Scared feelings

It has come to the scale is now the final analysis of everything about me. It's like recovery seems possible but I can not imagine how I can be ok without my eating disorder.

Frustration and Understanding

I'm having a real hard time dealing with the acceptance of lack of help for patients diagnosed with eating disorders.

This past week I was hospitalized for reasons unrelated to anorexia although it was well known to the medical profession at the hospital that I had an anorexia diagnosis. I was put onto the surgical floor and re-hydrated. They eventually became unclear as to the etiology of the pain relating to my VP Shunt. I was put on a "Calorie Count" due to my eating disorder. Now as if hospital food wasn't bad enough, to have somebody keeping track of every morsel you do or don't eat. I think I had maybe 500 calories the whole hospital stay. The food was horrible but the menu looked like a five star dinning menu.

The whole hospital experience was less than desirable. Being a teaching institute the "rounds" included 16 students, an attending physician, resident and anybody else who was "curious". They spend 30 minutes or more talking to eachother right over the top of you, while ignoring anything that comes out of your mouth. They all thank you and leave. As a patient you never really know what's happening or where they stand with "teaching" or diagnosing.

Now I acknowledge that I have an eating disorder, have accepted responsibility, have agreed to go to inpatient treatment and am fully aware of the consequences my actions on my health. However, the insurance company has decided to not approve inpatient treatment. There isn't much help out there available for eating disordered patients, hence, the 20% mortality rate of anorexia.

Guess I'm frustrated but understanding why so many people with eating disorders don't get help.

It’s about: Anorexia: “loss of appetite” What Anorexia has done to me:

It’s never about a loss of appetite but rather a loss of control and obsession over food

Being a slave to the scale, never being “good enough” the numbers never being low enough

Food consuming 99 percent of your thoughts

It becomes who you are, what you’re about and what you think about

It’s showing up to Thanksgiving with your can of 90 calorie Progresso soup, and soup bowl because you can’t eat, anything more, or anything that can’t fit into that bowl

It’s not being able to enjoy Christmas dinner with a family full of people you’ve hardly seen since last Christmas but having to work all day to cook it.

It’s anxiety before going grocery shopping

It’s about checking and re-checking every nutrition label before it’s “approved” for placement in your shopping cart

It’s about knowing how many calories are in something before how much it actually costs.

It’s about weighing meat, measuring liquids, counting items. A LOT of computing.

It’s about not being able to eat anything that isn’t packaged sealed with a nutrition label

It’s about obsessing over exercise, calories and numbers

On the treadmill, off the treadmill, on the scale, back on the treadmill

Finding accomplishment in something you can be good at, even if it is your own demise.

It destroys the image in the mirror. Being able to see one thing while thinking another

Fatigue from lack of sleep

It’s about spending time in the shower with the music loud while purging with a toothbrush

It’s about having a list of “good” foods or “bad” foods, or 100 reasons why you can’t eat that night

It’s sneaking to hide empty packages of diuretic pills, laxatives and other “forbidden” items.

It becomes an obsession, an addiction, a learned lifestyle

Headaches from dehydration

Muscle aches from starvation

It makes a good person turn bad.

Eventually, it’s a loss of control

In a sense, it is selfish; it has robbed my husband of a wife and my children of a mother.

But most of all Anorexia is such a deep seeded destructive persuit to be thin