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Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing

Yoga Mat Battlefield

May 17, 2022
yoga

I used to love pouring Elmer’s glue on the palms of my hands to the very edges of my fingertips. I’d let the goo ooze over the skin of my hands, sliding into the lines and crevices as I sat patiently waiting for it to harden. The glue slowly transformed from opaque to clear, from the outer edges inward. I waited, feeling the damp turn crisp before it was time to peel. I had to learn the hard way a few times to make sure the glue was completely dry for ultimate removal satisfaction.

It’s funny how I’d find this sense of gratification from adding a layer and instantly removing it. It was like removing a part of myself. My one-of-a-kind fingerprints, the divots and crannies that belonged only to me. If only another layer below could be removed. My real skin. Maybe layer after layer I could peel it off, again and again, all the way to the bone, and soon there would be a fragment of me left.

There’s something so indulgent, so satisfying about the removal of sorts. You know. Taking off your bra at the end of the day. Wet socks. Letting your hair down. Breaking up with a toxic boyfriend. A stubborn coffee stain on white t-shirt. A scab. Sand from the bottom of your shoes. The deep, earnest, withdrawing exhale after breathing in deep. They say that we inhale the deepest when we are nervous or on edge because we are inherently predisposed to be ready to run. Like the running and exhaling become symbiotic with one another. Is removing and exhaling the same as running away? If you would have told me that the exhale directly correlated to losing weight or to shedding another layer, I’d forget how important the inhale was too. I was constantly ready to run. I was constantly wanting to shed.

So maybe that’s why I loved peeling back the artificial layers of glue. That this child’s play was really just a subconscious desire to not be in this body of mine. That I hated how it was my representative, my identity– a tiny cloak of impression that tucked behind the layers beneath. Why can’t we just be glimmering stardust, a fraction of matter floating about a vast, open space? Just little dots floating, all the same. Instead, I had this meat suit. Instead, I had this body. One that I didn’t want to live in.

When I decided that I might have to actually accept the fact that I should possibly start to enjoy this body I inhabit, my therapist pushed me back to my yoga mat. “This is the next step of recovery”, she said. To get into my body, and not be my body. Yoga was a tough subject. It was a practice I had used to elongate myself, yet another tool to modify the body I had been given. Actually practicing in the way the practice was intended to be practiced did not concern me. Mindfullness, being in the body, even peace, was not what I cared about. I just wanted to morph into a gazelle-like creature with long legs and a slender torso.

This time, I wanted to get better. I’d try to re-frame, give this whole “just being” thing a try. So I went back to my yoga mat, 15 pounds heavier than the last time. I parked myself straight into the corner of the room slightly away from the ability to catch glimpses of myself in the reflection of the mirror. I felt proud and safe in my internal, non-reflection cocoon—and then I looked up. I saw bodies with abs and minimal belly fat, skintight Lululemons and thin faces with sunken eyes. I saw my former self in them.

I still wanted to be them.

Not this 15-pounds-heavier recovery body. And so began the reunification of the internal battlefield of me and the yoga mat. Me vs. the necessary 15 pounds. Me vs. the new, growing cellulite. Me vs. a self that was no longer consumed by hunger. Me vs. a body that I never thought I’d be able to live in.

While sweat started to seep out of every crevasse of my body, I wanted to remove that extra layer yet again. I stood there in Warrior Two with my front leg bent, hips square, back leg straight and arms in a horizontal line extending from my shoulders– and imagined myself peeling of this extra layer like I was Elmer’s glue. The extra layer I had not embraced, hated even. I made plans and yet another contract to get back to overexercising, dieting, restriction, no carbs or sugar or even joy. I could not handle the layer.

I went back to my therapist and told her about my plans to relapse, venting about my experience on the Yoga Mat Battlefield, and she said something that I still reach for when I’m struggling in my body.

“Who’s voice is that, on this what do you call it? Battlefield? You, or your eating disorder?”

I still witness others in their own version of the yoga mat battlefield. I see them suck in their bellies—not because the posture asked them to but because it’s a more tolerable view. I wonder how hungry they are. Still, I let my belly go. I hold the pose.

I will not let the yoga mat win, which is really just the eating disorder. It’s my voice that wins. The real and true one. The one that holds the pose and could care less about the reflection in the mirror.

