Why stop eating?

In fourth grade I just stopped eating when no one was looking or caring.  I found it to be the most controlling thing I could control about my life and really would drive people batty when they could not make me eat.

I became anorexic in fourth grade.  It was a culmination of many things.  First, I was humiliated at school when I was using the bathroom between the classrooms.  I was going to the bathroom when a boy in my class opened the door I failed to lock and started laughing because I was exposed.  That however would be the last time I ever went into a bathroom outside of my house.  Well the easiest way to fix that was to just give up food.

After all food was hard to make, required time to make it and never felt good in my tummy.  I was leaving my house alone every morning I went to school.  I can’t remember where my mom was but she wasn’t there to take me.  A girl in my class’ mother would pick me up.  At first it was forgetfulness of just forgetting my lunch but then it just turned into this grand thing where I didn’t have to go into the cafeteria, didn’t have to go to the bathroom and got more recess time.  However, I had created a monster; tiny at first but growing and growing until it was unstoppable even for me.

For thirteen years I struggled to eat and want to eat.  I lost hundreds of pounds over those years one day at a time in two, five and ten pound increments.  I was wasting away at one point so bad that my heart barely pumped, ketones strained my body and rising to a standing position rubbed bone on bones and made me severely light-headed.  On many occasions, I was hospitalized in psych care to force feed me through an nasogastric tube and sedate me enough to not fight it.  All in all though it was not about a power struggle it was about the loss of the will to survive.  I didn’t care if I lived or died…if my heart stop beating I would cease to exist and at the time that sounded pretty good.  Not only does anorexia become an addiction it also becomes a bottomless spiral into depression.  Physically we need food to feel good mentally.  When the body starves, mechanisms in the brain fixate on food.  It makes the anorexic fixate on not eating but in a slowed down foggy haze that dulls the thoughts and the creativity of the individual.  It’s a cyclical pattern towards destruction.

The destruction is a heart that ran amok to a body that started to fail to thrive to a deadened mind that dulled happiness or joyful thoughts.    I didn’t die I was lucky because I definitely pushed my luck.  I now am glad I am alive, I enjoy food immensely and also love to cook and bake.  I hold an average weight for my size and didn’t gain one ounce of fat until I turned forty.  I also don’t have any of the weird hangups around food that I used to in the midst of the disease.  I seriously never thought I would be on the other side of it but I am and I did it.  I  hope I can give insight into how to overcome this monster in this blog and be found by those who need it.