Are you Addicted Enough?

Most people would look at this post and go, what? But as always, just wait to see what I mean.

Most people (maybe not most, but a lot) of people I’ve ever heard talk about addiction talk about having the disease of “more.”

On a walk this afternoon, 65 hours after my last binge, I realized that I have the disease of enough. 

I used to ask myself,

Am I good/worth enough?

Do I belong enough?

Is there enough food for me? 

How can I become small enough? 

Did I burn off enough? 

My family used to comment that I would “eat like I was going to the electric chair” and tell me to “take human bites.” These comments didn’t help me, in fact, they probably made me internalize a lot of the mentality that I was “broken.”

Realistically, now I know that there is a glitch in my brain that falsely tells me that there is not enough food and that I better eat as much as I possibly can so that I get enough. This comes from dieting and starving beginning at age twelve; I built myself a deprivation mechanism that fossilized itself into my brain so hard, that when large quantities of food are present, my brain thinks its the last time I’ll ever eat again.

The reasons why I binged on thanksgiving this year are many. For one thing, I disassociated pretty bad when I got to the table, as if it were just me and the plate. I took a three hour nap after my meal and still felt sick. I wasn’t proud at all.

To my surprise, I woke up the next morning and felt SUPER charged with the energy to recover and do better. I don’t know where it came from; I think maybe I just knew that I didn’t want to feel the way I felt the night before…disgusted, alone, defeated and depressed. 

I went to a meeting with my cousin, and another one later that evening, and another one last night where I shared in front of a room full of 50+ people that I needed support. I asked myself two questions on paper last night, “How do I get better at asking for help?” and “How do I make g-d everything?” and I think that meetings and support systems will reveal the answers to those questions as I go forward.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that staying sober is pretty easy on me but, if I’m in active eating disordered behavior, that becomes a thousand percent false.

I never drank problematically until about a year ago, when I spent a month drinking at the same bar. During that time, I learned how connected my eating disorder and my problem of drinking were. My body image issues were the primary problem, but I learned quickly that if I drank, I no longer was conscious of what I looked like and I couldn’t really coherently think about what other people thought of me–or what I thought of myself. 

Even after I stopped drinking alcohol, I was so judgmental (one of my go-to defects). Today, I realized that this was how I behaved because I saw people the same way that I assumed they saw me, which was how I also saw myself–worthless, inferior, undeserving. And I kept blaming the internalized voices of my abusers for these projections, when realistically, it was a way of keeping up self will. Those voices that emotionally manipulated me down to nothing started as the voices of other people, and then started to sound a lot like me.

I blamed my higher power for that for so long, even though it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t trust a higher power because what had g-d ever done for me, anyway? I had to control my life. I had to protect myself. I had to find ways to survive abusive people. I had to successfully hide my identity from my family. I had to save the world and still make it home in time for dinner. All the stability in my life has always depended on ME. How was staying sober or free of self harm or away from disordered eating any different?

Those messages I received as a kid that I was small or unimportant came from people who chose their own form of self-will over unconditional love. And it gave me a model for allowing my own forms of self-will to run my life into the ground, on and off for the past (almost) 12 years.

And to think I kept this up until it attacked me head on this past week. 

I binged because my higher power wasn’t invited to the table with me where I sat and ate for almost 10 minutes in virtual silence. I didn’t give a power greater than myself a chance to protect me, and that’s on me. I was busy making sure I had enough, belonged enough, felt like enough–when in reality, I was born enough.

 

---

 

48 hours

Stare at your plate

eat, take more

eat, take more

until you can’t 

take anymore

you remember 

this time last year

you were well 

because you invited god

to your table

where is your god now

and why did you make her small?

because it’s all you know 

how to do

shrink yourself,

to feel like your life 

is your own 

except god didn’t have to

get smaller with you 

it’s not god’s fault 

the same way it wasn’t 

your fault

when they chose self will

over unconditional love

so you sit here 

and stare at the plate 

taking more,

promising you’ll make up for it tomorrow,

hollow yourself out 

until your body is screaming,

you’ll keep choosing self-will 

over unconditional love

and you can’t hear your body

screaming

“We are both so much more

than enough.”

Letter to an unaware fatphobic workshop presenter

This week, I went to about 10 minutes of a twelve step study workshop before I shut down. 

Literally, full trigger tears and an overwhelming sense of being immediately alienated from the room.

This person opened a workshop about the 12 steps by addressing and creating alarmism (a “hook” for her audience, if you will), around the “obesity epidemic” and the faulty statistics that go with it.

In my recent work on steps 6&7 in my eating disorder recovery, I have been learning to still give feedback that is important for the cohesiveness of my existence with the world, without stomping on that person’s truth altogether and making them feel small simply because I am hurt by their actions.

A close friend encouraged me to give the feedback, because as she said, so many people are unaware and feedback (but not attacks on their personality or their lack of knowledge), ultimately makes us better people. So I wrote an email when I got home.

---

 

Hi (name redacted),

My name is Cait, and I am a volunteer and regular participant at (organization redacted) I was at your workshop briefly this evening and I want to address some feedback that I have regarding some of the opening statements you made.

As a person in solid recovery from three different manifestations of eating disorders, and someone who lives in a body that is probably classified as either “overweight” or “obese”, I found myself immediately shutting down when you brought up these statistics and let them stand on their own to be falsely conflated to the disease(s) of alcohol & drug addiction.

(Organization) is the place where I was able to explore the information I am about to share with you, and personally, it was really triggering for me to hear the opening of your workshop in this context, as this very process of disembodying the social construct of weight being a function of “disease” used in this way is inherently somewhat problematic.

This kind of thinking is the very same thought pattern that perpetuates the diet industry, which makes more than 65 billion dollars a year letting people know that they are always one bite away from being a walking health risk (despite the fact that our consumption often has little to do with it, as 77 percent of our bodies’ health predispositions are determined by genetics), that they are broken people who can be fixed by following a magic set of rules that will change not just their body size, but how the world perceives, welcomes and includes them. 

Obesity as a standalone issue in our society is socially constructed, and in a lot of cases misused to create outright prejudice around the people who meet the ‘criteria’. It is a fact that any qualified statistician can tell you that the very act of weight causing disease and weight being correlated with any given disease are not empirically the same set of information.

When you said 70 percent of Americans are obese, there was no acknowledgement of the fact that there is buy-in from a diet consumer culture that creates those statistics. I know that “breaking down weight stigma” isn’t the workshop you’re running—but letting this statistic hang in the air as a way to analyze the steps seemed to serve only the purpose of creating a “wow” factor that confirmed sizeism and healthism among members of your audience.

Several years ago, the set of standards for what “obese” is was shifted, such that millions of Americans became suddenly obese overnight, based not on consumption of food but on a deliberate, fatphobic shift in the data. This shift in numbers was purposeful and meant to create a panic—we live in a world where politicians have literally said that fat is more of a risk to American society than terrorism. In one fell swoop, our war on terror became a war against fat—and thus, against fat people.

Food as an “addiction” has also been long debatable. I am an ex-member of Overeaters Anonymous, and it is my truth that the way I was guided by almost everyone I interacted with to view food and my body in that particular fellowship made me more paranoid, obsessed with food, and disconnected from my body’s needs than I’ve ever been.

It actually kickstarted the most recent manifestation restrictive end of my eating disorders, which were a part of my life for nearly 15 years. It is no surprise that OA works for so many, because it still has a mental framework that props up weight loss as a back-burner goal. It is a function of diet culture.

Letting this rhetoric about “obesity” and the idea that “food addiction” and substance abuse are biologically the exact same process circulate is potentially harmful to people, and frames shame around people in larger bodies when this stuff is spoken about.

Eating disorders—because that’s what we’ll call the whole spectrum, from restriction to exercise bulimia and orthorexia to compulsive eating—are similar, but not the same, as drug and alcohol addiction. I have experience with alcohol abuse and if I treated my ED the same way I recovered from alcohol, I assure you I probably wouldn’t be alive to write this feedback to you today.

Compulsive eating is just as much an eating disorder as anorexia, but neither are an “addiction”. What people with ED’s are addicted to, most of the time in one way or another, is perfectionism and a sense of self that involves intense anxiety, control issues, and body dysmorphia. 

Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence yielded from studies done on humans that food addiction actually exists. The brain lights up in response to food being eaten, but that’s literally what it’s supposed to do. It’s our body’s way of reinforcing that it needs to be fueled in order to survive, and to work together with other complex body systems to help us do just that using the nutrients we put in. When we eat, we create neurological connections that form patterns that make this behavior a regular occurrence for the sake of our species’ existence.

Food is meant to be a pleasurable experience that drives us to do, be, achieve and think clearly. Anything that suggests food as an addiction positions the so called “food addict” into a shame spiral and this thinking is rooted in diet culture and weight bias/stigma. Addictions are not eating disorders, and eating disorders are not addictions, and both come with their own degrees of shame on their own. This gets further reinforced when we try to carry this mode of thinking over to something that our bodies need in order to survive, that we have no choice but to have a working relationship with from birth until death. (See Christy Harrison’s episode of Food Psych Podcast for this exact information, articulated so wonderfully by Marci Evans).

Food is a substance, just as water or hydrogen peroxide are substances, but not a “drug”, and is something we need to regulate our bodies for the purpose of sustaining life. I gained more weight in my recovery than I ever did while actively in my eating disorder, and am in perfect health—but that’s not the fat person’s job to justify to the world.

Creating discourse around this that lets obesity stand alone and conflate a lot of its causalities with drug addiction doesn’t leave room to explore the socially unjust implications of disembodiment in this process. It is statistically, sociologically and psychologically known that weight stigma is actually far more of a health risk than being fat itself is. There is empirical information to support this, which I would really recommend looking into.

Some of the best resources I have read to this point are Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Body Respect by Dr. Linda Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon, and The Fat Studies Reader by Ester Rothblum & Sondra Solovay.

Their work is integral to breaking down what we have been conventionally sold about our bodies and how they work, how they should be treated in society over a certain size, and how to deconstruct this information using research that supports all bodies.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

Cait O.

Demi Lovato’s Invisible Illness

So I know I just wrote a really important post like…four days ago. But churning out stuff on this blog has become my default coping mechanism lately.

I have seen and taken in a lot of information today. This past weekend, I watched a documentary on the life of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, who died of a heroin-induced heart attack at age 27. 

This morning, I was listening to his posthumously released spoken-word album An American Prayer, to the track “Curses, Invocations” — he ends the poem with the verse, “I will always be a word man…it’s better than a bird man.”

Words are healers for so many of us.

But I digress. This is all somewhat connected, I promise. I was walking through NYC this morning and afternoon, listening to people on the train, finding myself in resentments toward people I didn’t know, and frustrated at how rude people can be, especially on mass transit. Sweating, trying to get to an interview on time, and noticing people struggling and thinking about all the assumptions we make about others dawned on me a lot as I walked through Manhattan trying to find where I needed to be.

When I got home, my brother called me and told me to Google Demi Lovato’s name, and that she had been hospitalized for a heroin overdose just hours ago.

Like I said, I know it’s only hours-old news, and I was already in your feeds just days ago. But writing about this, news that shook me really hard, is the way I’m going to process it all right now. Bare with me, please. 

The first thing I did when I read the article about Demi’s overdose was text my friend Lexie to ask if she’d heard. A conversation ensued.

A while ago, we’d both shared our frustrations over a Twitter storm she was involved in about pulling a ‘prank’ on her bodyguard that involved being touched nonconsensually. 

I pretty much at that moment decided that Demi, in my eyes, was cancelled. I was really upset that a person who was such a fundamental part of my recovery would do something like that and shrug it off so thoughtlessly.

I didn’t take the time to think about the invisible struggles that people are often going through when they lack self-awareness the most. I judged a person who, in all honesty, I didn’t know and couldn’t have known was making errs in judgment like she did, probably because of shame.

And worse, I wanted her to feel shame because I’d like to think, that as someone who is deeply invested in justice and love and compassion, that anyone I chose as a role model would do better. But I realize as I am shaken by what is happening in her life, that she is human. A human who is sick and suffering, just like so many of us.

Most people know somewhat about Demi’s eating disorder relapse last year after breaking up with Wilmer Valderrama, and the recent release of her song “Sober”, in which she bravely admits to relapsing in the area of substance abuse, had a lot of people in her corner encouraging her to find recovery again.

Even in the recording of this song, it sounds nothing like Demi’s voice. I gave it a first listen today and the first thing I thought to myself was, she sounds so scared, so ashamed, and so broken. 

During this conversation with my friend, a fellow person in recovery from ED and other mental health issues, we both shared the possibility that maybe Demi hasn’t been truly okay for a long time. 

And that’s more than okay.

I don’t know Demi Lovato personally, but I would be kidding myself if I failed to admit that she has been an integral part of my recovery and my own resilience. Her strangely appropriative relationship with the LGBTQ+ community hasn’t always sat well with me, but she has also done something that a lot of people can’t or won’t–shown up for herself and for millions of others in the face of the darkest struggles a person can go through.

Demi Lovato embodies vulnerability and courage.

She has successfully been the representative of “its okay not to be okay” for a really long time. Even after her relapse was reported last year, that was the message that I think we all got–that it’s okay to falter and keep working on ourselves. There is so much power in being honest, but it’s imperative to always be following up on that with the people who need it. Because these attitudes and behaviors aren’t always visible to the entire world at all hours of the day. 

Some of us may not think the person doing best needs check-ups; but I can assure you, connection is the very thing that keeps recovery alive. 

Like Demi herself has said in the past: “Recovery doesn’t get a day off.”

None of us, despite whether we are one of the 65 million people who follow her on Twitter, knows Demi’s life day in and out. Since she has shown up as the face of recovery for this generation–a person who has seemingly overcome self harm, self hate, drug abuse, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and an eating disorder–so many people have looked to her for inspiration and found it; myself included.

 

 

I remember seeing her at IZOD Center in 2014 and sobbing uncontrollably as she sat at the piano and sang “Warrior”. I cry every time I do a cover of the song myself, because so much of it is my truth. 

I, too, have had to recover from depression, crippling anxiety, abuse, codependency and an eating disorder simultaneously. I know that it often doesn’t happen all at once, and that the parts of your behaviors that aren’t “as severe” can seem like an okay thing to cling to because that’s the trade off your brain makes.

Once you are in recovery from one thing, your brain tries to sort the rest out, prioritizing your vices by which one will kill you last until they’re all no longer useful.

I liken it to playing something I call “symptomatic wack-a-mole,” because it can seem like just as you’ve got one symptom of your mental illness cared for and patched up, another one rears its ugly head.

And it’s not always as easy as “I’ve got this.” In fact, most people who can confidently say “I’ve got this” all by themselves, don’t really “got this.” Macklemore is a really good example–and one of my favorite recovery advocates to produce raw, unfiltered art on the realness of recovery.

 

At that concert four years ago, I had no way of knowing whether or not, at that exact moment, Demi was okay. Even Nick Jonas, who performed right beside her, has told media sources that sometimes he glances at her wrists when they see each other just to make sure she’s “okay.” Even then, that’s only a snapshot, a relative piece of wellbeing that makes up a recovering person’s ‘okay.’ Just like most of my family or friends and especially not strangers on the internet or even sitting around me at the concert that night had no way of knowing whether or not I was truly okay.

The best way to find out if someone is okay is to ask them. When you’re finished asking, listen. 

When you are held up and expected to represent an entire community of struggling, sometimes even broken people, self-care can be so hard. And the shame of falling from that image is even more tough to cope with. And when people depend on your success, your voice, and your triumphs to make a living, the burden only gets larger. And pretending, inauthenticity, and half-truthful recovery can only propel a person so far until those old vices start to get in line and fight for first. 

 

The one thing I was really floored by is that Demi is now (at least according to the reports) using opioids/heroin. A lot of people believe that heroin use is a dark, scary, last resort, unheard of ‘point of no return’ type of drug problem. But it’s way more common than we try to convince ourselves it is. I live on a literal island where the opioid epidemic is at its worst in our entire country. And it is grueling and scary and heartbreaking all the time.

As someone who shares a lot of struggles with Demi Lovato, I said to myself when I read this that she probably feels so powerless right now. Lexie pointed out that she felt that Demi still, to this day, despite recovery, probably feels this unstoppable desire to be perfect.

Being given the assignment of poster child for mental wellbeing is emotionally exhausting a lot of the time, and sometimes–I know from experience–this work can be counterproductive to our wellness in a lot of ways. Perfection was and likely still is the first thing I was addicted to. So many of us with eating disorders live this truth to its fullest extent.

 

I hope that with this instance of relapse, despite how public it is becoming, we can have conversations with each other about the invisibility of illnesses like addiction and mental health (which undoubtedly go hand in hand). Awareness is great, but often not enough. We must move from awareness into action.

We cannot treat brokenness, addiction, or shame without compassion and vulnerability. I have seen some really, really awful things in the comments of the articles I’ve surveyed about Demi’s overdose in the past few hours (Looking at you, TMZ). 

This may be an opportunity for Demi to get real and even more raw with her art. Thus far, her sobriety has been a public event, so much a part of her label-created image as an ex-Disney starlet. Her powerlessness as a celebrity, and as a celebrity in recovery, is so much bigger than herself, and the stakes are high. I think the pedestal on which she has been placed is holding her back more than anything, and I hope that she can find peace and freedom on her own terms as soon as possible.

Until then, it’s on us to let her heal, check in with ourselves and our loved ones as we cope with the realities of things like addiction and disease of the mind. Demi Lovato’s words, her image, her humility and her courage have all taught me first and foremost that no matter what we believe in, we must first believe in our own worthiness. 

Get better soon, Demi. Cheering for you. xoxox

-inbetweenqueen ❤

Navigating the “Normal” Eaters in Your Life

“I have to get new batteries for the scale, I think it’s dead.”

“I haven’t weighed myself in a while. I’m trying not to make it the whole point of everything.”

“Oh. Well you should. You don’t want to go back to where you were!”

I get it. I do. My mom means well.
Many of the people in our lives whose eating is not disordered seem to interact with our recovery in ways that are focusing on the weight as our central problem, offering us extrinsic validation (“You look great!”), tough love that they call “motivation,” comparing our bodies to other peoples’ to make us feel better about ourselves (as if we don’t, as disordered eaters, already understand that the people in those bodies probably have insecurities and struggles of their own); ultimately, they offer us ideas that reek of the diet culture that we so desperately try to shake ourselves from in recovery.

And while the “You look great!”s and “how much have you lost?” are well-intentioned markers that our progress is being noticed by people that live outside our bodies, it’s worth knowing that our progress may look different to them than it does to us.

But the only person whose definition of your progress matters is YOU.

After almost five months of asking my mom repeatedly not to comment, not to help, to please stop offering to set me up at weight watchers, to please let me pack my own lunch…I am still met with a conflict.

By now, I have learned a lot of acceptance. I have accepted that my eating disorder exists. I have accepted that eating seven 13 oz. jars of Nutella in a week is not acceptable, normal, or indicative of being in a mentally healthy place.

I’ve accepted that as long as I choose to recover, I will struggle against myself, my ego, and my brain’s petulant roommate, binge eating. I have also accepted that I will stop struggling in a different way, and find peace.
I have accepted that in order to find peace, I have to forgive myself for not being perfect.

But I also have to forgive others for not understanding. And this also means their inability to understand that maybe, they just don’t understand.

What I mean by this is that people, particularly people who are not disordered who love you, will do what they can to match your experiences, because it’s easier than admitting that they just don’t get it. Human instinct is to relate, to have answers, to never look unprepared.

But until they’ve spent a majority of their hours awake thinking about their next meal, until they’ve dug food out of the trash and eaten it, until they’ve actually thought “Maybe if I didn’t have this body part I would weigh 20 pounds less,” they have not experienced what I have. And I have peacefully internalized that. Sometimes, when this situation arises, I reflect quickly and I accept it for them.

It’s not always that easy, however. There are momentary frustrations like the situation with my mom, that I get caught up in my resentment of other people’s understanding or their complete lack of it.

But then I am reminded: I have been given the gift of having my eyes opened to what being in disorder really means.

I have something that “normal” eaters don’t: an abnormal relationship with food, and a specific mechanism of healing–one that those who are not in recovery do not need.

So I am working on accepting the assumptions and the advice and not expecting people to meet me where I am at. They haven’t been where I am at.

And that’s okay.

I have to teach those who live parallel to my recovery that it’s okay that they haven’t been in my place, too. I have to teach acceptance by living it.

*happy Hillary dance for good luck*