Sub-Clinical Disorders, Control, and How the Hell We Move On From Here
by Elizabeth Majors
Today, as I stepped into the shower, I looked at myself in the mirror as I always do. I turn from side to side, the inspectors within my head ready to fire their lethal bullets. But today they don’t have their guns. I took their ammunition away months ago. Instead I see, or rather do not see, something for the first time in those months. My ribs are hidden beneath my skin, and I cannot make out the shape of each individual bone as I was once able to.
The first emotion I feel is shame. It is instant as the inspectors scream in my head. The condemnation in their voices is the only weapon they have left to hurt me. I push the feeling down. I should be proud of myself for being close to healthy for the first time in years. But I’m not. I feel disgusted with myself for not being able to make out my own skeleton. It has been my identifying factor since I became aware of my weight, the praise of “Oh you’re so skinny!” riding along with the shouts of “whore”, “fatty”, and “gross” within my brain. Little do they know their comments are reinforcement for my behavior.
I might be recovered but I still struggle to evict the firing squad that has taken residence in my conscious since I was young. Sometimes the target is my grades, sometimes my looks, but almost always my weight. Others are able to believe in a full return to normalcy, but I know better to hold that illusion for myself. This is something I will fight my entire life, and I will probably die trying to.
The thing is, no one can ever see that fight. My mother is naturally skinny and close to my height. I have a small frame as well, so no one makes the conclusion (to my face) that I have an eating disorder. That being said I can still feel all the eyes in the room on me whenever one of my classes discusses ED. No one can be that height and that weight withoutsomething, they reason. But I’ve seen her eat before! And she never goes to the gym! So it must be nothing after all, right?
Wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong. I avoid the gym because working out is my trigger (why do they think it is a good idea to put calorie-counters in every machine?) and I eat because I adore the taste of food. I am obsessed with the aroma of it, the presentation. I even work in a restaurant. Everything is a practice in self-deprivation and control. I deny myself and simultaneously tantalize myself with it on a daily basis. It is though I think I can sustain myself on fumes and vicarious consumption.
It is the assumption that because all of the symptoms are not there that the disease is not present. This is how people like me fall through the cracks. We can dodge and avoid the questions, insist that we do not have a problem because, well “I never do that!” We avoid hospitalization, treatment, medication, therapy, and anything else that might help us because we have pieces of a defense. What we do is classified as a “sub-clinical” eating disorder, and it can be just as deadly. A slow siege can be just as dangerous as a direct attack if it goes on for long enough.
People know about anorexia and bulimia, but few know about the regions in-between or below. A sub-clinical eating disorder can morph into one of these if the correct stressors are present, but in some cases in can continue as it is for years. We exist, we have a disease, and we deserve the same consideration as anyone else with the more recognizable EDs.
No one thought to ask me what I was doing when I nibbled at food at dinner, or how come I always ate alone or at home. I got more backlash when I became a vegetarian and when I stopped drinking milk than when I only ate one meal a day, if I had a meal at all. If you think something is wrong, you need to ask. Insist. Watch how they react when they are around food. They’ll thank you for it later. Even if you aren’t able to tell, they might be killing themselves. When I was at my lowest point I had destroyed my pelvic floor muscles and severally damaged the rest of my digestive system.
I refuse to let this go unnoticed in other people. I will advocate for the recognition of these struggles, advocate for preventing this pain, and advocate the validation of these voices until no one has to silently wither away because they don’t quite fit the bill.
The first emotion I feel is shame. It is instant as the inspectors scream in my head. The condemnation in their voices is the only weapon they have left to hurt me. I push the feeling down. I should be proud of myself for being close to healthy for the first time in years. But I’m not. I feel disgusted with myself for not being able to make out my own skeleton. It has been my identifying factor since I became aware of my weight, the praise of “Oh you’re so skinny!” riding along with the shouts of “whore”, “fatty”, and “gross” within my brain. Little do they know their comments are reinforcement for my behavior.
