anorexia/restriction, running, and how to stop the insanity

@tennosea – (Love the name, by the way.) Your honesty about your current situation really touched my heart. I have been in a very similar situation in the past. I did 20 years in quasi-recovery. Which is to say, I was very, very unwell. At my lowest points (and there were several) I was down to under 120 pounds at 6′ tall. I’m a man, and I’m guessing that you’re a woman and BMI is BS anyway, but all the same, factoring in for those considerations, I’m guessing that your current weight is probably similar in many regards to when I was at my lowest weight. (Almost identical BMI, which, as I said, is BS, but at least a reference point.) So my initial thought, before I even read the rest of what you had written, was that your weight sounds dangerously low. I’m sure you know that from your engineer mind, but knowing that from your emotional mind is another thing. I know. If all it took was logic, then I wouldn’t have lived with ED for so long. But on the other hand, logic can be a powerful ally. So I wouldn’t dismiss it just yet. To be entirely honest, for me, I got so sick eventually that something just switched in my brain. It didn’t make all my problems go away, but it was a definite shift whereby I simply wasn’t willing to believe my own neuroses any longer. But somewhere in there I believe that logic was a strong ally. First, I had to be willing to take a good and honest look at my situation: I was starving and I was doing it to myself. I was going to die sooner rather than later, and, to be honest, I was so miserable that I would have been happier to die than to have continued in that way. Perhaps that is what led to the shift. But upon taking an honest look and account of my situation I then reasoned that the only possible way out was to eat and to rest (i.e. no exercise.) Now, of course, I also knew that there were reasons that I restricted and exercised compulsively (as well as plenty of other compulsions) – it was all an attempt to relieve the (seemingly) unbearable anxiety that I experienced from the obsessive thinking that I had. My brain was always on, always talking, and it was tyrannical. It went something like this: “You shouldn’t eat that. If you eat that you’ll feel bad. And sugar/fat/meat/grain/etc. is morally, ethically, and spiritually impure. If you eat that you’ll be impure. By the way, don’t eat that apple that you’re thinking of eating either because it too might have some as-yet unknown or unseen impurity. Best not to eat anything.” Or “You ate that food that had something wrong with it. Now you’ve got to do something about it. You have to fast. You have to exercise. You have to do penitence.” Etc. Etc. And then there was the physical sensations that I tried to avoid. I didn’t want to feel full or bloated. I wanted to feel light and pure. But I knew, logically, that I needed to eat, and I needed to eat enough, and I needed to eat unrestrictedly. Oh, and I also knew that I needed to reject the compulsions. For me, I realized that it was absolutely not worth living the way I had been living – obsessing, starving, etc. So I decided that I would eat, eat enough, and not restrict for the rest of my life starting immediately. And I decided that I would not give in to compulsions any longer. I found YE, and I decided to follow the MiniMaud guidelines. I took it upon myself as as new challenge, to see if I could be creative enough to succeed. And for me it definitely has taken creativity. My digestion was so compromised that I simply couldn’t eat that much food at first. So I had to find ways to dramatically increase my calories without adding a lot of bulk.

I searched for years and years for the secret that would allow me to defy the basic laws of this reality – to be able to eat little to nothing, be severely emaciated, be obsessed, engage in compulsive behavior…and still be healthy, with boundless energy, enthusiastic, and happy. I finally concluded that there is no such secret. For me, the real secret has been this: thought is just thought, nothing more. My ED was fueled by the fact that I believed my thoughts. Even if I rationally could understand that my thoughts were lies or at least flawed, I wasn’t truly seeing through them. There was still some degree of belief that I held in them. I had super paranoid thoughts (i.e. someone just put something “bad” in my food when I blinked my eyes or turned away for a second) that I rationally knew were not true. But I *did* believe the thought that followed those “crazy” thoughts – thoughts such as “if I don’t follow this compulsion not to eat or to exercise or whatever, then I will be punished or suffer.” So for me, I had to completely see through all thoughts. I eventually recognized that thought has no substance. No thought is true. It is just a thought. What is true is true, and thought is, at best, an interpretation. But it is not the truth. For me, understanding that I didn’t have to believe my thoughts gave me a new freedom. It didn’t take away the anxiety immediately. For that, I had to be willing to just ride it through without giving in to compulsion. For me, the greatest way through that is to physically relax. Any time I felt anxiety I chose to do a sort of PNR (progressive neuromuscular relaxation) style relaxation – scanning to find where I held tension, and releasing the tension. Soon I found that I was less anxious less often. And now, I don’t obsess about food or anything like I used to. I feel a sense of freedom that I would have had a very difficult time imagining just a few years ago.

