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The whole effort of an anorexic is directed towards control of the uncontrollable: the body, other people, and ultimately, life and death.

So terrified are they of losing control that they are frozen on the borderline of life and death, power and madness.

Such a yearning for control, in most cases, originates in childhood, where children were either told that they should keep their feelings ‘firmly under wraps and not expressed at all’, or they were in the firing line of violent outbursts where people got hurt emotionally and/or physically. In either case, there was no room, for example, for anger or grief to come and go. This is why, in adolescence, the children of such families might develop anorexia.

The mind/body split

When eating becomes the primary focus of one’s life, demanding continual planning and self-discipline, the obsessive preoccupation serves as a defence against experiencing painful emotions. It therefore also acts as a preventative factor against the outbursts reminiscent of their childhood.

By separating the body from the mind, external perfection can be sought to compensate for profound feelings of inferiority. This is how anorexics can get to such low weights and keep going. It’s all driven by the distorted logic that their body, a ‘foreign container’, is filled with all the bad feelings, and that only once it is destroyed can their mind, the ‘real me’, be free of intolerable feelings, painful memories, and physical harm.

Anorexics have this perspective, given that the unhappy family situations that so many grew up in could not in any way provide a safe enough setting for them to experience a normal, full range of feelings and learn to survive them without disastrous consequences. So often, there were disastrous consequences to ordinary healthy feelings, whereby it was impossible to feel angry, for example, without also feeling guilty. And so, they learned to squash their emotions so as not to cause further distress.

No matter how emaciated I am, all is well. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

For people with eating disorders, their self-worth only seems to exist if it is validated by an external source. This is why, when they eat ‘good’ food, they can allow themselves to feel ‘good’ as a person, until the time when they eat ‘bad’ food, and then the pattern reverses.

As well as relationships within the family being troubled for many people with eating disorders, another familial similarity can be seen in the particular roles that many anorexics played within their families when they were children.

Taking on the role of the ‘responsible child’ is a common experience in eating disorder patients. This often includes taking on what are generally considered parental tasks, for example, having considerable responsibility for the running of the home. Generally, these tasks hold a lot of responsibility, but ultimately, the child has little control. At this stage, the child learns how to look after others’ needs and, during this process, begins to suppress their own. The more the child fulfils this role, the more skilled she* becomes at suppressing her own needs. 

*(‘She’ because, in the patriarchal society within which we live, men hold more power than women, and are therefore taught to have more of a voice and act out their feelings. In contrast, women tend to internalise their feelings and act in. This is why there are so many more women in mental institutions as opposed to prisons).

How to move forward

Most women have real difficulty in consciously acknowledging the anger they hold surrounding their roles as children, as this would mean recognising their own resentment toward their parents, particularly their mother, whom they had always tried to protect against any emotion perceived as negative.

For the guilty child who finds themselves, a decade later, stating that ‘it wasn’t that bad’, it’s important to remember that emotional hunger isn’t always about receiving nothing. It can also be about receiving the wrong thing (for example, being given gifts and money when what you really need is a hug).

Alas, there doesn’t need to be any hatred aimed towards anyone, only awareness, and this is what recovery strives for.

Recovery relies on evoking an awareness of impulses, feelings, and needs that originate within oneself. The purpose of this is to encourage greater autonomy and self-directed identity, where what one has to say is listened to and made the object of exploration. This is to combat the issues with self-image that many people with Anorexia experience (very poor with extremely high ego-ideal* standards).

*(The ego ideal is a core component of the superego in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, representing the internal image of the ‘perfect’ self that an individual strives to become).

I needed to express myself, not only so that others might hear me, but so that I could hear myself.

And this leads me onto my next point… 

The importance of art in recovery.

Art acts as a vital link between the anorexic and the outside world. While both are about expressing oneself without words, unlike anorexia, which acts like a numbing agent where being constantly fearful of a lack of control can translate to a total cutting out of emotions, art helps and guides one back to communicate with others, bringing pain into the open. It does this owing to the separation that it offers.

Art can help one to distance their emotions from themselves. Therefore, instead of feeling guilty for feeling a certain way, as they might previously have done, getting their emotions down on paper can help them to analyse their feelings as though they were observing someone else.

No longer did I feel guilty about wasting so much time in hospital, because I was now using the experience to fuel my work.

Mindfully honouring creativity helps one transcend the feeling of deficient emptiness that drives self-destructive behaviour. ‘What is in must out.’

Ultimately, though, recovery can only be achieved when one can see the emptiness of their behaviour. Anorexia is not good, not evil, just an outside ‘thing’ that has been unintelligently used to ease suffering. I write ‘unintelligently’ here, not to be rude, but because no addiction in the history of the world has ever alleviated more suffering than it has ended up causing.

Art, however… 

Art saves lives. 

I first became aware of my body, in a pinching and prodding way, just over a decade ago. I can remember standing in front of a mirror and scrutinising my stomach, while feeling a sense of shame that I didn’t have the ‘definition’ that the women I saw online had.

I was 14.

From that day forward, I vowed that I would change, and that I did.

My dad has always been a runner, and I decided to follow suit. I bought the cheapest running shoes they had in Sports Direct, a pair of Karrimor’s, and off I went. All it took was one decision to change the course of my life for the next decade.

After a few weeks of running with my dad, I decided to join my local athletics club. I started entering races and, ever the perfectionist, researched how I could get faster.

I landed at the conclusion that to get faster, I had to run more and eat less.

I cut out all saturated fat, sugar, and simple carbs from my diet. At my worst (or, as I would define it then, my ‘best’), I was eating only fruit and vegetables, and running 50+ miles a week, all the while I was still growing.

