What is "the recovery choice"?

Sometimes my ideas about food are so complicated. I have no idea if there is some deep emotional root to this situation, however at the moment I really don't think so.

I am weird about food. I am trying not to be black and white. I am trying to have balance. I know someone who gave me some advice that her nutritionist gave her. It sounded simple enough- when she is choosing what to eat to make her meal plan, she should ask herself, "What is the recovery choice? And what is the eating disorder choice?" Easy right?

Or not.

Today I was planning on baking something with the kids. I fully enjoy cooking and the creative experience it is for me, just as I enjoy writing and art. Mostly I like making healthy recipes for my family, but I have incorporated more baking as of late because I have four January birthdays (including Piper's first birthday) and one December. And everyone wants something special, which I'm trying to accommodate, because well, it's not the kids' fault I am fertile in the spring. So I am practicing in the hope to have some mad skillz here soon. And decorating these treats is actually fun and relaxing to me (I'm basically the only person in the world that finds running around a hot kitchen with an infant strapped to her back in a baby wearing contraption relaxing but nonetheless....)

However, ED circumvented my plans, or maybe not. Maybe I am making this woefully more complicated than it is. Dylan wants Spider-Man cupcakes. Oh heavens, this requires a ton of red dye. I find this incredibly unnatural and am not planning on eating one, but hey, let children be children right? Or not. How bad in the scheme of badness is red food dye for kids? I figure I am yet again overthinking this in a moment of serious orthorexic anxiety, and go to the store for (gulp) red dye and marshmallows.

And this is where I choke a bit on my unsweetened ice coffee with organic milk. The latest issue of "Eating Well" has come out, and apparently one can make a natural (notice I did not say low-calorie, I am fully aware I am not on a diet, and neither are my kids) sugar cookie dough, and decorate these with sprinkles and icing tinted with cranberry juice concentrate and green tea and egg whites, rather than a host of unknown ingredients and chemical additives. My natural hippy heart skips a beat and starts gathering the whole, pure foods necessary to make these cookies. They are perfect! They are moderately healthy and they are still cookies, after all. This, I decide, is the recovery choice. Except no one will die from artificial crap at the same time.

And then..... Dylan. Cranberry juice cannot possibly yield a deep enough red for Spider-Man. It's just a simple fact. So I go, and gather my packaged dye, conflicted. My brain is flooded with thoughts and I walk the aisles of the store for an hour.

Finally I decide that we will do both, although we cannot do both TODAY. I pay for my scary red stuff and marshmallows in a package and decide we will do natural Christmas cookies when it is closer to the holiday.

Dude, I hope this meets the definition of balance. Because I am conflicted and exhausted and starting to rethink the idea of baking. Anything. At all. Ever.

Oh this is just not easy......

They call it a mental illness for a reason- it simply doesn't make any rational sense. Someday I will post more about treatment during pregnancy, and how deep I was in the disorder, and how for some reason I was completely petrified of gaining weight, but yet I did understand I needed to do that, even if I needed serious help accomplishing the six time a day decision to nourish myself and my daughter. The reality of the situation, was that Piper grew and flourished. It was I who suffered dizziness and nearly fainted from excessive exercise and crashing blood sugars..... That's because she took the calories I was eating and I, well, starved.

Anyway. Fast forward to the present moment, where I am 10 months postpartum and my beautiful girl thrives on both breast milk and solids. And I'm underweight. I've been sold on the concept of not losing any more weight. I mean, once I started losing, it was like this rapid descent into hell that I could not stop if I wanted to. The road to anorexia is like a bit of snow landing on the ground. Oh that snow is pretty and soft and you hope a few more flakes will fall and join it. And they do. And the next thing you know this giant, out of control snowball is sliding down the hill, straight where you live, right for your home, picking up more and more snow until it smashes into you and yours and takes you down. That is the disease. It is a soul-sucking, mind-numbing, emotionally blunting, hauntingly terrifying and yet sneaky with how alluring it can certainly be. Who doesn't want to be fit? Healthy? Most people, but no one, and I mean no one, experiences the drive for thinness like an anorexic. It's like a lifetime goal for us, and if the disorder had its way we would starve ourselves straight to death and it would still never be enough.....

But. You know what? A little treatment team intervention with the hubs made me realize that the eating disorder wasn't going to win because no one was going to let it. So I ate the meal plan and waited to get fat. And gained..... Nothing. My needs at the moment are apparently quite high. I have gotten myself to a physical state in which if I eat a normal amount of calories I will actually lose weight and right now I'm eating a hell of a lot and barely maintaining my weight. I am really really scared of what I am going to have to eat in order to actually gain anything. Because in reality I can't understand why I have to do this at all! Ok, I stopped losing. I'm not dying or anything. Why can't we just leave well enough alone?

Or what if I dig a little deeper, and I leave behind the urge I have to always be the story teller, and stop fixating, for a moment, on numbers and behaviors like restricting and exercise, and ask myself why? Why is it that when I agreed to gain this weight that I haven't gained, I went crazy orthorexic and started making literally everything I was going to eat myself, in order to know what was in it, precisely? I was in the kitchen, cooking and freezing stuff, and ensuring my status of fruits and vegetables consumed was optimum, all with a baby on my back. Exhausting. And there I go again, focusing on what really doesn't matter.