The resistance I choose to create starts with me on my yoga mat, with Elmer’s glue dried on my palms. This time I won’t peel it off.

Amanda Blackwell is former professional figure skater who is now just an ordinary but not-so-ordinary 30-something ditching the status quo, and living in Hawaii away from the corporate hustle and rat race. A recovered Eating Disorder survivor, passionate about Mental Health and wellness, Amanda likes to write about trauma and pain and finding meaning within it all. When she’s not over-analyzing life or writing about it, she’s surfing, drinking coffee, cooking and enjoying a mellow existence.

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Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Eating/Food

My Food Obsession

October 18, 2020
food

By Sarah Losner

On a Saturday morning the local Whole Foods is stocked with shipments of fresh produce. A myriad of canned and boxed foods line the shelves. Delightful smelling breads from the bakery section, and the aromas Indian cuisine from the open buffet make their way to the noses of shoppers, ready to stock their panties and refrigerators. The store is bursting with color and life.

Without a shopping cart or basket, I scan the aisles meticulously. I’m not looking for anything in particular, rather, you could say that I’m looking at everything. I run my hand on the outside of an avocado, feeling the grooves along the peel with my fingertips. I put a lime beneath my nose, smelling the rind and imagining what scents the insides will yield. A bag of chips makes a crinkling sound as I hold it in my hands. The bag is light and airy. In the candy aisle, I pick up bars of chocolate and turn them to the back, examining the label in the same way that a researcher analyzes a science experiment. Taking notes, paying attention to detail, absorbing the information. I decide to buy a chocolate bar.

Upon leaving the store and returning to my car in the parking lot, I remove the chocolate bar from the paper grocery bag. I turn to the nutrition label on the back of the packaging. There are 370 calories in a serving, and two servings per bar. Since there are twenty squares of chocolate in one bar, a single square must contain 37 calories. I pride myself on being good at math.

I carefully open the package and separate one chocolate square from the remaining 19. The chocolate sits in the palm of my hand for many minutes. The more I stare at it, the more it looks like God – something that exists beyond my comprehension. Metaphysical. I bring the chocolate square to my mouth and stop. I’m not ready for this. I put it in a ziplock bag that I brought with me from home. I write the number 37 in a note on my phone so that I don’t forget, and throw the ziplock bag into the back seat of my car. Then, I return my attention back to the remaining chocolate bar.

With the wrapper on, I put the bar in my mouth and chew, trying to imagine how my tastebuds would perceive the sweet taste, and how my tongue would embrace the smooth texture. I chew a few times before the packaging rips and an inkling of chocolate goes into my mouth. One calorie. Probably. I throw the chewed up chocolate bar out of the car window and begin to cry. It’s almost noon. I have spent my entire morning immersing my senses in food, and yet I am starving.

People with Anorexia love food. We love food so much that we consume it all day. We watch Tasty cooking videos and the Food Network for hours in a single sitting. We look through pictures in cookbooks. We bake and stir and fry and steam and make others eat the food we concoct. We put food in our mouths to absorb the flavors, then spit out the chewed up remains into a nearby garbage can. Food occupies our minds all day long. We can’t get enough of it; we just can’t eat it either.

I suffered from Anorexia during my college years. It stared out with small restrictions. Instead of eating desert every night, I limited myself to once a day. Coke and other sodas were replaced with the zero calorie versions. I stopped using oil when cooking and swore on Pam spray instead. Soon, I stopped going out to dinners with friends and family. I refused to eat while anyone was looking at me. Somewhere along the way I stopped eating meals altogether.

I was in denial about my eating disorder for a long time because of my weight. It’s a common misconception that people who suffer from Anorexia have to be thin. In reality, anyone, of any size could be suffering from the illness. Anorexia is a mindset coupled with restrictive food behaviors. Not everyone’s body will become thin from restriction. Some bodies even gain mass in a restrictive state because hen a person is starving, the body has a tendency to hold onto calories and fat, not knowing when it will next receive nutrients.

