Nurture your body, invest in your mind.
Whether you have any degree of disordered eating, mental illness, or not, we all have an inner critic that can both drive and destroy us. Athletes can use it to our favour; our inner critic can spur us to attack and persevere through hard training. But currently, many of us have more time alone with our inner critic, don’t have our usual outlet of competition to keep self-criticism constructive, and have less ability to properly debrief with our social supports. Not to mention increased social media use and opportunity for downward self-comparison! This perfect storm can lead to focusing on insignificant and unhelpful outlets, such as food, body image, excessive training or worse.
A day in the life of Anorexia Nervosa.
The doctor sits me down and in her usual caring manner relays that I'm heading downhill fast, am now well into the weight criteria for Anorexia Nervosa, and should be in hospital. Even sitting here in the state I am in, I marvel and the stupidity of that. My internal world and behaviors have not changed for months, but all of a sudden my diagnosis changes because I lost another X amount to get below the hallowed threshold? Who even decided where that line that I have been chains gall this time is?
A day in the life of 'atypical' anorexia.
On the walk home I dispose of all the hidden morsels of food at a bin in a park. I count my steps as I go, trying to control every little bit of what I am doing. See, I'm different now. I'm one of those people that has self control. I am 30kg down and suddenly everyone is treating my differently. Mum is happier with how I look, when I go out I no longer feel like I stick out like a sore thumb, and I have a boyfriend now. I must be doing the right thing, surely. Besides, I can't have a problem, my BMI is still 22.5, that's way above what would ever be considered an eating disorder. Even my GP is happy with my weight loss, he was the one always saying I needed to lose weight to help my asthma.