I suppose alot of them can be described as small and seemingly innocent. "Them", being some of the things I did on a daily basis when I had my ED. I've already mentioned the meal-skipping; how I couldn't go through a day without either missing at least lunch or breakfast; and how, when I did eat, it all consisted of the tiniest, smallest amounts possible. Now I am going to go through some of my regular, abnormal habits and thoughts in more detail...and outline to you the deception involved as I desperately sought to hide the real truth from the ones I loved.
Well, firstly, let's say I was at home one day at the weekend or whatever. When I was at college it was different again...of course when I was away from home, when I was on my own, it was in general alot worse.
So, at home, I suppose we have always had a little daily routine: breakfast about nineish, then coffee mid-morning, lunch around two, then tea or coffee or whatever in the afternoon, with dinner usually being around eight in the evening. And so the usual story with me would be to try and skip either breakfast or lunch, and not snack between meals, of course. I knew I would never get away with skipping dinner at home because the evening meal was the most important and it was the one time when we would all be together - Mam and Dad would be home from work, my brother would have usually have returned from town after seeing his friends or whatever, and my sis, the days before she left home, would also appear, usually with hay in her hair and mucky stains upon her hands, having spent most of the day tending to Molly, our gorgeous chocolate dun mare, who was the apple of my sister's eye. And so I didn't try to skip dinner...I knew, if I just didn't eat then, it would be noticed, no matter what excuse I tried to come up with. But whereas we did usually come together at breakfast and lunch too, it wasn't quite the same thing I suppose. Usually there would be at least one of us missing. Dad might be at work, Liz might have to ride Molly early before the rain came in, and so on. And so I came up with my own excuses to not be at the table when someone else was going to eat. I was careful about it of course...careful and so horribly, horribly sneaky. As I mentioned before, I would rinse a plate or a bowl in the sink, and bits of cutlery, and leave them on the draining board, so whoever came into the kitchen would see them sitting there and assume that I had eaten. Whereas in reality...I had eaten nothing. Or I might have slipped off to my room and shut myself in, pretending to be studying or whatever. I would sometimes put an apple or something small in my pocket to bring with me, just in case my stomach would start groaning with hunger, as it did sometimes...but often it didn't...I think it came to a stage that I was eating so little so often, that my stomach itself shrank, and almost accepted the fact that it wasn't going to get anything...
And when I did eat, even...when I did eat there were still so many things I did to try and ensure I was getting as little food into me as possible. Take breakfast, for example. If I had cereal, it would be a small, tiny little bowl, with very little milk on it. To stop others from noticing what little I had in a bowl, I would usually get a spoon and mash them around a bit in the milk and start chewing on one single piece of cereal before I sat down with everyone else, so it appeared as if I had started eating while I was standing in the kitchen, and had had more than I really had done...
If I had toast...it had to be a thin slice; the very thought of eating thickly-sliced was incomprehensible to me. I would have a tiny bit of spread on it, or a bit of jam. I cut off the crusts claiming I didn't like them - another lie. Mam tried to encourage me to have both toast and cereal when I really started to lose weight, and I pretended that I did have both if she asked...but it was rare that I ever did. It had to be only one or the other; I couldn't have more than my fixed tiny bowl of cereal or one single thin piece of bread...
For lunch, same kind of idea...so little, so little, so little. If I ate anything at lunch it would usually be a roll or a bap - a small-sized one, of course; and if it wasn't small enough for my liking I picked large bits off the inside of it - and a few scraps of ham; placed at the edges of the bread like I used to do with my packed lunches for school...so it appeared as if I had perhaps a slice or so inside the roll while really, of course, there was hardly anything at all. I had yoghurt sometimes, fat free if possible: I pretended I didn't like the taste of full-fat. With milk it was the same: I claimed that I couldn't stomach drinking the full-fat type and so I always tried to have semi-skimmed or skimmed instead. I never ate between meals. Hot chocolate I did have when I was at home. I realise now that hot chocolate was probably one of the things that did actually save me from becoming dangerously, dangerously thin: I loved it so much and I could never resist having it if Mam offered to make me one (again, if I was alone, I would never think to make one for myself...). And the ones mam made were with milk, not water, and always with full fat or semi-skimmed. If I felt as if I had "overeaten" on any particular day, I did sometimes pour away half of the mug. But this was rare because as I mentioned before I started getting fastidious about wasting food, and anyway, I just loved my Mam's hot chocolate so much and throwing it away was something which I really, really hated doing.
Whereas I did actually eat dinner when I was at home, that didn't mean that I was not constantly fretting and worrying about what I would have to eat for the family evening meal; and the amounts involved. There were many foods which I refused to eat in the pretence that I did not like them. Cheese, chips, creamy sauces, chilli, cabbage cooked in butter...the list is endless; but I'll be addressing the issue of fear foods a little later on, so we can go into more detail about that. I spread food around my plate so it looked as if I had more than I really had. I ate really slowly and painfully and chewed my food loads of times; and I cut my food into the tiniest little bits and placed one bit at a time into my mouth. My mindset was: if everyone else has finished and I'm still eating, I can say that I'm full or that I'm not really enjoying it and that I've had enough. I pushed food to the edges of my plate, letting small bits fall onto the tablecloth, and I mashed up things with a fork, spreading them out so that there was always some little bits of food squished onto the surface of the plate. I never left the table having left my plate spotlessly clean: there always had to be something left.
Of course when I was away from home...there was no need to pretend or fit in with scheduled mealtimes...basically, I could do whatever my ED dictated I should do.
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