So it's been quite awhile since I last posted.  I ended up finishing my semester at college successfully with all A's, yay.  But I also lost 30lbs.  I probably don't have to say my ed doctor was not happy with me.  Each visit she would try to get me back into the program there but I really didn't have time with school and my job at the library.  Part of me wanted to keep bingeing, purging, and restricting because I wanted to really hurt my body for once.  I've never really had any health problems from my eating disorder despite it having been going on for 9 years now.  I mean I've had low blood pressure/heart rate, been orthostatic and super dizzy and had some reflux but that's nothing.  I feel like I have to be really sick to have something to get better from, if that makes any sense...

So now that school is over I resigned myself to going into the partial program again.  I miss my low weight and wish I could have gotten lower.  Part of me really doesn't want to get better as my mood is still pretty good (I've struggled with severe depression for years so this is amazing) and I feel like I can get away with bingeing and purging several times a day then.  But I also know having an eating disorder makes college a ton harder and makes relationships with anyone difficult.  Plus my parents can't afford any more treatment for me.  Plus I want to be a therapist and how can I help others if I've never recovered?  So I'm doing it.  Fake it til you make I guess. I've been eating meals again and trying to reduce my binge/purge episodes.  So far I've gotten 2 days in symptom-free.

It's so hard to say goodbye to this eating disorder.  I've grown up with it and it's a part of me strangely enough.  But I guess it's made me who I am and it's really time to move on.

I wrote this awhile ago when I was reading a book called Feed Me which is essays on food and weight.

For the past approximately eight years since I found myself floundering in the muddy waters of depression and an eating disorder, the only activity that truly excites me is eating.  Something about lifting various amalgamations of protein, vegetables, carbohydrates and lipids to my mouth seems to light a spark in my otherwise very slow and very desolate brain.  Often I ask myself why is it eating that entrances me so?  Shouldn’t I be devoting myself to philosophy, art, volunteering, making bead necklaces for god’s sake!  Have I sunk to such a primitive state that my mind merely focuses on my next meal?  How did I get here? 

I go through various possibilities in my mind.  One would be my body is starving so my frantic and very craftily life-preserving brain is sending me signals of food, food, food.  Well, scratch that one, as much as I long for the sharp ice body of an anorexic I am quite healthy.  5’6” and 130lbs, what many a chart would deem ideal. And not to say I don’t know about anorexia and how it consumes the brain with ideations of food.  What I feel is very similar to that.  Yes, I still pore over food magazines like the harder I stare the more real the food will become except now it is no longer accompanied by a sunken stomach and pure physical need. 

So it it’s not physical why not emotional?  Of course it is emotional.  I still go running to the nearest grocery store at the first hint of negative emotion.  But if it was just emotional there would be times I was free and I am never free of my need for food.  Food for me is life itself.  It has past physical, blown by emotional and has now become my meaning. 

I have a theory about this too.  I once read in my psychology textbook about how we fulfill our needs in a type of pyramid that begins with nourishment and gradually builds to things like social status, acceptance, love, and self-actualization.  My belief is that since I’m bereft of any concept how to achieve the higher levels, I stick to what I can do; eat.  So meal after meal, I try to fulfill myself.  Will this box of cookies be the one that teaches me true love and the meaning of life?  So I stuff my body and at least have tried to leave the shackles of this shallow life behind.  In some ironic way food is a giant relief for me that shuts out worries yet I believe can answer my problems at the same time. 

So why is food my only interest?  Because food is hope three times a day on street corner and in my mouth.