I ate lunch at Panera today, and there was something new on the menu: calorie counts.

It didn't mess with my head as badly as this prior experience, nor did it rattle me for very long. It annoyed me and upset me a bit, in no small part because I wasn't expecting it.

The calories were listed on the right-hand side of the menu, next to the price. The description of the food was listed on the left. When I was deep in the ED, I would have picked everything out beforehand if I couldn't weasel my way out of the occasion, so I could make absolutely sure I wasn't eating one single calorie more than I had to. I would have asked for the chips (if my meal came with that--it threw people off my trail) and saved them "for later," neatly disposing of them when no one was looking. Early in recovery, I would have made a minimal attempt to ignore the information, and then have found the lowest calorie item and ordered that. I would have gotten the apple or the carrot sticks as a side dish, but I would, in fact, eat these.

I was able to be much more calm and rational. Instead of finding the item with the lowest calories and then deciding if I would order that (as long as I didn't hate anything integral to the dish), I looked at the different dishes and then checked the calories.

In an ideal world, the calorie information would just be numbers, like the metric tons of methane produced by flatulent bovines. "Party facts," my undergraduate advisor called them. But over a decade of an ED means that facts aren't just facts. They're very emotionally charged facts. They're not just numbers, nor are they going to BE just numbers any time in the near future.

Given that fact, I did the next best thing: I tried to make the (irrelevant) information as small a part of my decision as possible. I did order a yummy entree salad with a hunk o' bread on the side. It fulfilled my meal plan requirements. The number was also within the "acceptable" limits. Was there something else on the menu I might have liked more? Probably. Were the calories a factor? Yep. Were they the only factor? Not really.

The big difference wasn't that I overcame my calorie-counting compulsion* and felt the shackles fall from my ankles. The difference was that I could be much more rational and healthy about my decision-making process. I could focus on what I might want to order AND the calories. Usually the first factor was almost completely ignored. As long as I didn't hate the lowest calorie item, that was what I ordered. I freaked out and all semblance of sanity went out the window. This time, it didn't. This time, I was able to step back for a second, take a deep breath, and do what I needed to do.

*I get obsessive about numbers in general- the OCD and the AN pretty much fed the compulsive counting.

One of my favorite blogs is F*ck Feelings, and last week, they addressed fear and anxiety. Although not fear per se, but rather our fear of fear and anxiety. Oh dear--I'm making this quite a bit complicated. I'll let "Dr. Lastname" from the blog introduce the subject for me:

Fear isn’t all bad (e.g., fearing snakes goes a long way towards keeping you from poison venom). On the other hand, fear itself is stressful and painful, so our first instinct is to avoid it, no matter what…which is, of course, when things start getting really frightening. No matter how much we want to protect ourselves or those we love, it’s not gonna happen, so we have to accept the unavoidable scariness of life (and anacondas). It won’t necessarily calm you down, but it will give you the strength to do what matters, fear or no.

Anxiety sucks. There's no getting around that. Anxiety is also pretty normal. It's when we organize our lives around avoiding or neutralizing that anxiety that it becomes really problematic. Of course, it's easier to say that when you're not anxious all the freaking time, but that's a bit of a different story.

I'm good at avoidance. Like really, really good. When I get really stressed, I turn ostrich-like and try to avoid whatever is freaking me out. If I'm anxious about making a phone call, I put it off. And off and off and then even further off. If I'm anxious about what I'm going to eat, I used to avoid eating, or eat only a few specific foods that provoked the least amount of anxiety. If I'm anxious about what might happen if I don't exercise, I just make sure I exercise. The more I avoid these things, the more fearful I become. It becomes more and more certain that something bad really will happen if I make that call, eat that food, or skip that workout.

From the time I was 13 or 14, my life has been dictated by anxiety, be it OCD-driven (mainly germ and contamination fears), about school/work, the eating disorder, or something else entirely. Through recovery from my eating disorder, my anxieties about food haven't gone away. They're still there. What I've learned in my recovery is how not to let my anxieties about food dictate my life. And the more I disregard the dictates of my eating disorder, the less important those dictates really seem.

True, the eating disordered fears still occupy way too much room in my skull. I still do a lot of things to avoid fears about eating more than what my meal plan ways, or exercise less than the maximum I'm allowed, or eat something that isn't the lowest-calorie version. Some of the reason I haven't challenged these is that they really haven't gotten in the way of most of the things I want to do. The other reason is that, well, I'm scared. I know the anxiety won't actually hurt me, but I don't relish the idea of provoking the anxiety demon. Best to let it sleep, right?

