why?

after over a year of anorexia, i think i finally discovered my "why." it was never about the fear of being fat, abuse/trauma, i wondered if it was just health in general (i've always been somewhat health-conscious), but that just didn't seem to be it.

it was for control, but not like some people think. not like i wanted to control everything that went into me, like "it was the only part of my life i felt like i could control..." i had been gaining weight slowly and healthfully (i was growing) and i think i just didn't want the scale to move anymore. i wanted it to stay the same number. (i'm incredibly ocd and have been since i was a toddler.) i was also afraid of foods and situations unfamiliar to me. i guess my "safe" foods just became less and less, and over time came to eliminate dense foods because i wanted to make sure that number on the scale did not go up, although what my body actually looked like i didn't care. i developed a little girl body, but at least that was something i already knew how to handle. literally, i cared how the digital number looked, not how fat/skinny i was!!!

weird, right? i just had to post because it's something i've always wondered about since i was diagnosed with anorexia.

i don't think "why" is very important in the big picture, only that we are able to recover and lead normal, happy lives, but for anyone who does understand the background of their own story: why?

I'm so happy that you discovered the root - it can help to prevent future relapses. 

For me, I had a very horrible and traumatic sexual violation occur when I was about 6 years old. I then developed panic disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. It didn't get bad until I was about 9, and my family was in turmoil. I got very ill one night when I was away from my mother, and developed emetophobia(a fear of vomiting). The anixiety became so bad I couldn't leave my house and would have upwards of 10 panic attacks a day. I was so afraid I would get ill that I stopped eating. I became very sick and underweight, and after being treated and getting on anxiety meds(they even gave me placebo "no vomit" pills to keep me from freaking out) my weight stabilized. I was okay until I was in middle school, and ended up restricting again due to anxiety, which led to a safe feeling, a feeling of control. This turned into bulemia and EDNOS(I wasn't underweight enough to be diagnosed anorexic apparently.) and this continued until early highschool. I ended up becoming underweight, but I recovered and was weight restored a year or so later. I was doing great until last summer when I relapsed :(. 

I plan on getting into a counselor who can go through everything and hopefully help me get over some of these early issues so i can be done with this e/d once and for all.

Hmmm, interesting topic..

I was overweight to begin with, and early last year began a diet to lose weight in a healthy manner. I had no friends, and was constantly picked on. I was convinced it was my body, since that was what set me so far apart from everyone else. Later in the summer, my dad moved in and my mom moved out, and I was forced to takeover all the responsibilities of running a household. I felt so restricted to school and housework all the time, so I turned to excessive exercise for relief from all this. I did binge/purge only like 4 or 5 times, and they were during extremely stressful events..

I really need to both find other ways to manage stress and boost my self esteem. Yet today I continue to compare myself with other people (particularly those my age), and try to avoid being too different from them. This is what is making recovery so hard...

The reason for me starting my anorexia / supposedly healthy lifestyle was because I felt as If i needed to lose weight because people would like me better.

I also had what you would call "man breasts" this was very embarrassing I coul not take off my shirt in public at all. even at pools etc..

So I started "eating healthy / exercising" regularly during early February of this year.. I would only eat certain things like beans, chicken, and oatmeal. Those were the things I was living off of for about 6 or 8 months. I was only intaking about 1200 calories or 1000 calories a day, whiile exercising everyday for about 30 min.

I lost about 30 pounds rapidly. within 2 months. I kept on exercising because I thought to myself hey might aswell lose some more. But boy was I wrong.

My lowest weight was about 92 lbs.

Highest weight was 132 lbs.

Currrent: 102 lbs

Even when I was 132 lbs I looked chunky because I ate only junk food and greasy foods and never exercised so I was unhappy with my looks.

I'm just starting to recover and so far I feel so much energy, joy and love.

Im going to keep on gaiing weight but also excersise to make sure I donot relapse. Because I feel if I end up looking the way I did before I will relapse.

Original Post by blueberry_lips: i don't think "why" is very important in the big picture, only that we are able to recover and lead normal, happy lives, but for anyone who does understand the background of their own story: why?

Hope you don't mind me jumping in, never been anorexic but suffered with depression for many years and anxiety more recently.

