What It’s Like to Have an Eating Disorder During Lockdown
By: Cara Roe
Tags: Coronavirus, Mental Health, Pandemic, Self, Body

What It’s Like to Have an Eating Disorder During Lockdown

A cupboard full of canned goods triggers my deepest insecurities

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

When I was 11 years old, I watched the second Jurassic Park movie, The Lost World, and had a panic attack about a giant meteor hitting the Earth and causing the end of the world. I lay in bed and pushed my open eyes into my pillowcase, imagining the last moments I would spend with my family. Apart from the total and encompassing terror a panic attack brings, I sensed frustration — this imagined catastrophe was so utterly unfair. Why did this have to happen to me? Surely it wasn’t the actual end? What did I do wrong?

My feeling of powerlessness during these childhood attacks still angers me. Over time, I have trained myself to control these fears. I’ve learned to either ignore reality with self-medication (to my own detriment) or to play so deeply into the needs of the people closest to me that when they eventually hurt me and my fears are confirmed, I call it control.

Control has been high on my list of values for a long time. As soon as I become uncomfortable in a situation, I shrink into the safety of rituals that shape who I am when I am alone with myself. Ask anyone who has an eating disorder or is in recovery from one what goes on in their head, and most will describe a similar tendency. No matter how anxious I get, I know I can find refuge in those rituals—no matter what they cost me.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve fielded a dizzying barrage of information about Covid-19 from various corners of the internet. Apart from generally triggering my anxiety about the end of the world, I feel bullied into a corner by familiar fears and trace traumas.

Here’s what it’s like for someone suffering from ED: On a good day, I can eat three medium-ish meals and snacks and only have nine to 10 negative thoughts about my actions. On a great day, I can have ice cream or fast food and only once hear the growl of the thought that I’m going to balloon to the size of a planet. On a bad day, I can’t sit down for 10 minutes for fear of being called a lazy, fat bitch by the voice in my head — and proving it right.

As I’ve learned to care for myself again and regain some of the actual control my ED faked for so long, I’ve learned to quiet these thoughts a bit. During recovery, I loosened the grip I had on my own throat. I eventually fell into patterns that I concede are sort of relaxed “rules” that still cause me major anxiety when broken. It’s like a soft orthorexia (an obsession with healthy eating) that at once benefits and restricts me.

On a great day, I can have ice cream or fast food and only once hear the growl of the thought that I’m going to balloon to the size of a planet.

Recently, I saw a headline about a staff member at one of the gyms I attend being infected with the novel coronavirus. It felt disgusting of me, really, that my first thought was panic at the idea of not being able to go to the gym — instead of sadness for this person who was infected. When I think about removing this part of my routine from my day, images of my flabby body flash before my eyes like a Spielbergian war scene. In 2015, when I hospitalized myself for a week to try to make some progress with my recovery, I quietly did illegal sit-ups and high knees in my curtained portion of the room. I knew it was stupid, but I felt like the world would end if I didn’t perform for my disorder. Is this what I would be reduced to once Sydney is shut down and we couldn’t leave the house? I wondered.

Other habits I thought I’d conquered have become harder to avoid in isolation: checking my body in every mirror to dissect the minute differences in the size of my stomach, treating Coke Zero as a meal replacement, and trying on clothes I haven’t worn in months and squinting at my reflection like it’s a gore-filled scene in a slasher film.

Even the word “stockpiling” sends shivers down my spine. Having massive amounts of food in the apartment seconds away from the possibility of being devoured is an alarming concept, to say the least. (It’s a funny quirk people with anorexia have: believing they have no self-control when they are literally starving themselves to death.)

What would my quarantine menu consist of? The safe stuff — beans? Bread? No, too many carbs and not enough using those carbs. Those carbs will stick to you like glue. Soup might be okay, but pasta is out—not that I have a choice in that anymore.

I debate with myself, all while knowing that food is energy and my body needs energy to fight off any kind of disease. But that seems less important than staying skinny. I sit after a meal for hours and hours, confined in a hotbox of panic, unable to relieve my guilt with exercise. The fact that I can still consider these fears in times of a literal pandemic is shocking to me and reinforces how deadly my disorder is. It would have you die before defying it. This disorder tells you it’s better to die skinny and sick than survive and be any bigger than you are, which is already too big.

I know that, at heart, this is about something deeper than weight or body shape or what I look like to others, which truly doesn’t worry me that much anymore. It’s about testing the self-worth I have grown over the past five years. It’s about existing with myself at my core and not othering the healthy, beautiful body I have been given. These rules around food and exercise are coping mechanisms that have been working, for the most part, and being forced to alter them feels fucking terrifying. Here, I really have no control.

Yes, I know this all sounds very silly. I am very embarrassed to admit these things because sending them out into the world makes them real, but I am trying not to lie to myself so much anymore. I am incredibly privileged to even have access to food, medicine, and shelter. What this has taught me is that unlearning practices we all hold dear to us is going to be difficult. If I can get through this time without descending into a relapse my ED so badly wants me to return to—and without getting physically sick—I will consider myself incredibly lucky. Many will not have that opportunity.

As a last thought, I think it’s pretty ironic that one of my obsessive-compulsive disorder tics used to be repeatedly washing my hands while counting to 30 seconds. Full circle, right?