Normal vs. Healthy

There are several ED-related buzzwords that make me cringe a bit each time I hear them: "triggering", "fear food", "thinspiration", "meal plan". Today, however, the words I am focusing on are "normal" and "healthy". I don't like either of these words because I believe their definition varies from person to person. Too often, society tries to measure everyone against someone else's vision of normal and healthy.What is normal for me or healthy for me is not necessarily normal or healthy for you. But, more importantly, what is normal for me, isn't necessarily healthy, period.

I realized this a few moments ago while enjoying my lunch which consisted of a mandarin orange, one of those 100-calories bags of popcorn, and a handful of chocolate candy. By no means is this lunch the nutritional ideal for anyone, but, for me, it's quite normal. In other words, within the context of my life,this was not an unusual lunch for me to have (usually I eat breakfast, try to skip lunch, then eat dinner, only to end up snacking on a variety of nutritionally-derelict items). While this might be normal for me, it is not healthy, even though I do little to change my behavior. It seems I need to be reminded that behaviors aren't normal just because they are repeated over and over again.This is an important concept to keep in mind during recovery. It is easy for us to fall into patterns, to repeat certain behaviors, and become oblivious to them. But we need to be self-aware enough to identify which behaviors are "normal" in the larger scheme of things, and which behaviors feed from eating-disordered thoughts and impulses. Next, we have to fashion a plan to remedy these behaviors if they are damaging or if they interfere with our recovery, our health, or the quality of our lives. I can guarantee that my substandard lunch was the product of my eating disorder. Now, what am I going to do to fix it? Stop skipping meals. Stop restricting. Eat well-rounded meals with proper nutrition to avoid absent-minded snacking and hunger-induced binges.

I also have to remember that eating disorders are not normal. Of course this seems like common sense, but after you've lived with an eating disorder for a number of years (whether you are in recovery or you are not) your life begins to feel somewhat normal because it's all you know. Even if you aren't happy with the way your life is progressing, if you're sad, if you're tired of being sick--whatever-- it begins to feel safe and normal and the desire to change things lessens. The need for total recovery fades and you begin to live this pieced together sort of life in which you are partly recovered and partly broken. You step in and out of both realms, trying on both masks and constantly swapping one out for the other. But in order to ever be truly happy, or truly healthy, or truly normal in the most basic sense of any of those words, we have to self-aware. We have to look inward, notice our patterns and behaviors, and work hard toward changing those which are negative, destructive, lazy, neglectful, or hurtful.

Otherwise, we're living life half-full.

"To be free, one must give up a part of oneself." Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I want to be free.

My eating disorder keeps me a PRISONER.

What do I have to give up to be free?

I have to give up the lies.

I have to give up the panic.

I have to give up the fear.

I want to be healthy.

My eating disorder keeps me SICK.

What do I have to give up to be healthy?

I have to give up the obsession.

I have to give up the pain.

I have to give up the bones.

I want to be strong.

My eating disorder keeps me WEAK.

What do I have to give up to be strong?

I have to give up the dependence.

I have to give up the doubt.

I have to give up the excuses.

To be free, I have to give up part of myself, but only the bad part.

What I have to lose is not worth keeping.

What I have to gain is everything.

Let's thrive

This post is for those girls and boys, those broken down women and men, the ones who think the way I used to think: that recovery is impossible, unnecessary, unattainable. That recovery is quitting, tapping out, giving up, giving in. I used to think recovery was for losers. Hacks. Sell-outs. Weaklings. The ones who weren't special or elite enough to reach their goals.

That was my disorder talking.

Does it sound familiar?

That is the voice of your disease.

By definition, disease is not a good thing.

I used to think that I could never recover, but I realize now, that's only because I didn't want to recover. I didn't want to be healthy. I thought healthy meant ordinary and there was nothing I could think of that I wanted less to be. The trouble is that those thoughts were not my own. My anorexia (and later my bulimia) made the decisions for me. I didn't want to recover because I thought there was no life after anorexia. I couldn't see a way out. I thought I'd carry my disease around forever, dragging her around like a corpse everywhere that I went. It was exhausting. And it was killing me. I realize now that there is life after anorexia. Better yet, there is only life after anorexia. Those years I spent sick were not living. I was only existing, and just barely.

I want to thrive.

If you are one of those people who thinks recovery is impossible or unattainable, I challenge you to reconsider. I challenge you to ask yourself what you have to gain by staying sick versus what you have to gain by getting well.

It's like that old cliche I've heard my entire life and never understood until now:

"You are what you eat."

Do you really want to be nothing?

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

If it isn't obvious from the quote in the title, I just saw Eat, Pray, Love. This is not a post about the movie or the book (I recommend both, the book more so than the movie. Isn't that always the case?) This post is about ruin. This post is about transformation. This is a concept I've been thinking about for weeks, since I read the book of essays by Eula Biss. I had an entire post devoted to it. Gilbert says "“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation” and Eula Biss says, "there is always some promise in destruction." I agree with both.

My eating disorder was certainly destructive. It certainly left my entire life in ruin. But would I be the person I am today without it?

I would never wish an eating disorder on anyone. I know that most people can't even begin to imagine how serious they are--how destructive. How deadly. Anorexia is contradictory in the eyes of society. On one hand, the overly thin are glamorized and idealized. On the other hand, they're ridiculed. The point is that people are judgmental and fickle. If you're too fat they'll tell you to slim down. Once you get too slim, then they'll tell you to fatten up. I've been on both sides of the spectrum and I wasn't happy at either. Unlike a lot of people who develop anorexia, I was slightly overweight when my eating disorder began. I wasn't obese, but I wasn't thin either. By the time anorexia was finished with me, I'd lost 80 lbs. I was a skeleton. I was sick. I was dying. And it still wasn't good enough for anyone. The people who used to say I was chubby now said I'd gone way too far, as if it was their place to decide how I should look. Now my weight is somewhere in between. I'm not overweight and I'm not underweight. I'm tired of being pulled in either direction.

Like anyone else who has overcome an eating disorder or any other major struggle, I'm not left with bruises, I'm left with scars. Some of them are deeper than others. But they will all heal. I have never been content with myself. I wasn't happy when I was chubby. I wasn't happy when I was skinny. I didn't love myself high and I didn't love myself low.

Here is to balance.

Here is to contentment. To courage. To strength.

I am thankful for all I've been through because it's brought me where I am:

Somewhere in the middle between healing and happiness.

Recovery means Life

I used to avoid recovery, even when I knew anorexia was killing me and had to come to an end, because deep down I thought recovery meant failure. I thought my eating disorder, as much as I knew it was wrong, was what made me special. Recovery meant normal. Normal meant boring. Normal was everything I tried my whole life to distance myself from. Normal meant mediocre. I couldn't think of anything worse.

But I've realized recovery doesn't mean boring.

It doesn't mean normal or mediocre or bland.

Recovery just means healthy.

How can I be spectacular and different and unique if I'm dead?

Anorexia = another statistic.

Anorexia = death.

Dead means dead.

Dead means it's over. No more chances. No coming back.

But with recovery comes hope.

Hope means good things will come.

Recovery means energy.

Energy means I can do all the things I want to do.

Recovery means promise.

Promise means a chance to be all the things I want to be.

Recovery means life.

It means more than life.

It means to be alive.

Unique. Special. Free.

Why recovery is worth it:

In recovery, you realize your body is special.

You are worth saving.

Life is too short to be miserable, sick, and hungry.

Food has a purpose. It fuels your body to give you the energy to live.

You will remember what it feels like to hope and to dream.

If you're healthy, you can actually begin to make them come true.

When you're free from your eating disorder, you are free. Your thoughts are your own.

You don't have to answer to anyone.

You don't have to lie to people or live a double life.

You don't have to feel guilty.

You don't have to hate yourself.

Food is not the enemy. You don't have to be afraid of food.

Your hair will stop falling out.

Your stomach will stop growling.

You won't be light headed.

And you won't gain a hundred pounds.

Eventually, you'll stop fighting with the mirror.

You will begin to trust yourself.

You will begin to take care of yourself.

You will begin to love yourself.

You can start over.

It's not too late.

You are worth saving.

Who says being vegan is hard?

It's actually not as complicated as most people think. And the good thing about going vegan is that it's healthy for your body, the environment, and the planet. For dinner tonight I made risotto with corn, tomatoes, and fresh basil with an avocado, grapefruit, and pistachio salad and fresh mint lemonade. Delicious and healthy. My boyfriend said it was restaurant quality which means a lot coming from a chef. But now there's all these dishes to do...

I have found that cooking has been an unexpected but very therapeutic way for me to recover from my eating disorder. I've had to learn how to eat healthily, which is something I never did, even before I was anorexic. I have been a vegetarian since I was a child because I couldn't stand the thought of eating an animal. I used to look at chicken nuggets and see nothing but the baby chickens my grandfather raised in his barn, the little yellow puffs of feather and fuzz that I wanted so badly to touch, not to eat. So I didn't. But for me, a vegetarian diet was not a diet of vegetables. I found myself eating lots of french fries, pizza, pasta-- all of those things that are indeed vegetarian, and often wonderfully delicious, but nutritionally invalid.

These days I have traded in my lifetime of vegetarianism for strict veganism. This means no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, no gelatin, no honey. Apart from food, it also means no fur, no leather, no animal-tested cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and no products of any sort that use animal by-products of any capacity. It's not as difficult as it sounds. I've been doing it for years and have had to change my lifestyle very little in order to accommodate it.

I am certain my jump to veganism was indirectly related to my anorexia, which, ironic as it sounds, has made me a healthier person. How? By being so conscious of everything I put into my body, I then became conscious of where my food came from and how it was made. I couldn't eat in restaurants because everything was so fat and calorie packed that it terrified me. So did packaged and processed foods. My solution? I didn't eat much, but what I did eat, I made myself.

It is weird to consider cooking as a means of dealing with anorexia, since as an anorexic, I barely ate at all. Instead, I would watch the food network for hours. I could taste the food in my mind just from watching it being prepared without ever having to taste it. I picked up lots of useful information along the way. Somehow I managed to learn how to properly feed myself in the midst of starving myself. When I actually began the recovery process and slowly started to reintegrate food back into my life, I found that cooking was enjoyable, and eating could be enjoyable too. This is what else I have learned:

Food is not the enemy.

Food gives our bodies the fuel they need to survive and to thrive in the world.

We are all so full of potential, each one of us capable of so many wonderful and unique things.

We can't do them while running on empty.

For a list of companies that do and do not test on animals, please visit:
http://search.caringconsumer.com/

For more information on becoming vegan, please visit:
http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/