Shifting Baselines in Recovery

Ok, I had a super-intense week (I'm definintely feeling like a legitimate loaded-down graduate student), but I submitted a proposal and another assignment yesterday, so I can take some time to breathe and post updatage this weekend. I expect blogging may be much more sporadic in the coming months.

So far, though, the verdict on grad school definitely positive. My classload is pretty light, and classes are really just looked at as a formality at this level (you have to take courses and earn credits, but the profs make it very difficult not to get good grades). I have external funding, so I don't have to teach or hold office hours for students. I have class for one hour every morning, and the rest is just unsupervised time to work. I do have a ton of reading for my classes, so that takes some time, but other than that I am pretty autonomous, working on grant proposals, a review paper I'm hoping to submit for publication, organizing plans for my research, etc. My advisor is completely laid back and lets me make my own hours, so I'm generally there from 8-1. I go home, have lunch, and work from here for the rest of the afternoon. There's no point in G. being by himself all day when the internet allows me to do exactly the same work here. This is not to say that things aren't stressful, of course, there is PLENTY to fill my autonomous hours, but I feel like I am learning so much and am really enjoying moving on to a more professional status.

I had my first appointment at the ED center on Thursday, but I'll write about that in a separate post. I'm backlogged on updating, and there was other stuff I wanted to mention first.

Ok, so after I moved (and actually starting before I moved) I was in a state of slippage, and I lost weight steadily for the first 2-3 weeks that I was here. The worst was the week classes started (maybe about 10 days ago? feels like much longer, it's been an eventful 1.5 weeks), because I was constantly being put in new environments with new people and unknown eating situations.

I've started to do better since then, even before my appt at the ED center (I've only had one, which did not make an appreciable impact on my status, the first visit was just history/review). Not better as in going out and buying milkshakes 3x a day, but better as in at least restoring the baseline eating/behaviors I had been functioning with prior to slippage.

How/why did I make a conscious choice to catch the slip? I thought I looked too thin, and unhealthy. I saw that, and definitely realized that it was correlated with me feeling fuzzy and shitty all the time, and that this is not the kind of life I want for myself. But what I find to be interesting from a recovery standpoint, and the point of this post, is this: Current Weight is still significantly higher than what I have maintained for most of my adult life. Less than what I weighed three months ago, but much higher than what I weighed two years ago, or three, four, five...you get the picture. Two years ago, if you told me I needed to be at Current Weight, I would have freaked out and imagined myself as a gooey, spherical miscreant.* But now, I am able to accept that Current Weight still has me in the underweight range and neither looks nor feels good.

I know many people assume that anorexics see themselves as fat. That is not always the case. At many points I have been painfully aware of how painfully thin I was, but the key was that I was convinced that if I gained any weight, then I would become fat. Even if the weight gain still kept me well below normal. It wasn't so much wanting to lose weight, it was obsession with Not Gaining that kept me trapped. I still can't say that I'm gung-ho about gaining weight yet, but I did feel like I was smacked in the face with an insight when I realized that even though I have indeed gained X, I'm still pretty damn thin, so maybe the next X pounds won't turn me into Jabba the Cammy* either.

So, the shifting baseline of body perception was the story I wanted to share today.

Of course I'm not claiming my body image is normal now, or may ever be 100%. Even though I know quantitatively I'm considered underweight, I still have anxiety over my stomach and other "problem areas," and am still struggling with food rituals and my exercise rut. But I don't want to be sick, and I feel like my perspective is slowing moving in the right direction.

(I hope that readers realize that when I make remarks like that I am just relaying what goes on in my mind about myself, and am not at all implying that that is what I think about other people who may be overweight. I never look at an obese person and plug "Jabba the" in front of their name. I think it's common for people to think hateful things about themselves that they would never apply to others, and I just wanted to make sure no one was offended).

Matched?

I just had my first "date" (more like an on-campus coffee appointment) with my Match.com guy, and it went well! He was very nice, and we had some interesting conversation. I felt kind of bad because we lost track of time and he was late to his next class. Even if nothing romantic develops, I at least feel like I've made a friend.

Ok, nose back to the grindstone, some ED thoughts (not disordered thoughts, thoughts about ED, you know what I mean!) later.

Scraps

I have now been tagged twice for the Honest Scrap Award, by Amy and Kim, but I've been so hectic for the past couple of weeks that I haven't done it yet. Sorry!

