It really has been a strange year hasn’t it? A real life, giant
oompa-loompa won the presidential race over the pond, the UK consciously
uncoupled from the EU and Ed Balls publically danced a salsa to ‘Gangnam
Style’…had we not suffered enough? My eyes being permanently scared from the
latter has not been the reason that I haven’t blogged though.
I’ve been ill. Really ill.
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer within the first 4 lines but
I’ve got to get it of my chest and say what’s been going on. I personally think
it will save what’s left of 2016…I’m doing it for the people really.
Just a head’s up guys, what I am about to write isn’t going
to be pretty and at times is going to be ranking at a 9.7 on the minging scale
but this illness doesn’t deserve to be seen through rose tinted glasses or “covered in chocolate
buttons” to make it seem like its not serious. (Just a little Love
Actually reference there…I obviously had a very productive Christmas and didn’t
watch that film 14 times, not at all…ahem).
So, I developed an illness. An illness that you couldn’t physically see. An illness that Doctor’s couldn’t physically see and an illness that I definitely
couldn’t see. Or maybe I could and just didn’t want to. That illness is called
‘Orthorexia Nervosa’. I’ll save you the google search-
-Orthorexia
an obsession with eating
foods that one considers healthy.
That in a nutshell is what it is. At first it wasn’t an
obsession either. You don’t just wake up one morning and think ‘I’m only going
to eat chicken and green vegetables from now on…sounds like fun’.
Mine started when I was working towards a dancing
competition at the end of 2015, I wanted to cut back on junk food, eat a bit
healthier so I could look and feel better in my self. And it worked. I had less
wobbly bits, my skin was clearer and I felt happier. Mix that with exercise
videos and I felt on top of the world. I went to the main competition in April
feeling super fit, in the best shape of my life and confident I could get the
job done and make that final.
But then I didn’t.
I was gutted…actually, that’s the understatement of the
year, I was devastated. I went down to earth like a sack of shit with a lead
shaped bullet dragging me down even faster. I had failed and it hurt. All I
kept thinking was everything I had worked towards had been a waste, I was a failure,
I wasn’t good at anything.
But I was, I was good at exercising and eating healthily. At
the time I could remember thinking this was a redeeming quality, a skill that I
had worked hard to gain and I wasn’t going to fail at this how I had at
dancing. So I kept working out…then I started working out every day…then twice
a day…with a 10 mile walk every other day added in for good measure. I got to
the point where I had a fitness ‘routine’ to complete whilst brushing my teeth.
If I didn’t complete 50 squats, 50 side crunches and 50 calf raises whilst
doing my teeth I was a failure.. Then came the routine before I went to bed-
1 minute plank
1 minute side plank( each side)
40 push ups
40 sit ups
40 squats
1 minute plank
Again, if I didn’t complete this I had failed, I was a
failure, I was going to wake up fat. It seems far-fetched but this is how my
mind started to work, all my energy was focused on exercising and eating
‘clean’.
Oh yes, the eating.
At the start of the year I started to follow a guy called
‘The Body Coach”, who had a very simple way of eating clean – after a workout
eat your carbs with your protein and veg and the other times knock out the
carbs and fill your plate with a healthy fat instead.
Easy.
And it works.
I’m not knocking his plan by any means. This guy has changed so many people's lives for the better and my experience is probably very rare in his business but what I am knocking
is this man’s very subtle wording. He would throw words around like ‘guilty’ on
his snapchat when he would add a sweet potato to his dinner, or if he had been
a bit cheeky and brought a Mars bar on his way home. The phrase ‘earn your
dinner’ was another favourite of his as well. All innocent…except my brain took
them, mangled them up and spat them back out.
I took the phrase ‘earn your dinner’ to the extreme, I would
think that I hadn’t worked hard enough during a workout (even though I would be
seeing black dots) so I would halve my portion of the carb I was meant to have,
then I brought scales so I could have 50g of carbohydrate, no more no less.
