Picky Eating or Eating Disorder?

I was probably 9 or 10 years old when I had my first "eating disorder" thought. We were at my grandparents house for family Christmas and there was chocolate cake for dessert. I loved chocolate cake. I was so excited when my aunt cut me a rather large piece and then someone said, "You're going to eat that whole thing?" in a disdainful way. I didn't love chocolate cake anymore. I can still remember this moment so clearly. It was when my whole life changed. 

After that, I started noticing how my clothes were tighter on me, especially around my tummy. I noticed that my friends were thinner than me as well as my brother. By no fault of his own, I have always, to this day, wished I had his body instead of my own. While growing up, I started to develop these thoughts categorizing foods into "boy foods" and "girl foods." "Boy foods" were mostly junk foods: potato chips, sugary cereal, chocolatey desserts, basically anything greasy or sugary. "Girl foods" were the blander, "healthier" foods: pretzels, rice, plain pasta... I think I doing this because I knew my brother could eat these things and still stay skinny but I couldn't, so instead I would just say, "I don't like that," even if I may have actually wanted it. This is where I began being classified as a "picky eater." 

I never realized that my picky eating was disordered eating until I got to college and started going to therapy. See the thing with my version of picky eating wasn't that I would try something and realize that I don't like it. My picky eating was refusing to eat something in the first place, usually because in my mind, it was "bad." This in itself is considered a form of Anorexia: the refusal to eat. Then with anorexia almost always comes the binge eating of these so-called "bad foods," normally in secret while alone. Which eventually leads to the purging of said foods, enter: Bulimia. So you can see how this "picky eating" quickly became more than meets the eye. 

I'm definitely not saying all "picky eaters" have underlying eating disorders, that's not true at all. I'm trying to help you watch out for signs of more than just picky eating. This is something I've dealt with for a majority of my life, a lot I which I'm angry that I let it affect me the way it did and that it held me back from so many opportunities. I'm hoping that by sharing my stories, I can help someone else struggling know that they're not alone, and help others understand that mental health is more than just a bad day.

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Overthinking About Overthinking...

You know how at the end of Finding Nemo, all the fish from the dentist office finally make it  back to the ocean but are still trapped in those plastic bags? That's what it feels like to have anxiety. 

You can see the whole ocean and all these possibilities of endless things that you want to do but you're stuck in this plastic bag and you just can't do them no matter how hard you try...except the ocean is life and the plastic bag is your brain. 

All too often, people assume social anxiety is just being nervous around people or being too scared to try new things, but once again, you're wrong. Anxiety is crippling. 

For example, there was this one time in college where it was raining and I didn't feel like taking the bus to class so I drove my car and parked in in an apartment building parking lot near by. As I got out of my car and began walking towards campus, a guy said to me, "You know this is a private parking lot right? You shouldn't park here, you'll probably get towed." And just that comment from a guy, probably trying to be nice and look out for me, was enough to literally wrack my body/mind with anxiety and I got back in my car, skipped class, drove home and got in bed and didn't speak to anyone for probably the rest of the night. That was about three years ago and it has still stuck with me as one of the most ridiculous bouts of anxiety I've ever had. 

See the thing with anxiety is that you know it's ridiculous and unrealistic. You know this but yet you still can't break through that "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" surrounding your brain. Logically, I should have just taken that guy's advice, parked else-where and still went to class but my brain told me that just doing that one small thing like getting noticed parking in the wrong area made me the biggest failure and I would be better off hiding from anyone so I couldn't possibly fail that badly again.

Another common occurrence with me (and why most of my friends hate me, I swear), is communication, especially through texting. I'll get a text from a friend while I'm working or busy in some way and I'll tell myself I'll text them back later. Then I, more often than not, will forget to respond until the next day and when this happens, I am sent into a over-thinking spiral of, "Did I wait too long to respond that it would be weird if I respond now? Because if I say I was busy or at work they'll wonder why I didn't just respond afterward and if I say I forgot then they're going to think I didn't care enough to respond to them even though I really do care about them, I just genuinely forgot..." When this happens, I usually end up just never texting back which is really awful because that really makes it seem like I don't care at all which isn't true.

Just typing all of this out really makes me see how ridiculous it all is while also making me anxious about how absurd it actually sounds...but that's also what I'm trying to explain. While my logical mind knows that it's unrealistic and absurd, my anxious mind is looking at it through that goddamn "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" again and can't make a hole in the bag big enough for me to calm the logic of my brain and break out into the ocean. 

While my meds help with all of this a little bit, it's still quite a struggle daily. I'll talk about medication another time though, as that's a whole other lengthy explanation in which I'll probably use more crazy analogies such as cartoon fish in bags near P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. 

"But you don't look like you have an eating disorder..."

"I haven't eaten all day. God, I'm so anorexic."

"She's not skinny enough to have an eating disorder."

"Ugh, she's so skinny, she's practically anorexic." 

No.

Stop.


These may be some of the most toxic sentences ever spoken for someone who has an eating disorder.
As someone who has dealt with various types of disordered eating since they were 12 (not diagnosed until I was 18), I can tell you that there is no one way that an eating disorder "looks."
Yes, the most common idea of what an ED looks like is a very skinny female with sunken in eyes and bones protruding, but that is only a small percentage of people who cope with an eating disorder.
In the USA around 20 million women and 10 million men deal with some sort of eating disorder at some point in their life (NEDA). The most commonly known are anorexia and bulimia. But what you may not know is that there are other kinds of EDs and some people may have more than one type.
There are really four(-ish) types of EDs (NEDA):

1. Anorexia Nervosa: restriction of food/drink resulting in inadequate food/drink intake with a fear of weight-gain.
2. Bulimia Nervosa: the purging of food/drink through vomiting, excessive exercise, and/or laxatives.
3. Binge Eating Disorder: seemingly uncontrollable eating/drinking of excessive amounts of food.
4. EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified): any other eating disorder that causes significant distress in your life but cannot be defined by the other three categories.

Each of these types have many different signs and symptoms and can all be deadly.

Before I continue, I would like to make it extremely clear to anyone who doesn't know: EATING DISORDERS ARE NOT SOLELY ABOUT FOOD/WEIGHT/BODY IMAGE. Yes, those are major factors in what composes them, but what really drives an ED is perfection, and the definition of "perfection" looks different for all of us.

Most of the people who have EDs don't "look" like they have one. The reason the idea that there is a way EDs "look" is so triggering is that when we hear this, it flips a switch inour brains. See, an ED will always tell us that we've failed. "You're not skinny enough." "You don't have good enough self control." "You're not 'sick enough.'" Essentially, you're a failure. When we hear things like those at the beginning of this post, that validates these thoughts and the cycle gets worse.

So please, try and help change the stigma that mental health problems are not adjectives and are not to be taken lightly.

OCD is Not an Adjective

Every day I hear someone off-handedly say, "God, I'm so OCD. I just have to have everything organized." This drives me crazy for many reasons. Reason number one, say it with me: "OCD IS NOT AN ADJECTIVE." You are not OCD because you like your car clean. You are not OCD because you like your desk tidy. You may be OCD if you think something bad will happen to you if your desk isn't tidy or if your car isn't clean. Reason number two, OCD stands for "obsessive/compulsive disorder." This means that it encompasses a variety of feelings, obsessive ones and compulsive ones. Compulsive feelings are the ones that people normally associate with OCD, having to do things a certain number of times, needing everything placed "just so," and keeping everything excessively clean. Obsessive feelings are when you focus on one seemingly insignificant aspect of your life and feeling like bad things will happen if you don't do it "correctly" or do it the same every day. Essentially, it's "obsessing" over these things. Someone with OCD may lean more towards the obsessive side of the spectrum or the compulsive side of the spectrum, or both.

I have obsessive OCD. I'd like to show you a glimpse into my brain throughout the day. These are the thoughts that go through my head every day. I tried to pick the most common obsessions I have and make them detailed so that maybe you'll understand what OCD really is.

6:15 am: My alarm goes off. I turn it off and lay in bed for an extra five minutes when my second alarm goes off. I get out of bed and go to the bathroom. Yesterday was a good day and I got dressed before I brushed my teeth, right? So today I should get dressed before I brush my teeth. Wait…did I get dressed before I brushed my teeth yesterday or did I brush my teeth before I got dressed? Okay, I’ll get dressed before I brush my teeth then see how today goes and if it goes well then I’ll continue doing it in that order.

6:40 am: While I’m driving to work, I press the button to use the cruise in my car, mentally reminding myself NOT to forget to turn it off before I park and get out otherwise I’ll have a bad day.

10:00 am: While messing around on my phone, I notice that the pictures in the album on my phone end evenly with four at the bottom. No wonder he hasn’t texted me back, those stupid pictures have been like that. I go through and delete two random photos so that the pictures line up the way that they are supposed to. Doing this reminds me to double check my Tumblr app and make sure that my fitness blog is the last one I reblogged to and not my personal blog because that would REALLY screw up everything.

1:00 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone.

1:03 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone again.

1:07 pm: I change the lockscreen on my phone back to the original lockscreen it was because I’m scared of what may happen if it’s changed.

4:30 pm: When I get home from work, I make sure that everything in my car is where it’s supposed to be and that all the trash is taken out and thrown away. Frantically, I put my makeup that I carried in my purse that day away in its proper place, I should never have brought it in the first place. It ruined my whole day because my purse should only hold my wallet, sunglasses, and chapstick. How could I have been so stupid?

6:00 pm: I take a shower. Okay, I’ve been doing the same routine for a while now and things have been going alright, right? So should I keep the same order or change it up and see what happens? What if I wash my body while I let the conditioner sit in my hair instead of rinsing it out then washing my body? What if I wash my body with the bar soap instead of the loofah and body wash? WHAT IF I wash my body: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg instead of left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg? No, no that would be HORRIBLE. Just do what you’ve been doing. Wait, I have to shave my legs…which leg do I shave first? I can’t remember which one it was last week that worked right. Oh no…okay, whichever my hand goes to first will be the one I shave first and…it’s the right, okay, that’s okay, no problem. Okay, now should I dry myself off while standing in the shower still or do I step out onto the bathmat and dry off? I’ll step out and dry off.

6:40 pm: He doesn’t respond to my snapchat the way I want. Goddammit I should have dried off while STILL IN the tub. Why did I do that? I can’t go back and change it now! My life is going to be shit until tomorrow when I shower again.

7:30 pm: I start a crossword on the computer. Akeena barks at me because she needs to go out, but doesn’t she know that I can’t go out until I’ve finished the crossword?

9:00 pm: I get ready for bed. This t-shirt is so comfy and I want to wear it but he last time I wore it to bed, I got in an argument with someone. I better just be safe and wear the same one I’ve been wearing. I really like Friends…but the last time I watched it to fall asleep, things went badly the next day. I better just watch Criminal Minds again, to be safe.

 9:30 pm: I must make sure there are three alarms on the alarm app but only two are set for the morning. The other one is for my nap on my lunch break but it should be off for now. I can’t have two alarms or four alarms. It has to be three.

10:40 pm: I’m about to fall asleep when I remember that I need to make sure my phone is on the nightstand while I sleep instead of near my pillow because the other day when I had slept with it near my pillow I got disappointed by some bad news so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Phew, good thing I remembered that before I went to sleep.

6:15 am: My alarm goes off…