The description is: "this award is bestowed on a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver's opinion, brilliant. This award is about bloggers who post from their heart, who often put their heart on display as they write. There are three rules that need to be followed on accepting this award:

1) Brag about it.

2) Select seven blogs you find brilliant and link to them.

3) List 10 honest things about yourself.

Bragging is hard. Hopefully it is enough to say that I am honored and appreciate the fact that Kim and Amy thought of me when tagging people for the award. If I am proud of anything, it is that I've been lucky enough to meet such amazing people in

this corner of the blogosphere. So I brag for all of us. :)

Ok, 10 honest things....

1) Every year I get one of those Page-A-Day calendars and keep it in my kitchen, but I always forget to keep up with it (I use a regular calendar and a day planner to track important things), so by the end of the year I am still somewhere in the April section.

2) The only thing I have ever deliberately stolen was the lid to a toilet tank, swiped from a gas station. This is a loooong story.

3) I scar insanely easily. Even little scratches or scrapes that barely even drew blood often form keloid scars. My knees are the worst, due to an active and adventurous childhood.

4) The amount of music I listen to dropped dramatically when I got an iPod. When I'm walking (which is about 98% of the time I listen to my ipod), I prefer podcasts and audiobooks. Podcasts are FREE and music is not...I do have quite a bit of music on there, though, and listen to it while I drive, and when I work out.

5) If I am eating something square or rectangular (sandwich, poptart, etc), I bite around the perimeter of it first until it's round and then eat the middle. This is not an ED quirk, I've done it ever since I can remember.

6) I have worked with a variety of animals that many people are afraid of, but I am very afraid of water fowl (ducks, swans, etc). Bad childhood experiences.

7) When I was a kid, I had an imaginary camel named P.J., and I used to play checkers with him. I wish I remembered whether he was a Bactrian or a Dromedary.

8) I was so insanely lonely and desperate to meet people after I moved that I finally joined Match.com. My new city is big enough that there were actually a good number of people in the vicinity also registered on the site. I've been trading e-mails with a few people, but have one that is definitely a favorite. Awkward turtle: on the day of my grad school orientation, one of the PhD students recognized me from the site and sent me an e-mail afterwards confirming he was right. Ack!

9) I am immune to poison ivy. I still try to avoid it, because it is one of those things to which you develop sensitivity, not immunity, through exposure. (Did you know the mango is in the same family as poison ivy? Some people's mouths break out of if they eat it. Sad.)

10) I always wrote stories as a kid, and have the first 50,000 words of a novel gathering digital dust on my hard drive right now.

I have been sp behind the times with doing this that I am not sure of who has already been tagged and who hasn't, so I sprinkle the tag juice on the masses, go forth and confess your quirks!

Panic Fading

I am starting to feel a little less in danger of spontaneously combusting. I got moved into my office (I have an office!) today, and having my own "space" on campus is a big comfort. I share it with one other grad student, who happens to be the HOTTEST guy I have seen in the department so far. He is also in the class that I had this morning. Hmmm. And he has pictures of his family on his desk in the office, but there are no wifey looking people. Hmmm.

Grad school classes are awesome. Well, I've only had one official class as of yet, the rest don't meet until next week, but so far so good. My professor brought coffee for everyone today, and told us that worrying about grades is a distraction, so we've all got A's unless we really just go out of our ways to screw up. The material is going to be pretty fascinating, and there are people from a variety of research areas (within our field) in the class, so I think it will be a good experience.

I am going to one of the meet and greet socials tonight, hopefully I will be successful in, well, meeting and greeting people. It is timed such that it doesn't interfere too badly with my routines, and that I can make it home for my own dinner at the usual time. I'm not planning on eating there, but I have no idea what they'll be having, and I've done ok with food on my own today. If I plan to eat there, then I still fall into the pattern of restricting the rest of the day to "save up" for what they might have, and that just doesn't put me in a good place. So that tendency is one thing I need to work on.

Speaking of working on things, some progress in the treatment front today: I had an appointment with my new physician here. Actually, only the nurse practitioner talked to me, but she was great. She spent a lot of time and seemed genuinely interested in me. I told her upfront that the main reason for my appointment was to get a referral to the local ED center. My old doctor kind of glazed over and seemed clueless on the subject of EDs, but she was much more on top of things. When I said "eating disorder," she immediately had a list of questions about my bones, reproductive stuff, water intake, etc etc. She seemed more prepared to deal with the topic than any physician I have dealt with so far.

