Mantra for the Morning

Morning reminder:

No bones look as good as energy feels.

Friends

I have amazing friends.  I really felt loved tonight, and my only regret is that there is no way I'll ever be able to communicate to them how much I needed that.

Positive Padding

Now that hot weather us upon us again, there is one aspect of my added poundage for which I am actually thankful.  In the past, I have been extremely, extremely self conscious about having thick, ropy veins visible on my arms and legs when I got overheated.  The webby patterned skin may have worked for Spiderman, but for mere mortals, it's just not nice looking.

 It was also always a dead give away, when I lived at home, that I had been exercising in my room.  If my mom knocked on the door to see what I was doing, I could act nonchalant, but she knew to check my forearms to see how visible the veins were. Vasodilation ratted me out every time.

Having added muscle, and yes, fat, does make for much more aesthetically pleasing limbs when it comes to hiding those veins (I mean, obviously you can see healthy people's veins sometimes, but the sticky-outy-ness is diminished), so that is my positive body thought for the day.

I am afraid people are going to come back from the weekend and see this barrage of posts by me and think, well, I don't know, insert negative thought here.  Now that the semester is winding up, and my life is about to go down a whole new road, I guess I have just been in a contemplative mood.

No More Plan B

I'm looking forward to my graduation, but one thing is looming like a cloud guaranteed to rain on my parade: photographs.  There are going to be cameras, camcorders, and required photos everywhere.  It will also be the most complete family reunion we've had in a long time, and I want to remember myself with these people.  I wish I could document it without actually having to save images of myself.

I have never, never been comfortable with my appearance.  This came way before the weight issues. I could/can list a zillion things wrong with my nose, eyes, skin, teeth, you name it and I hate it. I have always been too wrapped up in other things to spend a ton of time on vanity (I am very low-maintenance), but it's always just been a fact of life that I will be displeased when I look in the mirror.  In that I know I'm not unique among young women, or any women, or most people in our culture/society.

H. and I have been talking about the fact that one of the many facets of the development of my ED was to use thinness as a proxy for beauty.  In a nutshell, the reasoning has always been "If I can't be pretty, at least I'll be skinny."

So that has been the Plan B ever since I was 13.  And now I am 1) facing the fact that my body is moving closer and closer to my normal weight range, meaning I can't count on having "skinny" as a fallback, and 2) realizing that I just can't afford to be feeble, not with everything coming up for me in the near future.

Thus, Plan B must die a much-deserved death.  

But even a misguided path gives you a direction, and now I am feeling a little lost.  Unconfident and very self-conscious and negative and desirous of a rock to crawl under, to spare both myself and the public.

Anorexia Athletica vs Exercise Bulimia?

I truly like H., and connect with her extremely well.  I would not be where I am today without her, of that I am sure.  But there is one thing she does that really irks me, that we absolutely can't agree on. 

 She refers to my compulsive exercise as "purging."  This never fails to irritate the hell out of me.  

My rationalization that my exercise is not purging:

A) I do not binge.  I can literally count on one hand the amount of times I have had out-of-control eating experiences in my nine year journey through anorexia.  

B)Exercise doesn't increase if I eat more, because I never eat more than my meal plan, I have a hard enough time just accomplishing my baseline every day.

C) I still exercise even when I've eaten significantly less than I should have, or nothing at all, and thus can't be purging what is not in my system.

D) The exercise increases when I'm stressed, showing that if it is purging anything it is anxiety, not food.

E) The main thing, which I hope makes sense: I don't work out because I ate X, I eat X so that I can make it through my workout.  

H's counter evidence:

1) If I can't exercise, I dramatically cut my calories, way beyond what is necessary to compensate for inactivity.  Therefore the purpose of the exercise must be to get rid of calories.

2)Getting rid of calories  =  purging.

I can see her point, but I still don't agree with her.  She says it is because I am an intensely controlled person, and I have an aversion to the term "purging" because I associate it with making up for a lapse in control.  On this, she is probably right.  OK, definitely right.  I do have an aversion to the term, but I also feel like it's an inaccurate term in my case.  

I could bicker about this all day, and expect/hope that at some point in my future I will look back and realize how stubborn I am being.  But the main point of this post is that I wanted to move beyond my own case and discuss the broader issue of labels, which I find to be interesting.  I have seen both "exercise bulimia" and "anorexia athletica" referred to in both the popular and medical literature.  To me, it seems like EB is over-exercising following a binge, whereas AA is just compulsive exercise as part of a more rigid, obsessional routine. It is more about the ritual and less about the penance. But I am honestly not that familiar with the role that exercise tends to play in "regular" BN (I cringe at using that term, but you know what I mean...), so maybe I am mischaracterizing it?  Thoughts? 

