all control. Cleo not only denied herself food but also intimate relationships, career opportunities, and even simple items to decorate her home. Her walls were bare.
I remember speaking to an emaciated woman lying in a UCLA hospital bed, dying of starvation. She was asking for help and said she wanted to live, but she wouldn't let the doctors give her a feeding tube because, she said, “They all want to make me fat.” The tragedy is that the extreme of this distorted thinking ends in death.
Fear permeates many examples of eating disorders; fear needs to be addressed more than the food itself.
Another unusual attitude about food results in weight gain rather than thinness. Food can seem dangerous if you are hungry. You then become more afraid of feeling hungry than of the food. If you graze continually throughout the day, especially on high fat/high sugar snacks, you can assure yourself of never being hungry. Then you have a sense of being in control even though you are frustrated and miserable as your weight continually climbs.
Fear permeates these examples, and fear needs to be addressed more than the food itself.
Further complicating matters, a starved body also means a starved brain. A starved brain creates a mind that cannot think clearly and is subject to wild distortions. It's important to remember that a heavy person can have a starved brain as well as a thin person.
If you have an eating disorder, you ignore the genuine needs of your body. Yet, your body is real, and the human body needs adequate nourishment to function. Adequate nourishment becomes part of recovery, yet it has to be approached with caution since you will experience any change in your eating habits as tampering with what keeps you safe in this world.
You control your moods and experience by eating the foods you have learned “work” for you. For example, you can eat several handfuls of nuts or some fruit and cheese before you go out to dinner with other people. By eating this heavy food, you protect yourself against feeling hunger in public. You protect yourself from feeling out of control, vulnerable, or natural with your companions. You can choose what you will eat and feel comfortable.
This may or may not be a problem. Only you know if this is troublesome for you. If you need to binge and purge before a social dinner, you have a problem.
If you know you will be eating with people who delay the meal beyond your comfort zone, it makes sense to eat beforehand so you aren't too famished. But if you are unwilling to allow others to see you when you feel something authentic, including hunger, then you are eating in advance for protection.
Emotional eating presents a dilemma if you eat to relieve tension even though your stomach is quite full. You might eat on a full stomach and cause yourself pain so you can't participate in activities. Or maybe you eat on a full stomach and throw up. Hours on a treadmill might take care of those calories, but running while your stomach is overloaded can create digestive problems.
Eating until you are so full you pass out is an indication of a possible eating disorder. If you do this to relieve stress, you make yourself non-functional. You have to cancel appointments, miss opportunities, and are unavailable to friends and family. Trying to get through emotional strain by chewing packs of sugar-free gum is an attempt to get binge eating relief without eating. The excessive chewing can cause gas, painful gastric distress, and embarrassing diarrhea. If and when these complications occur, they only add to your sense of shame and worthlessness.
The ultimate goal of a woman in the grip of severe anorexia is to disappear, to lose her body completely, to not only be as light as air, but to actually be air. This dangerous goal gets mixed up with spirituality. The anorexic woman wants to be “pure spirit,” gossamer in the wind. If she could reach this impossible ultimate fantasy, she would be invisible to the human eye and sensed only as a vibrating energy that others could feel but not see. If this is you, please know that in your attempt to reach such a goal, you can starve yourself into emaciation, organ destruction, and loss of brain function. If you continue striving for this “ultimate” goal, you will die.
A different anorexia scenario involves separating your sense of self from your body. If you achieve this psychological split, you create an experience where you send your body into the world while your real self remains unknown. You become a puppeteer moving the strings of your body, manipulating it to be the shape required and to function as needed. This, I believe, is part of the dynamic for anorexic women who need or want to be thin for public display.
Yet another addition to these scenarios is believing you feel anxious and bad about yourself because your body is fat, ugly, and disgusting, irrespective of your actual appearance. You use the words “fat” and “ugly” interchangeably. You believe you would feel better, even wonderful, if you were beautiful. Again, you try to use your physicality to tend to your emotional needs, usually at the price of a healthy body.
I've worked with celebrities whose beauty is acclaimed by thousands, even millions, yet who still say they feel fat and ugly. Such a woman knows that her appearance wields power in her world. She may use her beauty as a negotiating tool or as a way of influencing or manipulating. She may consider people influenced by her appearance to be fools because they don't see the frightened, helpless, ugly, fat, and unlovable person she believes herself to be. She's in a complex and painful state. She's won because her true self is invisible. She's lost because she's alone with her ever-present, self-punishing inner voice.
A woman who suffers from binge eating or bulimia can also believe she has the power to make herself invisible.
A woman who suffers from binge eating or bulimia can also believe she has the power to make herself invisible. The need to isolate is part of all eating disorders to some degree.
When Kimberly, twenty-nine and suffering from bulimia, needed her binge foods, she put on her “invisible clothes,” usually innocuous sweatpants and sweatshirt and a blank look on her face, and got herself to a grocery store or take-out restaurant. She didn't look anyone in the eye. She avoided personal connection and felt that she was a shadow figure who couldn't be seen. If she saw someone she knew, she made it clear with body language that she didn't see or recognize them. If the person didn't respond to her, it reinforced her belief that she was invisible.
When Kimberly got home she rushed through putting away the perishables, leaving out the boxes and bags of salty, crunchy, and sweet. She gathered up her binge foods and felt relief that she could give up the strain of being invisible and get on with eating, secure in her sense of being alone in her private and unseen world.
Janet, forty-five, achieved her invisibility by using what she considered sleight of hand. In public she ate small and seemingly inconsequential tidbits she was certain no one would notice. While other people filled their plates or nibbled on appetizers, Janet was stealing. She took candy decorations from food trays when she believed no one was looking and quickly popped them in her mouth. She also filled her pockets and her purse with sweets to eat on the way home.
A very large woman knows about yet another kind of invisibility. She can be still and disappear into the background. I remember attending a crowded Overeaters Anonymous meeting of about 200 people. Men and women of all ages and sizes sat in rows of chairs. Those who couldn't find a seat sat on the floor or stood along the walls.
I sat in a chair near a thick pole for at least twenty minutes before I realized a woman was standing in front of that pole. She seemed to gradually appear. She must have weighed close to 350 pounds. She wore a loose-fitting garment in shades of brown and stood immobile and expressionless.
After I noticed her, I looked around the room again. I saw four more women, large, immobile, expressionless, in bland neutral colors, whom I hadn't seen before. I wondered
