Disordered Eating and it's Often Invisibility

I have never, in my conscious memory gone a day without thinking about fatness. I'm not sure I ever go much more than an hour. Food and fatness pervade every corner of my thoughts, feeling and practice. My BMI now is very very average; I'm neither overweight nor underweight. When things are clear I know that. But my head is too often muddled.

When I was 12 I was fat, boys at school told me I was fat and the world told me I was fat. Kids school trousers didn't fit me and as the lady who measured me in M&S made sure to let me know "we don't make bras in a 38AA." I never really stopped punishing myself for 12 year old me, who every day used her school dinner token to buy pudding and wondered if anyone- anyone in the whole world- could ever think she was pretty.

As I got thinner, people got friendlier. I made friends, lots of them. The world stopped punishing me for the body I lived in. And so I started punishing my body. Packed lunch in the bin then sick after dinner. I was skinny, though. It's very hard to disassociate yourself from a narrative where thin means good and fat means bad when all your past social interactions have reinforced it.

My diet steadied, I moralised food but I ate "normally". This felt ok for a bit. Then I watched myself ballooning. Old pictures boasted thigh gaps and twiggy arms. And I was stranded in a new blown up body I didn't feel belonged to me. My reflection impersonated this great monster. Deformed and freakish. I was anxious. The constant checking procedures looked vain and attention seeking. Everything had to be perfect. The fragile world I had constructed for myself came crashing down easily and often. I became alienating and jarring. I was detached from myself and everyone else. I was bigger but I wasn't better.

I think a lot of the disciplining of my body has been shaped by my interactions with men. First, when I learnt that with boys, unless you’re skinny enough/soft enough/pretty enough to fit inside what they believe belongs in the subcategory of ‘female’, then you are to be dismissed and dehumanised; a hybrid creature not worthy of their time. I also went to a school where feminism wasn't a thing, where education on consent wasn't a thing. When you're made to feel like an object, but don't have the tools or language to describe what happened to you, you end up subscribing to those feelings. When you feel like you have an object worth, it's your object worth you invest in. When you feel the boundaries of your body have been attacked, you do anything to gain back control and redefine those boundaries. But those boundaries aren't: this is my body, I do what I want with it. They are more like: no bread, ever. And if you do, you better grab a toothbrush.

I would binge, a lot. And I needed a coping mechanism for when food and my body became too overwhelming. It had been a year and a half since I last indulged in vomiting as a way out. I guess old habits die hard. What followed were months of gross delirium. I would fetishize my own thinness, this was a period of extreme elation and extreme lows: every day was plagued by collapsing, crying and numbness. I stopped attending sixth form. Counselling was too painful, this lady kept prodding at past traumas and it hurt. I was hurting everyone I loved, and on track to fail my A levels too. And so I buried these behaviors again. “You look well” felt a lot like “you look fat” for a long time. To those closest to me, my wellness was surely signified by fatness, but I must stress that fatness does not always mean you are well.

I am so bored of the perceived choice between eating what you want and hating your body and restricting what you eat and being allowed to like yourself a little bit more. I am constantly trying to navigate between two extremes. It's as depressing as it is cyclical. When I'm happy I eat what I want and when I eat what I want I get fat. And when I get fat I fall into patterns of binging and starving and purging. And repeat.

There is something difficult about the seemingly oppressive confidence of all your friends who were born skinny and stay skinny. I feel trapped in this alien body and everyone around me seems just fine. I am ok, largely. I still throw up involuntary when I'm anxious about what I've eaten. At the moment this is every day. And it is today, because I feel particularly fed up, that I have decided to write this. Because being sick is a reminder that I still have a difficult relationship with food and my body. Consciously, I have have tried to stop self-deprecating behaviors around food and yet my subconscious is still to catch up.

When your body doesn't match the image that some people have of women with eating disorders, you don’t feel like you're worthy of sharing your own experiences. You don’t feel you’ve earned it. Writing this down feels good. When your thoughts are constructed like a monologue, it's easy to rationalise very irrational behaviors. By sharing them, I make my thoughts a discussion. I think discussion is how I might learn to love myself.