Although this article was more geared towards parents, I think it really helped me understand a lot better about what the hell was going on in my head during the worst of the eating disorder.

An excerpt:

An interesting area of research known as “theory of mind” posits that your child’s brain really does change as his or her weight dips below the starvation level. Theory of mind researchers are studying the eating disordered person’s ability to read facial expressions to intuit mental states, sometimes solely by looking at the eyes of the person they are with. They’re finding that this ability falls victim to starvation, just as does the body’s ability to maintain strong bones, keep warm, or grow lustrous, healthy-looking hair. A starving person has difficulty attributing emotions, beliefs, and desires to themselves and to others. Without this ability, it can be hard to function smoothly in the social world.



...One test the researchers used showed both people with anorexia and recovered patients film clips of social interactions between people. Test subjects had to scrutinize facial expressions, body language, conversation and context to read complicated emotions such as desire, embarrassment and hostility. When a teen with anorexia looks into her worried, and frustrated parents’ eyes, can she recognize the emotions written on their faces, and compare it to feelings she has experienced herself? Researchers noted clear deficits in this area among anorexics. The test was able to distinguish those currently suffering from anorexia and those who had recovered. So the good news is that this weakness in processing emotion seems to get better with recovery.


Ulrike Schmidt and colleagues are now readying a paper for the International Journal of Eating Disorders that looks at theory of mind in relation to bulimia. In her tests, Schmidt and her colleagues examine study subjects and the ability to attribute mental states to others and ourselves, which they call “mentalizing.” Interestingly, when a group of patients with bulimia were given this test, they were better able to recognize negative emotion than the control group. Schmidt and colleagues have detected enough of a “distinct socio-cognitive profile” among bulimic patients (translation: they do read and process emotions differently) to merit further research.

The fact that patients with anorexia who have recovered seem to regain their ability to recognize and attribute emotions to others, Banker notes, indicates that this phenomenon could well be a temporary lapse into autism-like cognitive behavior. “When someone’s in a state of starvation that kind of empathic, or higher-relational function shuts down,” she notes, news she hopes will “reduce the personal hurt” that comes with the territory of helping a loved one battle anorexia.

Basically, when I am in the grips of the eating disorder, my "self" shuts down.  It's like my own self is too difficult, too expensive for my starving brain to maintain. And so it goes to ground. Hibernates.

When it does come back, it's like your hand or foot waking up after falling asleep--pain and pins and needles. That this phase is likely necessary doesn't make it any easier. What also doesn't make it easier is when you realize just how long you've been absent. When it suddenly hits you that all your similarly-aged friends are married and having babies and you're still not quite figuring out this whole thing the world likes to call "dating."*

It makes me want to get a t-shirt that says "Excuse me, but my brain was on a prolonged leave of absence."

The irony is that my life looked pretty normal. Graduate degrees, jobs, things like that. It didn't look like I was missing out on a whole lot. But I realize that I never really went through the process of making friends and meeting people for almost a decade. Add in the fact that my natural skills at these tops out at "total suckitude," and it's not hard to see how you find yourself at 30, rather adrift in the world.

Even more ironic is that the eating disorder can start to seem like a good solution. If I shrink my world back down, I'll go back to being oblivious about what I'm missing. Not a bad solution, at least in the short term. Until you realize that going back will mean that even more time has passed and you are further and further behind where you want to be in life.

I think this is the "mourning" the therapists tell you about. You don't just mourn the loss of the eating disorder, you mostly mourn the loss of everything that went along with it. The illness keeps you charmingly oblivious to, well, everything, and only as you come out do you realize what you've been missing.

*Honestly, what keeps my sanity is looking at mating rituals in the animal kingdom. I can put them into context that way. Clearly, I'm a nerd...

I think that self-care is a big part of recovery.  That being said, my history of adequately caring for myself is generally bad.

If you are friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, then you have probably heard me whinging about my awful cold.  The terrible I-think-I-just-swallowed-glass-shards stage has passed, and now I'm into trying to figure out how to get through life with five gallons of snot sloshing around in my skull.

Not fun.

So instead of blogging tonight, I'm going to take a bit of my own advice and practice good self-care.  I am logging off the computer and getting some extra rest. 

With that, I'll talk to everyone in the morning.

I've never really considered myself athletic. For starters, my coordination and grace are pretty minimal (I was voted "Class Klutz" in high school). Second, sports were never really a big thing in my family. Lastly, I always thought of myself as too chubby to play sports (even though I wasn't). I was almost always chosen last in gym class, which ultimately made sports a humiliating experience that I wrote off as quickly as possible.

I started exercising in college to manage stress, but I never really integrated that into my identity. Then I ultimately gravitated to compulsive exercise as part of the eating disorder. Carrie the Gym Rat was very much a part of my identity, but I still didn't see myself as particularly athletic. The actual exercise was fairly irrelevant--as long as I was burning calories, engaging in the ritual, and mentally checking out while exercising, it didn't matter.

That has changed as I've gotten stronger in my recovery. I've been doing a fair amount of cycling, and I took a Pilates class for a while. I've been thinking about taking a kickboxing class, or an Irish dance class, or even a dance aerobics class (I did it a few years ago and it was pretty fun). I would love to go kayaking and learn how to play tennis. I took tennis lessons when I was about 12 or so, but I quit after I nailed my teacher in the nads with a ball--he did say "Aim it at me!"--and I was too embarrassed to go back because I had a big crush on him. I would love to get back into it.

All of these activities has caused me to rethink the absence of "athletic" from my self-concept. I'm not much into team sports like basketball or volleyball. I'm still not at all coordinated, and since I don't like many quote-unquote "sports" (at least as they're mostly thought of in the US), I don't feel entirely comfortable calling myself athletic. But I have started to think of myself as "sporty." I like being active, even above and beyond the eating disorder. I'm not super-adventurous, but I do like to try new activities, especially water sports.

