It doesn’t take a genius or the horrors of Belsen to illustrate the connection between anorexia and food fixation –

There’s nothing like a touch of starvation to really focus the mind.

Anorexia gets you hooked on an emotional level – but it’s the physical reaction that will really screw with your head.

A fixation with food is the first symptom. Like the blue elephant that only appears when you don’t want to think about it, food moves from peripheral to centre. It becomes the first – and last – thing that crosses your mind each day.

And so, to feed the fixation – without actually giving it any food – you get caught up in the paraphernalia of eating. You satisfy the hunger through magazines of recipes that will never be cooked, and trips to the supermarket that will never result in a purchase, or mental meals that are so vivid you can almost taste the illusion –

It’s hard to keep a grip on reality when you’re body is slowly eating itself. It’s impossible to focus on anything – other than the hunger – and things start getting a little warped….

Food becomes far more complicated when you’re focussing in on it 24 7. Anything that is limited suddenly rises in value; and, the constant pre-occupation feeds straight into the anorexia’s message about greed – even though you’re now in a state of starvation.

As the hunger grows, the headspace for other things – like people and places – shrinks, and you find yourself inhabiting a world where thinking about anything else is done half heartedly, and as a distraction.

Living is far more difficult when you’re struggling to stay alive. When each moment is precariously balance between life – and death – you’re fighting all the time. The hunger is, inevitably, accompanied by the tiredness and the cold and a state of being where everything is an effort and everything feels just that little bit too hard –

Until you make the connection between food and life.

Until you realise that controlling food is not solving a problem – it’s just making everything way more difficult….

For a long time, life seemed tough enough without adding a battle with anorexia into the equation. There were, it appeared, few pleasures, aside from my daily binges and a sense that I could, at least, gain a little order through deciding what I put in my mouth. Going out was cold and tiring and stressful; social occasions were angst ridden and filled with food complications; work was exhausting; chores, draining –

For years, I mistook this for laziness in the same way I interpreted the fixation with food as greed.

This is the great eating disorder deception.

It’s not life itself that’s un-enjoyable: it’s the state you’re in when you’re participating in life that dictates the experience.

When you stop starving, food is taken out of the equation – and you can make an informed decision about whether life is – or isn’t – worth fighting for.

Tags: Anorexia Nervosa, Food, living with it

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 8:50 am and is filed under Anorexia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.