Anorexic's Advice

If someone goes on a starvation diet, there's basically 3 things that can happen.

1. You get bored of it. It sucks. It's so much hard work! You last 3 days living off celery and apples and then someone offers you a slice of cake and you think "screw it" and you're back to normal. This is the best possible outcome.

2. You get what you wished for and develop anorexia. It is thought this only tends to happen if you have the psychological disposition for it though, before you get excited. You starve and starve, and for a while you think it's great - you're losing weight, everyone's complimenting your new figure, you feel in such control. You may start to join Proanorexia sites to become a better anorexic, and you'll be so pleased with yourself. Then you'll realise you're obsessed - you just can't stop - you're actually scared to eat! Terrified even. You cut down your eating more and more, lying to everyone, pretending you're okay, and everyone's angry and scared. Your health is going downhill - dizzy, weak, cold, newly-developed insomia, dull hair, bruises everywhere, headaches constantly. You can identify with the horror-stories on Why We Hate Anorexia now. You'll become dangerously underweight and your periods will stop - you're officially anorexic now - but by now you've probably realised anorexia really isn't fun. You may get more serious and horrible health issues - heart conditions, fainting, incontinence, osteoporosis. Your parents may fork out huge amounts of money for therapy and hospital treatment - they'll feed you through a tube into your stomach if you don't eat, and stand with you while you pee to make sure you don't purge. You're unlikely to fully recover, in fact you have a 25% chance of dying, and you're quite likely to develop a new eating disorder - bulimia.

3. You start binge-eating, and this may develop into an eating disorder - bulimia or binge-eating disorder. This can happen after days or months of starvation, and is very likely. You become ridiculusly hungry, and before you know it you're eating - more and more - and you can't stop. It's like someone has taken over your body - and that's exactly what's happened - your unconscious is trying to save you from malnutrition. You stuff the food down so fast, barely chewing, barely tasting. You only stop when you're so full and so sick you physically can't take any more. You sit there feeling horrible - guilty and bloated and sick. You may be so disgusted with yourself and how you're going to gain weight that you throw it up, or take laxatives, or exercise like crazy - and voila - you're developing bulimia. The sad thing is that once you're in a bingeing cycle, it's really hard to escape. You may end up bingeing several times a day, maybe on over 10000 calories at a time. You gain weight so so fast. Even if you've turned to bulimia you'll still gain some weight - the methods to prevent weightgain don't work well, and the average bulimic is normal-overweight. You may become obese and waddle around in specially-made clothes being laughed at by normal people, and facing health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure. If you become bulimic you'll probably stay around the same weight, but your teeth will rot, your hair will dull, you'll get puffy cheeks, a bloated stomach, diarrhoea, constipation, chest pains; you may die of a heart attack, or your oesophagus could rupture, or an electrolyte imbalance could render you brain-damaged or paralysed. Both bulimics and binge-eaters will spend huge amounts of money on food, and feel so so ashamed.

"I clearly remember sitting in the kitchen reading a magazine article about
anorexia and saying out loud to my horrified mother, "I wish I could get
that." Well, you've heard the old saying about being careful what you wish
for! I mustered up the willpower to cut my calories to 1,200 a day - then
1,000 - then 800 - then 500 - then none. Every time the weight loss stopped
I dropped it a little more. I was within the normal weight range for my
height when I started this but I dropped 30 lbs anyway.

Now, this was not a pretty state of affairs. I wasn't chic or beautiful. I
was dry-skinned, dull-haired, sunken eyed,  and FLABBY. The calorie
restriction had cost me all of my muscle tone so I looked awful. I was
"thin" but I still had a sagging butt, cellulite, and a distended stomach. I
still wouldn't have worn a bathing suit or shorts in public if my life
depended on it. I didn't grasp that this was a direct result of the
starvation diet. I just thought that I was cursed with bad genes or some
drivel. I was really perplexed that I could be so thin and still be saggy
and dimpled.

I couldn't exercise because everything turned purple when I moved fast. I
was freezing cold all the time. I was always shaky and nauseous from low
blood sugar. Nothing like that pounding headache and nausea 24 hours a day!
I couldn't have endured this indefinitely. Every fiber of my being was
urging me to eat, so when I did eat, I totally lost control. I ate
everything that wasn't nailed to the floor. I ate until I hurt. I ate until
I puked. I ate until I felt *horrible* about myself. I mean, what a
weak-willed slug! What a failure! I would become more determined than ever
to starve and re-gain control. And then, of course, I would eventually cave
in and eat everything in sight.

I finally came to my senses and decided that I didn't like that ugly cycle.
I decided that was going to just eat a modest 800 calories every day. That
way I could keep the weight off and not feel so crazed... I thought. What
actually happened is that I had my metabolism so screwed up I began
*gaining* weight on only 800 calories a day. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks!
On 800 calories a day! I can't even tell you how much that scared me. What
does that mean? If I want to be thin, I can't eat at all now???

After I started eating again and I started gaining weight, I pretty much
gave up. I ate anything and everything. I quickly regained the 30 pounds and
then some. Only here's the real horror, when I lost weight, I lost a
combination of fat and muscle. What I gained back was *all fat.* Muscle is
metabolically active, the more of it you have the more calories you burn
around the clock and the easier it is to stay lean. And I now had, like,
*none*. NO MUSCLE. NO METABOLISM. Thanks to my brilliant brush with
starvation, I'd managed to transform myself from a normal athletic looking
teenager with a normal metabolism into a pudgy human dough girl with the
metabolism of a small snail.

It took years to fix this. I mean, it was like a decade of hard work for me. The
only way to have a lean, strong, fit body that doesn't jiggle is to build
muscle. In order to build muscle you need a calorie surplus. If you suddenly
have a calorie surplus after months or years of starving yourself, you're
initially going to gain fat as well as muscle, and that's going to do a real
number on your head. That's where professional help comes in. It's a whole lot
more complicated than just giving you a menu and a few exercises. I would
recommend finding someone who's qualified to treat eating disorders. That's the
fast track to getting healthy and fit. I took the big self-guided detour through
Pigville, which I don't recommend. :-)"

Thankfully Skwigg recovered her metabolism and health, and is now slim and healthy. See her site for fantastic weightloss information and articles at http://www.skwigg.com/index.html.