Spotting the signs.

A friend of mine has recently admitted to having an ed, and it got me thinking about how everyone has an individual experience.

For me, the warning signs were weighing out food and becoming increasingly inflexible about deviating from my food plans. Those were behaviours that people noticed as being obsessive and abnormal. But for her. it is different. She has become very spontaneous about eating, because she gets so hungry that she eats exactly what she craves, followed by nothing for several hours (length depending on the ed voice).

So, what changed when your disorder developed?

Why am I so ashamed?

Today I got thinking about how much more capable I am to articulate my ed problems and feelings than  I used to be, but in a way I’m actually more secretive.

When it comes to not having eaten, or any other behaviour or feeling to do with restriction, I am past lying to those closest to me, as they know about it and so that’s relatively comfortable. Sometimes, being able to say words out loud makes them a little less confusing. Yet when it comes to binges, taking laxatives, and obsessively exercising I am rarely honest. It is at these times when my feelings become so incredibly powerful that I am sometimes literally unable to move my body out of utter hopelessness.

I guess that has something to do with the “numbing” effect of purely anorexic behaviour, but it still fascinates me that I feel the need to be so secretive about all the other stuff, despite my having an eating disorder being a pretty well known fact.

I’m reading a book at the moment about the workings of the mind and our 2 thinking systems. Aside from being really interesting, it has also taught me that some of our human judgement is NOT reasoned and considered at all; we have a host of associations and links to certain ideas, mental images, words etc, and so it could well be that the relatively common teenage thought that anorexia is “better” than bulimia has made me lie and conceal those aspects of my ed.

Weird huh?