Doublethink

I got this term from the novel '1984' by George Orwell. There are many concepts in that book that I can relate to my eating disorder, but for now:

‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradicting beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.’

I guess this is another way of expressing the paradoxical nature of my thoughts and experiences. This is what makes it frustrating and so hard to explain. Some of my doublethinks are/were:

• I genuinely believe I have not lost weight, even when I know my previously tight trousers are beginning to hang off me.
• I will trully believe I am fat whilst being proud of how thin I am.
• The reason I don't like gravy is because it tastes nice. Or it did taste nice, after 8 years you forget.
• I feel superior when others have to eat, and I can resist, but inferior because they have the freedom to eat and I do not.

Some of the paradoxes are:

1. I binge because I can’t stand being satiated.
2. I hate being told I am doing well. Doing well causes the voices to get worse, not better.
3. The more I achieve in recovery, the iller I get; the longer I go without bingeing, the worse it gets in the long-run.
4. A big plate of veg is scarier than a chocolate bar; the veg is larger in volume.
5. I fear food, yet I binge all the time. I binge because when I stop, the fear gets worse.
6. I developed an eating disorder as a result of trying to be healthy.

My fears of what is real, and what is not.

I am scared to quit bingeing because...

I am terrified that if I stop, I won't be able to stop stopping, and then I will die. I tell myself of course that's not going to happen, I'm overweight, it'd take me a long time to die of starvation. But then I think, well, I used to be underweight, and I thought it'd take me a long time to get objectively fat. It did take a long time, two years of more or less none stop bingeing, bar the odd fast. But the end of a long time allways comes, and suddenly when it does come, it didn't seem so long afterall.

It's like there are two trains going in opposite directions, but these trains don't stop at stations so you can get off or take a break. They just carry on, hurtling along the track until the track runs out and they crash. And once they have crashed it is unlikely you will survive. I survived the last time, but I have no idea how. I remember being trapped in the debris that they called Anorexia, and the clock was ticking, time was running out. I went mad and that's when I knew I was dying; the effects of starvation torture your mind into madness.

A lot of the time I think I want that other side of this illness back, but then I realise that it's only the first phase that I want back; the phase of speed and exhileration; the high I get from reducing my food and increasing my excercise. The feeling that I am invincible. Although deep down I know I can't have that without the inevitable crash.

I am not sure where I am now. It feels like I can't bear another day, but I allways do. I am not at the end, things could get a lot worse. I am not mordbidly obese and my health isn't yet in dramatic danger. My only way out is to jump and hope I land on the platform, but the odds of that happening aren't good because my heart isn't in it. My mind very much doesn't want to reach the platform, because then I may get better and eat normally and be a normal weight and... this is were my sense of reality comes in. I feel like I would be a fake if I did that and I would be trapped and banned from getting back on the train because nobody would believe that the eating disorder was still inside of me. The train is only for people who are loyal to the creature that lies within them.

I am even more scared that I myself wouldn't realise the eating disorder was inside me. I was initially afraid of treatment because I was convinced they would brainwash me into being a normal person, then I would be stuck in a world which isn't real. The ED tells me that my world, in my head, is the real world, and that falling into the trap of believing otherwise would be a psychological suicide. I liken it to in the film 'The Matrix', where Neo is given the option to take the blue pill and return to his old life, with all memory that it isn't real, erased; or to take the red pill and be shown the reality. The reality is that the robots have taken over and are controlling the matrix. The reality isn't nice. And yet, I feel like letting go of my eating disorder would be like swallowing the blue pill to go back to a dream world. I can't do it. I can't let go of what I believe is the truth.

'The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.' - Morpheus.

Random thoughts of the day

The books I am reading at the moment are mostly not ED books, so I thought I would post something more personal in the meantime. Today I got up in the middle of the afternoon, and noticed light was streaming in through the hall. I opened the door, just to look outside for a few minutes and feel the fresh air. It struck me how wonderful it would be to just walk down the street. I have not done that in a very long time, and it saddens me. I feel like a mole popping its head out of its burrow, then retreating out of fear. I couldn’t step out of my own door alone, because the Ed thoughts get louder and louder as I walk, until the purpose of getting out is destroyed. I heard a neighbour move, and I quickly closed the door before they wondered what I was looking for.

When people ask me what my illness is, what is actually stopping me from doing these things, I feel my throat close at the back as though locking in something I want to explain so badly, but there are no words. I try and the thoughts get tangled and misinterpreted. You can throw all the logic in the world at me, but words don’t dint the creature inside, because it is not human. It isn’t even an animal, more like a spirit. I am not religious but in some paradoxical way, the closest thing I can liken this evil thing to, is God. I have this belief that I have to stay loyal to whatever it is inside me, despite there being no proof that it is real, just like there is no proof that God is real. Even when religeous belief causes harm, people don't stop believing. There was something about reality I wanted to write about, but I have just accidently taken my sleeping pills thinking they were paracetamol. So now I am all lethargic and keep stumbling when I try to write. I may come back tomorrow x

The Passion of Alice

By Stephanie Grant.

