Fair trade

Liam likes me better when I'm sick. He's got issues with self-confidence, mostly because he's too intelligent and that makes him socially awkward. He tends to over-think things, and he's terrible at filtering the truth to make it more palatable. He's also pretty judgmental. Ironically, this all makes him a fantastic therapist, because he's excellent at getting people to recognize the reality of their situations. I wouldn't have thought that were true, except his clients actually recommend him to friends and family members.

But back to what I said before. It's true. I remember him saying at one point last semester, "I'm afraid that if you get better, you won't want me anymore."

My illness, obsessions, whatever-the-hell, has always been a good way for him to...not control me, per se, but to know how I'm feeling. It makes me very predictable. And he likes that. His ex-girlfriend cheated on him after a 5-year relationship, and it's all made him rather paranoid about my faithfulness, especially considering we live in separate states. It's completely ironic that the dissolution of our relationship was what it took for me to recommit to losing weight. And doubly ironic, the fact that I've gotten sick again makes him want me back. He always loves me, but I think my being strong and confidant scares him, because when I'm at my best, I easily outshine him. I'm incredibly sociable and dedicated and passionate. I can honestly say that I look for the best in people. I'm an optimist at heart. In general, I love people and I'm always eager to make them at least a little bit happier for having known me. That's my fair trade for the privilege of being alive.

The only thing I'm excessively negative about is my weight, and the only person I'm really hard on is myself. And Liam, he pulled me out of it before. And when I got better for a few months, he started to see me as independent and unpredictable, and all his irrational worries just got worse and worse. Officially, he broke up with me because he'd "rather be my therapist than my boyfriend," and he didn't feel like he was happy with me anymore. If this sounds psychologically manipulate and controlling, yeah, I suppose it is. And I've come to terms with that.

Now, one month later, I'm losing weight again, and I regularly talk to him about it instead of hiding it. Whenever I'm having false or excessively negative thoughts, I call him and he tries to help me rationally assess my behavior. The fucked up part is, that's what he loves me for. As much as he says that he fell in love with me because I'm a strong, independent woman with morals and positive ideals, I don't think that's true.

He loves the broken little girl, who wears white lace and never combs her curly hair and can't stand to be touched.

I should be upset, but I like it better this way too. It's probably sick, but it's comforting.

Bread

How often do you just stand in front of the mirror, kneading your stomach like bread dough?

Vapors

It's not so much that I want to be dead. It's just that I don't want to exist anymore. There is too much of me, and I think that anything at all will always be too much.

Maybe I just need to up my dosage. Maybe I need to go back to the desert. I don't know how to make myself better. I'm too lethargic to go to the gym, which is probably the only thing I can do to alleviate the pressure anyway. I've eaten too much, and I've made myself too much. I haven't been quiet or calm. So today I'm fasting, and hoping that this helps me feel better tomorrow.

I don't know how to feel good. I'm sick and I'm weak and I'm tired.

More human than human

I’m really torn between feeling guilty for not obsessing over my diet, and feeling happy for the first time in months. Being back home, in the Midwest, finally seeing my boyfriend for more than three days every other month, it’s really confusing. It’s like I don’t know how to handle…feeling good about myself. Liam loves me, no matter what I look like, no matter what I do, completely unconditionally. I almost don’t believe it’s real.

And that’s my problem: no matter what he tells me, and no matter what my logical brain “knows,” I don’t believe for a second that any could love me if I were fat. I believe that the only reason he loves me as much as he does it because, currently, I’m good looking. But the second I stop taking care of myself, and obsessing over my diet and my exercise, he’ll stop loving me. It’s actually really embarrassing to admit that, because I never thought I’d be the person who thought that real emotional love was based on physical looks. I know he loves every part of me, but I don’t think (and this, really, is insulting to him) that he’d be able to be with me if I wasn’t a size small. And that’s bullshit, and I know it. He loves me for who I am, and he thinks I’m beautiful because of who I am. He could give a fuck less about what I look like. But I don’t believe it. We’ve been together for eight months, and we can’t have sex for the same reason that I can’t eat what I want to: Guilt. I feel like eating anything “bad” will make me fat, and having sex will make me a whore. So, basically, everything I’m doing is to prevent myself from feeling like a fat whore. That’s the echo in my head; “fatwhorefatwhorefatwhorefatwhorefatwhore.” So to keep myself from feeling like a bad person, I avoid food and I avoid sex. And then that voice isn’t so loud.

