Wow, I am totally right there with you. While I can't say it always works, I try to think of the things ED prevents me from doing, or the problems/hurt it causes other people. Example: Not being able to concentrate in class makes my performance go down. Not being healthy makes my parents worry. I suppose these are really just guilt traps in themselves, but *sometimes* it's enough to make me *not* engage in harmful behavior.

Anorexia does feel like a foreign invader to me - I often wonder what happened to the real me; will she ever come back?

But I doubt it; the real me is the me I am now as I enter my fourth year battling this (and I think developing it midlife contributes to the feeling of invasion),

I still don't always see my ED as the problem. It's like I try to bargain with recovery - I want to recover, but only so far and only as much as I want to. Then I want to stop and keep the ED behaviors (and, I'm ashamed to admit, but the low weight) because of what these behaviors do for me (relieve anxiety and depression, not face feelings and issues of the past, etc.)

I try to think about how anorexia has ripped through my life like a tornado, overturning everything and leaving me with shattered ruins. I often think of my life pre-ED when I was free - free to eat, free of the scale and the tyranny of numbers (always numbers - weight, calories, size), free of much of the anxiety, free to pursue my dreams, free of fear, and especially free of the 24/7 obsessions (anorexia really kicked my OCD tendencies into high gear.)

In spite of all that, I still often don't want to let go of ED and I still give in to the urges to restrict and engage in other ED behaviors. I've likened ED to a bad-boy boyfriend - you know he's not good for you, but damn he's attractive at times!

I spent nearly 30 yrs of my life being 'ruled' by anorexic thoughts. When these thoughts started, at age 11, they seemed like a good idea. After all, I was do healthy things wasn't I - like exercising a lot and avoiding 'unhealthy' foods? Environmental messages supported the notion that my eating and exercising plan was healthy. Low fat/calorie foods were labelled as 'healthy', and exercise was viewed as a wholesome pursuit.

The trouble was, I over-did it. I couldn't do without it. I depended upon my behaviours for my self esteem, and I HAD to stick to my eating + exercise 'rules'. The weight fell off me and I hardly noticed it. Others did notice it, of course. By the time I was forced to change my behaviours for the sake of my wellbeing I was 'hooked'/dependent on them.

However, I only saw anorexia nervosa as a problem (and started to hate it) when I was disabled with both heart failure and osteoporosis. Somehow my body had been quite resilient, for many years. However, when life stresses led to me eating less and less 6-7 yrs ago (at age 37-38 yrs) and my weight fell a bit further my body started to fail badly. The physical pain, dizziness, nausea etc. were unbearable. I was actually relieved when a doctor in A&E told me 'enough-is-enough'. He saw ED as a problem and (finally) so did I.

Do I have the urge to restrict and to over-exercise now? Yes, of course I do. However, every bit of me recognises that these behaviours are BAD, not good. My deterrent is the memory of how awful I felt when I was at 'death's door'.

For me it was the form that the eating disorder took, rather than the eating disorder itself that became the problem prompting me to seek help. Whilst I was restricting, I could have happily carried on until the end, but it was when I entered a phase of binging and purging that I decided I wanted out. Even now, one of the main motivators for not restricting is to avoid entering the binge-purge cycle again. I often wonder if my eating disorder had not deviated from pure restriction alone, whether I would be recovering today....

Sarah x

its very hard to disinguish between An and ME(or you). It becomes so over wellming that you think it is you. i'm pretty much 75% AN. what it wants drives me to not socialise/restrict/exercise. need to keep "blocking" it out and challenging ourselfs. its very very hard to risk take, i cant even risk a mini mars bar!

I had the same mindset for years...the ED was just fine, the problem was the difficulty of integrating it with a 'normal' life. similarly to Cathy, I started to see it as a problem when it threatened to totally destroy the semblance of normality I had left.

also though, to get me through tough situations now I tend to think of the 'problem' as lying with the reaction I have to challenging the ED rather than the challenge itself. that is to say, having to eat a meal out with my family isn't a problem, its the fact that it's liable to cause anxiety. and that is purely linked to the ED...I just tell myself that when I'm recovered I won't feel that anxiety anymore. I think it got easier for me to do this when I started facing up to things that scared me...seeing the crappy feelings I had about doing that as a 'problem' was a lot easier than trying to convince myself that feeling 'safe' and 'good' about following anorexia's rules was a problem!

