Healing From Almost Anorexic

  Yes, Almost Anorexia is a thing. Some people still have trouble believing or understanding it but nevertheless a lot of people find that they have been dancing on the edge with eating disorders of some kind for years and perhaps don't even know it. I found this book through the local library as I was searching for books to support me in what I felt was something that had always been there. The name of the book drew me in and made me curious and as I read it made a lot of sense to me. It made me look at things differently but it also had me questioning some things. Like, are all methods for losing weight basically encouraging people to develop eating disorders? I thought about it and my conclusion is not necessarily but maybe. Because eating disorders of any kind are what can be seen as an addictive behavior it would stand to reason that diets, exercises, eliminating entire food groups and the like would make it easy for an Anorexic or an Almost Anorexic to go deeper. Just as putting alcohol in the same room as an Alcoholic would undoubtedly tempt them and to fall off the wagon.

 But fitness and eating healthfully cannot be ignored so these things cannot be ignored by a person with Eating Disorders. Balance is tricky for everyone especially because there are so many opinions about what diets are healthy and what ones will "make you lose weight". Many times the opinions are put forward as facts when there are other opinions out there which conflict with them. All diet regimens and exercise regimens out there do not trust the person to rely on their innermost instincts to eat or exercises instinctively, naturally and healthfully. Over the years I did not try ever single diet out there but there were diets that I definitely hid behind. Veganism was one diet that I hid behind and within spiritual and yogic communities it was easy to hide behind periods of fasting.

 Many people think that Anorexia or eating disorders which are related are all about vanity or all about how one looks. It isn't as simple as that. It goes deeper. Sometimes when many things in an Anorexics life are out of control and it isn't in their hands the most readily accessible thing to have control over is all of the things that they can do to lose weight. It is very seductive because the greater culture supports people doing "anything" to lose weight. We have some fitness leaders that are similar to cult leaders who use their language to rope susceptible people in and pretty much say that losing weight is " all that they care about". This particular kind of philosophy is very dangerous and fitness leaders of all kinds including dance teachers owe it to their students to consider the words that come out of their mouths. To someone who is teetering at the edge of Almost Anorexia or Anorexia words from the mouths of a teacher can do much to send them over the edge. But teachers and fitness leaders also have great power to send people in the other direction towards health and a holistic quality of life.

 I never became so sick from Almost Anorexia that I had to be hospitalized but yes it does happen. On the outside people cannot see whether someone is Almost Anorexic or Anorexic until the person has lost a huge amount of weight in a short time or if the person wasn't able to disguise their behavior. A person can do a lot of damage to their body taking part in extreme measures to lose weight even if their body weight is 130-140 pounds. People tend to not realize that but it's a truth.

 Over the years I checked myself in the mirror or windows of shops a lot. I constantly felt self conscious but it didn't stop me from Belly Dancing, being an Exotic Dancer or modelling nude for drawing classes. My perception of myself would shift radically and over the years I decided that I could trust no mirror and especially no camera lens. Aside from that many things outside of my control got in the way of my progress and eclipsed my dreams. It was too difficult to hold onto my dreams and to see them come to fruition which felt vulnerable and powerless. I also expected myself to somehow be able to see my dreams through even with all that was going on and had been going on. So a lot of the time the most accessible thing was to work out a lot and to study methods for changing my diet to lose weight. But both of these things while stressed out are very hard on the system. The body and mind doesn't handle changes of diet or athletic exercise while under deep stress. And then when methods don't work or come quickly enough it's easy to think of how easy it would be to skip a meal or skip two, or three. Or to limit your intake to broth.