Starving people are often obsessed with food. These obsessions don’t take form overnight. They are brought on by a void. Something that is missing in a person’s life that he or she is longing to fill. In some cases, the void is filled in a healthy manner. In others, it’s done dangerously. I think that for me, that void was uncertainty. Back in college, I didn’t now what grades I would get on exams, the kind of firm that I would end up working for, or if I would have enough money to move out on my own. I was insecure in my friendships and didn’t know if I would get invited to parties or events. I realized that one of the only things that I could control and was certain about was what went into my mouth.

When I first started to restrict my food intake, I felt powerful. I made lists of the foods that I would eat on a specific day well in advance. I calculated the calories and fat grams in each food I ate to ensure that I knew the exact nutrients that were going into my body. I knew exactly what my mornings, afternoons, and evenings would look like concerning food and other eating disorder related-behaviors. The uncertainty that I had once felt was removed from my life completely. I couldn’t focus on anything other than food.

When I was sick I also had an extreme fear of losing control. Food seemed to be everywhere. It was always following me. I know now that I was hyperaware of food in the world around me because I was starving. Every aroma smelled more potent. Colors were more vibrant. When people around me were eating food, I could hear every bite. The sound of teeth crunching potato chips sounded like the waves of the ocean. It brought me peace and calmness to see others eating knowing that I had the will power to resist.

The more I controlled my food intake, the more I was sucked into the grasp of my eating disorder. I felt a sense of gratification from using food to fill a void in my life, and that gratification was addictive. I restricted more and more until I was in a state of starvation. My starving brain went to extreme lengths to obtain food. One of the ways I tried to fill my need for food was by visiting markets and grocery stores. Walking the aisles of the grocery store on my leisure time was one of my many ways of consuming food without having to eat it. Food was the number one priority in my life.

One day a friend called and told me that he was “breaking up” with me as a friend. I was never there for him anymore. I seemed distant and distracted. I missed his birthday party a few weeks earlier and didn’t send a card. I was devastated. Later that day I typed the question “Do I have an eating disorder?” into Google. One of the top results was an advertisement for a clinic near where lived. I booked an appointment for later in the week. During that appointment I was diagnosed with Anorexia.

While some are obsess over Instagram, or sex, or material things, others are fixated on basic necessities that are needed to live. Obsessions aren’t inherently bad, but they should be checked when they start interfering with health or relationships. In recovery I have been working hard on creating healthier obsessions for myself. I obsess over the spring with all its vibrant flowers. I obsess over my friend’s birthdays, the color purple, or a great book. I obsess over a really good milkshake. I just don’t let that milkshake obsession permeate into other parts of my life.

Sarah Losner is from Long Island, NY. She loves reading and writing essays and poetry. Her poetry has been published by Indolent Books.

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Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Eating/Food

On Reaching Forward and Looking Back

January 8, 2018
eating

By Jamie Siegel

Yesterday I celebrated Thanksgiving and gave thanks for all of the wonderful things in my life, things that I didn’t have this time last year: interests, a job, a voice, finally some peace. Yesterday I recognized all that I have gained through my various experiences since I came to LA for eating disorder treatment and yet today I mourn. Today I mourn because of all that I have lost, not as a result of having had my eating disorder for most of my life, but because of letting go of it a little more each day.  For a friendly introduction to my eating disorder, take a look at what I wrote when I was in the depths of it almost 2 years ago, a few months before seeking treatment for the second time.  It’s very uplifting, I know: Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, eating disorder, Eating Disorders/Healing

The Hilly Place

September 13, 2017

By Carolyn Getches

After one week in Guanajuato, Mexico I could make it home from school without a map. My favorite route took me down the grand sandstone steps of La Universidad de Guanajuato, past the serene bronze statue at Plaza de la Paz, and through the colorful and carefully tended Jardín de la Unión. As I walked along the narrow streets, I saw a young man standing in front of a symmetrical red stucco building with royal blue trim. A small crowd was gathered in front of him and a boombox played Bob Marley near his feet.

He was holding one stick in each hand and using them to toss a third stick in the air, one that was flaming on both ends. The muscles in his ropey arms tensed as he caught the fiery stick between the other two. His dark brown dreadlocks swayed back and forth with his choreographed movements, tapping his tank top and catching on his layered necklaces.

