To start we have to go WAY back to when I was around 4 years old or so. This is when I started chewing and spitting food and just plain refusing to eat. I didn’t think I was fat or that I needed to lose weight. I was using it as a coping mechanism for the abuse I was going through.

Chewing and spitting continued for a couple years until I got caught. Then the adults in my life would follow my to the bathroom to make sure I wasn’t spitting the food out. I threw tantrums but they didn’t stop. I was still a very picky eater.

Growing up, I would go through periods of eating very little and then gradually start eating more without anyone really noticing. I would “play games” to see how little I could eat for how long and then see how long it would take to eat normal again.

This served a purpose. I was being abused and during the time I was with the abusers, I wasn’t allowed to eat enough and would be punished in various ways if I did eat more than they allowed. So I “practiced” not eating so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat normally when I was with my abusers. 

So, my little food games continued after the abuse ended when I was 12, only it got more serious. The periods of not eating were lasting longer and I never quite got back to “normal” eating before I would start restricting again. It became a way to control the flashbacks that eating some times would cause.

I started the worst of these cycles when I was 17. I was 5’1.5 and weighed about 110 lbs. I drastically cut my calories and kept an obsessive spreadsheet of how many calories I ate per day, the average for the week, and the overall average among other statistics. Over the year and half I kept track of my calories, I averaged less than 1000 calories a day. Towards the end of that time, I was averaging a few hundred calories a day and was eating less than 3000 a week. 

People began to notice, slowly. I’ve always been small so I guess it wasn’t too noticeable. I also never lost my curvy shape, so I didn’t appear to be ill. I did get some comments from teachers and friends that were out of concern.

I’d get told I looked like death and that I needed to eat more. One of my teachers assigned us problems in statistics class about how long patients in an Eating Disorder clinic took to regain weight. When I asked her about it, she asked me if I got the point. This teacher was always commenting on what I was, or was not eating, even in front of the class, and seemed to make it her job to check my plate at lunch. 

I reached my lowest weight in October of 2004. I was 86 lbs. Try as I would for the next 9 months, I would not get any lower than that.

I was very active. I was a majorette for football season, and during the winter months a competitive dancer and majorette. I was in practice or at competitions for about 20 hours a week during contest season.

I went to the ER frequently with chest pains. They never found anything wrong. One time I went, the doctor on call said that I either agreed to get counseling or he was going to keep me overnight to run more tests. I agreed to go to counseling.

I started going to Mound Builders but it was pretty worthless. I was told my weight was fine as my doctor told her my ideal weight is between 90-100 lbs. My doctor said he would recommend I be hospitalized if my weight got below 70 lbs. 

I went to a dietitian only to get told I was eating a normal amount for a teenage girl. I never knew that 600 calories a day was normal for ANYONE let alone someone as active as I was. That just helped me defend my actions “My Dr. and the dietitian say I’m fine.” 

I had dreams about passing out while performing a dance routine in a contest. In February of 2005, this could have happened. I woke up and had trouble getting out of bed by myself. I was really weak and had to be carried or led from room to room. Napping didn’t help. My heart rate was erratic and low, in the 50’s. I had chest pains all day and at one point, I got a severe pain and then everything went black for a fraction of a second. I refused to go to the ER and still have no idea what really happened. You think this would have changed things, but I didn’t stop. 

By this time I was having a lot of symptoms that should have told my doctors something was wrong:  </

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hair loss

gray skin at times

always cold

low blood pressure

always tired but couldn’t sleep

dizziness

chest pains

heart palpitations

anemia

bruised easily

took forever to heal

no longer got hungry

constipation

constant dehydration

lanugo

muscle soreness

hypoglycemia

I don’t remember high school graduation. I had a fever and was very out of it. I WAS happy to be done with high school and be moving on to the next phase of life. But I wanted there to BE a next phase of life also.

I started telling my therapist at Mound Builders I was worried about my weight and eating. I wasn’t really getting any response. The day before one of my appointments, I didn’t eat, or drink, anything. A complete 24 hour fast. Then I walked to Mound Builders, which is about 3 miles away, in the summer heat. My weight must have been low enough to scare her as she recommended I see a specialist.