It's been interesting, this learning to think of myself as a sporty person. And I like it. It feels genuine and authentic, a side of myself I never thought I had.

I saw this blog post on my Real Beauty Is... newsletter, and it really struck me how much I've been letting go of who I was in recovery.

Danielle Boonstra writes:

I used to identify myself with so many external things. This, I thought, helped me to know my worth in the world. I would question "Is my job good enough? Do I make enough money? Do we live in a nice enough neighbourhood? Am I smart enough?". Of course all of this was meaningless. Being in competition leads to misery every single time. Life is not a race.

And so I work on shedding these things. I get better and better at it everyday. Who I really am is not concerned with how much money I make. My authentic self is concerned only with creative expression of my divine purpose! As I let go of the labels I used to love, I become more me...the me who will not be defined because I am constantly evolving!

Ah, that old tired game of Compare and Despair. The truth is this: I often don't have a clue of who I am, where I stand, or if I'm "good" at something because I'm always comparing myself to others. How could I be smart when there was an 11-year-old mathematical prodigy in my calculus class? How could I be pretty if I had a zit? How could I be a good friend if I got mad at my friends? There was always someone nicer and smarter than me. Which was probably true, it's just that the big cognitive distortion was that this meant that I couldn't be nice or smart. If I wasn't the best, it didn't matter.

I can has perfectionism?

In a way, letting go of who I was is somewhat easy because I didn't really know who I was. Sure, I could find adjectives to describe myself that weren't all negative, and I'm guessing that some of those adjectives are still the same (curious, moody, funny). But mostly, this letting go of who I was means letting go of that insecure girl who needed others to define her. Who was so unsure of herself that she hauled out any and all yardsticks necessary to try and figure out where she stood. I'm still getting out the yardstick too damn often, and it's not helping me or anyone else. I used to get rather angry at that girl for (among other things) being "stupid" enough to get an eating disorder and then being too stupid to get herself out.

The simple fact is I can't really hate the girl who didn't know any better than to go yardstick hunting before she could walk--she was doing the best she could. And even if I could hate her, I just don't have the energy. So I'm letting go of that insecure girl, the girl who cared so damn much how she stacked up and where she stood. I don't know that I can't be defined, as Boonstra says, but I do know that the actual definition itself isn't a tool with which to measure myself. It's a definition. It can change. So can I.

See here's the thing about learning to be yourself (and maybe one day like yourself, but that's quite a ways off for me): you have to accept what you're NOT, too.

This sucks.

It goes a little something like this: I meet many different cool people who are able to do things (many things) that I can't do, or they do them better than me. So I start to want to be like them- except the ME part of me just doesn't do that. Things like talent at sports, getting up easily in the mornings, lack of anxiety and depression, fashion sense, flexibility, doing something half-assed everyone once in a while just because. Those kind of things.

And if I really, truly start accepting myself for who I am right in this moment, it means I have to accept that I am a night owl, that I have no innate talent at athletics, my tendencies are to be regimented, and looking on the bright side isn't my strong point. In my stereotypical way, I thought that if I worked hard enough, I could make these things come true. I was going to be in bed by 10pm EVERY NIGHT and WIDE AWAKE at 6am, and have a full day's work done by noon! Or I would start trying to plan an impulsive trip- is this a good weekend to call someone to go on a road trip? Maybe?

What this really means is: I wish I were different.

There. I said it.

Constantly wishing to be different let me live in a fantasy world where I really was different, where those possibilities existed and I could fulfill them. Except here's reality and this is where I try to live most of the time, and I have to make the most of what I have.

Which still makes me sad.

I don't think that self-improvement is a futile task- far from it, in fact. But you have to start with who you really are, and not who you're NOT.

I hear a lot about self-esteem in therapy. "Work on your self-esteem," they say. Do affirmations. Give yourself a manicure/pedicure. Take a bubble bath.

Um, okay.

Not that these things are bad at all. But they're not me.

I saw this article awhile ago, then, and was intrigued. "Be kind to yourself and cure your eating disorder." I have no illusions (never did) that being nice to myself would magically cure me of anorexia. If only!* However, ED professionals in the UK are pioneering a new therapy called Compassionate Mind Therapy (CMT) to help people "develop strategies to treat themselves in a compassionate way." CMT seems essentially a form of cognitive behavioral therapy; here, instead, you replace ineffective/harmful behaviors with ones that are more compassionate.

One of the psychologists using CMT with his patients had this to say:

[He] thought that this would be a good focus for the work he was doing with patients with eating disorders: “They experience high levels of shame and self-criticism, and CMT helps people to develop the ability to soothe themselves at times of emotional distress. For example, bingeing is often used as a way of promoting a positive or neutral emotional state to avoid anxiety, anger or shame. If people can activate the self-soothing system they won’t need to engage in bingeing to manage difficult feelings.”

Gilbert explains that it is a case of replacing one set of emotions with another. “So instead of self-anger or contempt, there is self-kindness and warmth. This is
the same as in therapy for anxiety in which people are taught relaxation
exercises because they can’t feel anxious and relaxed at the same
time.”

Interestingly, part of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT**) involves emotion regulation and self-soothing. And researchers at Duke found that self-compassion worked better at helping people deal with negative events.

Many people with eating disorders are perfectionists, people who tend to criticize themselves relentlessly. So even if therapies like CMT don't help you recover, per se, it can help you stay in recovery and learn better life skills to prevent relapse.

*I have major problems with this headline. When will they say "Food cures anorexia"?
**Don't you just love acronyms?