Being thin is the telltale sign of anorexia.
Thinness and anorexia. The words have almost become almost synonymous now. Interchangeable descriptors.
I can see where they’re coming from. Starvation is a pretty visual effect. It demands the most attention. It’s a bit of a giveaway.
Being thin was at the heart of my eating disorder and completely irrelevant to it. It was, simultaneously, a desired consequence and an unintended outcome.
Confused?
It’s taken me a while to get a handle on the complexity of my relationship with being thin; but I’ll try and explain, I’ll try and make sense of the paradox.
I’m not sure how important being thin was when it all started.
I know that I felt bigger than other people. I know that, with the naivety of a child, I associated the fat in food with becoming a fat person. But, I’m not sure that I had any real idea of what ‘thin’ was; that I had made the link – however obvious to the initiated mind – between food and weight and size. I don’t know that I consciously aspired to thinness; it was more about feeling a little bigger – and not necessarily in the size sense – than my peers; a little greedier and a little less girl-like and a little less in control of myself.
And that was as far as it went.
No obsessing about models (Beryl the Peril was no Kate Moss).
No frantic and obsessive scale antics (at that point).
No real idea of where I was heading.
When the weight started dropping off – which it inevitably did as I cut out food group by food group – it’s not the being thin that sticks in my memory; it’s the feeling of being thin. It’s the hunger and the emptiness and a perverse sense of power and a strange punishing satisfaction. It’s the lying in bed at night feeling the physicality of hunger. It’s the intensity of the focus. An acute sharpening of the senses. A constant exercise in self control and deprivation and reward.
The first time that someone mentioned my thinness, I was intensely embarrassed. I was utterly ashamed. With the stomach twisting fear of a 12 year old knowing that they have done something wrong, I cried for two hours and dreaded going home.
It kind of puts a spanner in the whole theory that anorexia is just about attention seeking or solely based around aspirations of thinness.
There’s an element of truth but it’s certainly not the whole story. It’s certainly not that simple.
For me, the first phase was all about the food, it was all about learning self control, all about trying to discipline myself. Getting thin was the unforeseen – albeit inevitable – consequence. It was a strange outcome that gradually moved to centre stage. It was a top priority only after the eating disorder had already sunk its claws in.
Tags: Anorexia Nervosa, Body Image
