I was sitting in my office at work on what felt like an ordinary Tuesday after a bank holiday weekend.
On this particular day I had the space all to myself, not realising at the time how lucky I was to have that. It was about 4pm when I started to feel incredibly lethargic. My energy was shot, and my body was shivering. Despite the shivers, which one would often associate with simply being cold, my body started burning up, and I felt sharp pains through my chest.
My stomach was so bloated, it felt like it was about to rip open. I sat there with it, trying to distract myself with just about anything. It didn’t work, and on this day, the carpet outside my office was being cleaned, blocking my usual toilet. I knew I was about to be sick, and it got more and more intense until I knew I wouldn’t make it up the three flights of stairs to the nearest toilet.
In the moment, I grabbed my empty coffee cup and filled it up. Still, afterwards, it didn’t feel quite done, but eventually it was time to pack up and go. I boarded my bus, which would take 1½ hours, terrified I would get sick on the bus – or, worse, have an accident the other way.
READ MORE
For the entire journey I sat there with my jacket over me, shivering and burning up as the cool air from the fan came down, and felt constant sharp pains and warmth burning through my body. When I finally got home, I decided to go for an hour nap with the hope I might feel better afterwards. I slept, but the sleep was quite interrupted by my changing body temperature. It felt like my body was going to shut down; I couldn’t even drum up the energy to swat away the pesky fly that kept flying back and forth above my head, trying to land on me.
In that moment I continued to lie there, clutching the side of the bed, afraid to even take a sip of water in case it set me off down the path of getting sick or worse. As I felt the pain shooting through my chest and back and the intensity of my stomach feeling like it was about to rip open, my eyes filled with tears, and I found myself feeling so incredibly hopeless about my eating disorder recovery.
I knew the reason this had happened was due to eating too much food, forgetting how important it is to work on slowly increasing amounts when you’re in recovery.
I had set my body into shock, and my line of thinking in the moment immediately went to: Will I ever be able to get over this, or get to a point where I can do the thing that everyone else can with so little consideration? As I lay there, the thoughts pooled in, good and bad. I felt so hopeless and frustrated. Hopelessness because there were truly good intentions behind what I did, and frustration because I was remembering first hand exactly why the “just eat” advice is no good.
[ ‘My time with anorexia was the darkest years of my life’Opens in new window ]
My eating disorder primarily plagued my life in my early to late teenage years. I started my recovery around the age of 16, and from then until I was just about to turn 28, it was lying dormant. I use this language because, in my own experience, an eating disorder never truly leaves. It’s always there, waiting to be triggered by something again. In one of my recent columns, I wrote about why my eating disorder was triggered and returned, but essentially, the relapse came about in the lead-up to me making a big life change that involved putting myself first.
This is something I never do, so naturally, it felt alien.
My eating disorder was never predominantly body-focused. I do deal with a lot of body dysmorphia, as so many do now with everything on social media and the body standards out there for both genders, but it was always 80 per cent about controlling emotions. I struggle massively with dealing with emotional discomfort and getting vulnerable. My eating disorder always served as a way to numb myself out, to achieve a euphoria so I could continue to put on the “I’m fine” mask to the world.
This is the exact same reason I struggled with self-harm when I was a teenager. There are a lot of correlations between self-harm and eating disorders like anorexia. However, I realised that where self-harm left behind evidence, my eating disorder didn’t. It was a lot more of an invisible method. You might be thinking that sounds strange because your image of an eating disorder on the “skinny” side of things has always been a malnourished girl, but if you do some research, you’ll come to find that less than 6 per cent of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as underweight.
This statistic is reported by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, the Alliance for Eating Disorders, the Eating Recovery Center, research projects, and more. I was one of the many people who didn’t fall into this “less than 6 per cent” figure. I was always thin, and while I did lose weight, I still maintained a “healthy” BMI; it was just on the low side. I was never hospitalised for my eating disorder, but I ensured my body was as malnourished as it could get in my toughest days. I will admit, even I had some prejudice here.
I remember recently in therapy, when I was still not quite making a lot of progress with eating, my therapist was pushing me as to why this was. I said to her: “Because I don’t think I’m that bad, my friends all tell me I look great and my body is fantastic. I don’t feel I’ve lost that much weight, so while I’m barely eating, it makes me think it’s working for me, and if I start now, I won’t be able to maintain this.”
It’s this exact misunderstanding that makes people think they don’t have a problem and encourages them to keep doing what they are doing.
It’s terrifying to be this out of control, and if it was just about the food or vanity, the healthcare industry would be saving a lot of money
— Bronagh Loughlin
The thing is, even if I had lost a lot more weight, people might still have been saying to me I look great. I’ve been quite open with the people in my life that I’m struggling with an eating disorder again. I’m very grateful to have a supportive circle of people, and they do try their best to understand and support me, despite having very little understanding of eating disorders. I do remember back when I was a teenager, though, speaking with adults or young people who expressed concern about my weight or the fact that I wasn’t eating, telling me to “Just eat” when I mentioned I was struggling with my eating disorder.
It’s not been something that has cropped up in recent times during my recovery because I do have such a supportive circle nowadays, but it was something that came back to me as I was lying on the bed, feeling like my body was going into shut down. I was dealing with a lighter case of refeeding syndrome, as I later discovered after speaking with a professional. For those unfamiliar, this occurs when someone who has been malnourished for some time begins feeding again. It happens when food is introduced too quickly and can cause severe sickness.
It’s exactly why “just eat” should never be thrown at anyone dealing with an eating disorder that involves restriction.
I found my frustration and anger growing as I lay there and thought about this and how that misguided advice would usually be followed by “You’re skinny enough; you don’t need to be this vain”, as though my eating disorder was just a matter of glamour. As I felt goosebumps across my entire body and the tears well up in my eyes, I thought: I’m not looking so glamorous right now. I’m going through such a hard time in my life that a lot of people couldn’t begin to fathom what it’s like.
What’s more, it is such an invisible mental health disorder, and I’m such an expert masker that I am truly isolated as I go through this, with no one really knowing I’m struggling unless I actually tell them.
Throughout my second recovery wave, I’ve had limited control over my body. I was reintroducing food into my body, but felt I could faint at any moment. I was bloating over eating something as minuscule as a Nutri-Grain bar. I felt serious fatigue from having an apple, feared I might throw up because I felt bloated after a bowl of cereal, or that I was going to have an accident the other way out in a public place. This is a very complex mental health disorder; anyone dealing with this would agree that we wouldn’t wish it on our worst enemy. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through, because it is always there.
It’s had a grip on my life since I was 13, occupied so much space in my mind, and overtaken my ability to be carefree. I’ve come out the other side of many other tough things, and my ability to slip back here so easily should serve as a testament to how hard this truly is. Eating disorder recovery feels like a full-time job most of the time.
I have to constantly remind myself to eat and plan out food. Sometimes, it feels like all I’m doing is eating, and I’m dealing with the changes happening within my body. I’m dealing with the potential of something I’m not prepared for happening.
It’s terrifying to be this out of control, and if it was just about the food or vanity, the healthcare industry would be saving a lot of money.
If you or someone you know is struggling with body image or disordered eating, support is available through Bodywhys Ireland (www.bodywhys.ie) or your GP