 Healing is possible for people with eating disorders but it takes concentrated effort and a compassionate understanding and acceptance that at times you might fall off a little or that thoughts related to eating disorders may come up. In my own practice I resist the temptation to fast or to do Intermittent Fasting. I resist becoming completely 100% vegetarian or vegan again because I know how all of these diets affected my body and mind. And I know how eliminating food groups as being sinful affects me. I also remind myself of my priorities and tell myself what matters like the fact that I haven't developed Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia which runs in my family. I am grateful that not only I can still walk but I can dance. I am also grateful that after a bout of having pain in my knees that they are better,that I can do level changes and floor work. I focus on my strengths and my passions. I don't deny myself to have them so that I can spend the majority of my time making myself a size 6. My body is my body with muscle and flesh. The only time I have really lost weight was when I had a cyst on my ovary which blocked my organs. This meant I was throwing up and feeling sick unlike anything I had felt before. I could not eat for weeks. But thinking like an Almost Anorexic I loved that I was losing weight. With everything I was going through at the time that wasn't in my control and was absolutely horrible and even with being as sick as I had been, I loved that I had lost so much weight. And when I was better before I got worse again, I was afraid of gaining it back again. These are the thoughts of someone with Almost Anorexia or Anorexia. The more a person with an eating disorder indulges in the behaviors the more it changes brain chemistry and therefore the way they think. It becomes harder and harder to rationalize or to gain perspective, to create real priorities. That is why it is very important to not eliminate any food group completely unless the person is allergic or intolerant.

 I both trust and don't trust what I see when I look in the mirror or a picture of me. I know that my eye sees better than a camera lens and that many things are going on to distort the image. I also know that not all mirrors are equal, lighting effects everything. And the state of mind and the way a person looks out onto the world at everything and themselves changes the way a reflection or image is seen too. When I look I remind myself it is an illusion that doesn't reflect reality and it doesn't reflect all of who I am either. I hold myself back from body checking as much as I used to. But I also look to see beauty and grace. It's important to be able to stop body checking in a bad way. To refrain from that but then to be able to look for the good and the beauty. It's also important to remember that perception can change day by day or within a day depending on what is going on. And to notice that when your perception changes so quickly within such a quick amount of time to be stubborn about not believing it. That your perception of yourself and your body and wanting to indulge in losing weight and body obsessive behaviors has only changed from some outside event. "Feeling fat" is not an emotion yet to many people with eating disorders it comes to be a prominent feeling that takes the place of other negative feelings. It becomes a way of keeping other difficult feelings from awareness. Or sometimes it corresponds with a strong held belief that this culture actually encourages. Such as
" I will never be successful if I am not "thin." This too has to be questioned and recognized for the illusion it is because it has absolutely no root in reality. Being thin does not accord respect no matter how much people believe it. So called thin or skinny people can be badgered and poked at all the time for their shape or size. They can be called not thin enough, the wrong shape, too thin. Everyone has an opinion about what our bodies should be and obviously there is no way to win except to give it up. All of the effort to win such a thing truly is not worth it. In this game no one ever wins. They only lose. In extreme cases they lose their lives or have to live the rest of their lives with a health issue that has been made permanent by their eating disorder.

 To stop buying what we're being sold, ideas about what being thin means, means the beginning of a quality life. Almost every day I do dance practice or do a weight/cardio workout and I am accountable by how much I do. It's my job to keep it under control so that I have energy and time for other things in my life that matter to me. I do practice a lot but I am able to handle it now that my life is different. Exercise is far easier and healthier when not under extreme stress and the body recuperates and heals quicker and has more endurance. I dance for the sake of the art of it rather than for the sake of losing pounds. Sometimes a voice pipes up and tries to hold onto hope that the amount of practice I put in will make me into a size 6. But I resist it because it changes how practice feels. Instead of practice feeling like it is alive and breathing it feels more like I'm waiting to exhale. I resist because numbers and sizes mean absolutely nothing and the way sizes are defined changes from country to country and decade to decade or year by year. This is why I never encourage anyone to do Belly Dance, Yoga or even lifting weights as a means to lose weight. My philosophy is intuitive health and balance in the body, mind and spirit. I have done a lot of forms of exercise and there is no such thing as the magic exercise for losing weight to the size or shape you think that you should be able to achieve. For some people it takes an unreal amount of extreme work to achieve some kind of culturally accepted standard. It might look healthy on the outside when really they aren't healthy or happy.

