I’ve always been funny about food. As a toddler, I’d refuse to eat if my food wasn’t arranged just so on my Babar plate. At 15, I got food poisoning, spent two days throwing up, and realised I liked the emptiness. When I had a growth spurt and people started saying I could model, I liked it even more.
My BMI dipped to 15.4 toward the end of high school, but at university I was happy simply maintaining my size 8 figure rather than whittling it down further. Moving in with my partner at 25, I stopped weighing myself altogether. It was freeing, living without the daily intrusion of numbers.
Nevertheless, habits I’d established in my teens persisted, like chewing gum or drinking water when my stomach growled. These habits didn’t just keep me thin. They were easier than eating, which seemed like an endless balancing act, a tyranny of choice that could too easily lead to chaos.
Instead, chaos came in early 2019, a time when I felt stronger than ever. I’d recently started doing cardio every evening, finding it helped me focus on the novel I was writing outside my 9 to 5 job. I only ate one meal a day – dinner, around 10pm – and often woke in a sweat, desperately thirsty yet energised. I didn’t realise I was malnourished until I found myself in ICU, having drunk so much water that the sodium in my blood plummeted, causing a seizure, kidney failure and week-long coma. My BMI was just a kilo outside the “healthy” range.
The most dangerous eating disorders are typically associated with skeletal women, counting their bones and weighing themselves obsessively, yet there’s danger in flying under the radar, too. When questioned by doctors, I was adamant I wasn’t intentionally starving myself. Instead, I spoke of “habits”; explained how running on empty felt comfortable to me and how I had trouble differentiating hunger from thirst. They’d heard it all before. An endocrinologist told me she’d seen five cases like mine in as many years: fit, active young women hydrating themselves to the point of organ failure.
Since hospital, I’ve started changing habits. I’ve cut back on gum and diet cola. I monitor my water intake. I eat an apple every morning at my desk, whether I want to or not. Some days, I eat several snacks and enjoy them.
Other days, it’s more of an effort.
When a co-worker fell pregnant last year, a few months after my release from hospital, I noticed how quickly her body changed. I also noticed the way people commented on it, telling her how big she looked, how round. She didn’t seem to mind. To me, the attention seemed nightmarish.
Pregnancy, with its rapid physical changes, is often talked about as a miraculous, euphoric experience. Few talk about the toll it can take on those with a history of disordered eating, for whom rapid physical change can signify a terrifying loss of control.
It’s worth talking about, considering that an estimated 4% of Australians are currently living with an eating disorder. While pregnancy may motivate recovery for some, others may find themselves triggered by the bodily changes, weigh-ins and well-meaning comments about size, shape and diet. Not to mention the expectation that all this should be met with euphoria.
I recently turned 30, which means I’ve lived with some level of disordered eating for half my life. It also means I’m aware of the baby question, with or without reminders from my in-laws. At this point in time, it’s not a question I’m ready to answer.
If and when I do, though, it’ll be something I decide with full consideration of the risks involved. As a woman in recovery from an eating disorder, I understand that the stresses of pregnancy may cause me to relapse; that I have an increased likelihood of perinatal and postnatal mental illness, as well as miscarriage, premature delivery and low birth weight. I also understand that I may be lucky enough to get through the process unscathed; to flourish, even. There’s no way of knowing.
What I do know is that no good can come from the pressure to take on more than I’m ready for, to want something that may cause me harm, to put the needs of others before myself.
I’m eating for one. For now, that’s more than enough.
• Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the Melbourne-based author of The Love of a Bad Man and Beautiful Revolutionary
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