I might be recovered but I still struggle to evict the firing squad that has taken residence in my conscious since I was young. Sometimes the target is my grades, sometimes my looks, but almost always my weight. Others are able to believe in a full return to normalcy, but I know better to hold that illusion for myself. This is something I will fight my entire life, and I will probably die trying to.
The thing is, no one can ever see that fight. My mother is naturally skinny and close to my height. I have a small frame as well, so no one makes the conclusion (to my face) that I have an eating disorder. That being said I can still feel all the eyes in the room on me whenever one of my classes discusses ED. No one can be that height and that weight withoutsomething, they reason. But I’ve seen her eat before! And she never goes to the gym! So it must be nothing after all, right?
Wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong. I avoid the gym because working out is my trigger (why do they think it is a good idea to put calorie-counters in every machine?) and I eat because I adore the taste of food. I am obsessed with the aroma of it, the presentation. I even work in a restaurant. Everything is a practice in self-deprivation and control. I deny myself and simultaneously tantalize myself with it on a daily basis. It is though I think I can sustain myself on fumes and vicarious consumption.
It is the assumption that because all of the symptoms are not there that the disease is not present. This is how people like me fall through the cracks. We can dodge and avoid the questions, insist that we do not have a problem because, well “I never do that!” We avoid hospitalization, treatment, medication, therapy, and anything else that might help us because we have pieces of a defense. What we do is classified as a “sub-clinical” eating disorder, and it can be just as deadly. A slow siege can be just as dangerous as a direct attack if it goes on for long enough.
People know about anorexia and bulimia, but few know about the regions in-between or below. A sub-clinical eating disorder can morph into one of these if the correct stressors are present, but in some cases in can continue as it is for years. We exist, we have a disease, and we deserve the same consideration as anyone else with the more recognizable EDs.
No one thought to ask me what I was doing when I nibbled at food at dinner, or how come I always ate alone or at home. I got more backlash when I became a vegetarian and when I stopped drinking milk than when I only ate one meal a day, if I had a meal at all. If you think something is wrong, you need to ask. Insist. Watch how they react when they are around food. They’ll thank you for it later. Even if you aren’t able to tell, they might be killing themselves. When I was at my lowest point I had destroyed my pelvic floor muscles and severally damaged the rest of my digestive system.
I refuse to let this go unnoticed in other people. I will advocate for the recognition of these struggles, advocate for preventing this pain, and advocate the validation of these voices until no one has to silently wither away because they don’t quite fit the bill.
Part 2
When you think of what causes eating disorders, what comes to mind? Do statistics flash behind your eyelids, the ones you have heard repeated countless times and told others just as many? Our minds rush to body image, to self-esteem, to all those people that make others feel like they aren’t pretty enough even if they don’t mean to. Of course there are the countless videos showing the fakeness of Photoshop, the dishonesty that comes with the professional camera lenses. We think of skin-thin models, girls with alien proportions that represent a small (and largely white, cisgendered and straight) part of the population.
When I was younger I remember being inundated with images like these. There were the half-naked women in body wash commercials, the ripple-abed men on Abercrombie advertisements, and the smiling “teenagers” in sitcom dramas that were played by actors four or five years older than their characters. None of these things were helpful when it came to dealing with my self-esteem. I was a late bloomer, the shortest in my class, and cursed with a lack of curves. I hated my body and wondered desperately when I would look like everyone else.
But this is not the whole story. Pictures alone do not drive most people into eating disorders. There is something deep and psychological we are discounting because it is an unpleasant truth about human nature. It is easy to make a bad guy out something with a face, but it is so much harder to blame something that is both a part of us and our culture.
We need control.
When we are dissatisfied with the way that we look compared to others, there is very little we can do about it. Plastic surgery can only do so much and our genes control most of our features. By controlling our intake of food we can find a way to control the way that we look, offering a way to get the desired outcome. When one starts down this path it is seldom realized that the desired outcome is actually a moving target, going about eighty miles an hour, on a completely different planet. It is unattainable.
The expression of control through restricted food intake can become a coping mechanism for more than just our dissatisfaction with our bodies. This is why triggers for eating disorders can be so varied. A loss in the family, a sudden death, an unwanted family move, and so many other things can compound the issue. Those with eating disorders are often perfectionists as well and they have trouble dealing with anything that cannot be how they desire it to be. An eating disorder is not only a way for a perfectionist to get what they want from their body, but also a way to deal with forces that impact them in unwanted ways that are outside of their domain. It might not always start out as a coping mechanism, but as the disorder begins to consume the majority of our lives it can become one.
I remember feeling as though food was the one thing I had power over in my life, and I clung to it desperately. I could not control that my family was moving, so I starved myself. I could not control my significant other breaking up with me, so I denied myself despite my hunger. I could not control my stress at work, so I skipped another meal. I could not save my dog from dying, so I held a foodless vigil in her memory. I did none of this consciously, but it was how I reacted to events.
Full control is the real desired outcome of an eating disorder. Like a perfect body, this is unattainable. There are usually two possible things that happen when it becomes apparent that the domination over our needs isn’t working. The first is that the grip on our lives becomes tighter and tighter. We search for more things that we can do to get what we want. Our diet and regime becomes stricter and stricter until we are either dead or a shallow form of our former selves, still unsatisfied. The second is that the control completely unravels.
This is one the reasons why anorexia sometimes morphs into bulimia or binge eating. Our perfectly orchestrated relationship with hunger breaks down. We can no longer tolerate being bombarded with the scent and the taste of food day after day, and we give in. The one thing we were supposedly able to control disintegrates into chaos, and we clamor for a way to get it back. We are flooded with more feelings of guilt and shame. We hate ourselves not just because we feel fat or ugly, but because we were so pathetic that we couldn’t even have the discipline to keep ourselves away from food.
I challenge you to think about this issue complexly. It is more than just how we think about ourselves, about all the doctored images and unrealistic expectations. It is also about how we as a species want to have power over things we simply cannot. What else is there can feed an eating disorder? And, more importantly, how the hell can we deal with the fact that not everything is for us to control?
If you’re in the mood for some non-fiction reading about the relationship between food , control and EDs, I would highly recommend the book “Hunger” by Jackie Morse Kessler. It is a powerful and positive book about overcoming and balancing our wants and reconciling our need for power.
When I was younger I remember being inundated with images like these. There were the half-naked women in body wash commercials, the ripple-abed men on Abercrombie advertisements, and the smiling “teenagers” in sitcom dramas that were played by actors four or five years older than their characters. None of these things were helpful when it came to dealing with my self-esteem. I was a late bloomer, the shortest in my class, and cursed with a lack of curves. I hated my body and wondered desperately when I would look like everyone else.
But this is not the whole story. Pictures alone do not drive most people into eating disorders. There is something deep and psychological we are discounting because it is an unpleasant truth about human nature. It is easy to make a bad guy out something with a face, but it is so much harder to blame something that is both a part of us and our culture.
We need control.
When we are dissatisfied with the way that we look compared to others, there is very little we can do about it. Plastic surgery can only do so much and our genes control most of our features. By controlling our intake of food we can find a way to control the way that we look, offering a way to get the desired outcome. When one starts down this path it is seldom realized that the desired outcome is actually a moving target, going about eighty miles an hour, on a completely different planet. It is unattainable.
The expression of control through restricted food intake can become a coping mechanism for more than just our dissatisfaction with our bodies. This is why triggers for eating disorders can be so varied. A loss in the family, a sudden death, an unwanted family move, and so many other things can compound the issue. Those with eating disorders are often perfectionists as well and they have trouble dealing with anything that cannot be how they desire it to be. An eating disorder is not only a way for a perfectionist to get what they want from their body, but also a way to deal with forces that impact them in unwanted ways that are outside of their domain. It might not always start out as a coping mechanism, but as the disorder begins to consume the majority of our lives it can become one.