 Addiction to exercise is a thing and can be separate from an eating disorder but usually is seen playing right alongside of calorie restriction and obsessive calorie planning. It means being obsessive about planning workouts, endless hours of working out, ignoring injuries and sickness to work out, ignoring other signs from the body to slow down as well as ignoring damage done to career and relationships. However if being a fitness trainer is a persons whole life and their behavior is creating problems for them then it's very easy for their problem to be seen as something to look up to and emulate. It also creates the perfect atmosphere to find others to share in the same philosophies and ways of life to normalize unhealthy behavior. At times my addiction to working out meant that even if I had already done a difficult work out my mind said that I still had to do more because I hadn't done enough cardio or hadn't done enough muscle groups. It meant planning my workouts a lot. And it definitely meant that I was too exhausted to do anything else. All of it left me feeling like I hadn't done enough which is the same thing someone with Almost Anorexia, Anorexia or Anorexia/Bulimia thinks. And to top it all off the main thought is "I can't do or become these things until I have lost this amount of weight, become a certain size or specific shape. Once I have achieved it then I can do or be anything and my success in all of thee things will be certain!"

 It has been found that eating disorders are learned from the culture and media as well as roles of status in the 1800s but also that it can be inherited. Because we inherit genes it is likely that we had grown up with someone carrying those genes and therefore watched their eating disorder behaviors. I grew up with a mother who not only was/is a Paranoid Schizophrenic but who was Anorexic. Even as a little girl who did not know anything abut eating disorders I thought it odd when I found boxes of Ex-Lax in the bathroom. I found it odd that she only had half of a grape-fruit for breakfast or when she ate differently than the rest of us but at the same time all of it was normal. Including that she did workout a lot everyday. I watched her go from her extremely self diligent behavior to letting everything go. She started smoking, drank lots of coffee, stopped exercising and just watched tv or read the same Romance novels over and over again. She never went outside anymore and had other people including me run errands and take on things that should be a parents job all. Of course as a child I didn't do something right or the way it should've been or I did something that should have been done but was seen as useless to her. Eating disorders run deeper obviously than just the media around us. They simply take advantage of a sales a opportunity of people who are already ripe for the picking.

 Being extremely poor it also came naturally to me to know how to fast later in life. I had already been through the experiences of going without food for days or being severely limited in food selection. When I tried Intermittent Fasting in the past year or so I found myself feeling like my old self when I was a teen ager. There would be a long time of having not much food. Then the check would come in at the first of the month and we'd by our groceries that would do us until the next check. I'd be ravenous, scarf food down and basically have to binge. When your starving the body/mind takes over and eats a lot of food quickly. In some cases a person has difficulty eating a normal amount of food again. When I did Intermittent Fasting I found myself eating more than I usually would and not being able to stop. I remember eating a regular sized meal but then eating a whole large bowl of popcorn. I did not like feeling out of control like that again. The feeling of being desperate for food and not getting enough all while feeling guilty about it can't be explained. You feel like you're failing or are short in discipline or something. So I vowed to never do Intermittent Fasting again because not only was it an Eating Disorder behavior which was normalized, it served to encourage more eating disorder behaviors and thoughts. I realized that Intermittent Fasting could easily be the gateway diet to an Anorexic entering into a Binge and Purge cycle. All in all, people who believe in Intermittent Fasting even say that when your done your fast that you can eat as much of whatever you want within a specific time period. I also so them on forums defending their behavior. They would be defensive and complain with each other about how people close to them thought they had an eating disorder which is pretty much what people with eating disorders do. They commiserate on-line or with anorexic friends about how people don't understand and say they have a problem all while they believe they do not. It is no different than the denial of a person addicted to anything.