Except that I can't recover if I allow these pretty major fears to dictate my actions. All I can do is confront these fears and stop letting them tell me what to do.

Our area got clobbered by some pretty serious storms tonight--thankfully I had saved my work and turned off my computer before the power went out briefly. Watching through the front window, my dad said he saw a pine tree in the yard bent over at almost a 90 degree angle.

Wind that powerful should have splintered that tree, broken it in two, sent it crashing to the ground.

But it didn't.

What saved our pine tree wasn't necessarily its strength, but its flexibility.

I wondered whether a similar but inflexible tree would have survived that wind. Would the storm have broken the tree that couldn't adapt to the (temporary) harsh conditions?

Perhaps.

I'm not a flexible person. If you alter my plans or habits, I freak. I don't like it. I like things in the same way, the same order, and any wind just totally uproots me (to continue the metaphor). The "winds" of life have previously either uprooted me entirely or snapped me in two and sent me crashing to the ground. When the going gets tough, the inflexible cling to their routines.

Our tree that bent and swayed in the wind didn't need to stay perfectly upright. It was able to "go with the flow," so to speak. And it stayed standing.

Flexibility.

I can do the physical kind just fine, but the mental/emotional stuff? Not so much. And increasing my flexibility has been one of the hardest things to tackle in recovery. I don't expect that I will become a happy-go-lucky, chipper, impulsive type of person. That's not the point. To some extent, I like my inflexibility--or at least I recognize when it's useful and that it's not going anywhere.

There are, however, times when my inflexibility is not so useful. When I have "rules" that box in every aspect of my life: no sleeping until all my homework is done, no resting until I have done X amount of exercise, no eating until I have done X amount of exercise, no speaking up among strangers, no breaks while working. I could go on and on. These rules are irrational and occasionally irritating and they often keep me from being a fully happy, useful person. And when life stirs things up, these routines become utterly sacrosanct. The harder the wind blows, the more entrenched these rituals get.

We all have rituals that help us feel grounded and secure--I'm not talking about these. Those are more like the roots of a tree than an incapability to be flexible.

Trees that can bend don't break as much. They spring back. They recover. They don't shatter and they don't blow over and they end up just freaking fine.

I need to remember this more often.

Image credit: Jimmedia

This winter has not been easy on me- I have been hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. Around November or so, the amount of exercise I was doing began to creep up...and up and up. Yet it took until the middle of this month for me to realize that things were really out of control. My weight had dropped some, nothing catastrophic, but also nothing to sneeze at. I have managed to get back on track with the exercise and eating, in part due to a painful left foot.

For the past month or so, I have had this nagging foot pain that wasn't getting any better. I got a referral to the podiatrist about two weeks ago, and finally got in for an appointment this morning. He took one look at my foot, poked at a spot he said "looked puffy" (I couldn't really tell the difference), poked it causing me to yelp, and said, "Yep- that's a stress fracture." X-rays confirmed the diagnosis.*

What does this mean for Carrie? No exercise--none--for about three weeks, and then only non-weight-bearing things like swimming or a stationary bike. I also have some fun footwear in the form of a walking cast, aka The Boot. Otherwise, rest, Advil, and ice, with orders to come back for more x-rays in about a month.

Well, shit.

A metatarsal stress fracture is pretty classic of the female athlete triad, the combination of osteoporosis, disordered eating, and amenorrhea. Although I currently get a period, I do have a history of osteoporosis/osteopenia (depends on the bone- my spine is the worst), and the disordered eating--well, you knew that. It's not that I think I'm invincible. I've experienced too many things to really believe that. But I didn't think the ED would keep affecting me, even after being in recovery.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize exactly how driven and disordered my behavior was. I was exercising several hours a day on a fractured foot. This sort of behavior is light-years away from wanting to look like the ingenue of the week or getting some sort of revenge at Mommy Dearest for not letting me go on Spring Break in high school. This sort of behavior is tremendously biologically driven and very addictive in nature.

I'm kicking myself (with my good foot) for letting the exercise get out of hand. I feel I should have known better. Although I've had exercise issues in the past, they never approached many of the stories I would hear in treatment. My behavior was compulsive, although not phenomenally excessive. This time around, however, it was both.

I want to forget, I really want to forget, how much ED lurks and may always lurk. I want to think there will be a day when I can relax and be a little less vigilant. But for now, I have to remember that Mad-Eye Moody said it best: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

*It's not uncommon for stress fractures in the foot to fail to appear on an x-ray, but sometimes they do.