He threw the stick up in the air again. This time, he fumbled the catch and the lit stick fell to the ground. I’ve never had the constitution for embarrassment, mine or otherwise. When I was in the seventh grade, I walked straight into the large glass door of a movie theater. My forehead and nose struck the thick sheet of glass, and a loud thud echoed between my ears. I stood still for a moment as I pieced together what happened. Then, I turned around and sprinted into the parking lot, abandoning my friend who was already at the ticket counter. She found me twenty minutes later, hiding behind a car with snot and blood covering my upper lip. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing

How To Get Over An Eating Disorder

August 25, 2017
cookies

By Sarah Simmons

It’s 3:58pm, known around the parenting world as the witching hour.  Babies and toddlers are terribly whiny and you’re not sure what to do about it. It’s too early for dinner but it’s also too late to plan an outing.  For me it’s a time where I restlessly walk around the condo past the accumulating crap of life,  pile of laundry and the kids because I should and could be playing with them or folding the clothes or even getting to the closet that needs to be organized but I don’t. Instead my mind keeps wandering to food.

My dinners are the same every night.  Some sort of vegetable with ranch dressing. The same so I don’t have to think about it. It’s light enough where I’m not full and then can go to town on what I really want, which are the cookies.  But it’s not just a woman sitting down with 3 cookies on a plate daintily munching whilst watching Modern Family.  It’s a woman shiftily going back and forth from living room to kitchen, like an alcoholic,  to reach under the cabinet where one of the several 2 pound bags of animal crackers lie open,  to grab handful upon handful until most of the bag –okay the entire bag- is empty.  I crave these things all day long  and try to plan it so I might possibly eat less. Like, maybe if I eat dinner late enough then I will be too sleepy to eat?  It doesn’t work.

Eating has represented more for me than hunger. Food=control=suffering=filling a void.  I don’t know how these things come to be or why I can’t just have a healthy relationship with food but I do know this: Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, depression, Eating Disorders/Healing, Writing & The Body

A Tale of 19 Wet Towels or How I Failed to Shed My Skin

March 23, 2017
towel

By Ella Wilson.

1. Birth

Every time in my life that I have had the opportunity – that is to say I have been in the presence of a huge coming or going or leaving or starting, a massive adding on or taking away – every time I have had the chance to step out, to leave behind, to shed, to transform, to butterfly, to snake – every time I could have showered off the detritus of some time in my life that lay heavy on my skin. Every time I could have grown, instead I wet-toweled.

2. Starting school

Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.

3. Suicide attempt age 12

You shiver at first because the wet towel makes you cold. The weight of it makes you slow. After a few days you start to smell old and nothing seems like a very good idea.

4. Puberty

Shame is sticky and the antidote to transformation.

5. Losing my virginity

Shame tells you to hide, unfortunately the tools it gives you for hiding promote shame on shame. Shameless self promotion.

6. Leaving school

When you would rather not be seen it is preferable to hide in anything you can find.

7. Leaving home

8. Getting a job

9. My father dying

When my father died I did not notice. This is not because I was not paying attention exactly, in fact I paid so much attention, maybe too much. Nursing him from when I was 13 to 22. But something can become normal, like someone being ill, like thinking someone won’t really die. So I slept on his hospital floor for months. I swabbed his throat with little pink sponges. I knew the nurses names. He died. I wanted to stay on the floor. I wasn’t ready not to have a father. I wore his clothes. I didn’t cry. I did not become fatherless. I just became personless.

10. Moving to America

11. Being hospitalized for anorexia

12. Getting married Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing

Wine for Beginners

December 27, 2016
wine

CW: This essay discusses eating disorders.

By Caitlyn Renee Miller

Franzia Chillable Red (Provenance Unclear). $10.99/5 liters

“A light-bodied red that is made to be served chilled … softer than traditional red wines. Pairs well with lighter foods.”

You check out of your eating disorder treatment facility against medical advice so that you can start your freshman year of college on time. You are eighteen, and nothing feels more important than starting on time. You find that you are able to shed parts of the past in a new environment, one with brick sidewalks, dorms, science labs, and a brick dining hall. There are a lot of bricks. They make the campus feel lofty, and you’re sure you’ll learn a lot. Every time you breathe the end-of-summer air, you think it smells like the future. Like promise. Maybe you’ll even learn who you’re supposed to be.