I believe that the "why" is the most important part of recovering. You can be re-fed, or put on medication for depression or whatever and appear to recover but they are just crutches and as long as you don't understand what got you there in the first place you will relapse as soon as the crutches are removed. That's why counselling is so important as it can help make the connection between a seemingly unrelated event in your past and the way you feel now.

You can't just "get better" unless you acknowledge and deal with the reason you became unwell in the first place.

It's taken me many many years, my whole life pretty much, to even begin to realise the real reasons I have the problems I do and will probably take me a few more to deal with them!

I wish everybody dealing with their "whys" the most luck :)

oh my God ecwk6 you just wrote my life story. the abuse, the panic disorder and ocd. and most awful and debillatating - the emetophobia. and following that the need for power to control what i ate in the belief ''if i dont eat-i cant be sick'', anorexia developed.

i have been trying to find hope and freedom.... sometimes i feel its a lost cause. but i soldier on

Good thread everyone. It's certainly hopeful to know!

Mine was a combination of my personality traits: perfectionism, control issues, low self-esteem and various life events. I also self-harmed up until the point the eating disorder appeared; I pretty much relapsed one form of self-abuse with another. The trigger was a diet that I started in 2007, at a BMI of 20/21. I did not need to lose weight, but I did not know that, I just knew that I was bigger than I had ever been. Me and my boyfriend had recently broken up after a traumatic relationship (possible sexual abuse). Once I 'finished' the diet, I supposed I just kept on going, right through my final year of University. I didn't lose much weight at that point though. ED really kicked in when I left Uni and got a new boyfriend, who was emotionally abusive and controlling. My way of getting control back for myself was through my eating.

I am glad I'm so aware of how my ED started, and now I've started recovery I'm dealing with my issues. Wish I had dealt with them earlier! My biggest fear right now is of turning to self-harm again once ED has gone, or of being riddled with mental illness forever... But I also know that I'm the only one who has the power to stop that from happening :)

First thank you all for sharing your why. I am sorry so many of you have been through so much. In so many programs for ed I have done much digging behind the why of my ed. I think it is good to look at it so that you can work on healthy ways to get through it though do agree the physical is a must. For me my ed was a way out of basically everything I did not want to face. That being emotions,things like school/work,hard situations. It got me no where but after so many years of living life that way it became what I knew and comfortable in a horrid way. Now that I am living healthy and not using my ed as an escape or excuse it is does cause so much anxiety,fear,and confusion. I never know how I will respond to something,if I will be able to cope,how others will respond to me. Constant fears but like fidget I am remaining hopeful in a bigger life.

I never had a specific why. It was a multitude of things. When I was little, it was mostly just me and brother taking care of each other. I can remember refusing to eat on anything but paper plates because I was too short to reach the kitchen sink. And I didn't want my mom to come home and have to wash my dirty plates. She was so busy taking care of my grandparents and I didn't want to be a burden. And my father was an alcoholic, so he was rather useless. Always shooing me away so he could drink in peace. I remember being six years old, him sitting me down and telling me it was OK for me to eat more than one oreo with my milk before bed. Then I got older. Didn't fit in at school because I was smart. Got picked on for being taller than almost everyone else. Went to middle school and things were bad at home, both my parents were unemployed and we were spending whatever money we did have on my brother. He was going to Rutgers University, and became chronically ill. It took months and months for someone to finally figure out what was wrong with him and tons of insurance bills. I was only ever able to eat at my friend's houses since we had almost no food. I shot up from 4'8" at age 12 to 5'8" at age 13 or 14. And didn't gain a single pound (now considered to be a red flag for AN) My doctor put me on a milkshake diet. I gained like two pounds. Then I started losing weight from all the stress I put myself under and just really didn't care about myself anymore. Had abusive boyfriends - physically and emotionally. Was a cutter and not eating. Did drugs. Had crappy friends that abandoned me until they needed a shoulder to cry on. I was always everyone's rock. So I hated it when I couldnt make things better. And I never allowed myself to feel much of anything. 

I think the overall cause of my ED was self-hatred and this belief that I needed to punish myself for my own existance. I always felt like such a burden to everyone I knew. Between the starvation, the over exercising and the cutting - I think I was searching to fill some sort of void, trying to feel something even if it felt miserable because I thought that was what I deserved. I also had this belief that if I shed myself enough, I would eventually become "good" again. Meh.

The important thing is making life better for the future.

i think for me it made me feel i had a purpose  i was struggling to mature and with lifes problems , and it was my way of avoiding all this, i felt like losing weight was the only thing i could do to control these feeling . it almost protected me from the outside world. i am a twin which was hard as he is a boy and girls grow quicker than boys , my bro was always so thin i was seen as the big one . i was so scared of not doing the right things in life , all i knew was i felt overweight and doing this made me feel better. i felt like i needed to achieve things in life get a good job etc but i felt i wasnt good enough , there seems endless reasons and somebody else could of experienced what i had and not become anorexic its hard to understand, but all i know i want to move on from all this

I think this is really interesting...I'm in the midst of a sort of relapse at the moment, because I think I set out for physical recovery without ever addressing the reasons behind it, so I've been doing a lot of thinking recently.

For me, my anorexia seemed at the time the only sane reaction to an insane system.  I felt that the world, and society was telling me how I should be, how I should look, what I should do, what I should do, and I couldn't stand it. I hated, I hate, the fact that I was supposed to buy in to a system that I saw as completely unfair - that as a woman everyone was allowed to judge me - how clever I was, how successful, how many friends I had, and how thin.  I was supposed to be a straight A student AND be the hub of the social world AND be thin.  I was supposed to care about what others thought of me.

By refusing to eat, I saw a way to remove myself from the world's system and society's 'should'.  It was supposed to be one way, I wasn't even going to do the opposite, I was just not going to do.  By removing myself from the system, I master it.

Oddly enough, my anorexia brought out a lot of characteristics about myself that I'm most proud of: my determination, my ability to listen to myself, and my sense of justice.  I did what I set out to do, harmful or not.

So now, now...Now I need to find a way to channel that anger outside myself I think.  While the point I was making is still valid, very valid, nobody understands it when you're that underweight, they just see your illness.  It's self negating, because I'm shouting, but no-one's hearing me, in fact I'm just buying into the system even more.  So I think recovery for me is about learning to channel my energy, to accept that there is no should, that society might tell me one thing, but I don't have to listen, and I don't have to harm myself to prove anything.

Of course, it's far easier said than done.

I guess part of it was that I wanted to punish myself, because I had a lot of self-loathing.  I didn't feel good enough to deserve food.  And whenever I saw the grocery bill -- although we could afford it, it always seemed pretty high -- I felt really bad for relying so much, and being a burden, on others so I basically just ate as little as possible.  It was never really about looks.  I'm a guy (which makes this situation kind of embarassing) and have always been happy at my healthy weight before this. 

Opeth - men make up about 15% of all ED cases. You have nothing to be ashamed about.

I had a family that did not especially like me. I was one of four kids and always made to feel like the 'bad' one, even though I tried really hard. We were also quite poor until I was in my teens and I grew up with the belief that any money spent on me was too much; I was greedy and needy and unacceptable.

I was also in a horrible group of friends through primary and secondary school who really weren't friends at all - I was bullied pretty mercilessly. I developed depression, OCD and anxiety. Routines and rituals helped keep my panic attacks in check while I was on my way to school.

My best friend in high school had anorexia and while I never aimed to become anorexic, it certainly gave me unrealistic ideas about how little I could eat and other disordered eating behaviour. I realised dieting was something I was really good at. It gave me a high to see my weight go down and, with my background of OCD, it quickly became an obsessive ambition.

I was raped during my recovery. It didn't inspire me to become anorexia again but it is the event that I would credit a descent into bulima to.

None of these reactions of mine were necessary - I accept that fact. I could have had a difficult time growing up but chosen different ways to cope. At the time, those were the coping mechanisms I used; I can't go back and change that. But nor would I. Surviving an eating disorder is a very powerful experience that makes you question who you are and what you value. It can make you much more aware of the power of mental illness and have more empathy towards others. Once you get through the other side, it's incredibly life-affirming to feel back in the 'land of the living' again.

