If anyone is reading these posts, I apologise for their tedious self-involvement. An eating disorder is a coping strategy. Once the crude and bloodied blade of self-harm is prised from your rigid grip, you lose the tools that allowed you to continue with some semblance of an existence. The rituals help you to get through your day, to perform at least the most rudimentary functions and thus engage, in some way, with your life, its people, its basic demands.
Now, though, we are left with nothing. Between meals and workshops there is nothing to do except sit in the lounge, until our bums ache, idly half-watching the TV, flicking listlessly through our phone apps, dozing.
It is inevitable, then, that our thoughts are going to turn inwards. If we’re to defeat this thing, we need a deep scouring, right down to the foundations of our minds, to rid ourselves of the last, infecting shreds of this disease, and embed cognitive techniques and strategies. If we leave behind even the tiniest culture of irrational eating habits, it will multiply, recolonise our brains.
Our heads are old, dirty pots, blackened by years of misuse.
Or maybe an even more hackneyed analogy works better: These compulsions have grown out of, and feed on, the dark soils of our minds and we need to dig down to make sure we leave not a single root behind or they will regrow. The tiniest foible or innocuous eccentricity can blossom into the full-blown madness again, partly because, at each stage, it doesn’t seem like madness, it feels like expediency – an expedient response to the alarm the condition itself generates.
Middle-aged Male Anorexic 