5 Questions & Answers About Anorexia

I'm pleased to re-introduce today's guest blogger, Dana Lise Shavin, author of The Body Tourist, a memoir about the six years following her recovery from anorexia nervosa.   Last year she wrote a guest post about her experience and it was so well-received that I'm thrilled to have her back.  

5 Questions for the Anorexic—and Answers

by Dana Lise Shavin

If you’ve been told you’re anorexic, then you’re familiar with the questions below.

Aren’t you hungry?

Yes. I’m starving—literally and literally. It is excruciatingly difficult to severely restrict calories and at the same time maintain an exercise regime designed to burn off what little I still allow myself, so that I can continue to lose weight.

I am never “not hungry” except for in the minutes just after I (guiltily) ingested a few calories. I have never lost my appetite, only my ability to appease it. Because malnutrition interferes with the brain’s pleasure sensors, what I feel in the presence of food is powerful hunger wrapped up inexorably with extreme anxiety about eating it.

Can’t you see how thin you are?

No, I can’t. The reason for this lies partly in the realm of physiology and partly in the realm of psychology.

Physiologically my body, having used up its reserve of excess fat, turned to my muscles and connective tissues for fuel, and once those reserves were gone, it went after the neurons in my brain. Compromised (read: shrunken) brain capacity means I have serious problems with concentration, emotional lability (this is why I cry a lot or am otherwise moody), and difficulty remembering facts and events.

It has also thrown off my judgment, impaired my insight, deregulated my impulse control, and even interfered with my understanding of consequences.

Psychologically, I can’t see how thin I am because I have linked being happy with being thin, and although the number on the scale shows that I am extremely thin, I don’t believe it because I’m not happy yet.

And rather than question my hypothesis, I conclude I haven’t lost enough weight. I also can’t see myself clearly because I am emotionally unstable and wrapped up in control issues centering around my family, my body, and my independence, all weighty issues (if you will) that are causing me tremendous anxiety.

Also, look at our culture’s celebrities and models! Thin is in, and the thinner the better, right?  In short, I can’t see how thin I am because my brain is not processing information correctly anymore, I am anxious and emotionally unstable, I have erroneously linked happiness and thinness, and celebrities are modeling extreme thinness as desirable. All of this is why you telling me I’m sick and holding up a mirror to prove it just doesn’t work.

I dieted and I didn’t become anorexic. Why did you?

The short answer is that dieting alone didn’t lead to my eating disorder. Anorexia is a complex disorder that arranges itself around the seemingly innocuous behavior of dieting to lose a few pounds.

While most people will not become anorexic as a result of dieting, those who, like me, are also struggling with depression (50% of those with eating disorders meet the criteria for depression) (source: National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders: ANAD), familial instability, a history of physical or sexual abuse, and/or who have absentee or weight-focused parents, are at a much greater risk for eating disorders.

Magical thinking also plays a role in the development of anorexia, whereby individuals who will become anorexic erroneously believe that weight loss insulates against pain, disappointment, and even death.

What will help you recover?

This is such a wonderful question, and one that will figure prominently in my treatment. First and foremost what must happen is I must be restored to a non-starvation weight, so that my brain can begin to function properly again. Without this, I cannot know that I am ill, and thus cannot begin to do the emotional work of recovery.

           

The second most important thing that will help me recover is posing this question to myself: Do I want to do this (i.e. starve, exercise myself into oblivion, live in the hospital or in my parents’ home) for the rest of my life? At twenty, despite my illness, what I know is this: I am unrelentingly hungry, always cold, and very lonely.

Losing weight has not dispelled my depression or won me more friends or a boyfriend, like I thought it would; in fact, it has pushed people away, isolated me, and made me MORE dependent on my parents: I’m unable to live independently because I’m a danger to myself.

Is this what I was going for when I set out to lose ten pounds? No. Is this what I want for the rest of my life? No. Is this what I’ll have if I don’t do the work of recovery? Yes, if I don’t die first. Because here’s a fact: eating disorders have the highest rate of mortality of any of the mental illnesses (source: ANAD).

What should I do if I think I, or someone I know, is in danger of becoming anorexic (or having any kind of eating disorder)?  

When I was 16, a friend confided that she had lost twenty pounds and couldn’t stop dieting, although ten pounds had been her goal. I called her mother. My friend was furious. But she got help.

