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...

Yes, yet another whiny post about my (soon-to-be-ending) lackluster career.

So my closest coworker- in terms of distance and time spent together, NOT favorite person wise- can multi-task like no other. Me? If I'm told more than one thing at a time, I go haywire. My brain just doesn't like it. I can email and do work at the same time, which basically means I check my email and can make it look like I'm working. I have to listen to music when I work because it drowns out all of the background noise. Being a trained pianist, I quite like the music and have gotten accustomed to it.

The real grate, however, comes when my boss rattles off this huuuuuuuge list of things to do to my co-worker and I. She just ticks all the items off her to-do list, and I'm left floundering after task one. I just can't switch between tasks very well.

Then, in my regular perusals of ED research, I find this article: Impaired "Set-Shifting" in Anorexia Nervosa. Basically, set-shifting is the ability to transition between several different sets of tasks. People with impaired set-shifting have higher rates of obsessionality. Which sort of goes to figure, since obsessions mean you focus on one thing. I know you can extrapolate research too far, but I also find it odd that I listen to the same band for ages and ages before I get into another phase. Plenty of people do this, but for some reason, I only want to listen to one band, or one type of music, for upwards of a year. Yes, there are variations. Even I would get bored of the same album for an entire year. Maybe this has something to do with set-shifting; maybe it doesn't. But people have always called me incredibly focused.

Take that as you will.

Even knowing and understanding this, I still have issues with my coworker. First off, she was one of the original Weight Watchers Queens. I am jealous of her. I am. She gets to lose weight (and be complimented for it); I have to gain. Yippee. She's my boss' favorite in terms of work completed; I need constant reminders to keep my head screwed on straight. She has a boyfriend; I don't. She has friends; I don't. I know I have plenty of good qualities, but sometimes I just want to do this whole little toddler thing and go: It's NOT FAIR!

Of course it's not. We all want life to be fair, for good people to get good things and bad people to get bad. But no one is entirely good or entirely bad. Hence the phrase: shit happens.

But knowing, at least on some level, why I need to be told only one task at a time helps not only my self-esteem, but my ability to tell people what I need.

One thing at a time, people. One thing at a time.