So, I did that, got stuck with some needles (never mind the tattoo, I HATE needles! I don't even have my ears pierced), and got my referral. I have an appointment at the ED center next week. H. promised to fax over a treatment history, so the new psychologist has a heads-up on what she's getting herself into with me.

I have not done well with food for the past few days leading up to this appointment. I just wanted to make sure that my poundage was "low enough" when they weighed me, even though I know that's an invalid concept for EDs. But with the appointment, combined with desperation to look nice and make good first impressions on my new colleagues this week, has meant crappy food habits. I usually consume vast (probably unhealthy) amounts of water (not to fill up, I'm genuinely that thirsty, might be the workouts, I think I talked about this at some point before), and I even restricted that prior to my appointment this morning and got dehydrated and felt terrible. Probably messed up my urine and blood samples, too, that definitely wasn't representative of my usual state. Getting back on the wagon with food will be a goal for the weekend.

I am feeling better about things today. Now that I have a rough draft of daily schedules in my head, I feel a little bit less like the sky is falling. In my last post I mentioned the challenge of cutting out a signficant chunk of exercise, and I think that is something I'm going to be doing in stages. I don't want to really talk about details here because I don't like outlining my workouts for everyone to judge. I won't end up with any cut out today, but next week will be the first full week of my full schedule, so we'll see how that goes.

Ok, off to try and pretty myself up for this social.

Want to be Real

First of all, thank you all for all your support on last week's worried post. I am sorry for slightly wigging out, but I have a constant fear of being triggering, or just coming across as incessantly and intolerably negative and whiny to the point that everyone hates me. I am going to keep writing about what's going on with my recovery, in the hopes that at least some people will identify and benefit with it, but I will make an effort to mix in more insights with my rants.

Speaking of such, my head is overflowing right now. I am starting grad school this week, and am quickly becoming overwhelmed. And it is not because the courses or research are too hard. My classload is actually much lighter than anything I ever had as an undergrad, and although I'm writing grants I already have a good nest egg of research funding. I don't have to teach this semester, so in theory it should be less stressful than my undergrad schedule.

But while the student stuff is easily manageable, the professional/community side have thrown a wrench in my lifestyle, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that I am going to have to make some lifestyle changes if I am going to keep up with this. It is expected that grad students maintain a presence on campus most days, in addition to participating in a lot of other things. It's hard to explain why exactly this is stressing me, because it's not that I don't want to be involved. I love this stuff, and these kind of people. And it's not as if I never left my house as an undergrad and this is a shock to my system, because I was way over-involved and busy with tons of organizations. It's just hard to explain right now.

I think a big thing is that over the summer my eating/exercise routines have become more and more rigid, and now that I am facing actual obligations that interfere with my cemented daily patterns, I'm sort of freaking out.

Most of this pressure is actually social, not academic. I know that it's the first week, so everyone is in meet & greet mode, but it seems like there are two social events every night. I have been incredibly lonely here, so I want to get out and meet people. I want to, but at the same time the anxiety over breaking my routines is killer. I feel so ridiculous.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but the fact that I can't walk to campus in this town is a huge source of all this anxiety. That was a nontrivial source of exercise for me as an undergrad (I lived close enough to walk but far enough away that it was significant). Now that I am commuting in a vehicle, I am going nuts trying to figure out how I'm going to compensate for that energy. I feel like I have to add yet another workout on top of everything else I do, at the same time that I am facing less and less opportunities to steal away and exercise. My mind has been this constant swirl of logistics and planning on how I can use every spare moment of the day to squeeze in a work out, or how much food I will have to slash if I don't. I am trying to work out my schedule for each day of the week in my head, I don't know why it's so important for me to know EXACTLY when I will do X, Y, or Z every day. Not knowing how I will fit everything in is making me crazy.

So, all of this has been stressful, to say the least. But I think it is serving as an eye-opener for me, too. My life style and relationships as an undergrad were built around the scaffold of my eating disorder. I was much better than high school, but I guess I hadn't realized how significant everything was until I was pulled out of my comfort zone. Like one of those rats that finds itself awakened and plopped into a maze with the harsh lights shining on it, dazed and lost and a little bit suspicious.