  People tend to think that an Anorexic hates food or hates eating. On the contrary. They are obsessed with food and will find anyway they can to be part of the cycle of food without actually eating it. Behavior such as cooking a lot of great food and serving it to everyone else and getting a great joy that is almost a high to them to see other people get to eat the food that they both loathe and love. I never got that far and never Binged and Purged thank God/Goddess but I wondered if I saw this behavior in a waitress who was waiting on me and my husband at a restaurant one summer. She was more thin than what I could see was healthy or natural and she had a different gleam in her eye about serving us food and finding out how much we had enjoyed it. Again it's another way that a person could potentially hide behind a job, career or way of life where it would make it harder for people to see. Where it would be easier for people to say "They're just naturally that skinny. They don't have a problem because they love food so much and I've seen them really enjoy eating!" That's true if the person is Bingeing and Purging.

  A lot of people believe that Belly Dance helps people to over come their issues with self image and in cases that is true. But I know from my own experience and from a few others who have spoken out that Belly Dance was not the solution to their patterns of thinking and behavior. In some cases such as mine it put me face to face with these thoughts and triggered them to which I had to try extra hard to silence them. But for many years I was more on it's side than I am now. I had more of the thought that I would do whatever I could and it wouldn't be unhealthy or an eating disorder per se. No, a lot of what I was doing and the way I was thinking is seen as fine, normal, healthy for anyone but I know now it wasn't and isn't. People are encouraged to be confident all while being on board with the "lose five pounds of fat and look lean" train. It's a contradiction that leaves everyone feeling like they are neither here or there, neither this or that and swinging between extremes sometimes very quickly.

  So when people talk about the issues with the Body Positivity Movement that has sprung in the last years I tend to question it. I take what they are saying into consideration but then come back to knowing what I know through experience. That the Body Positivity Movement and more people speaking out had more affect on my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health than being a Belly Dancer, Weight Lifter, or even a Yogi ever did. Some physical trainers on dvds triggered me with the way they talked more than others and the way Yoga had come to be sold didn't help me but harmed me. I had been doing yoga all my life and suddenly felt like I didn't belong. That I needed to make my body "look" like I did yoga to be a successful Yoga Teacher. Some people in the Yoga world hide behind the spirituality and self discipline when really it is silently more about getting the Yoga Body and the Yoga Butt. And of course it's really easy to hide behind fasting and specific cleanses and diets because it's "Yogic" at the moment. An underlying belief that flesh is undisciplined and toxic which needs to be cleansed from the body I have seen. And I totally picked up on it and it settled down to make itself at home in my life all while I knew what bullshit it was. A lot happened for me to quit teaching and of not putting so much of myself into the yoga path but ultimately it was a good thing for me to have distance from the current form Yoga was in at the time. And it took a long time for me to strengthen my ideals and to feel safe teaching yoga again after so much going wrong including being assaulted. For a long time I could not associate Yoga without all of these things and I longed for the days before I got lost in the Yoga world even though the seeds for Yoga being associated with thinness were sprung from the 80s. My mother did Yoga to be thin because the books she had would specify certain practices as helping women to lose weight and to look young. It was all about beauty and at times in my teen years when I was doing yoga in the hallway of our trailer I was susceptible to those messages from the book about Hatha Yoga we had. Later on in my teen years I simply did the yoga as a form of spirituality and of relieving tight muscles and fatigue. As a kid before school age I had no idea why people would put themselves in odd positions. To me of course they were funny and because I practiced yoga at a young age I still carry my early sense of humor into the practice. I also carry the awareness that the perception of a thing and an experience of a thing can change drastically depending on how you are lead to perceive it and experience it. That much of what we perceive is changeable and an illusion. That it takes a lot of work to distinguish the real from the illusion especially when a whole culture is selling an idea that is an illusion to be real and healthy.