Once again, I could have written this myself (especially all the work "problems and obligations" that interfere with my routines).

I completely echo what was said above, "It's like I try to bargain with recovery - I want to recover, but only so far and only as much as I want to. Then I want to stop and keep the ED behaviors (and, I'm ashamed to admit, but the low weight) because of what these behaviors do for me (relieve anxiety and depression, not face feelings and issues of the past, etc.)"

I am willing to see things as a problem and even admit that they are, but I only want to try and "fix" things to the point that I'm comfortable. As soon as it gets hard, when the urges hit to run or restrict, I see anything getting in my way of that as the "problem," not part of the solution.

Maybe it's just completely taking a leap of faith that the solutions we've been using to cope with that anxiety are obviously not working, and that the answer may just be simpler and "healthier" than we think they are. It's a trust thing--I have to trust someone or something other than myself, as that seems to be the "real" problem right now!

I think what's difficult is that, like you said, the obsessive thoughts are so bothersome that engaging in behaviors just FEELS better. That's the kicker. What's so bad for us really makes us feel less anxious/depressed/etc. I can very easily see that restricting is bad; but I don't often sit and think about the problem of the thoughts that lead to weight loss. I kind of accept those too easily. I've stewed over plenty a lunch meeting, thinking up excuses. I bitch and whine about the damn lunch meeting, when I know the problem is really my inflexibility. Yes, even without anorexia in my life, I wouldn't enjoy a lunch meeting, but I wouldn't risk my career to avoid it! There is a lot of bargaining in recovery -- I want to be at a healthy weight, but I don't want to do X; I don't want my relationships and career to suffer, but Y just isn't necessary.
As far as the foreign invader issue, I've never seen anorexia that way in my life. I know most people think of it as this other thing, this cancer, in a way. I've always just seen it as a sort of twisted part of my brain that I have to learn to manage.

My T always ask's me "How's that working for you?", that's when I know its a problem.

See all the things that I wanted to do but didn't do (ED has rules about what is allowed) is my way of seeing it as a problem.

So I guess this says it all about how I've done with seeing ED as the problem--I sitting here reading this and thinking, "God, I hate those fucking office lunches. They cause problems for so many people who just want to eat the way they want to eat away from everyone else." Uh, right. I still make up excuses to get out of office lunches. And I like the people I work with. Anyway, thanks for reminding me that it's not the damn lunch that's the problem :)

This is exactly what changed for me last year, I stopped seeing my eating disordered thoughts as logical and started seeing them as the problem. The problem now is that I'm not entirely sure HOW that changed! I really wish I could give people a step by step guide or something because things have been so, so much easier since this changed. Although I do still get anorexic thoughts wandering through my head now I am weight restored, they don't make me anxious, I don't see them as true and I have no desire to act on them. It feels incredible given how entrenched I was in the disorder only a little over a year ago, and I was ill for a pretty long time too.

I think part of it was getting angry with the eating disorder. Not bitter, because that never helps, but I stopped seeing the anorexia as the solution to all my problems and started realising just how much it had stolen from me. I started not only knowing intellectually that it was an illness but really feeling the truth of that, and wanting to rebel against this thing that made me stray so far from my own values and hopes. I always felt as if it were just a part of me before March last year, and I am still not 100% sure what changed that, but now I have proof because I love living without the eating disorder, even if that does mean having to actually deal with my anxiety/PTSD.

Sorry, this is a subject that makes me want to write an essay!

I totally agree with this post. I'm not going to launch an essay about how right you are but NOT doing behaviors is still part of every waking moment since they just FEEL so right despite me not wanting to do them and authentically wanting to be well and be rid of ED.

This is a great debate and really important. I wrote this piece about recognising my ED as an illness a while back (http://www.findingmelissa.co.uk/2009/06/first-steps-recovery/); and, whilst I think that this is only one aspect of the recognition, it was part of my changing perception.

A lot of the other comments resonate with my experiences, especially in relation to not being able to deny the harm of the eating disorder and, also, getting angry with it.

If I go back, it was quite a cognitive based process at first, which is really unusual for me. Everytime something was hard, I asked myself whether the thing itself was hard, or whether the ED was making it harder. Just by asking the question, I raised the possiblity that the "problem" might actually be the ED; and, eventually, this process created an element of distrust around the ED (was it really such a great friend) which, whilst horrifically uncomfortable, made it more possible for me to consider giving it up.