There are professionals specializing in the treatment of eating disorders, and inpatient, outpatient and day treatment centers across the US. Getting help—for yourself or someone else—begins with your understanding that disordered eating can consume years of your life (at best) or, if allowed to go unchecked, can take your life.

If you are struggling with anorexic thinking—even if you’re of normal weight—make an appointment to talk to a professional. If it’s a friend or family member who’s suffering, don’t get into in a power struggle around food, eating, or weight loss.

You won’t get her (or him) to see herself clearly no matter how many mirrors you hold up. You will be of the most help if you invite her to talk, are supportive, and offer to make an appointment and go with her to speak to a professional. If it’s a friend and she refuses your help, tell someone else close to her (a parent, teacher, or spouse) what you suspect. If it’s your child, you must insist on treatment. Look into ANAD or the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) for help about how to proceed.

Dana Shavin, M.S., CPCC, is a certified professional life coach, speaker, and author of the memoir, The Body Tourist, about the intersection of her struggle with anorexia with her mental health career. 

Her book has been featured on the Remuda Ranch treatment center website, on Shape.com, and on the San Francisco Review of Books list. New York Times best-selling author Jacqueline Mitchard called The Body Tourist “…riveting reading, the biography of an illness as stubborn as the woman determined to kill it. Dana Lise Shavin can write with both hands, by turns comic and tragic, and always fiercely honest.” 

In addition to her long-running personal column in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Dana speaks often about recovery and best life practices at both nondenominational and religious institutions and universities. She was a guest educator this past fall at the Meacham Writers Conference at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including Oxford American, The Sun, and The Writer.  Her website is Danashavin.com. 

How To Be More Patient (with yourself)

Yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  He said and did so much to inspire many generations.  A quote that really resonates with me is this one:

Easier said than done.  That staircase represents change. Often we wait until we're ready to climb, expecting to effortlessly bound up those stairs without losing a step or falling.  

That's not how change happens.  It's slow, often facilitated by blind faith, with many falls, stumbles and blocks along the way.  As author and Huffington Post blogger, Iris Ruth Pastor says, change is a result of "mouse steps, not kangaroo steps."

In her upcoming book, Iris writes a moving account of her recovery from an eating disorder.  I'm thrilled to share her wisdom about patience - in eating disorder recovery, and in life.

Take it away, Iris!

Lessons Learned Along the Way

by Iris Ruth Pastor

Within minutes of Nelson Mandela’s death in early December 2013, we are deluged with information about his life: a conqueror of apartheid, the first black president of South Africa, a master compromiser and a champion peace broker. 

One facet of his multi-layered life particularly fascinates me: how did he emerge from 27 years of wrongful imprisonment devoid of bitterness and rancor?

Myriad sources cite Mandela’s anger in his early years of confinement. As time passed, however, Mandela noted that he began to recognize that “hating clouds the mind and gets in the way of strategy.” (The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2013).

If he wanted to achieve lifelong dreams and ambitions, he realized he needed to control what was still left for him to control - his heart, his head, his thoughts and his attitude - or his captors would have indeed triumphed. Nelson Mandela entered prison as a revolutionary and emerged as a statesman.

I wonder how much time we all spend in a cage of our own making – raging about things we can’t control - rather than concentrating on strategies that will strengthen our wills and help achieve our desired results?

Clearly, quite often I find myself stuck in neutral – trying to keep from unraveling as I try to come to terms with my disordered eating. I witness normal eating among my peers, and yet remain unprepared for and incapable of fully and effectively embracing that paradign.

Perhaps I should think about shifting gears like Cheryl Strayed did. Reeling from the loss of her beloved mother, her life at age 22 was spiraling downward. Her family had fragmented and scattered. She was dabbling in heroin and free sex, estranged from her husband and employed in a series of dead-end jobs. 

In a desperate attempt to cure her of herself, Strayed decides that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone - from the Mojave Dessert through California and Oregon to Washington - will be her path to salvation. That walking with no discernible reason but just to observe the wonders of nature would prove restorative. Years later, she documents her journey in Wild, a book gracing The New York Times Best Seller List for over 35 weeks.

Strayed suffers from her inexperience: not budgeting for enough money to adequately see her through from outpost to outpost. She ignores admonishments about weighty backpacks, neglects to talk to anyone who has actually hiked the trail before her, and does woefully little physical training to prepare her for the rigors the trek will present. 

She encounters dessert heat, frigid mountain air, rattlesnakes, eroded trails and a near rape from a lusty, lecherous mountain man. She endures massive foot blisters, bruising, hunger, thirst, exhaustion and loneliness.

Among her many notable trials and triumphs on the trail, I am most drawn to one part of it: the beginning. She wakes up the morning she is to start her journey in a seedy, cheap motel 12 miles from the trail. She has trouble even lifting her back pack to position it across her back. And when she finally maneuvers that feat, she is already exhausted. Nevertheless, she closes the motel room door and steps into a parking light drenched in daylight. 

She realizes quickly – with great trepidation – that she is going to have to hitch a ride with strangers unless she wants to walk the 12 miles to the trail’s entrance in the searing heat of a June day. Two men in a minivan with Colorado plates offer her a ride. She climbs in gingerly, hoping she won’t get murdered. Thirty uneventful minutes later, they drop her off on a silent highway. She begins walking toward a fence post supporting a palm sized sign reading “Pacific Crest Trail.” She staggers the first few steps down the trail. She finds the trail register in a metal box nearby and signs it. She resumes walking.

Her journey had begun. There were no crowds heaving fistfuls of graffiti. No cheering loved ones throwing kisses. No photographers eagerly snapping pictures documenting her first steps. No massive send-off parade. It was just an ordinary day in an ordinary town, as she took her first tentative steps off the highway and into the wilderness. And though the beginning was neither dramatic nor pain free, she emerged at the end of her trek an altered person.

Like Cheryl Strayed, I hope all of us in the New Year can push to take those first faltering baby steps - as subtle and unnoticed as they may be by others - so that we can begin to achieve what really matters to us.

Like Nelson Mandela, let us resolve to work diligently on strategies for achieving what we want in life. And let us give less credence to the wrongs heaped upon us. 

No matter where in our journey we may be, let’s celebrate the small incremental mouse steps we take so that when the kangaroo leaps occur, we are ready for our hard earned success.

IRIS RUTH PASTOR

I am 5’2” – the truth

I weigh 115 lbs. – a lie

I like to dress funky.

Do what’s not expected.

Push the envelope of what‘s customary.

Surprise. Delight. Entertain and Connect.

I am an aging baby boomer, wife, mother and grandma,

Who writes a column entitled “Incidentally, Iris,”

Blogs for the Huffington Post,

And speaks on all topics related to mid life and baby boomers,

Including tattoos,

Though I graciously decline,

The opportunity to get one.

I have entered the social media age

Kicking and bitching and screaming

In order to motivate, inform, entertain and educate,

Foster connection and offer tidbits of authenticity

For myself and for others.

While doing so,

I try not to be judgmental, cloying and hypocritical.

Whiney, clingy and snippy.

Sometimes I even manage to carry it off.

My philosophy of life used to be Coping -

Just getting through with dignity -

But I’m no longer content

To settle for less.

So I’m tearing down my carefully built facade.

I’m repairing, remodeling, improving and updating.

I’m soaring and I’m jumping.

I’m preserving my bloom.

And I’m inviting you to join me

In preserving your own bloom too.

Want more from Iris (I know I do!)?   Sign up for her weekly newsletter of inspiration at www.irisruthpastor.com.  And please read, like and leave a comment at www.huffingtonpost.com/iris-ruth-pastor.  

How to Accept Yourself

When you think about the concept of self-acceptance, what “self” do you think of first?  The one in the mirror?   Because there is so much more to you than meets the eye.  

In this video, I'll show you how to find a renewed sense of self-acceptance and feel better about yourself. When you feel good, you won't turn to (or against) food to comfort, numb or express yourself.

Go ahead and WATCH now!

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#$%^&* My Anorexia Said

#$%^&* My Anorexia Said

Guest blog post by Dana Lise Shavin

Dana is a recovered anorexic and author of The Body Tourist, a gritty, blatantly honest, and funny memoir about life after eating disorders. 

When I was fifteen, I went on a hike with some friends. One of their fathers chaperoned. On our way up a steep mountain trail, my friend’s father asked each of us what our number one goal in life was. I didn’t even have to think about it.

“To die thin,” I said.

He laughed. “You are thin,” he said. Which I was. But I couldn’t see it.