Thanks to Elara for reccomending this :)

After reading the novel Wintergirls, I didn't expect to like The Passion of Alice. However, there was something about this book that made it intrigueing. Some of the reviews on Amazon* weren't impressed with the lesbian theme of the book, but I thought this gave an alternative view which is usually overlooked. I am not convinced of the accuracy regarding eating disorders, but as a novel it was good. It demonstrates how within inpatient treatment you can often learn more about yourself from other patients than you can from the therapists. The only problem is I feel that the story could have been built upon more, and I would have liked to find out what happened to Mauve (The protagonist's lover).

* Amazon.com. There are usually more reviews on the American site, so I check there before buying at .co.uk.

'...So I almost told him right then and there about the emptiness that the overeaters tried to fill with impossible amounts of food, again and again; the emptiness that the bulimics try to disgorge, as if it had been caught, a chicken bone or a fragile green fish’s gill in their quivering throats; the emptiness which we anorexics, in our superior knowledge and practice, tried to constrict, tried to compress by strangulation and deprivation...’

‘What seemed remarkable, finally, when I thought of it, was not that I loved women, but that I had loved a woman so imprecise. Maeve in all her chaos... That I loved her imperfection...’

Getting A Grip

On my body, my mind, my self By Monica Seles.

Monica's story was admireable; how she made a comeback both physically and emotionally, after being stabbed at one of her matches and losing her dad to Cancer.

As an autobiography it was good, but the tennis talk did get a bit repetitive, and if you are looking for a book on an eating disorder, i wouldn't reccomend it. I kept reading until the end in the hope that her resolution may be helpful to other sufferers, but like 'The Monster Within' (reviewed earlier), her recovery was very personal to her, in the sense that the cause of her disordered eating became obvious and it was clear how to deal with it; admitedly not easy, but clear. The end to her weight problems was basically 'give up dieting and start living'. I think for most people with an eating disoder dieting may play a part in triggering the illness, but once you are there, dieting is no longer the issue; the thing living inside you is the issue.

The Great Starvation Experiment

Ancel Keys and the men who starved for science, by Todd Tucker.

This book was not about Eating disorders, but due to the results of the experiment, it did touch upon Anorexia.

'The other volunteers began to notice Sam Legg’s strange behaviour before the scientists did. In the barracks, he began collecting cookbooks, reading the recipes, and staring at the pictures of food with almost pornographic fascination.’

‘...For weeks, it had been known that Legg liked to be left alone at meals...’

‘...He had combined all the food on his tray into one pile. He then took his fork and stirred and smashed it together... until it was a homogenous dark gray-greenish paste on his plate...’

‘...He was on the verge of crying... A lifetime spent in clinical environments had honed his instincts, and he deftly shoved himself away from his desk just as Weygandt vomited the forbidden fruit upon it.’

- Obsessing over food, even pictures of food

- Being irritated by any presence while you are eating

- Mushing all your 'meals' into one singular lump

All these things are common symptoms of anorexia nervosa, and all these symptoms were experienced by Legg, a man who had begun the experiment as a mentally and physically healthy individual. The final quote was describing a different participant, who had given in to hunger and eaten the food he was stacking in a shop he was working in. The act felt out of control. He was consequently mortified and panicked, so much so that he acted as a bulimic would and threw up the food.

The point I am trying to make is; put any normal human being in a situation where they are starving, and it is only natural that they start to act like a person who suffers from an eating disorder. In other words; these are instinctual reactions to starvation. Once you have lived it, you realise you were barely aware that you were performing these bizarre rituals, and you could not control them.

Before and after pictures of Sam Legg: Top: Healthy Legg at a Cilivilian Public Service camp before he (the conscientious objector) moved to Minesota to take part in the experiment as an alternative to forestry work. Bottom: A picture of Legg by Wallace Kirkland, which appeared in Life magazine in 1945.

‘Crow was fascinated to find that just like anorexics, the men in the experiment had at time greatly distorted body images...'

Conclusion: ‘Keys noted that the Minnesota experiment actually more closely duplicated anorexia than it did wartime starvation, in that conditions other than food intake, such as cleanliness and accessibility of medical care, were “normal.”’

The result was a 2 volume work created by Keys, A. et al. 1950: The biology of human starvation.

In picture form

These are some pictures I took from the net, which I like because they speak the truth. The hope one should be at the end, but for some reason that hunchbacked monster below it wouldn't let me move the hope any further down the page. I don't know if this is trying to tell me something.