My bones became so weak that I developed a stress fracture in my foot, and still I ran. I was later diagnosed with osteopenia, the early onset of osteoporosis. At the age of 15, I had the bone health of an 80-year-old, I was told.

I was referred to CAMHS, the children and adolescents’ mental health services, and diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa.

The rest is a blur of hospital appointments, training sessions at the running track, yelling matches with my parents, discussions (that went nowhere) with my dietician, blood tests and, finally, a section.

It was two weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I was soon to be entering the final year of my A-levels, and I was finally winning the races that I had been training so hard for. On the outside, with the exception of my emaciated body, everything looked like it was going well for me… Yet I was being forced to go to the hospital to receive treatment for an illness that I didn’t even think I had.

‘I’m just disciplined,’ I told myself and everyone else, all the while ignoring the ache in my chest. Alas, I wasn’t disciplined, I was dying, I now realise.

When I was first admitted to the hospital, it was hard. So hard. I felt like I was in a period of grief, almost. Not being able to run and being forced to eat all the foods that I had refused to eat for so long was terrifying. It felt like all the control that I had spent so long striving to have was suddenly taken away from me, and I was scared of what would happen to my body.

For the first few weeks of my admission, I wasn’t even allowed to go for a walk. Had I not been sectioned, there is no way that I would’ve stayed in there, but as I was, I wasn’t able to leave. I had to sit with the discomfort.

I was placed in an anti-ligature room because I couldn’t be trusted not to kill myself. I had to be supervised while I went to the toilet because ‘the exertion could be dangerous’ (it would be laughable if it weren’t true). I vowed that as soon as I could leave, I would.

Fast-forward two months, and following a review with my psychiatrist, my section was lifted. I was informed of my rights — as I was no longer sectioned, I was under no obligation to stay — but to everyone’s surprise, I did.

I stayed.

I was still very fixated on exercise, and the team knew that upon my return home, I would go back to running, so to ensure that I could return to it in a more gradual way, I was allowed to go to the running track when I was on home leave. It was a good feeling. The thing that had kept me going throughout my hospital admission was finally within reach again.

All I could think about was getting home to return to running, but I was more responsive to therapy and, for the first time, able to admit that I was ill and did need help.

I stayed in the hospital for a further four months until, finally, on the 1st of February 2019, after a six-month admission, I was discharged.

Keen to progress with my running, I started racing again after a couple of months. I soon discovered, however, that I couldn’t get back to the level I was at prior to being hospitalised without sacrificing the recovery that I had spent so long working towards.

I felt disheartened, and it wasn’t long until I started to experience the all too familiar sense of dread upon waking up and realising that it was time to go running. This time, though, instead of reverting to food restriction, as I had done before in an effort to ‘get quicker’, I made the decision to stop running altogether, and, in its place, started working out at home. It still wasn’t healthy, though, because I didn’t enjoy it. 

Until just two weeks ago, I was still forcing myself to exercise five days a week. But not anymore. Life’s too short to spend it feeling guilty for missing a workout. I don’t want my worth to be tied to movement anymore.

The fact is that if you feel like something awful will happen if you don’t exercise, you don’t have a healthy relationship with it, as I learnt the hard way…

When I was running every day, I hated the reflection that I saw in the mirror. Everyone told me how ill I was, how thin I was, and the weighing scales proved that I was incredibly poorly indeed, but for some reason, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see reality. Instead, I saw someone whose size was ‘above average’, and this is what made it so hard for me to recover, and why I was ultimately sectioned, because… 

Why do I need to gain weight when I’m already too big?

My brain was gaslighting my body, big time.

The main thing that stopped me from wanting to recover, when I did come to terms with the fact that I was ill, was the anxiety that I had surrounding what would happen to my body if I stopped exercising. I thought that gaining weight was equivalent to losing control. But, in a weird turn of events, I feel better now than I ever have, and that all comes down to ignoring the rhetoric that is pushed on us all by the media.

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ remedy when it comes to health. What is healthy for you might not be healthy for me.

Since I stopped exercising in such a structured way, I have felt more comfortable and at peace with my body than I have in over a decade.

I walk my dogs every morning, and I go hiking with my dad once a week, but I do these things because I love them. When I’m out in nature, I’m able to, albeit somewhat contradictorily, find myself in the act of getting lost in something bigger than myself. The worries I have about the way the fat on my stomach rolls, or the way my thighs meet, evaporate when I am standing atop a mountain, listening to the sound of flowing water cascading down a nearby waterfall, or watching a flock of birds take flight as they embark upon their great migration for the winter.

When I was sitting in the back of an ambulance on my way to the hospital, aged 16, I never would’ve believed that there would come a time when I wouldn’t need to exercise to feel ‘enough.’ But I am here, finally, and it feels amazing.

It’s taken a lot to get here, and I don’t know exactly what the turning point was, but I can say with certainty that being with my partner has been a game-changer for my recovery.

My partner, Lucy, loves and accepts all of me, and that helps me to love and accept the parts of myself that I have always had such a hard time with. She shows me that I don’t need to burn myself into the ground in order to be worthy of love. I am worthy of love simply because I am alive.

Scrap BMI, to determine your healthy weight, hold out for the moment that you stop obsessing about your body. Whatever your body looks like in that moment is representative of true health.

I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you could have the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, but if all you’re thinking about is food and exercise, then you’re just as unhealthy as someone who is morbidly obese…

I’m not saying that I will never exercise in a structured way again, because I might, and should I want to, in a healthy way, I will hold space for doing so in the future, but right now, I have things that are of greater importance to me than controlling my body.

Art and love over food restriction and exercise. Hope over control… I have finally tasted contentment, and oh, how sweet it is. ❤