So I am taking these baby steps in which I forge a life where the ED is not a comfortable friend (who has borderline personality disorder and really wants to take me down, but I have Stockholm syndrome and keep coming back for more)..... I am trying everything people! I distract. Anthony and I are now into Parenthood. We're totally addicted. We watch like three episodes a night as we are trying to catch up to the current season. I do stuff with my kids that is fun and doesn't always involve the gym. I am mindful when I exercise, ok not really, but I try. I stay off all the damn ads proclaiming how to lose more fat and what ten foods to never eat on Facebook. I am trying to be more social, but dude, I have anxiety. I'm failing at this. Next I am going back to church to try and reconnect spiritually. God got me nine years of sobriety, he can possibly get me to maintain a normal adult weight and eat like a normal human again too, right? Although honestly, divorcing myself from wine was a hell of a lot simpler than this six time a day decision I have to make. Eat. Eat healthy, but not overly so. Exercise. But not too much. Just because a little bit is healthy doesn't mean a lot is healthier. Good god my head is spinning. I am also trying art journaling. I love art, and I love writing. Let's see what happens when we put them together.

Digging deeper still, beyond the obvious fact I have control issues, and food and exercise are very safe things that I can try to control, and that I have a lot of dysmorphia regarding my size, it is very hard to let go of the ED. It's the one thing in this crazy, child-centered, stressful, chaotic life that is 100% mine. Kid refuses to nap? Start adding up the day's calories in your head. Financial problem being thrown in my lap? Whatever, I'll swim the English Channel and skip my evening snack. And in the morning I'll feel thinner. It's difficult to be an extremely emotional person who is not comfortable with emotion..... And then there are four kids with birthdays all in January, one with a birthday in December, and a couple of holidays sandwiched in for good measure. A normal person would take this opportunity to gain weight and run with it (not, ahem, die of anxiety over like two bites of cake.)
I'm trying to plan stuff to make them feel special without killing the budget, which will be awesome and spectacular. Because this time I am going to do art projects with Jules, and bake really cool birthday cakes, and swim for the joy of it. I'm going to write letters to my almost 11 year old while he still loves reading them, and run and play with my toddlers. And I am going to cuddle and nurse this baby girl for as long as she'll let me because she is our last. Once in a while I take a snap shot of the precious times with my brain, because I know someday they're  all gonna grow up and Anthony will have our calm again. But right now we have little kids that love us so much yet stress us almost to our very limits.

But I got this. I got this mommy thing. And I do it a hell of a lot better when I'm not hungry.

The Beginning

I guess I shall start by explaining what exactly this blog is about- I have blogged about attachment parenting, and all the parenting views I still hold dearly, but you know, when my life fell apart as a result of a deadly disease (one I was overly confident was far in the past), I started to care less and less about Facebook arguments and being "right" in the mommy wars, and more about the war I was waging to survive my pregnancy and nourish my baby. And compassion. Empathy. I started to feel a lot more of it in the way I addressed other moms. Because you just don't know what someone is suffering through that is not on the surface. In fact, I've become a bit jaded towards the so-called crunchy lifestyle because the myriad of hyperbolic Facebook posts and articles about the evils of different foods- gmo's, dairy, gluten, sugar, etc, had and really continue to impact me. Also the idea that psychiatry is toxic and the "go off your meds and onto some homeopathic medicine" attitude bothers me. A lot. These sentiments are harmful to those who require meds to live. So the short story is yes, I breast feed my kids into toddlerhood, and co-sleep with two babies and do not circumcise. But I also know the darkness of mental illness and that life is not always simple. Everyone has a story.

Anyway, this blog is about anorexia. Yes, there is almost an alluring aspect of this disease to both those who have it and those who don't, and the comments the anorexic receives do nothing but perpetuate the disease.......

"Oh you eat soooo healthy! How disciplined you are."
"Wow, you have the perfect body.... I really need to exercise like you do."

As I said this blog is about anorexia. In particular it is about relapsing into this illness during pregnancy and postpartum. These are challenging times for women in so many ways- the stress and identity change of becoming a mom, the body image issues that come the dramatic changes opregnancy, and the very real pressure to get "back to normal" very quickly after giving birth. And for those of us who struggled with an eating disorder before pregnancy, this can be a triggering time.

And here is where I put my trigger warning. Read on at your own risk as I don't intend to censor myself here.

I began restricting and compulsively exercising before Piper was conceived. I thought I was ok because I was still at a normal weight. When I found out I was pregnant, I could not eat enough to gain weight and both of our lives were in jeopardy. I had lost hunger cues, and thus the ability to eat intuitively. I was terrified of gaining too much weight, when in reality I was gaining nothing. At 11 weeks I was hospitalized and rehydrated and re-fed and sent to a treatment facility to try and recover. Six weeks later I entered a partial hospitalization program because I was just too deep in my disorder to recover on an outpatient level. For ten weeks I spent 11 hours a day, 3 meals, and 2 snacks with other women suffering from eating disorders. I spent so many hours sitting around that table with the lovely view of trees and beautiful water in the most idyllic northwest setting, freaking out over food. I was so entrenched in the disease, so starved because what little I was taking in was being taken by Piper, that I had emotionally disconnected from everything but my eating disorder; from the daughter I was growing, from the family I had left at home. I had checked out completely, but I had (and still have) this amazing treatment team. Feeding Piper. That was my goal, at least until I could find enough grace towards myself to nourish myself. In many ways I still keep going because I am feeding Piper- she is still mostly breastfed while she explores solid food. My therapist said once, "Your eating disorder is so harsh to you that it won't even give you grace for being pregnant."

Yes. Indeed.

"You must do the thing you fear you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt