Confessionals of life after anorexia: some of the things we forget

A recent comment has come into this blog asking if I would discuss something about life after anorexia that we often forget to talk about. So I’m going to be talking about the slightly unpleasant topic of what happens to the body after anorexia.

I want to start by saying there is a gross error made in the treatment of anorexia in the assumption that once you’re eating normally, you’re cured. Every time I read a story from a recovered anorexic, I find the same thing. They all say they still struggle with body image, with self-esteem. Eating again, as hard and as painful as that is, that’s the easy bit. It took a month to eat normally, and five years to gain a sense of self where I can look at who I am physically with confidence and be happy with who I am.

But that doesn’t mean I’m completely and entirely recovered, that anorexia is in my past. Because every meal out presents me with problems. Not of the emotional kind, but of a physical nature. This is where it gets confessional, where it gets difficult. For as confident as I am about myself, as little as I care what people think about the fact that I have permanent scars on my wrists, some things I’d rather not discuss in company.

I was anorexic for about fifteen years, and anorexic to the point where I hardly ate anything at all. For a year, I was severely addicted to laxatives and diuretics. For another period of about six months I took diet pills, which were frighteningly effective. The damage to my digestive system means I have real problems eating a lot of foods.

It became easier to say that I was gluten intolerant, because most of the foods I struggle with are wheat based. For some reason, it’s easier to be mocked by people who consider gluten intolerance to be fake than to sit plainly and explain that fifteen years of starvation plus addiction to laxatives has left me with permanent damage to my digestive system. If I had a camera, I’d take photos of their faces and put them up on display.

You end up walking an awkward line. Once you’ve crossed over into that other place, if it does physical damage, you’re never going to make it back. It’s a reminder of it. Even worse, if people know about it, they seem incapable of treating you as a normal person, but with a kind of patronising over-care that I find intensely annoying.

It’s perhaps one of the practical things I’d say to any anorexic. If you survive, you’ll look back and regret not just the time you wasted starving yourself, but the fact that every relationship involves explaining that while they make a joke out of certain things, for you they are the impact of damage you did while you could think of nothing but your own self-harm. And that trying to be treated and being a normal person living a normal life is a minefield.