“If I was thin, I would be happy, and I’m not happy,” I said. “So obviously I’m not thin enough.” 

My friend’s father was not equipped to confront my growing anorexic mindset, with its dangerous and deeply addictive hypothesis that thinness equals happiness, and as I recall, the conversation moved on to my friends who had real goals, like becoming teachers and doctors and musicians. Four years after that conversation, forty pounds lighter, I still wasn’t happy. But I was still dieting. Not surprisingly, I was hospitalized.

            As a survivor of anorexia nervosa, there’s one question I get asked more than any other: What was the turning point in your recovery?  It’s an interesting question, I think, because it assumes that recovery is linear—that it progresses from unrecovered to sort-of recovered to completely recovered without backtracking, relapsing, or second-guessing. It assumes there is an eye-opening event or insight that turns a light on in the anorexic brain and makes her say, “What was I thinking getting so thin? I must stop this right now!”

           The truth, as we all know, is that recovery happens in fits and starts. You feel better one day and worse the next, eat healthily one day and starve the next. As time goes on, and you continue to do the work of recovery, maybe you eat healthily for two days or two weeks before you relapse. Maybe you eat healthily but feel terrible about yourself, or maybe you eat terribly or starve but feel a shift happening somewhere inside, and you know, without knowing how you know, that real change is coming. This is the true face of recovery.

           So while there wasn’t so much a turning point, so to speak, on my anorexic journey, there was, along the way, a growing awareness about my situation. At nineteen, I had been expelled from college and sent home to my parents. Instead of living in a fun, noisy dorm, attending interesting classes, and hanging out with friends drinking interesting herbal teas in beautiful, snowy upstate New York, I was confined to a hospital ward in my disliked hometown of Atlanta. My long black hair, the one thing about my appearance I actually liked, was falling out in huge hanks. Everything I prided myself on: my independence, my spunk, my academic ability, my close relationships with my friends and my boyfriend, anorexia had devoured.

           But I could only see this in glimpses. Because anorexia is an illusionist. Along with tricking me into believing happiness and contentment lay in a thinness I could never quite attain, anorexia obscured my ability to see my life, and the direness of my situation, clearly and consistently.

In the early days, weeks, and months of my recovery, I regained (and re-lost, and re-gained) a portion of my weight, each time allowing a few more of the pounds to stay. As my brain began to stabilize and my thinking began to clear, I became able—and (this is important) WILLING—to open my eyes to all the ways that anorexia was stealing my life, my friends, my independence, my joy, my sense of humor, and my future.

          There was a growing understanding that I had a choice to make: I could live the way I was living (if I lived—I was already having serious blood sugar plummets and seizures) for years or decades, terrified of food and of eating, denying my body’s wants and needs, forever racing around in a haze of exercise while battling intense hunger.

           Or I could put an end to the anorexic madness and get back to real life, which meant gaining enough weight to go back to college and pick up where I left off with my friends and my studies, and summoning the courage to face the difficult and the scary and the disappointing and the profoundly rewarding aspects of being human. The choice of whether to continue to live the painfully simplistic thin=happy fallacy, or to dig down deep inside myself and discover what was really keeping me from feeling happy—and then to do something about THAT—was mine and mine alone to make.

Easy? No. Worth the effort and the fear and the uncertainty and, yes, the restoration of my weight without any guarantees? Yes. My life is fuller, happier, more creative, more interesting, and more resonant than I ever believed it could be.

          Like an ocean liner, recovery doesn’t turn on a dime. It takes dedicated and consistent time and effort. You are at the helm. Ask yourself: how do I want to live? What would my ideal life look like? Will your greatest achievement be that you died thin?  Or will it be that you summoned your courage, faced your fears, and as a result you really, really lived?

About the author:  Dana Lise Shavin was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1986, she obtained her Master's degree in Clinical Psychology and worked for fifteen years as a therapist, behavior specialist, and psychological examiner. For the past fifteen years, she has made her living as a fine art painter, exhibiting at outdoor art fairs and in galleries throughout the United States. In 2011, Dana returned to her mental health roots and became a certified professional life coach. She specializes in finding balance and fulfillment in life and work, and goal setting with soul. Dana's essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Oxford American, The Sun, The Writer, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many others. She has been a monthly columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press since 2002, and is the editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation newspaper, The Shofar.    http://www.danashavin.com/