Today has been a lot better. I ate a meal last night and although I did end up purging I had left it a while and only managed to get rid of a tiny bit. And even though my weight was the same this morning as yesterday (which normally triggers urges/self hatred “you’re useless, why haven’t you lost weight?”) I broke my lunch time routine a bit and had something different. Probably about the same in calories, but it wasn’t from my list of “safe foods”, so that’s a small triumph. Despite all this the thoughts have stayed fairly quiet. I’m also not feeling quite as ill. I still have a tentative eye infection, but my throats less sore and I’m not coughing anymore. My moods up a little bit, still not normal levels of operating; my thoughts are a bit sluggish. Yesterday my brain felt like treacle and I felt quite tearful. But today I’ve been fairly productive at work and won’t be leaving things in a complete state for the start of next week. So here’s hoping it was just a combination of illness/hormones as I really don’t want to deal with a proper depressive episode on top of all this.
I am aware that lack of food can precipitate depression and I’m doing the best I can to combat that (i.e. the lack of food), but depression right now would just make it even harder to fight the urges. I have a lot less resources to deal with bad thoughts when I get depressed. I get exhausted by them so easily and just start giving in to them – which right now would not be a good thing.
A comment on my previous post mentioned thinking that their eating disorder helped them control their mood, but actually they have more control over mood when in recovery. I think that’s interesting, because this relapse was very much interlinked with the aftermath of a hypomanic episode. I was quite upset and disappointed that I’d needed to take medication to control my mood, because before last summer I’d been medication free for a long while. It was difficult (and still is) to believe that I needed medication - even though people who I trust told me that I should take it. And the medication (olanzapine) had caused me to gain a fair bit of weight. Around October time I started to feel depressed and then in November I started loosing weight. This did start initially as a healthy diet to get rid of the weight I’d put on while taking olanzapine. In retrospect the healthy diet did very quickly descend it eating disorder behaviour and I think it took hold so quickly because part of me did feel more in control of my moods. When I saw my psychiatrist in December he started me on an antidepressant which really has sorted my low mood out a lot, but didn’t really deal with the eating disorder urges – in fact if anything they’re stronger than they were before I started taking them.
I guess it’s something else to think about when I’m trying to argue with the thoughts/urges. I really don’t want to be out of control like I was over the summer, but I think now I’m out of control in a completely different way.
My first thought was "wow that's so strange, my last relapse started in almost exactly the same way", but then I realised that it wasn't strange at all, it's a fairly common scenario. I was hospitalised in 2007 because effexor made me suicidal and then manic, and to combat the mania I was put on quetiapine. I lost a load of weight with the first drug, gained it back quickly with the second, then my digestive system pretty much stopped working so I couldn't eat very much at all for a couple of months. While I wasn't eating my mood finally evened out, and it was such a relief after being so up and down. I became terrified to try and gain the weight back and got sucked right back into my previous ED - malnutrition is the biggest relapse trigger, the biology of starvation is what keeps eating disorders going. So I was totally convinced for a good two years that anorexia was keeping me from going mad. Of course as you rightly say at the end of your post, that wasn't true at all - I just lost control in a different way, and ended up really sick. So yeah, you are right. It DOES feel like eating disordered behaviours are a sort of self medication, but only to begin with. You reach a point where everything goes haywire and you feel just as out of control as before. Anyway, I just had to comment (again! I don't half waffle on) because this was so similar to what happened to me last time too.
ReplyDeleteI relate so much to this. Losing weight in a more healthy way initially to get to a healthy weight, but then it becomes more and takes over. I suppose it is the illusion of the control that makes things so hard to stop.. for me anyway.
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