Then I just cut them out completely. Which is all well and good when you are getting
enough protein and fats…but I halved them as well. I stopped cooking in coconut
oil, the holy grail of clean eating, and cooked vegetables in water. I cut out
nuts and red meats as they were too high in calories…and I was in no position
to waste them. Did you know that in 20-23 almonds, dependent on the size of the
nut, there are 173 calories? I did. And I knew all calorie counts for 30g of 5
different types of nuts. I became the “Rain Main” of calorie counting. I ended
up at my worst point living on 400-500 calories a day…and still exercising at a
high intensity.
Now this no carb thing only lasts so long, and eventually
you start to get cravings that you really cannot ignore. Your mind is already
tired and against you where you aren’t feeding and nourishing it properly so
you begin to lose the ability to control cravings. I would find myself saying
‘Look just have one biscuit, one biscuit wont hurt you and it will curb that
craving’, so I would have one…and then another…and then another. Before I knew
it I would have eaten entire packets of biscuits, 7 bowls of cereal, countless
packets of crisps and bars of chocolate (and sometimes it would even be
chocolate that I didn’t like). It would be like something would take over you,
half the time I didn’t even realise I had binged until the mist would disappear
and you would be left with the harsh reality of bright empty packets all over
the kitchen floor, it felt like evidence at a crime scene. Then the swollen
stomach would appear where it would have stretched, not used to being full of
food, the jaw ache from eating things at super sonic speeds…and then the guilt.
The guilt of being a cheat, a fraud, a loser. “I need to get rid of it”. “I
need to get rid of it now.” I would find myself grabbing a bottle of water and
running up to the bathroom…it became another one of my routines.
Spoiler alert…you
know that grim bit I was talking about, yeah, this is it. Brace yourselves.
I can’t remember when it was the first time I made myself
sick, I remember I cried though. I also used salt water as I was too frightened
to use something to aggravate the throat.
I decided against the salt water after that first time as I read
somewhere it could make you even more bloated because of the salt in your
stomach…not the fact that it’s dangerous, messes with your bodies electrolytes
and can damage your kidneys but the fact that I could end up with a bloated
stomach.
In all honesty I think this was the part of my illness that
I was most ashamed of. It felt dirty. I felt dirty. But once I flushed the
toilet I can remember having this overwhelming sense of cleanliness…odd when
you’ve got vomit round your face but I think maybe it was because the ‘dirty’,
‘bad’ food was gone…whooossh, down the drain. No one ever had to know. It was
gone. I would come out and carry on my day, get into bed…I'd even go back out for my
dance lesson.
The damage that this did to my body though was more damaging
than not eating. I lost my period for a year. I would get regular nosebleeds
when purging because of the force needed (I even met one girl who burst blood
vessels in her eyes due to making herself sick, she’s in a unit now). I would
have an unbearably sore throat for weeks on end and would have burns on my
knuckles where the stomach acid would touch it. I would sometimes get heart
palpitations and nearly pass out from exhaustion. Swollen cheeks, swollen
glands…oh and I’ve also striped some of the enamel from the back of my teeth.
Yet I still carried on, every 10 days or so when the hunger got so unbearable,
there I was, raiding kitchen cupboards again. The day after I binge I would ‘punish’
myself by having 1 boiled egg, (only the whites though) and an apple. I didn't take many picturesn of myself as most of the time I thought I looked fat and ugly but I did take these pictures after I had binged once, this was at the start of the downward spiral (and around a stone heavier than I was at my lowest weight) to
inspire myself to not let myself get "this big again”…I thought I looked fat in these pictures.
That’s the thing with this disease, at the time everything
seems to be in your control, rational and normal, yet the reality is you lose
everything and you gladly give it away. It has you gripped so tightly that you
believe that its how life should be.
I would have frequent blackouts and one
morning my mum found me fitting in my bedroom as she heard my head hitting my
doorframe repeatedly.
You end up with a brain that does nothing but think about
food all the time (Should I eat that, I shouldn’t eat that, If I have that then
I cant eat that), I would eat two apples in a day and think it was too much. You’re
kept awake at night from hunger pains, your bones digging into your mattress,
thinking about what meals to eat the next day when you already know what you’ll
be having.
Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I would YouTube videos of people
making food or Google the amount of calories there are in a Twix bar. Every
time I washed my hair I would end up with copious amounts of hair in the brush
that had fallen out.
I was constantly cold, freezing in fact (I was wearing
jumpers and gloves in August), my nails were blue, I had bruises all over my
body and at my lowest weight I had lost so much fat that my veins constantly
protruded out of my arms…handy for the blood tests I had to have. But I thought
it was nothing, I would make excuses, blaming everything else. But that’s all
physical problems, what it doesn’t say in the NHS guide is how lonely you
become. I didn’t realise how many social occasions involved food. I remember
once my mum surprised me with arranging for one of my best friends to meet us
and my mum’s friend for brunch along the seafront in the summer, I had a
vegetarian breakfast (I’m not even a veggie), asked for 3 items to be removed
from it and had to ask how the mushrooms were cooked…I cried in the high street
on the way home as I didn’t know how many calories I had eaten. Far from the
nice morning my mum had planned. You get depressed and feel so down that
eventually the best part of your day is going to bed.
I never wanted to die but sometimes I thought that it would
be nice to sleep for a really long time. The days end up being very long as
your constantly looking at the clock to see when you can next eat or when you
have to get ready to exercise.
I stopped seeing friends, stopped planning things to do, stopped dreaming at night, I
stopped reading as I couldn’t concentrate. I was moody all the time, I didn’t
laugh or smile…unless the number on the scale went down, only then did I feel
happy as I felt it had been worth the struggle and pain, I’d gotten a result.
Only once you achieve a goal, its not good enough and you try and go one
further, nothing is ever good enough for this disease. I truly believe that an
eating disorder will only be happy when your dead. You never think you’re ill
‘enough’ , “Look Mum, this girl has it so much worse than me, she only eats 200
calories a day”, “I’m still exercising, I’m fine”. I ended up losing just over
2 stone in the space of 4 and ½ months… I didn’t have 2 stone to lose.
I found this quote and I think it really sums up what life
is like with an eating disorder-
“An eating disorder
is not skipping meals or wanting to loose a few pounds- for sure it may start
like this but it’s a mental disease. One that controls your life and overpowers
everything else. Its so much more that just ‘being skinny’. It transforms you
into a different person, steals your personality and happiness and replaces it
with fear, anxiety and depression’.
And it’s true. I may now be at a ‘healthy weight’ but it has
left me with anxiety. Anxiety that some days has left me not being able to
leave the house…but that’s for a different post, I already feel like I’ve
written more than I did in my English exam!
That’s the thing with eating disorders, anyone can have
them. You don’t have to be underweight to have one, you can be extremely
overweight, a normal ‘healthy’ weight, a boy, a girl, young or old, and it can
strike at any time. I think its like a light switch, always there, ready and
waiting for something or someone to flick it on. Did mine come from a need to
have control? Maybe. Did it come from being told that I was a ‘big’ girl? Could
be. It grows from so many different sources, stress, depression, perfectionism
but in the end it drains you mentally and physically and slowly, but surely, it
will end up killing you. Did you know eating disorders have the largest
mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder? It’s made me much more aware and considerate
of mental health disorders.
‘Just because you cant see an illness doesn’t mean it isn’t serious’.
Will this illness ever leave me and go? No, probably not.
Will I ever not be aware of how many calories I am putting in my mouth?
Doubtful. Will I be able to manage it though? Yes, yes I will.
So my aim from tomorrow is to loose the Christmas fluff (the
word fat is banned in our house now) that I and probably 99% of the world have put
on over Christmas but in a healthy, controlled way. To exercise because I want to feel
good, not to punish my body. But my main aim is to be happy. Truly, truly
happy. And that’s just a little something I’m working on…
But to finish, (Harry Potter just started on ITV1 btw) I
have learned a lot this year. I learned that things don’t always turn out the
way you planned them, or the way you think they should have. I’ve learned that
there are things that go wrong, things that don’t always get fixed or put back
together in the same way they were before. I’ve learned that sometimes things
stay broken as well. But I’ve mainly learned that you can get through bad times
and keep looking for better ones, just as long as you have people who love
you…its as simple as that.
Look after yourselves and have a fucking brilliant 2017.
Until next time,