I saw the specialist in Cleveland and was told that I was roughly 25% under where I should be. She told me I was too bad to be helped in outpatient and that I needed inpatient care. Ohio doesn’t have inpatient care and I was on Medicaid. She gave me the names of two places that accepted Medicaid, one in Pittsburgh and one on Minnesota.

I ended up going to inpatient in Pittsburgh at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. Getting there was a chore. I tried to catch a bus there but it was full. I went home and tried to catch another bus later in the day, but the WPIC wanted me to get blood work done first. My doctor wouldn’t call in the blood work without an appointment. I eventually DID get the blood work done and it showed my liver wasn’t working right and was starting to fail. Some other results were right on the border of being either too low or too high. My therapist from Mound Builders ended up dropping me off at the Columbus bus station, I took a bus to Pittsburgh, stayed overnight in a hotel, and then walked to WPIC the next day.

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I was on an Eating Disorders unit. It had 11 beds. We were not allowed to close our doors, the toilets flushed with a key, and we couldn’t go outside unless it was scheduled and were at a high enough weight. My calories started at 1200 a day. Before I left I would be eating more than 3400 a day, more than I was eating in an entire week.

I was there for 5 weeks and gained roughly 14 lbs. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. The pain of recovery, not just mental pain, but the physical pain, is horrible. Every time I ate I got nauseous. My stomach cramped. I was exhausted all the time. After meals I was freezing and nothing could warm me up

I got a stomach bug while I was there and was accused of purging. I have never purged in my life and it took my foster dad calling them and telling them to let a doctor see me before they figured out what was going on. They said it would set me back in getting out.

I had already been set back. They told me I could leave in time to go to college, but then changed their minds. I wanted to sign myself out but the doctor at my college wouldn’t let me. The only way I was able to go to college after being discharged was by signing a contract saying I would get weighed on a weekly basis, go to therapy, see a dietitian, etc.

Upon discharge, I was told by practically everyone that I was going to fail at college and was going to relapse. I was told I needed to take at least a semester off, maybe a year, before going to college. I didn’t. I started college a week late, having missed freshman orientation and the first week of classes. I got discharged on Friday, came back to Ohio Saturday, moved most of my stuff in Sunday, and started classes Monday.

I’ve never relapsed and there have been few slips and no major ones. I have never been in the double digits weight wise since getting discharged. I was on contract with my college through my freshman year and got off it my sophomore year.

I’ve graduated college now and I look back to freshman year and wonder how I did it. I’m a healthy weight now, even a higher one than IP said I would be. This is the weight I think I should be, especially since I lift weights.

Lifting weights has been my saving grace. It keeps me hungry, eating, and moving forward. There’s no way I want to go to restricting and lose everything I’ve gained, both psychologically and physically. I don’t want all that hard, painful work to be for nothing. I have dealt with the abuse issue and have no reason to restrict and no urge to either. Since the abuse was dealt with, all urges to restrict went away.

Unfortunately, all the years of restricting my calories have left me with some problems. I have shrunk and am no longer 5’1.5. Depending on the time of day, I can be as short as 5’0.25”. I also have digestion issues. Sometimes I can’t digest fatty foods (grease) and they make me nauseous and crampy. This happens on almost a monthly basis.

I also get extremely constipated to the point where I have to use a laxative of some kind or risk having a doctor get it out as almost happened my freshman year. I was impacted and literally couldn’t keep anything down because of it. I haven’t let it get that bad since though.

I still get chest pains as well. I’m much more sensitive to temperatures now and am still usually cold. My hair still isn’t as thick as it was before I had anorexia. My blood pressure is still really low, even lower than it was when I had anorexia and I still take longer than normal to heal. I also still have extremely low blood sugar.

My eating disorder had nothing to do with thinking I was fat or wanting to be skinny. It was a coping mechanism that I had been using for as long as I could remember. It was the only way to deal with the flashbacks I got when I ate.