 Honestly I think this whole issue just highlights the fact that there are no cookie-cutter ED cases, and that in reality distorted behaviors (and thoughts) exist along a spectrum, as opposed to discrete categories.  Some AN sufferers restrict severely and never work out, others let the exercise increase to the degree that they stay emaciated even while eating roughly as much as an "average" person (cringe again).  Most are somewhere in the middle, and many people move up and down the spectrum during the course of their disorder.  For me personally, since I've been in college the restriction-exercise balance has shifted significantly from what it was in middle/high school, not quite 180-degrees, maybe around 120. 

So, those are my thoughts, what are yours?  Discussion?

Exercise Thoughts D'jour

As I've mentioned before, exercise is one area in which I have made almost no progress so far in my recovery.  I know at some level that the amount of time I spend working out is insane, but I don't remember living any other way.  This is my modus operandi; I don't decide to do it, it's just default.  That same old argument.

H. is trying to convince me that cutting the exercise won't make me balloon.  I find this unfathomable.  Even with the exercise, I've still gained weight from upping my meal plan over the past year, with some plateaus but a definite upward trend.  I'm still not within my normal BMI range, but I'm inching in that direction.  Progress with eating makes it even harder to curb the exercise, because 1) gaining weight causes anxiety, which is vented through workouts and 2) I have more energy now that I'm not restricting.  My logical, quantitative brain refuses to accept that I can cut out a significant amount of exercise, in other words to stop burning as many calories, and yet still not become overweight.  I'm fattening up even with the workouts!  Numbers, numbers numbers.  I've gained weight at exactly the rate all the textbooks predict, according to the increase in my calories, during the times I've been consistent with the meal plan.  But what happens when I decrease the calories out on top of that?  Simple math . . . It makes me want to cling to exercise more tightly than ever.

I hope none of that was triggering (I always worry about that), I want to make clear that that is what my ED is constantly screaming in my ear.  H., however, who is a Smart Lady, has been treating EDs for decades, and has yet to steer me wrong, is insisting that cutting the exercise won't make me gain excessive weight.  The body doesn't read the textbooks, doesn't do math, and doesn't always work in a linear fashion.  The calories-in vs calories-out model is appropriate for some things, but doesn't take into account the way our metabolisms adjust their rates according to the care (or lack thereof) that we give our bodies.

H's argument: the constant exercise is teaching my body that it needs to hang onto all the energy it can, because it is going to need every scrap of it to sustain through the workouts.  Once I've established a healthier activity pattern, my metabolism will normalize and won't "want" to store every calorie. 

This makes sense, and is also ironic.  The whole reason the exercise compulsion developed within my AN journey was because I saw it as a way to keep my metabolism from coming to a complete standstill during restriction.  I figured a few workouts a day were a sure way to keep my system revved up, and then it kind of took on a life of its own and is now the dominant force in my ED.  Apparently, though, the metabolic benefits of working out can reach a point of diminishing returns, shifting into the realm of counterproductivity. 

I'm trying to convince myself of this.  I know that it makes sense, and that both H. and my nutritionist should know what they're talking about.  It's just so hard to put into practice.  I'll be moving this summer, and will have the chance to set up a new routine, this is a chance to force myself to take a leap.  Plus, it's not like cutting the workouts means I'm going to sit like a lump on the couch all day, it will just give me time to do "real life" activities that I miss out on during all my hours spent on the bike, with the aerobics DVD, etc.  

I don't have a very profound conclusion for this post, mostly just the musings of the day.

Thank You, Ms. Johansson

While I am usually slightly scornful of celebrity op-eds (what, just because you have tons of money we should buy into your opinions on economics, politics, etc etc?), but this one is a winner, and from it comes the quote of the day, although I do recommend reading the whole thing. She even directs people to the NEDA website.  Thoughts, comments?

I'm a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I'd have to part with both arms. And a foot. I'm frustrated with the irresponsibility of tabloid media who sell the public ideas about what we should look like and how we should get there.

~Scarlett Johansson

(And yes, I just realized the irony of choosing this particular quote after the topic of last night's post, if there is any correlation it was entirely subconscious).