I don't want to be the person that rushes home from class to work out instead of being in the office interacting with people. I don't want to be the person home alone every night while other people are having barbecues at the beach, just so she can have the same dinner she's been eating every night for years. I don't want to be the person running on 4 hours of sleep every night because she has to wake up so early to work out for hours before her first class. I don't want to be the person that is too busy mentally calculating calories during class to fully engage with the discussion. I don't want to be the person that can't do intramural sports or club hiking trips because she has neither the time nor the energy after doing her standard exercise.

I want to be a real person. After observing the other girls/women at orientation, I saw lots of examples of people who seem to be getting much more out of life than I am right now, and it gave me a lot to think about.

So, a challenge I have been contemplating is to cut out the morning workout that is supposed to be the equivalent of walking to class. (I have already added this, over the summer, because I wasn't going back and forth to campus, the issue is not having time for it anymore now that classes are starting). This would be a huge challenge, in both resisting the workout urge and trying not to adjust my calories to negate it. That is something I'm going to work on this week, though.

My alarm is going off in a little over 5 hours, so I need to go. Thanks again to everyone. Also, I have been tagged twice for the Honest Scrap award, I promise I am not ignoring it! I will probably never be tagged for anything again due to my slowness. Things have been hectic, but am thankful for the tags and will be on that the next change I get.

Undone Does Little for EDs

I just read the book Undone by Karin Slaughter. I don't typically do genre crime novels, but I read a review of the book in a magazine and it mentioned that the plot features a serial killer that targets women with eating disorders. I was intrigued, and picked it up even though I hadn't read any of the previous books in the series. (Apparently Undone is actually a convergence, where the main characters from the authors two series meet and interact).

I have to admit, even though I'm not a big fan of slasher/cop mysteries, the book was well-written and the plot had good twists. The ED issue, however, was done horribly. All of the victims were middle-aged women (late thirties-ish) living in the Atlanta area that knew one another only through a pro-anorexia web forum. I won't give away the plot to explain how the killer found them and how they all turned out to be linked in real life.

Each of the women was portrayed as nothing but an anal caricature of an uber-bitch. None of them had any friends, and they were all hated by their co-workers. They were all foul-mouthed and caustic to everyone around them (except two were single mothers with young sons they were devoted to). And I don't mean they were friendless because they were too sick for social lives, they were friendless because no one could stand them. I will give away one point: one woman who survives (I won't say how many did, I hate spoilers and try to avoid giving them) has nothing but rancor and hatred for the cops and doctors that saved her life, constantly calling the detective "bitch" and the like while she is being interviewed after she's safe. Their homes are sterile and virtually un-lived in, they display no compassion or feelings toward other anorexics than competitiveness and disdain. They are all successful and wealthy, but it is hammered over and over that they have such self-absorbed, rude, insufferable personalities that no one can stand them.

Out of the 435 pages of the book, there is one paragraph that tries to back pedal a bit: one cop asks another if all anorexics are like that, and she tells him something to the effect of no, but the disease is more common in people that already have those personalities. It is presented weakly and unconvincingly, and then the Starving Bitch stereotype is continued for the rest of the book.

I thought the author missed a great opportunity to point out the dangers of pro-sites (the details of the forum are never discussed, apparently cops were never able to crack the women's passwords and get into the site), or to have some intelligent discussion of how EDs are not just a teen issue. She did point out how many EDers at non-critical weights can fly unnoticed by medical professionals who think they are just thin, but to someone unacquainted with eating disorders I'm not sure if that was demonstrated clearly enough to pick up on (it was assumed at first that the killer had starved them, and the women were all thin but not deathly emaciated, having kept their illness subclinical for decades).

I have heard enough ignorant jokes about anorexics to be a little bit sensitive to these things in the first place, but I read this book carefully and I don't think it's just me projecting my defensiveness, I truly do think she presents a biased and inaccurate portrait. Many of the EDers I've met have indeed been driven and ambitious, but NONE have exhibited the kind of cut-throat mentality and complete misanthropy of the characters in the book. Really, their personalities are absolutely reptilian.

(I take that back, I own a reptile, and he is calm and nonvenomous).

Anyway, if you want to read a crime novel, Slaughter is a good writer (what an ironic name for someone who writes murder mysteries, I wonder if it's a pseudonym?), but I had major, major problems with her portrayal of ED sufferers in this book. I think I am going to write her a letter, possibly with a link to this post.

Sampling Error

Sunday linkage: Indexed blog hits the nail on the head: