My Disordered Eating and Road to Recovery

It is hard for me to look back at my disordered journey with food. It’s difficult to admit what it did to me mentally, but worse than that, how it impacted my entire family.

What is scary is that it started with a desire to get healthy, and then it spiraled. Trust me, nobody plans to have disordered eating. Here is my story. My hope in sharing this is to raise awareness around how something that appears to be "healthy" eating can lead to disordered eating. Maybe this will help you, or you can identify a loved one who is going down this path and you can help them. This is an issue, and it needs to be elevated as it oftentimes goes unnoticed or even praised.

I started with a commitment to changing my eating, and I lost weight doing it. I got a lot of compliments, and a lot of people asking me what I was doing. I started posting pictures on Facebook of different recipes and foods that I was preparing. I started meal prepping on the weekends for the week, and sharing what I was doing on social media. The interest grew, and I then decided to start a food blog. I called it “Cathy’s Clean Eating Chronicles”. Yep, a food blog all around “clean eating”.

News flash: there really is no definition for what is clean, and I won’t get in to those details here. But suffice it to state that there are no good or bad foods, and there are also no clean or dirty foods. I confess that I was gravely misinformed at that time.

I still love blueberries, but for the right reasons today.
They taste darn good!

I was cooking with all sorts of fruits and vegetables, as well as making sweets with ingredients like oats, applesauce, and powdered peanut butter.  I was so proud of the banana raisin cookies that I had baked, that I would take them with me and eat them instead of the cake being served at a party. This is really where things started to go down a darker path.

You may have never heard of something called orthorexia. I had heard of it in passing, but never
thought much of it. It wasn’t until more recently that I was enlightened in a podcast by mental health counselor and psychology teacher Tiffany Roe of what exactly it is, and what the signs of it are. That is when I realized that I was suffering from it.

Orthorexia is a sneaky illness. Not everyone agrees on the label. It is not listed as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5. It is considered an Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder, or OSFED. But it is an issue, because it can go unnoticed.

Orthorexia often starts out as an innocent attempt to eat more “clean”, but can take a turn to a fixation on food quality and purity. This then develops into a rigid eating style, which can crowd out other activities, interests, and relationships, and can actually cause health issues.

How can you tell if your healthy eating is just a solid commitment, or a pathological condition? Can’t meal prepping and let’s say, going dairy free just be considered a healthy habit? Tiffany does a great job in her podcast to explain when it goes too far. This is when I knew I had a problem and I will share the examples I have to illustrate. What I describe below manifested over a period of 3 years.

1. Fixation on food. If you find food consuming your thoughts and taking up your time, you may have a problem. I became so obsessed with tracking every single bite of everything that I ate.
MyFitnessPal was by far my most used app. I would plan my entire schedule of eating every night
for the next day. I had to meet my targets for calories and macros, and then I would track other
ingredients as well. When you have a good relationship with food, you naturally trust the way you
eat and you don’t think about it. You know your body can handle sugar, for example. Meanwhile, I
wasn’t trusting the way that I ate. If I ate something that I hadn’t planned for or I had demonized as
unhealthy, I would mentally beat myself up over it.

I must have offended so many on the plane with my smelly tuna.
Did I mention that I hate rice cakes?

2. Social isolation. My social life changed as a result of my eating habits. I would avoid eating at events, or bring something in a container and that is the only thing that I would eat. All too often I had my Tupperwares of food and I remember using the school kitchen microwave to nuke my food at my kid’s events. I would avoid going to the bar with friends or gym buddies, because I knew none of the options there would fit my rules. If we were going out to eat with the family, I would research restaurants to find one with a menu that I deemed suitable. I asked all kinds of questions about menu items and typically I would avoid anything cooked because I was too concerned with how it was prepared. So I would always order a salad, dressing on the side, with chicken. A super low point for me was when I decided not to host my annual holiday cookie swap, because I was afraid to bake and I didn’t think that I could say say no to desserts. This was an annual tradition that I had put on for over a decade. I was that terrified of even being near a cookie.  I knew I hit rock bottom when I totally lost it at a football game, because I had walked 3 times around the stadium and could not find one single food item that fit my criteria. I was hangry and on the hunt for coffee to shut up my stomach, and I couldn’t find that either. I had a massive meltdown while my kids and husband stared at me. It really sucks that a defining moment like that had to happen to mobilize change. But in retrospect I am also glad that it did, because I could finally admit that I had a problem and needed to seek help.

I look so happy.  Yet, I was at my rock bottom.
This was the day and place where I had my epic food meltdown.

3. Cutting food groups. I mean cutting them even though you do not have an allergy. I kept doing this. When my journey started, I was enjoying exploring recipes with beets, butternut squash, parsnips, and pears. I loved snacking on sugar snap peas and carrots. But the more and more that I read, the more concerned I got that maybe I shouldn’t eat these foods. I know this sounds crazy, but first went the fruit, then away went the hummus and all beans, then I cut starchy vegetables. I had my reasons for each of them but the overarching theme was in the name of consuming less carbs (another news flash: carbs are not the devil). What is so funny is that the more I cut, the worse my digestive system became, so then I would cut more because I thought that the food group was causing my issues. The real culprit was not having the diversity of food, but I did not realize this at the time.

Traveling with coolers...I did this all the time.

4. Judging others. I basically had put myself on a nutritional pedestal and wondered how others could possibly be eating the things that they consumed. I would eye other people’s grocery carts and even eye my own husband eating chips or drinking beer! Now I realize that this constant evaluation was actually a reflection of my own disordered thoughts and reinforcing a positive image in my mind of following the “rules”. Again, there are no good or bad foods. There was never anything wrong with what my husband or anyone else was eating. The issue was me, using that data as ammunition to reinforce my own disordered thinking under the guise of how “healthy” I was being. In retrospect, I am mortified. But now I know that I was being protective of my eating disorder. Sadly, I tied my disordered eating to my own self loveability.

There are other markers, but these are the major ones that impacted me personally. I thought that I had control and was in power, but the reality was that I was suffering and obsessed. I flew under the radar for years because we live in a culture that supports “healthy” eating and getting thinner.

I also want to mention that this is about much more than food. Please, if you are suffering, don’t think that all you have to do is fix the food part. That may be your first step, but I encourage you to dig deep.

Food was control for me, but I was doing this because of issues in my personal life that felt completely out of my control. I subconsciously recognized this situation and decided that since I could not control the personal stuff, I would control what went in to my mouth. As the personal situation intensified, so did my disorder. It was only until I managed my way through the personal issue that I could finally start to heal my mind. And with healing my mind, I am healing my body with intuitive eating.

It's been a journey.
And I am not done yet!

Please do not worry about me! I am on the recovery path and have been for eight months going strong. I just hope that sharing my story can help others avoid getting in to a similar situation. If you think you need help, I highly encourage you to find a professional that specializes in eating disorders and intuitive eating. Don’t go it alone. And make sure you get to the core of the issue, so that you can heal as a whole person.