I don’t know if my story is anything you can relate to. However, I have found a lot of people with restrictive ED can relate. So I hope you find something helpful in there. From what I have read of others’ accounts and from my conversations with others with ED, it seems to me that most people ultimately find that they just have to jump in with both feet, start eating the minimums, stop exercising, and ride through the anxiety to discover that it doesn’t have to control them. I can’t promise you what your experiences will be, but I can tell you without hesitation that jumping in and facing the anxiety, seeing through thought – this is one of the best things I have ever done.

@Ashley – Well said. Really well said.

@tennosea – Crazybrain is to be expected. Just expect it. And stop taking it seriously. You know it is crazy. Like Ashley suggested, would you take its advice (or mandates, as it were) if it was suggesting that you starve your loved ones? Of course not. Be daring enough to see yourself as worthwhile and important enough to treat yourself with basic decency and kindness – what you would offer to even your enemies.

And I fully recognize the way of thinking that you seem to be practicing as exemplified by your milkshake/television diet guru anecdote. First of all, I must point out that you are definitely not trusting in your future wisdom if you are willing to deny yourself necessary energy now. The future you that you must get in touch with is someone who is healthy, happy, and free. This puts you in touch with your own innate intelligence and clear-thinking that is available to you right now. You have been stuck in limited, narrow, painful habits and ruts of thought. But there is a greater wisdom within you from which you know that you are not limited by any such patterns or habits. You are free to choose in every moment. If the milkshake or ice cream or burger or pasta or whatever appeals to you now then you are free to eat it and enjoy it and reap the nutritional (and emotional) benefits without any fear that it means anything at all. It doesn’t mean anything. You assign the meaning. You are free. You can eat what you desire now and trust that you will still be free. Eating something you desire now does not lock you into a new habit of being forced to eat that same thing for the rest of your life even though you don’t want it and it makes you feel sick and unhealthy. That is just more crazybrain. You have within you a deep and abiding intelligence that you can absolutely trust to guide you every moment of your life. And this intelligence wants only the best for you – your freedom, peace of mind, and a healthy body. You are starving right now. For just a moment, connect with that safe, peaceful, happy, and joyous wisdom within you, and look objectively at yourself. If you look at yourself in this way when you are anxious and restricting, what does that change? What if you see yourself as your own child or your own friend or someone who you can see without all the fear and anxiety you attach to your self-directed ideations? What does that change? As Ashley suggested, would you deny yourself nutrition then? Would you put it off another day? Another hour? Another minute? My guess is that the problem with the “fast food milky delicious thing” is that you haven’t given yourself full permission. You were still restricting by limiting it to a few times a week. And what about all the other things you want? What about the real food that you crave on a daily basis? What about the pasta, the potatoes, the rice, the butter, the egg yolks, etc? What would life be like if you took away all the restrictions? What would it be like if you no longer had to worry and stress about trivial things? What if you weren’t hungry all the time? What if you were happy? What if you were at peace? I can tell you that from my own experience it is worth it. Letting go of the fear and anxiety, giving myself permission to trust my body and my desires, giving myself permission to enjoy life – this is the best thing I ever did. I was miserable and now I am happy. I was perfect in my misery. I was the shining example of will power and self-restraint. I was infallible. I was the king of my perfect, starving self. And I was chronically stressed, anxious, and miserable. I will tell you something that might sound a little scary to you, but it is the truth: the happiness and peace that I experience today would still be worth it even if I was 300 pounds of fatness. It is truly that wonderful. I wouldn’t trade it for the skinniest, purest, most perfect body and self imaginable. I wouldn’t trade it for a trillion dollars if it meant I had to be miserable again. Screw all those diet gurus and weightloss experts and personal trainers and fitness obsessives. Screw them because they are promoting misery. They aren’t willing to be happy and free themselves, and so they try to manipulate others into joining them in their misery. Screw that. That is disgusting and deplorable. Don’t be duped by them. Laugh at your TV. Laugh at all the self-proclaimed “experts”. Why? Because you know the secret to happiness. And it isn’t about keeping up with the