I’ve said it a hundred times, and I’ll probably say it a
thousand more but not everyone who suffers with anorexia spent their formative
years idolising super models in Vogue, counting calories in their packed lunch or
weighing themselves and their Barbie in the bathroom.
Actually, I spent my childhood an anxious mess in the bathroom worrying
about messing things up and counting ways not to get ill. And here lie the seeds
of my eating disorder, rooted firmly in anxiety.
A study in 2004 found two thirds of people with an eating
disorder also suffer with one or more lifelong anxiety disorder. In that group,
around 42 percent developed their issues with anxiety, whether that be generalised,
social, a phobia or OCD, in childhood, way before their eating disorder kicked
in.
My life was hit by an anxiety disorder at the age of seven.
I developed emetophobia, a fear of vomit and illness after a
traumatic incident at a local theatre. Living with this specific anxiety
disorder resulted in a childhood splattered with panic attacks and obsessive rules. But I learnt how to get by. It was horrible to grow up
feeling different to my friends, being a worrier, not really getting excited
about things, instead dread them going wrong or being ruined by illness. I
would go out of my way to avoid being sick.
My head was always full of my
little coping tactics or I’d be busy searching for new ways to stop the
anxiety.
I just needed a focus. I needed to take the anxiety away for
good. And while I am at it, I’d like to feel good enough, I want to fix my body
as well as my mind, I want to feel in control of my life. And for me, that’s where anorexia
nervosa started to creep in. (I will try to keep this simple, but there are
other reasons behind my eating disorder.)
For a while, it felt like I had found a simple, one-track
coping mechanism.
I could control food,
which kept me safe from sickness. I could focus on calories, which stopped me focusing on being sick. I could control my weight, because I couldn’t control
the panic attacks. I could measure my worth in kilos, because measuring it against
my friends was making me feel crap.
This miracle cure for anxiety was anorexia. Finally, I’d solved
it. I was fixed. Wrong.
There is a big fault here. I was like an addict; I got more
obsessed with this new found control, hooked on the way it made me feel. It
became my life; I never wanted to feel anxiety again. But to keep up the hits
had to get strong and for longer. I’d have to run further, eat less and see
lower numbers on the scale to hit that euphoria. It seems I'm not alone, as studies into anorexia playing this role have shown.
Another fault in this 'fix' for anxiety is that anorexia is a
serious mental illness. It brings its own anxieties and obsessions along for the ride, which get tangled with the underlying anxiety it was ‘meant’ to be solving.
I didn’t develop anorexia because I'd always been obsessed with being
thin. One of the biggest reasons I, and many others, end up with an eating
disorder is because we became obsessed with the distraction it gives us. The distraction from
the anxiety which fills our minds, it gives us the order and structure we crave. Until, that is, it winds up being even more chaotic than the problems that came before it.
This is just one reason we need to be ANXIETY AWARE. We need
to alert people to the faulty ways of taking anxieties away, before they get
tangled too.
What's your experience with existential anxiety and an eating disorder? Please share.
Helpful Links:
Anxiety in Children - Guide for Parents from Young Minds
Beat - Eating Disorders