As I'm writing this, it’s almost midnight, and I’m up watching the newest I Used to be Fat, thinking about cardio tomorrow. Did I mention that I hate cardio? But I did legs today, and arms yesterday, and I don’t work muscle groups more than twice a week. So tomorrow’s made up of a glorious amount of cardio. Did I also mention that I ate a piece of pizza at 8:30pm? That’s sick. There is something fundamentally wrong with eating that late. So I’m running an extra mile tomorrow, because that was a mistake and I should know better by now. I can’t keep doing this. Drinking tea every night and staying up until 2am and thinking about how much I need to sleep and not caring enough to actually do anything.

I feel disconnected from my body, like I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. I don’t know that girl. And I know I don’t want to go back to the South. I’m sick there. I don’t want to go back to grad school. I’ll just get sicker. I can eat here. I can’t do that there.

Sometimes Liam tries to talk with me about eastern psychology, and eastern religion, and the general concept of duality and balance. I feel that. I feel like two different people. One’s weak, pathetic, fat, loud, explosive, emotional, needy, lazy. I’m ashamed of her. The other one is strong, quiet, stoic, cold, rigid, structured, almost robotic. Mechanical. That’s the person I want to be. I don’t want to need so much. I want to be less human, or more human. And that’s the other dual part: I can’t figure out if what I’m trying to be is something subhuman, or something above human. Or simply more human.

I don’t have a balance, and I don’t feel like I have a structure. I know I do, but it’s not enough. And I know that if I give myself completely to either side, skinny or fit, emotional or strong (because I assume those are opposites), I’ll lose something.

Headache

The Victoria's Secret Christmas commercials on Hulu make me feel obese and haggard.

My final exam in psychopathology less well than I hoped, but I haven't received my grade yet, and I probably won't for at least another week, so I'll hold off punishing myself until then. I know from that deep place inside myself (which is miraculously free of neuroticism) that I got an A, but I'm still paranoid.

What I do get to punish myself for today is how much I've eaten over the last two days. Today wasn't much better than yesterday. The real crime was Starbucks. Even if you get the skinny versions of their drinks, they still have enough sugar to kill a small child. Abdominal fat. Ugh. I didn't work out today either, but I did have a two-hour final worth 1/3 of my grade. So I'll use that as an excuse and kill myself tomorrow. And I do plan on it.

I have to wake up at 6am to make it to my 8am training fresh and ready to go. Training lasts an hour, and I'm sure my trainer is planning on killing me since it's our last workout together until next semester. After that, I come home, shower, go to my office on campus to work on my take-home grad stats final. Then, I go to a performance training session with Becka in the campus gym. Right after that, Becka and I have to drive a city over for a meeting. Then, I have to go shopping with another classmate for a Christmas gift for yet another classmate. Then, I will shower again.

I am going to try to do all of this while subsisting on tea and vegetable soup. If I'm not ready to collapse by 7:00pm, I will have done something wrong.

I have a permeating headache right now, and I really want to go to bed.

I thrive on this

I am stressed. I have a final tomorrow. It's for my grad-level psychopathology class. It involves answering four essay questions. The professor gave us eight essay questions to study for. We won't know which four are actually on the exam until we take the exam. We have two hours to answer the questions. We must be thorough, but concise. This is one of three grades I receive in this class (the other two being for a paper, on which I received and A+, and a 3-hour presentation, on which I received an A+). In order to pass the class, I have to get an A. Anything less with either fail me, or put me on academic probation, because that's just how our program works. So far, for the semester, I have a 4.0. I am an A student. I am also a type A personality. I thrive on stress. It makes it easy to quiet all the little voices in my head that tell me I'm weak. I'm not weak today. So I took the advantage and ate a shit ton of food, knowing that academics come before nutrition, and I can't panic about food while I'm panicking about school. No, seriously. And this is coming from someone with an eating disorder. So that should tell you how stressed I get about school.

And grad school is fucking hard, kids. But hey, I'm gonna have a Ph.D. in a few years.

I'm also stressed because I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, Chinese food for lunch, and a burger and fries for dinner. I had almost 2,000 calories today, and I think I'm gonna die. I only worked out for an hour and a half today. On the plus side, I have a new workout buddy. Her name is Becka. She's another member of my cohort, and she's a former gymnast. 5'0", 105 pounds of almost pure muscle. She also has some kind of an eating disorder. She's one of the loveliest people I've ever met in my life. She also happens to have a deep scar running from her right eyebrow, across her face, diagonally down to her left cheek. She doesn't try to hide it. We do yoga together. For our workout today, we did chest, back, and abs. She has some of the most envy-inducing core strength I have ever seen. This is me, jealous.

On second thought, this might not be stress. This is actually kind of fun. I see it more as a challenge, something to overcome, than something to suffer for. That's how I feel about exercise too. Maybe I can apply that mindset to food. As soon as finals are over, I'm going to utilize this theory.

Yoga and dosage

I broke down last night and called the emergency crisis hotline. No, I'm not suicidal. I'm just too miserable to function. I talked to the woman on the other end for forty minutes. She told me I needed to learn to relax. I took a yoga class this morning. It really did help for about an hour. Then I went to the student health center to talk to the nurse practitioner about increasing my dosage. She doubled it. My third counselor at the mental health center on campus wants to move me to a fourth counselor on a different campus, one who specializes in eating disorder.

I'm so, so tired. I'm so tired. I'm so tired. Back up to 139. I can't sleep anymore.

I have a question

I’m not so sure I had an eating disorder until people started telling me I did. Sure, I flirted with the idea. What I do isn’t normal, but I thought it bordered more on OCD. I’ve always been a perfectionist, and I’ve always prided myself on self control. But it didn’t necessarily revolve around food until I started dieting, and even then, I didn’t develop any real anxiety about it until people started commenting on my diet. Back in February, I was almost convinced it was an ED, but when I looked up the diagnostic criteria, I was too fat to have anorexia and I couldn’t have bulimia because I didn’t binge or purge. Right now, I vary somewhere between “eating disorder” and plain old “disordered eating.” Liam, my boyfriend, believes it’s an eating disorder, and he’s sure I’m just going to get worse and worse until I start treatment at the ED clinic. He predicts that it’ll develop into full blown anorexia.

I really, really don’t think that’s the case. I can’t stress enough that I have zero desire to be skinny. I want to be muscular and slim and sexy and have a fairly low body-fat percentage, and there is nothing sexy to me about weighing 97 pounds. That’s sickly. I want to be strong; I do not want my weight or body fat to dip so low as to put my health in jeopardy. My rigid control, inflexibility, and guilt are all hallmark characteristics of eating disordered behavior, but I simply don’t fit the category for a stereotypical eating disorder, and I hate “ED-NOS.” I hate my label. It doesn’t mean anything. There are so many different ways to categorize a person with an eating disorder, and I think the only thing we really have in common is that we are never, ever happy with our bodies; we are never happy with staying the same every day; and we either have too much control or not nearly enough.

Does that theme run in every aspect of your life? Your grades, your relationships? It does for me. Please, give me your thoughts, because I’m 22 and I’m still trying to figure it out. I want to know how the behaviors that led to your ED, or the ones caused by your ED, permeate the rest of who you are. Are you this obsessive/controlling/anxious about everything, or just food and exercise?

My blog title, “Like Machine Does It,” comes from how I’ve always thought about myself - mechanical. I function. I don’t like to think of myself as a person with totally basic boring awful wretched weak human needs. I wish I didn’t need so much. My friends think of me as a bit mechanical and cold and so straight forward, someone who always does what’s asked of her without complaining. I sleep, I work out, I eat clean, I get my shit done. But lately I feel entirely too much (lately being in the last year) and it’s scaring me. So, the machine is something I aspire to be like. And I behave this way because this is like machines behave - this is like machine does it. And machines don’t feel, and they’re perfect, and they’re never weak - they simply don’t exist to be weak. Food is just one of my ways of controlling that need, that thing that makes me a weak awful human.

God, sorry for that awful pseudo-poetic ramble.

Wretched

I was bad yesterday. I was so, so bad. One thousand six hundred eighty three calories worth of bad and vile and absolutely wretched. I almost started crying between dinner and dessert. The food was delicious, something out of Better Homes and Gardens. The company was fantastic. And I feel like a huge fucking cow.

And it's deceptive. A friend took a picture of me from after dinner, sitting on the floor holding a camera, and I look so tiny. I look like a happy, giggling little girl. I've never seen a picture of myself at this weight. I weighed 140.2 pounds again this morning. That picture doesn't make sense. I know it's because I had a cardigan on, hiding my arms, otherwise I would have looked like I always do. My arms are my second least favorite feature, after my stomach. But in that picture, I looked...petite. I've never been petite in my life. It's surreal.

I've been good today, better than I've ever been. Six hundred and forty six calories. I need penance after yesterday; I need to purifying my body. And it feels fantastic. I walked a lot, drank a lot of tea. I'm sorry for what I did yesterday. It was wrong. I know I'd reach 135 faster if I didn't do this to myself.

And then I tell myself, there is nothing wrong with eating 1600 calories in one day. That's perfectly fucking normal. But normally I don't go over 1200. So 1600 feels like a huge overeat. I know I'm wrong. But I can't stop feeling so insanely guilty. And the way I feel when I'm empty, it's like being holy. How can I give that up? I know it's wrong. I know it's a problem. And I'm trying, I really am. I don't like knowing that I behave illogically.