joneses or trying to garner acceptance from a bunch of narrow-minded bigoted skinny-minnies in spandex who deny themselves everything they need, sustaining themselves on stress hormones and smugness. It’s about letting all that go. Forget about it. Where did your idea of the “perfect” body come from anyway? From deep down inside yourself? I doubt it. It came from external sources – from these “experts” and “gurus” and from all the corporations that profit more by convincing you that you aren’t good enough and that you’re too fat and too ugly and too disgusting and so on and that you need to buy their products and listen to their advice and read their books and do their diet programs and do their exercise routines and so forth. But it’s lies. All lies. What about this instead: you’re perfect, beautiful, amazing, and wonderful no matter what, and you owe it to yourself and to everyone else you know to accept yourself and care for yourself no matter what. What if you redefine beauty as you and your body exactly as you are and exactly as you will be – whatever you look like and whatever your weight. Dare to be happy. Dare to be free. Eat the freaking milkshake. And while you’re at it, eat everything else you want too. Have so much confidence in yourself that you are willing to put on however much weight is necessary for you to be healthy and happy. Not just willing, but proud and happy to do so. Trust yourself. Trust your body. Yeah, you will put on weight if you eat enough. Why? Well, for one, because from the sound of it you NEED more weight. And secondly, you’ve injured your metabolism, and you’re going to need to readjust and ramp up your metabolism. And all that takes time and weight. So get used to it. But your starved brain tells you that another 20 or 30 or 40 pounds would make you fat. Sorry to break it to you, but at 33 years old and 5′ 6″, you need that weight to be healthy. Be willing to tell yourself the truth about that. Reset your thinking and your perception. You’re thinking is completely out of whack right now. Know that, and use your rational brain to acknowledge the truth about this. You need to gain weight to be healthy. Therefore, gaining weight is actually desirable. It is not something to fear. Make it your goal. Those weightloss idiots know nothing about you and care nothing about you. That woman in spandex on the TV doesn’t know you. She’s out to make a buck. But not at your expense. Not any more. Because you’ve got to care for yourself enough to know that he lies and her delusions don’t apply to you. If other people want to make themselves sick and miserable by listening to her then that is their business, but you’re goal is health, happiness, and freedom. And you know, deep inside you know that you need to eat. And you know that you can trust your desires to guide you to eat the right things in the right quantities. Don’t fear it. Flip it on its head and make gaining weight your goal. Picture yourself being strong and healthy. Do you really imagine that strong and healthy is going to look like a skeleton? I was there. I was a skeleton. And while I knew it rationally, I didn’t know it emotionally. But looking back at pictures from those times I am now amazed at how twisted my perception was. Strong and healthy requires energy, which requires food, and it means more muscle and more fat. Like Ashley suggested: just do it. Go for it. And don’t look back. Trust yourself. Trust your body. Eat the food. Give yourself permission. Make it all okay. More than okay. Make it important. Eating milkshakes isn’t just a cheat anymore. It is the most important thing you can do. It is your job. You’ve got to take it seriously. Work hard at it. Just as hard as you worked to starve yourself and be perfect and pure, now you’ve got to work that hard to heal and nourish yourself. Take it just as seriously (though the more seriously you take it, the more you’ll find yourself laughing and lightening up) and do your job by eating lots and lots of food. See it for what it is: important and a very, very good and necessary thing.

I have never been a runner. But I had a history of lots of other forms of compulsive exercise including weightlifting, yoga, hiking, and bodyweight exercises. Like Ashley, I stopped exercising entirely while refeeding. In my case it wasn’t hard because I had been severely sick for a few years prior, and I had gotten so weak that I couldn’t do those things anymore. But what is amazing is that I still do almost no intentional exercise, but I am stronger and more flexible now than I have been my whole life. I do occasionally lift some weights for very brief periods of time just because it feels good. And the weights that I have had for years are too light by far! My strength has doubled without working for it. My endurance has increased. I can stretch much more deeply and comfortably than before. So it sounds like my experience echos Ashley’s in some respect. Perhaps that could be reassuring that there is benefit from NOT exercising for a while – not just in terms of healing metabolism, but also in terms of improving overall condition – strength, endurance, recovery time, flexibility, etc.