Diet soda

This was also where my mind was in August of 2013:

As a person who struggles with anorexia nervosa, I am a master at restricting my food.  Evidenced in a previous post, I understand and embrace a monotonous diet, eating the exact same foods everyday.

But I don't understand and embrace celebrating.

When I first started having symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN) and restricting my food, I told myself that I was not going to link food and relationships with people.  For me, that meant that I could sit at a table with friends or family and not eat but still fully participate in the relationship and the celebration.

I was going to completely separate food and people.

I've sat at many celebratory tables--Thanksgivings, Christmases, weddings, birthdays--and either did not eat at all or restricted what I did eat.

This idea that I can somehow make food devoid of any meaning is not healthy nor achievable.

By trying to make food not have any meaning for days of celebration, I have effectually made food the most important part of a celebratory day.  I spend most days of the year restricting and not allowing myself food that I would like to have, so when a celebration day comes around, I begin obsessing about all of the foods that I could let myself have.

I fantasize about Subway sandwiches, bananas, fruit, salad, ice cream, bagels with cream cheese, peanut butter.  My mind obsesses about the possibilities, the calories, what I will have to give up to choose one of these other options, the next time that I can let myself have a celebration.

I don't "affirm faith and relationships as the basis for celebrating" (Longacre).

When I do allow myself a food as a way to celebrate, I also co-opt it into my restrictive pattern and turn it into something completely devoid of joy.

Over Christmas, I had my first diet soda.  Before that, I had almost completely restricted soda since high school.

I do enjoy these zero calorie beverages, but I have changed them from a part of a celebratory day, like the last day of school or Christmas vacation, into another part of my system of restricting.

Instead of sitting down with my husband and drinking a diet soda to celebrate our ten year anniversary, I spend the day planning when I will drink it, worrying that caffeine is bad for me, Googling the effects of caffeine, feeling guilty that I spent 50 cents for the diet soda, and feeling sad that I will only have one and wishing that I could have more.

But I further strip any joy out of the experience once I actually drink the diet soda.  I will watch the clock and only drink at certain times, hoping to prolong the enjoyment of the drink, therefore not enjoying the actual celebration.  And wanting to hold onto these feelings of joy and excitement even longer, I will save the diet soda and drink it all week.

This allows me to think about it every day and plan when I will drink it and be excited about getting to drink it and hoping that I will feel the same elation I felt when I was celebrating with people I love.

So, instead of enjoying a nice 15 minute time of sitting with my husband to celebrate our ten year anniversary while I enjoy a diet soda, I will spend the next week guiltily gulping sips of it out of the bottle while I stand in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open.

By trying to make food devoid of any meaning for celebrations, I have made it carry all of the meaning of the day.

We create special food days to try and make a random day like the first Friday in June special.  But everyday can't be, and doesn't need to be, a celebration.  We don't need to cling to a feeling of joy or falsely manufacture days to celebrate.  Life is full of beautiful relationships and amazing faith worth affirming. 

Since I have discovered that food cannot be disentangled from relationships with people and celebrations, I want to re-prioritize what it means for me.  I want it to play a complementary role as I affirm faith and relationships as the basis for celebrating.

Reflections on the word "diet"

Here is something I wrote on August 6, 2013 while working on this blog and before the hiatus and brain re-wire work.

When I encounter the word diet, my mind sometimes follows this trajectory: losing weight, eating less, being healthy, working out, bathing suits, obsession, scale, my stomach feels fat, I am fat, I need to work out more, I should work out right now, How can I eat less today?

Sure, most people have had these thoughts run through their minds.  You're walking through the mall, and you see a display of swimsuits and wish that you were in better shape.  There's an ad on TV for the latest weight loss plan (gimmick), and you entertain the idea of learning more about it or maybe even trying it.

But my mind didn't use to stop with those thoughts.  My mind would latch onto a word, an image, an idea, a thought and not let go of it.

If someone mentioned that they were starting a diet, my mind would eventually lead me to think and believe that I needed to start a diet.  Depending on the day, I may have even convinced myself that the other person had hinted or even suggested that I too needed to go on a diet.

But before I drag you further into the dark creveces of my mind, I want to talk about the word diet. 

I would like to say that I understand and use the word diet as defined on Wikipedia as : "(nutrition), the sum of food consumed by an organism or group," as opposed to the definition of dieting: "the deliberate selection of food to control body weight or nutrient intake.: 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet

But I do not feel that I even talk about food in a healthy way, let alone think about, or eat it in a way that promotes health and well-being.

You may argue that it is a game of symantics, that my word choice does not matter.  But to me, it matters immensly.  Using the word "food", "nutrition", or "nutrients" for what I consume can feel as important to me as if someone calls me "white", "anglo", or "American".  These words feel very different as they are applied to me as a person.  The same is true for the words that I use for the stuff that I put in my mouth that I consume to survive.

