AUTHOR: DEVANSHI CHENGAPPA (INSTA)
“It means you can’t keep rowing. You’ll have to stop that, and all the high-intensity stuff too.”
It was a brand new school year, and I had just turned 15. Previously lacking in talent within sports, I’d discovered my love for rowing just one year before and had incorporated training with the school team into my hyper-busy schedule. Exhaustion, piles of school work and music exams didn’t stop me from giving the team my all but a sudden shooting pain from my lower back through to my little toes did.
“I’m sorry, I know it means a lot to you. But you can’t keep going! Think of how much it will cost on your future life insurance if this gets worse!” That was my mum’s reaction. Ever the practical one, her position as a doctor meant that once the diagnosis came through with the MRI, she knew I couldn’t keep up the activities I’d loved so much.
“Oh. Well. It’s fine. I’ve got loads of exams this year anyway,” I had said. What else was there to say?
But something was happening inside me at that moment. All my worries about keeping my calorie consumption in line with my training suddenly became more absorbing as I looked at my body in the mirror and imagined losing all the muscle that I had worked to the point of sickness to gain. Slowly but surely, I no longer wanted to make sure that I was eating ENOUGH calories to fuel my body, but to make sure that I was in what the ‘experts’ online called a “calorie deficit”.
That’s how I’d keep the weight off. That’s how I’d keep looking good. That’s how I’d make sure that I still had friends.
The correlation between weight and friends wasn’t unfounded, but it misjudged the context in which I had gained popularity. Yes, during my weight loss the year before my popularity had seemed to soar, but only because I was now part of the more elite sports community in the school. In reality, it had nothing to do with my body, but that wasn’t how I saw it at the time. I saw a very simple equation:
Slim body = lots of friends
As time progressed, I went from weighing myself once every fortnight to a few times a day. I measured and pinched and squatted till it was just a part of my routine and I thought nothing of my strict rules such as doing 100 squats each time I went to the loo. To be entirely honest, those months went by in a blur and I don’t have many clear memories but I do remember hitting my first milestone within my weight loss ‘journey’.
50kg. How exciting! It was below my original goal, but the number looked so good! An even number. A perfect number. Wonderful. Still... What if I could push it down just a bit more?
Just a bit.
Of course, I did. And between January and early March, my weight had dropped to just below 40kg. (For those of you who aren’t sure, for a growing teenage girl with a height of 5”4, that is significantly underweight)
At this point, the people around me could see my weight loss and were beginning to worry. Blood was tested and supplement shakes (which I fondly term ‘fat shakes’) were made, but nothing really changed. I’d throw as much of the food away as possible, hiding it anywhere I could till I could find a place to get rid of it without any of my friends or teachers seeing it and confronting me. I worked out in every 10-minute gap I could find, usually naked so that my mum wouldn’t see my sweaty clothes and realise that I was still exercising against her wishes. I knew it was wrong - I was the type of person that had fully researched my diagnosis: Anorexia Nervosa. I had looked at the studies, the side effects, the forums. But none of that knowledge seemed to translate into my actions as I poured the chocolate ‘fat shakes’ down the drain.
I just wanted to be skinny. What was wrong with that?
Over time, I lost the battle to refuse a physical recovery and slowly gained back some weight. I even became somewhat overweight, using binging to comfort me in ways that nothing else did within my turbulent life. But despite my appearance no longer showing signs of an eating disorder, my mental health was still a mess.
With other diagnoses now being used to describe my mental health, from depression to borderline personality disorder, my eating disorder found a way to manifest itself in a different way: bulimia.
I had always found myself wishing I was bulimic whilst I suffered from anorexia. “They get to eat all the yummy food and still be skinny!” was what my brain thought. Isn’t it magic? Isn’t that what everyone dreams of?
For anyone who may think that now: the answer is no.
Bulimia tore apart my life in ways that my anorexia did not. Yes, anorexia had me shivering in the middle of summer whilst I tried to get comfortable in my own bed as my bones seemed to hit against every surface, but bulimia took a different type of toll. It took away time - hours and hours of my time spent in a toxic cycle that only broke when I passed out in bed, or sometimes just on the floor. More than that, it sent my body into an exhausting spiral that I couldn’t escape from as I felt like the only time I was alive and could see the world in colour was when I was knee-deep in doughnuts and ice-cream.
It hurt when I was forced to realise that my eating disorder was indeed still active and taking a huge toll on my quality of life. I was supposed to be recovered! I’d beaten anorexia, hadn’t
I? I was a warrior! I wasn’t starving myself nearly as often anymore. And my weight was nowhere near as low as it had once been! I was recovered... right?
But I wasn’t. The physical recovery that I had made as I gained weight, got my menstrual cycle back and went through the last stages of puberty, delayed because of nutritional deficiencies, was wonderful. But it didn’t even begin to touch the deeper levels of mental pain that I was in and those were the things that I needed to work on to create a long term recovery.
And I did.
I read the literature again, this time focusing in on the stories of people that had relapsed during recovery and expressed how they managed to start the entire process again without feeling defeated or like a fallen soldier.
I put in place all the self-care bits I could find, turning to Pinterest and Instagram for face masks and meditations. I bought a new wardrobe, revamping old clothes so that I felt like I was moving forward in my life and leaving the difficulties I tried to muffle with food behind me.
I found creative outlets; writing for online platforms that had inspiring conversations about eating disorders and using music to create my own forms of personal meditation.
And, ultimately, I did the groundwork. I looked at my deeper issues and tried to start the process of unpicking the triggers that hurt and replacing rotten roots in my memory with more constructive and stable foundations.
A key part of this entire process, though, was realising that my road to recovery wasn’t going to be linear, or even close. Just a few months ago, I had a relapse that lasted weeks and left me feeling angry and bitter at how much progress I had lost by ‘giving in’ to the eating disorder. But what I didn’t realise at the time was that despite having a long and intense bout of the bulimia taking over, I had still come leaps and bounds in my mental strength.
This time, lockdown became a serious factor in my recovery. For many, lockdown increases the pressure as families are stuck inside the house and are hyperaware of one another’s actions - my idea of a nightmare. But there is a flip side.
The time that came with being stuck at home forced me to go straight back to my recovery, crawling and then walking and then running till I reached a point from which I look back now and feel my breath taken away by how far I’ve come in a matter of months. It wasn’t really a matter of months - it was hard work over a number of years, finally coming together. Yes, the suffocation that can come with being stuck in a building can really hurt your mental health, but I urge you to look into the ways that you can use your time. Those CBT courses that you’ve always heard about but never had time to commit to - do them now. Turn yourself into a self-care warrior by surrounding yourself with lavender or vanilla or whatever other
essential oil you can think of and consider turning this time in your life into one that aids your recovery.
Of course, that might not always be possible and I don’t think that the rest of my journey is going to be a straight line. I know that my hard work will benefit me in the long run but that there are going to be times that an invitation to have some birthday cake is going to step on my triggers in a way I just can’t protect myself from. Overall though, the work that I’ve done has proven to create an upward trend and I am going to hold on to that knowledge as I keep going through recovery. Ultimately, I’m going to be kind to myself. Kind to my body and my mind, without judging it or my recovery and I encourage anyone struggling with their own unique experience of recovery to do the same.
Recovery is not linear. But you are constantly learning and growing, and that means that you are never back at square one. Keep going. There is light beyond the calorie counting and food obsession.
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