  I had to throw away everything I had been sold about Yoga and get back to the basics of Yoga with true integrity. Not the yoga that had been parading itself is being it, of being the real one with integrity. Like a lot of people I fell in because I needed something larger than myself to put faith and belief in. I wanted an old tradition to feel enfolded by. But I realized that the tradition sold as old was actually quite new and infused with the ideals of modern culture. That healthy is thin, that thin and healthy is the image of a proper and real yogi. That yogis eat like this, sleep and wake up like that. A lot of poor behavior and lack of awareness can hide behind these superficial yogic practices that are sold as the answer to all of our problems. Any practice no matter if it's called yoga or not is superficial if the intent is superficial hiding behind the guise of a meaningful spirituality. If the intent is to say " I am a Master Yogi."  It doesn't really lead to what yoga really is or to what is healthy and hopefully people eventually come to realize that they are wrapping yoga in the disease of the culture acting like it's somehow set apart, above or different than the western culture. If yoga or any practice only serves to create more self doubt and a distrust of ones own inner guidance and instincts it fails to be what it's selling itself as being. Disease and degradation of mental health and the quality of our lives increase as we doubt ourselves more. We can even believe that something like Yoga is helping us when in reality we might be handing our power over more than before depending on the teacher. And depending on the teacher, if they are skilled, experienced and fearless to face these things they will be able to help people to guide themselves and to hear their instincts. That kind of teacher points to their own body wisdom, instincts and inner strength and honors the students strengths and limitations rather than taking it personally if the student says "No."

  Strengthening our own ability to hear our own wisdom in everything we do is the solution to our healing. Whether it is an eating disorder of any kind, an addiction of any kind, mental illness, physical illness, we grow stronger the more we can honor our deep instincts and be 100% involved in our healing process because we are the healers. The healers, the gurus, the teachers, the people, and the structures outside of ourselves should only serve as guides to point us back to what we have forgotten or come to lose touch with n ourselves. We forget how much power that we hold and how much wisdom that we already have to create the life that we dream. We doubt how much we already know and doubt that we already are "pure" enough or "cleansed" enough. We forget that anything we do to nurture and guide ourselves is only adding and strengthening more to all of the great that is already there instead of it creating purity, beauty and grace from nothing. When we look to teachers or books, religions, spiritual practices as making us into something better this intent weakens us rather than strengthens us. It actually cancels out the effects of practice or studying spiritual texts. We already are that which we seek. We need only to do what we need to do to see it manifest in our lives in accordance with our dreams and what we are meant to do.

  In extreme cases where much damage has been done and behaviors set in addictive behaviors such as with eating disorder everything or almost everything I just said would likely fall on deaf ears. Living with a person who is mentally ill all of my life I know from experience that you can't reason with a person who is not in their right mind. That if you are going to get a message across to them that you have to do everything you can to understand their way of thinking even if it is crazy or alien to your own. And then to work from that to communicate with them. Sometimes reason does break through but only when it is delivered in just the right way that does not create a knee jerk reaction for them to send their walls up and believe me it's very easy to do. It will happen but if you know someone who you are concerned about for any of these reasons you must do all that you can to refine what you are saying in a way that they can understand and actually allow to sink in. That being said a person who is in the later stages of Anorexia can't be reasoned with. They need help usually by force to stabilize their physical functions as well as their mind. And they need to be separated from the cultures that support and encourage their behavior and thinking processes devoted to losing weight. All of this needs to be done so that they have the ability to reason and to have the ability for self care again. Guilting won't work, shaming will not work, reason will not work. A person in middle to advanced stages needs help that is often very expensive. Do all you can to educate yourself about Eating Disorders in all of the ways they can manifest and if you think you might have an eating disorder get help. Whether you are a dancer or not , when you're ready the world needs to hear your voice and needs your story about your relationship with yourself and eating disorders. I know that everyone who has spoken up in documentaries and on-line especially if they are a Belly-Dancer that it has helped me.

 I wish for healing to anyone reading this who has suffered in silence for years with an eating disorder. You deserve a quality life! All of us do and that is what I offer to myself everyday no matter what.