On The Starving Brain

When I was 16 I decided I wanted to get skinny. I didn’t want to get too skinny, I just wanted a hot body like the rest of my friends were getting. But what I didn’t know was that my brain worked differently from most brains. I’d always known that I was a perfectionist and that sometimes when I got thoughts or ideas in my head it was hard to make them go away. But overall it had never really been a big problem. I got perfect grades and tried my best in everything I did, even if I wasn’t much of an athlete. I did spend a lot of my time feeling guilty and worried, but overall my life was really good, so I was fine as long as I didn’t get too far inside my own head.

When I first started cutting calories it was the summer before my Junior year of high school. It’s not like I was super overweight or anything. I was a late bloomer. I still had baby fat. So I started running a few miles every day, doing sit-ups in my bedroom, spending more time at the gym, and trying to eat mostly fruit and veggies. At first I did little things like avoiding cheese and eating my burgers without the buns. I had found my niche that year in high school and had a lot of friends I was going to the river and house parties with. As the weeks turned to months people started noticing and commenting on the changes in my body. I became more confident in my appearance and when it was time to go back to school I’d gone down a size in clothes. I never wanted this feeling of satisfaction to go away. Even people at the gym were complimenting me daily on how much I had changed. Boys were starting to take notice. But something else was happening, too.

As summer turned to fall and the pressures of school and sports started to creep back in, I was getting more and more obsessive about how much I exercised and what and when I ate. It wasn’t about what I looked like anymore; it was about the rules that I’d created for myself. Just running at Cross Country practice wasn’t enough anymore. If our route that day was four miles, I needed to run six. If I could do 100 crunches, then I should do 150. I’d tell myself that if I worked out everyday that week, I could take a break on Saturday, but when Saturday came around I just couldn’t get myself to stop. I was never satisfied.

It was a similar compulsion with food. I’d skip breakfast and promise to reward myself at lunch, but at lunchtime it felt like the hummus sandwich and banana I packed were an awful lot of food. After school I never skipped a day of practice or the gym, and by the time dinner came around I was usually lightheaded with hunger. My parents, despite both working full time, always made sure that a beautiful, balanced dinner was prepared each evening, but the new rules I had created for myself were restricting my diet more and more. I was avoiding carbs and fats like the plague. In my mind, I knew that my body needed these things for energy, but something else in me kept me from breaking the “rules”. If dinner was chicken and rice with roasted veggies, I’d pick around the rice, use my napkin to discreetly soak up any excess oil saturating the carrots and beets, carefully check each bite of meat for bits of fat. Eating became a source of constant anxiety, and though I was always hungry, I never ate to the point of becoming full.

My period hadn’t come since the previous summer. My jeans hung further and further off my hips. I was always shivering. People who had just months before complimented my new figure started showing concern.

“Are you sure you’re eating enough? You’re getting really thin!”

I brushed them off and, seeing as a young girl’s weight isn’t really a topic of conversation most people are comfortable discussing in much depth, they stopped questioning. My parents, on the other hand, were showing real concern. I promised them again and again that I wouldn’t lose anymore weight, and a part of me meant it. But another part, deep down, knew that I wasn’t going to change. Because when I was alone in my room at night the urge to do sit ups was always going to be stronger than the logic that they were no longer healthy for me. The promise I made to eat a handful of almonds at lunch could never be worth the guilt that I knew would come.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Compulsions are sort of like addictions. An addict can say, “I’m going to give up heroin,” and they can mean it, but when it comes to it, the drugs are more than a person can overcome alone. For me the Eating Disorder was a drug. I truly didn’t want to lie to my parents, but it was literally too hard for me to change. I couldn’t control the impulses and, therefore, I couldn’t keep on the weight.

I became able to separate myself from the person who was lying to my loved ones, so that they were no longer lies, but more of a script. My friends and my family would ask what I ate that day. I would tell them what I knew they wanted to hear. Another day would go by. And every time I stepped on the scale and saw that the number had dropped down again, I secretly felt an immense sense of relief because I knew that I hadn’t failed at following the rules.

I felt like shit. Sitting for long periods of time was horribly painful because the bones in my butt constantly dug into my seat. I was always mentally and physically depleted to the point of exhaustion and sometimes just sat and cried. The worst part was that the cold was unbearable. My fingers were permanently white and numb. All day I stood hunched over, trying to retreat into myself for warmth. My body was broken.

I longed for a reprieve but as more and more time passed it became clear that there wasn’t one coming. Giving up the compulsions, going back to “normal”, was just too scary. I don’t know that I would be alive if my parents hadn’t stepped in because I had truly lost control of my actions. In March they took me to the doctor. My pediatrician pricked my finger for a blood sample and I passed out cold. She diagnosed me with Anorexia and ordered an EKG.The next day she called the house to inform my parents that I was at severe risk of going into cardiac arrest, and I was rushed overnight to Stanford Children’s Hospital’s Eating Disorder Ward.

It all happened so fast. This carefully regimented lifestyle I had obsessed over for months and months was suddenly ripped out of my control. Forget running, I wasn’t even allowed out of bed. Wires were stuck all over my chest and I was hooked up to a machine that beeped when my heart rate dropped too low. Because the bathroom was too far of a walk from the beep machine, I used a bedside commode. I was force fed Ensure Nutritional Drinks by different nurses every few hours because the doctors feared that digesting solid food could be more than my body could handle. I was told I may be there for weeks and I had never ever hated everyone and everything as much as I did after arriving at that hospital ward. Ever.

My parents hardly left my side the entire time I was “locked up.” I’ll never forgive myself for the way I treated them during those weeks and in the months that followed. I was filled with an anger unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I took it out on the people who were there for me. I was a right little twat. To be fair, I was nearly 17 years old, had just been torn away from my friends, and had been stripped of all agency that I had over my own life.

I was on bed rest for around 10 days or so, I think. The nurses would give me sponge baths some days, which was highly unsatisfying and marginally uncomfortable. When I was finally allowed to get up and use a real restroom, I was hardly recognizable in the mirror. I looked like a white-faced gorilla. I hadn’t seen sunshine or tweezers in over a week. I wasn’t allowed a razor in the shower for safety purposes. The nurses had to check the toilets for vomit before anyone was allowed to flush the toilet.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m downplaying my sickness, because I know that I was fifty shades of fucked up, but compared to a lot of the girls there, I at least had hope. Coming to the hospital had been a reality check for me. I was desperately homesick and lonely, and just wanted my life back. I was willing to eat the extra servings even when my stomach felt painfully stuffed because I knew that food was my only way out. As glutinous and disgusting as I sometimes felt shoveling 1000 calorie meals into my mouth in one sitting, I learned to think of it as a job- a means to an end.

Sadly, that wasn’t the case for most of the patients. There were girls my age who had spent the last 5 or more years in and out of Eating Disorder clinics. They were consumed by the disease and had no desire to change. Sometimes in the common dining area when the nurses would step outside briefly to check something, I would hear a small group of them exchanging tips on how to hide the food without being caught. They would sit at the table, pale and waiflike, and stare at the plates of food with lifeless eyes, clearly with no intention of taking even a bite. Looking back now, I pity these hopeless girls, but at the time they scared me. I ate and ate and ate so that, if for no other reason, I would not be seen as one of them. So that I could go home to my friends and family who loved me and the beautiful life that I had momentarily lost, but that was still waiting for me. They had nothing to return to except their eating disorders.

I turned 17 in the hospital. A few days later the doctors deemed my heart rate stable and I was released with a strict nutrition plan that my parents were in charge of and a therapist already lined up. I was up 6 pounds from the 94 I had come in at, but more importantly, my organs seemed to be functioning better. I was pooping everyday and wasn’t quite so cold all the time. I was shedding, which was apparently a very good sign as well. My body looked perpetually swollen, like something small and hard stuffed full with more that it was meant to hold.

The long months that followed were very hard. I was often angry and unkind to my parents. I would not be in charge of my own diet for quite some time and the doctors were strict about allowing me to exercise. I still lied often because, once back home, my obsessive thoughts returned to an extent. At times my friends lost patience with me as I picked at meals or left gatherings to go run. I can’t give you a moment, or even a general time frame, of when I “got better” because I am still compulsive to this day. I can tell you, though, that by the time I went away to college, just over a year later, I was healthier and ready. The distractions of partying and friends and boys ironically helped me to live a more normal life, probably just as much as the hours and hours of therapy (which I should mention were also essential). Making time for friendships, laughter and fun, I believe, cannot be overstated as a staple for mental health. Anxiety medication has also made a huge difference in my life.

Regardless of all of these blessings that continue to make me a better person, I know that I will always have an obsessive personality. Because it is no longer killing me, I am okay with that. If you were to come into my house you would not find a speck of dust or an un-fluffed pillow. If I see something out of order, I will drop whatever it is I am doing and fix it immediately or I will drive myself crazy thinking about it. I will not miss a day at the gym. When I go running I often circle telephone poles because I get a sudden overwhelming feeling that if I don’t, something bad will happen. Every night before going to sleep I touch the top of my head and the bottom of my toes. I always leave at least one bite of food on my plate uneaten.

But I know that I am not alone in having such strange idiosyncrasies and I have learned to see the humor in them. They aren’t going to kill me.