At Christmas, you go to the boys’ dorm across the way from yours. The guy you’ll have a will-they-won’t-they thing with over the next two years is having a few people over for (boxed) wine and cookies. You’ve discovered that you are able to enjoy food if you’ve been drinking. The evening involves him pouring Franzia into your mouth from the box’s built in spigot and ends with you vomiting a bright red stream on his flip flops as he walks you safely home. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Eating/Food

A Binge To Remember

December 1, 2016
binge

TW: This essay discusses eating disorders.

By Jenna Robino

I am 20. I live in a one bedroom apartment all by myself, right next to LAX. I’m practically a terminal I’m so close. It’s my sophomore year at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I am a theater major. No minor. I have no idea what I want to do after college, I just like acting and playing different characters. In high school my graduating class voted me “most likely to be on SNL,” so I decided I’d stick with it, and here I am.

Let me close my window. They’re double-sided because of the noise from the planes. Yeah, that black stuff is from the exhaust. I’m sure it’s going to cause some sort of health problem down the road.

One of the reasons I live here, by myself, is because I have a problem. At night, I turn into a food hungry monster and no one’s food is safe. When I had roommates, living in the campus dorms, I would sneak into their rooms when they weren’t there and steal food: handfuls of cereal, candy, a granola bar. If there was one of anything, of course I didn’t take it. I was a thoughtful thief. Whatever I scored, I’d bring back to my top bunk, stick in a container and hide under my pillow. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Young Voices

Eight Years Later And I’m Still Not Better

July 27, 2016
healing

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

By Alyssa Limperis

I can still remember coming home from the doctor and hearing my mom ask, “Did he say you were better?” She was referencing my 9-month old eating disorder of anorexia. At about month 8, I’d decided that I wanted to start getting help. I wanted to start getting better. I’d decided I wanted to stop blacking out every weekend, to stop being freezing in the summer, to stop waking up at 5am to work out for 2 hours, to stop only sleeping for 3, and to stop dreading daylight because it meant the beginning of starvation.

I didn’t want to be possessed by a nasty dictator. I wanted to be free. I longed to take a bite into an apple without feeling disgusted with my weak self. I wanted to undo the damage I had done to my decaying bones. I wanted to be normal again. And so I went to get help. And a month later my mom asked if I was better. And in that month, I knew what that answer would be for a long time. I
quickly realized this wasn’t a cold. I couldn’t get a Z-pack and be ready for work on Monday. I had learned ugly truths. I had memorized specific details. I had lived in a frail body. Those are not strands of mucus that get blown into a tissue and
disappear. Those are pieces of knowledge that got lodged into my brain. My underfed, misguided brain. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Eating/Food, Guest Posts, healing

Tales of a Food Restrictor

December 10, 2015

By Anne Falkowski

At 45, I made the decision to face my disordered eating. It was a dark creepy crawly which followed me around for more than half my life. (It’s not unusual for women in their 40s or older to have untreated eating disorders for twenty, thirty or even forty years.

I decided it was time to let go.

I could do this. But I needed help.

I called the experts and landed in an office the color of fog and ocean. The colors of healing. This was a place for anorexics, bulimics and eating disorders not otherwise specified (like myself).

There was a large rubber plate of fake food next to the tissue box. On this fake plate was a mound of beans, a thick slice of bread, a pile of broccoli and an unidentified piece of meat. I liked to run my fingers over the beans and feel their lumpiness.

It was in this ocean room, while I fingered the beans, when Mark, the therapist, told me I was a food restrictor.

“Are you sure? Wouldn’t I be thin if I did that?”

As always, I was hyperaware of my body which refused to be the size I wanted it.

“Well, not necessarily.”

His hand reached up to touch his tie. Mark always wore a shirt and tie. He was twenty years younger than me. At first his youth threw me. How could a clean cut baby-faced twenty something counsel me, a middle aged woman, who had been dealing or not dealing with disordered eating probably as long as he had been alive?

He told me that we cannot pick the bodies we want.

I wanted to be slim, slender, thin, and bony.

“It doesn’t work that way. We don’t get to choose our bodies.” He held my gaze. Continue Reading…