Come journey with me on the path of re-wiring

I definitely took a hiatus. I'm not sure you can count multiple years as a hiatus, but that is what I called it. Since my last post there have been numerous Lenten seasons, life-altering moments, and many monotonous moments. So goes the life of human beings. I have done some very hard work with re-wiring my brain, which I wrote about a couple of years ago and just posted tonight. I just wanted to say that I am here. I am re-starting my writing. The format and content are changing, but the theme and message will remain the same. My project of cooking through the Mennonite cookbook did end with my last post in 2014, but I have so much to share from my journey to health and recovery. I plan to take you with me on this journey as I share what it was like to re-wire my brain through journal entries from the past few yeas and stories that have shaped my life. Thank you for reading.

Is four years still considered a hiatus?

I wrote this in 2018, and I am now ready to post it:

Wow, four years ago I took a hiatus from this project. From 2014 to the fall of 2015, I was on a slow trajectory of becoming more unhealthy and getting stuck in Anorexia. I am grateful for the people in my life who spoke into this and asked me to get help. I went back to my doctor to do blood work and began the slow and difficult process of re-feeding, yet again. I felt somewhat defeated as I had done this cycle before. But I also felt hopeful because I was doing it more because I wanted to and desired health for myself.

It was a process of re-gaining my physical health as I would still restrict and then reactive eat. I tried Whole 30, and a metabolism diet because I thought I was binging on sugar and thought I might be developing bulimia or a sugar-addiction. I tried the intuitive eating idea after reading the book by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. I made up a food plan that consisted of the exact same foods everyday, with the bulk of my food being a Subway sandwich and cookie. The people at Subway know me and my order. All of these things were me attempting to find a safe way to be healthy, to make my brain less anxious, to feel in control around food. But I was still eating only my foods, and only after 7PM when my kids had gone to bed. And I still wanted to avoid places and things with food.

Then, I rediscovered the blog by Tabitha Farrar in May and have been on a completely new path since then. In the past year, I've been able to express that sometimes my brain feels like I've gotten on the wrong path, I've gotten more anxious and narrow-focused. It's hard not to be obsessed with food and the anxiety surrounding that. When I read Tabitha's blog and book, Rehabilitate, Re-wire, Recover, she confirmed this feeling. Anorexia nervosa is a brain-based mental illness. My brain has been wired to fear food. And when my brain is around food, it shifts into the Parasympapthetic Nervous System, which is fight or flight. My brain was usually screaming at me to get away from food, to get it out of my house, to get it away from my husband and kids. Farrar explains that this was probably originally a mechanism that some people had during the days of migration. A person whose brain was wired with anorexia would go into migrate mode when put into nutritional depletion. So, I would have been the person that told the others to put the food down and move to a new area where the food was plentiful when we were running out of food or the herd was moving. All of this really resonated with me: the extreme fear around food and wanting to move away from it and get it out. I recognized all of these behaviors in myself.

But I had been going about recovery completely wrong. I thought that to feel safe around food, I had to completely control it. I asked my husband not to buy foods that I thought I would eat without control. I used to call these binges but have since learned that if I have a restrictive eating disorder, these are not binges. They are reactive eating experiences in response to restricting. So, I would try and eat only foods that I deemed safe. And these safe foods and safe experiences have changed so many times over the 20 years that anorexia has been activated in my brain. My brain always found a new way to change and adapt, so that I would continue restricting and be ready to migrate. But during the days of migration, the restriction served a short-term purpose to get the group to migrate to abundant food. And then people ate, and there wasn't nutritional inadequacy anymore. But for me, I kept going back to the restrictive and depleted nutritional state.

And when I would allow myself to eat unrestricted, it was still while in the Parasympathetic Nervous System. My brain and body were still aroused and anxious, and I was continuing to dig the trenches in the channels of my brain that said food is to be feared. And when you do have the foods that your body is asking for, you end up eating them in a quantity that is past satisfaction.

I started reading Farrar's book about re-wiring in May, 2018 and realized that to recover, I had to do all of the things that my brain is afraid to do. My brain is wired to fear food. I can re-wire it to not be afraid of food.

Some people may read this and misunderstand what I am describing with the general cultural hatred of fat and gaining weight. They are two separate issues, both worth addressing, and both very serious. A culture obsessed with weight, and food lifestyles, and ethical eating, and prolonging our lives, and our outward appearances creates an environment that is easy for eating disorders to get activated in those people pre-disposed to them. But there are many people who will go on diets and lose weight who do not have eating disorders, and their brains will not then be wired to fear food. Food will not become a threat to be avoided.

Here's an example to share how an anorexic brain responds to a food that it believes to be a threat. In May, 2018 we had teacher appreciation week. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to have candy or other sugar foods in my box or in the teacher's break room. One morning, I was teaching a reading lesson in a small group, and an e-mail popped up that said "Donuts in the break room". It was instantaneous. I read it. My brain perceive a threat, and I went into full-on, high alert, fight-or-flight mode. I was trying to plan the rest of my day to avoid walking anywhere near that room.