Calories have gone below 1000 for the second time in four weeks. Am I crazy? I've kept myself of the anorexia wagon for a good year because of fears of adaptive thermogenesis (basically 'metabolism slowing' for you folks who aren't health/diet/fitness freaks) but it's coming back. Four weeks ago I started consumiin 800 calories but I got too scared of AT so I went up to 1000 and then increased again to 1200 but now I'm back down to 1000 because I don't know why. I think I mentioned the other night that I've started crying myself to sleep and I can't remember if that happened last night because I was too freaked out over possible delusions that I may have been having -- I hear a woman screaming like she was either getting attacked or in labour. I then felt a pain around the bottom of back/bum area sort of thing and I couldn't tell if I was asleep or not but I'm 90% sure that I was awake. I don't know how to describe it, it was so surreal. I then proceeded to have multiple nightmares about drugs, black magic, spiders (I'm an arachnophobe), bees, and my nephew being in danger from a spider which morphed into a cat. It was a great night's sleep for me! (fml.)
So, anorexia, anorexia, anorexia, anorexia. You wouldn't believe it if you saw me. I'm 5'2 and 140lbs though I look like I'm 130lbs. At least I have that going for me. I used to be about 60lbs bigger but through the proccess of calorie counting and maintaing a calorie deficit, the inevitable result of weight loss came upon me. When I was at my lowest weight I was about 130lbs and when my cousins saw the skinny me for the first time they were speechless. I specifically remember the first reaction one of them made which was "you look gaunt!" (I have a distinct jawline and cheekbones, both which are severely emphasised when my weight drops below ~135lbs.) I never felt happier before then. Of course, this was just the beginning of my downfall and it was about a year before I met le ex boyfriend, but still, hearing that comment was probably the biggest compliment I could imagine.
I realised I was heading for a relapse approximately 12 hours ago and I thought to myself "you only relapse when you need to over compensate for something. Are you feeling shit about your personality?" (For those wondering, I do tend to speak to myself in second person. It makes being my own best friend/counsellor a lot easier because it feels more realistic this way.) The answer was yes. I faced rejection in uni just under two weeks ago because I was in an over-crowded group and my seminar leader told us one person had to go to another group. As it always is the case with me, that person was me. I knew it was coming. It was six to a group and I was the one to band the group together. Person number 7 came in fifteen minutes late and one particularly clingy woman just had to have him in the group. Now, I don't care about what group I'm in or who I'm with so the situation itself didn't hurt me. What really hurt me was the nostalgia, and I will go into more detail about this in a later post, but for now I guess I'll just say that for the entirety of my school and family life I've always been the rejected one. It's contributed to a lot of the mental health problems that I've suffered/am suffering.
So, what has this got to do with my personality and anorexia? I'm too tired to go into intricate psychological detail now but basically I seem to use my eating habits as a coping mechanism for when things are too hard to cope with. Think about alcoholics and the shit they face, or drug addicts and the shit they face -- I'm a food addict but unlike alcoholics and drug addicts, my addiction swings from restricting to binging, depending on the situation. During my breakdown I was suffering binge eating disorder. So, from around January until September all you would see me doing is eating. Thankfully I didn't gain too much weight - only about half a dress size - but I was dangerously dependent on it. It's almost as if I was overcompensating or trying to fill that "empty" void that BPD brings via food.
On the other hand, when I suffered anorexia and it's relapses, it's almost as if losing weight was my way of trying to lose myself -- "maybe if my weight disappeared then I would disappear and I'll become a whole new person!" was pretty much the essence of my thought process back then.
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