I remember feeling as though food was the one thing I had power over in my life, and I clung to it desperately. I could not control that my family was moving, so I starved myself. I could not control my significant other breaking up with me, so I denied myself despite my hunger. I could not control my stress at work, so I skipped another meal. I could not save my dog from dying, so I held a foodless vigil in her memory. I did none of this consciously, but it was how I reacted to events.
Full control is the real desired outcome of an eating disorder. Like a perfect body, this is unattainable. There are usually two possible things that happen when it becomes apparent that the domination over our needs isn’t working. The first is that the grip on our lives becomes tighter and tighter. We search for more things that we can do to get what we want. Our diet and regime becomes stricter and stricter until we are either dead or a shallow form of our former selves, still unsatisfied. The second is that the control completely unravels.
This is one the reasons why anorexia sometimes morphs into bulimia or binge eating. Our perfectly orchestrated relationship with hunger breaks down. We can no longer tolerate being bombarded with the scent and the taste of food day after day, and we give in. The one thing we were supposedly able to control disintegrates into chaos, and we clamor for a way to get it back. We are flooded with more feelings of guilt and shame. We hate ourselves not just because we feel fat or ugly, but because we were so pathetic that we couldn’t even have the discipline to keep ourselves away from food.
I challenge you to think about this issue complexly. It is more than just how we think about ourselves, about all the doctored images and unrealistic expectations. It is also about how we as a species want to have power over things we simply cannot. What else is there can feed an eating disorder? And, more importantly, how the hell can we deal with the fact that not everything is for us to control?
If you’re in the mood for some non-fiction reading about the relationship between food , control and EDs, I would highly recommend the book “Hunger” by Jackie Morse Kessler. It is a powerful and positive book about overcoming and balancing our wants and reconciling our need for power.
Part 3
As I have previously suggested, the need for control and eating disorders are linked. I do not mean to suggest that all people that suffer from EDs are control freaks. That label is a bit harsh. If anything, they are simply over conforming to our society’s demands. From the time we are young we are taught how to manipulate the world around us. We are taught not only how to control our interactions with others but with our own bodies as well. We place taboos on normal body functions and learn how to hide them. We are expected to shave, pluck, and cover up all of our “imperfections”. We are expected to be our very best, do our very best, all the time. Nearly everything we do in order to fit into our cultural norms is a form of exerting our power over something else. Our obsession with perfection is killing us.
It simply cannot be done. We have a desire to fix anything that we see as out of place, whether that be a fuzzy pair of eyebrows or legs that lack a thigh gap. But to be honest, neither of these things is really a problem. We don’t have to chase after an unreachable idea, and this is where the healing can begin.
What I am suggesting does not go for just disordered eating. It goes for test anxiety, it goes for social anxiety, it goes for anything that has ever made you worry about how you look, how you perform, or how you interact compared to others. It is okay not to be in control all the time. It is okay to let your body be how it is. It is okay not to be the same as everyone else.
We need to relax the vice grip we have on our self-expectations. People are people and they come up short sometimes. You don’t need to be the best at everything to validate yourself. Not everything needs to be in your power and sometimes it simply cannot be. Some of us will be naturally skinny, and that’s fine, but if you aren’t you don’t need to starve yourself into a temporary shape. During an exam there is no way to change the outcome once you already there. Do not stress about it. If you do not do as well as you would have liked, study what you need to for next time and try not to repeat your mistakes (you probably will repeat a few, but that’s just life). If you don’t fit in with your group of friends or are too shy to make any, that’s okay too. People will see through you if you try to suppress your natural personality and become someone else. No one likes a fake. Even if it is just a handful of folks, there always at least a few people who will admire your true self. They might be a little reserved too, so a little searching could be in order. If things don’t always go your way know that there was probably nothing you could do about it. Do not obsess over what can’t be changed.
Do not regulate your hunger. Own up to it. Listen to what your body is telling you. If you truly want that cookie, then eat it. If you feel so full you could get sick, don’t eat any more. If you want to be a vegetarian, that’s cool. If you want to go back to eating meat, go right ahead! Your mind is not a weapon to fight against the needs of your body, it is its partner. Learn to recognize the pangs of hunger and the sensation of fullness. What you want is not bad or wrong and there is nothing the matter with letting your stomach do the thinking when it comes to food. Your stomach was designed for consumption, but your brain was not.
