In one of the comments from the other day's post, one of my readers posted the following comment:

You know... I relate to a lot of what you said... but a couple things popped out at me, and it made me wonder if you're remembering the eating disorder in a distortedly positive light? For instance, you said, "Starving made me feel better. Life...didn't." If you really think about it, do you really think starving made you feel better? For me, I know that I thought I preferred to feel starved. I know that I didn't feel as much self-disgust or as much constant anxiety. But I did feel cold, I cried a lot, I had a recording of calorie counts on repeat in my head, and my world was very narrow. That didn't really feel better than life. I just thought it did. And it's easy to explain to other people that you "feel better" in the eating disorder... but you only feel better in the eating disorder when you're still in the eating disorder. But really take a second to pause and try to remember the eating disorder accurately. Did you really feel better in a starved state?

It's true on many levels.

I think it gets to how we remember the eating disorder. Memory is a funny thing- it's not a videorecording of exactly what happened. It's a highly edited version of what happened, and we tend to remember different facets of different events. What got ingrained in my memory was the quick feel-better sensation that restricting and over-exercising gave me.

Which is true, of course. It's a primal feeling. And the relief from anxiety and depression were things that my brain really wanted to hang on to.

What got edited out, however, was all of the nasty stuff that followed. The cold. The despair. The loneliness. Those were later, further down the line, and therefore distanced as consequences of the eating disordered behavior. It's like when doctors and therapists told me that I would die if I didn't start eating. The reason that sort of warning never really worked was that potential death was nebulous and hazy, as well as sometime in the future. The terror about eating was right here, right now, and very, very real. When your brain kicks into fear mode, it's focused on ways to get rid of the fear NOW. Not five minutes from now, not five seconds from now, NOW.

Still, I can make myself remember that the quick fix and anxiety relief always bring less-than-pleasant consequences. That it's all too easy to romanticize anorexia and forget that it really does make you miserable. Anorexia had benefits, yes, but those benefits were very short-term and wore off all too quickly.

I have a memory, it seems, for the most bizarre facts related to my eating disorder. For instance: I have these packets of instant oatmeal type cereal. I had the occasional packet, and then wouldn't eat them for a year or two because they had too many calories. After a year or so, I find the box in my parents' pantry. I reach in to grab a packet, and I think, "I bet this has X calories." I flip the box around to read the label- and there it was. Each packet did, indeed, have X calories.

This is also why I have trouble with the little flavored coffee creamers. When I was working at the office-turned-giant-Weight-Watchers-cult, one of the ladies had to post a sign on the little bowl of coffee creamers, announcing how many calories, fat grams, and sugar grams each thing had. Still remember it. Granted, when I'm guzzling several cups in a row as I do now because of the 12+ hour days I have with the commute, all of that creamer leaves me feeling vaguely ill.

The point has nothing to do with oatmeal or coffee creamer. It has to do with the way that so many people with eating disorders remember these factoids. So many other things, I can't remember from that time. It's as if my memory is this giant slice of Swiss cheese: largely intact but so many holes!

I'm not the only person to notice this. A group of researchers in Turkey* did a series of directed forgetting experiments in people with anorexia to examine memory bias. Directed forgetting is an experiment where you're asked to learn something and then told to forget it. You're NOT told not to think about it- this technique, called thought suppression is notoriously ineffective. By telling yourself not to think about something, you're automatically thinking about it.

Both a group of people with anorexia and a group of healthy control subjects were given two sets of words: neutral words and disorder-related words. They were then told whether to remember those words or forget them. Although both groups did, indeed, forget some of the words, the group with anorexia didn't really forget those words related to the eating disorder. Says the researchers: "Our findings support the existence of a strong memory bias for disorder-relevant information in patients with anorexia nervosa, who had difficulty in avoiding the processing of information that they were asked to forget."

So why is this? Could it be that people with anorexia obsess so much over food and weight and calories and exercise that the triggers are so primed that one mention of a word sets off the series of events? That is, are the tracks of a sufferer's thoughts so ingrained that your brain just goes there? Is it an emotional response? Something more akin to an addict's response when seeing an old street corner where he used to score dope?

Any thoughts?

*If there were other scientists on the paper from Hungary, it would have been too ironic.