I think my perfectionism really contributes to my "why", as well as this sort-of umm, 'addiction to achievement'? I don't know how to explain it, but getting 100% in a test or seeing that number on the scale drop gives me this amazing feeling. Once I started losing weight, I kept going because I liked feeling 'special' I guess, not so much for the attention but just knowing that I was different to other people and had more 'will power' and determination than them felt nice.
Ever since I was little I have been an extremely picky and fussy eater so that certainly added to it and I also used it as a 'stress management technique' *cough* but that ended up making me stress out more.
So for me its not really one thing that triggered it off, but more like ten different factors combined together.

I don't have a why, which makes me feel incredibly guilty and stupid.

I can still remember getting below 100 pounds, and freaking out, recognizing that this was WAY too low, and knowing I needed to gain weight. Although I wanted more than anything to be at a normal weight again, I just couldn't actually eat more.

Original Post by merylwhite1:

None of these reactions of mine were necessary - I accept that fact. I could have had a difficult time growing up but chosen different ways to cope. At the time, those were the coping mechanisms I used; I can't go back and change that. But nor would I. Surviving an eating disorder is a very powerful experience that makes you question who you are and what you value. It can make you much more aware of the power of mental illness and have more empathy towards others. Once you get through the other side, it's incredibly life-affirming to feel back in the 'land of the living' again.

*hugs* - I hope I get through to the other side too, someday :) ... I've never been there, even pre-ED.

*Ticks the box labelled "control issues"*, and likewise, the box for "perfectionism"... God, with me it has been one thing after another throughout.my.entire.life. There has always been some drama with me. Some form of self abuse. Seriously, it just goes from one method to the next. I don't know if it will ever stop. Even during recovery, it turned into a really nasty form of binge eating - not all due to the starvation, but a PUNISHING kind of binge. I used to be a major self-harmer, huge cutter, burner, brander, into scarification... Into tattoos and insertions mainly because I wanted my body cut into. Even bouts of cosmetic surgery to mutate my body and have it lacerated in various ways. I'm giving a lot away here... Apparently I just truly do terminally hate myself, this body, this mind, this 'being'. Everything I do, even things done in enjoyment, contain the essential seed of destruction and self harm. I also used to abuse drugs excessively. Anything, everything. Writing this has just made me even more depressed. So many times I've sought help, and so many people/institutions have tried so hard to help me. But still, here I am. This piece of self-loathing nothingness.

Oh hun. I have been there, believe me. I know what it's like to think "Is this ever going to end?" To abuse your body in various creative ways and with various substances. But I know that you too will move on from this part of your life, leaving behind these destructive thoughts and embracing the warmth of a new life.

Why do I know this? Because you are a survivor. Just look at all the dark times you have been through - yet you are still standing, still challenging those thoughts, still providing hope and inspiration to others. When you look at all the struggles you have been through, don't think of yourself as some kind of failure. Look at how strong, brave, motivated and courageous you have been to stand up and fight!

Nina, you are a beautiful, kind-hearted, intelligent and nurturing soul. You have helped so many people in these forums already with your words of wisdom. You have already come so far - and we are all here behind you rooting for you to beat those demons. Baby steps will get you there just fine.

(((((Hugs))))).

You make me cry, meryl. You truly are such an inspiration. Such a beautiful creature. xoxoxox Thank you for your words. You really, honestly, do give me hope. I know you have been to hell and back. The fact that you're in a higher place now really proves it can happen. I'm so glad you're there now *hugs*

i second meryl there. that broke my heart to read that. nina you are such a kind gentle warm hearted beautiful woman , you give so much and take such little. I Wish i could help you believe this i want to take away your hurt your pain and i cant :( , all i can do is try and help you belive , and pray that one day you will be able to see this . nina just keep fighting ! you have been my rock during this journey and behind me every step of the way , i just hope you know im behind you to h xxxx

many people walk into our lifes ,but its only certain ones that leave footprints in our hearts xxx

Oh helen, gosh you touch my heart. I love you girl *hugs*. Likewise, you please keep battling on. You are such a wonderful creature - I want to see you shining completely free of this crazy illness - you already shine so much through it, I can see how much you are capable of. xoxox

nina, friends apart are in the heart h xxxxx