Do not disavow your own body. The body is the one permanent home you always have, and if you give into the temptation to hate it you will be miserable. There is no way to force yourself into being taller, no way to change your bone structure, and no way to really change how you look. Observe what you see as flaws and accept the fact there is nothing outside of drastic surgery to change anything in the long-run. As the saying goes, you are beautiful just the way you are.
The hardest thing to do will be to convince everyone else of this. You don’t need to get straight A’s, be a size 0, or play a varsity sport to be a good person. I can think of a few people that have at least one of these traits going for them who aren’t very nice at all. Let yourself be, naturally. Or you know, not naturally (getting tattoos, wearing makeup, dying your hair, wearing piercings are dandy too if that’s what you wish). If we could all just accept the fact that we are not the supreme leaders of the universe, and that we can’t always get what we want out of life, then everyone would be a lot better off. The waves will keep rolling on the shore even if we try and stop them.
It simply cannot be done. We have a desire to fix anything that we see as out of place, whether that be a fuzzy pair of eyebrows or legs that lack a thigh gap. But to be honest, neither of these things is really a problem. We don’t have to chase after an unreachable idea, and this is where the healing can begin.
What I am suggesting does not go for just disordered eating. It goes for test anxiety, it goes for social anxiety, it goes for anything that has ever made you worry about how you look, how you perform, or how you interact compared to others. It is okay not to be in control all the time. It is okay to let your body be how it is. It is okay not to be the same as everyone else.
We need to relax the vice grip we have on our self-expectations. People are people and they come up short sometimes. You don’t need to be the best at everything to validate yourself. Not everything needs to be in your power and sometimes it simply cannot be. Some of us will be naturally skinny, and that’s fine, but if you aren’t you don’t need to starve yourself into a temporary shape. During an exam there is no way to change the outcome once you already there. Do not stress about it. If you do not do as well as you would have liked, study what you need to for next time and try not to repeat your mistakes (you probably will repeat a few, but that’s just life). If you don’t fit in with your group of friends or are too shy to make any, that’s okay too. People will see through you if you try to suppress your natural personality and become someone else. No one likes a fake. Even if it is just a handful of folks, there always at least a few people who will admire your true self. They might be a little reserved too, so a little searching could be in order. If things don’t always go your way know that there was probably nothing you could do about it. Do not obsess over what can’t be changed.
Do not regulate your hunger. Own up to it. Listen to what your body is telling you. If you truly want that cookie, then eat it. If you feel so full you could get sick, don’t eat any more. If you want to be a vegetarian, that’s cool. If you want to go back to eating meat, go right ahead! Your mind is not a weapon to fight against the needs of your body, it is its partner. Learn to recognize the pangs of hunger and the sensation of fullness. What you want is not bad or wrong and there is nothing the matter with letting your stomach do the thinking when it comes to food. Your stomach was designed for consumption, but your brain was not.
Do not disavow your own body. The body is the one permanent home you always have, and if you give into the temptation to hate it you will be miserable. There is no way to force yourself into being taller, no way to change your bone structure, and no way to really change how you look. Observe what you see as flaws and accept the fact there is nothing outside of drastic surgery to change anything in the long-run. As the saying goes, you are beautiful just the way you are.
The hardest thing to do will be to convince everyone else of this. You don’t need to get straight A’s, be a size 0, or play a varsity sport to be a good person. I can think of a few people that have at least one of these traits going for them who aren’t very nice at all. Let yourself be, naturally. Or you know, not naturally (getting tattoos, wearing makeup, dying your hair, wearing piercings are dandy too if that’s what you wish). If we could all just accept the fact that we are not the supreme leaders of the universe, and that we can’t always get what we want out of life, then everyone would be a lot better off. The waves will keep rolling on the shore even if we try and stop them.