Eating Disorder Recovery - Some Physical Aftermaths

Fulfilling a Promise

It's almost the end of the week and I promised a post on 'Eating Disorder Recovery' this week. I don't even know if I'll get online tomorrow, and am running out of time today, so in order to keep my promise to myself and to you, here goes! This will be a 'live capture,' as opposed to my usual 'prepared at home first' posts, so let's see what we find.

Since I am still processing the information that I was given about my general physical condition by the naturopath yesterday (as I talk about a bit in my Eighty Percent Raw blog), I will follow the flow and write about some physical aftermaths. Of course, the emotional onslaught is the bigger piece, the shadow self, the black-hole negation of self constantly waiting to swallow me up - and maybe writing about the physical stuff will give me the courage to talk about that soon.

Finding the Blessing in the Situation

Let me start by saying that I sincerely believe that my experience is a blessing. I am still alive, and very thankful for the kind of life that I get to live, and get to go to beautiful places, connect with wonderful people and other beings and do amazing things. Since I did not die, as I might well have (during the course of my illness I had incipient kidney failure at one point, extremely low heart rate and blood pressure for extended periods several times, drove my car on the freeway in that kind of condition on the verge of blacking out, attempted suicide, sliced the top of my finger off tamping a blender and lost a lot of blood...) it is at least pleasant to think that there is a reason why I am still here, or that I can create a reason, can be of some kind of service.

Getting Real - Predispositions

So much for internal background. For some external background, I am going to paraphrase something the naturopath said to me yesterday. He said that in general, my constitution is predisposed to conditions of deficiency as opposed to excess. The eating disorder synergizes with that tendency in a negative way, and he said that my fascination with very restrictive diets, cleansing, fasting, etc, as I heal residual physical issues, holds the danger of perpetuating the deficient/anorexic mind-and-body-set. This made a lot of sense to me. I embraced 'Natural Hygiene' for several years, which makes a rigid distinction between food and medicine (which I don't actually believe in) and eschews any kind of medical intervention except for fasting, insisting that the body just heal itself. It seemed like a beautiful ideal - but one of my great loves from childhood up had been playing my 'witch' persona and teasing power out of herbs and spices. It was with some sadness that I recognized that putting cinnamon on my bananas had become a guilty pleasure.

On the other hand, trying 'anything goes' was a nightmare for me - I felt physically out of control and crazy, and had wrenchingly painful cravings, whilst my compulsion to restrict came back against those stronger than ever and my body image deteriorated rapidly again...

Although it's true that when your internal system is in disarray, you develop allergies to everything very rapidly, I really believe that the quality of food that you eat makes an enormous difference to the success of your recovery. Processed foods and simple sugars are so deeply irritating on so many levels. I knew that I was finally getting real when I was able to admit that I could feel simple sugars making my skin crawl, even from raw honey and organic fruit, both of which I loved and venerated. Processed foods at best give me a stomach ache and at worst, make me psychotic. I have to agree with Courtney Pool here: emotions and attitude are extremely important, but what food you put in really does matter!
 
Sadly, years of self-starvation and obstinacy made simple sugars seem extremely attractive because everything else is so much more challenging to digest. I wish now that I'd been willing to take enzymes and supplements back then, and to consume more green foods, nuts and seeds, and generally to remineralize.

Minerals and Heavy Metals

Minerals are a huge issue in physical recovery from anorexia, especially given prevalence of environmental toxins. Your body will use what's available - and so, my calcium-starved body is full of lead! There is also a mercury overload - I wasn't getting enough zinc, and so my body incorporated mercury instead.

Mercury makes your lower digestive tract more alkaline. Now, alkaline blood is desirable, but when combined with insufficient stomach acid, bile and pancreatic enzymes that fail to kill them off, an alkaline condition in the gut (as opposed to the blood) equates to a more hospitable environment for yeastie beasties.

Heavy Metals and Yeastie Beasties

Mercury and yeasties combined wreak havoc. In fact, they can mimic so many different symptoms, sometimes manifesting opposite conditions (constipation vs. diarrhea, overweight vs. underweight) in different bodily constitutions, that mainstream doctors really don't like to take them into account much: they are hard to pin down.

Yeasties crowd out the good bacteria that are responsible for synthesizing and absorbing vitamin B12 in the colon, and then eat any B12 that is present themselves, and when B12  supplies get run down there are all kinds of neurological impairments that follow.

Mercury interferes with the conversion process whereby the thyroid hormone T4 is converted into its active form T3. Low T3 can heighten the malabsorption of the yeast condition, leading to all kinds of weakness, fatigue, indigestion and other debility. I am currently taking replacement T3 hormone, and the naturopath said that I wouldn't be able to get off that (as I dearly wish) until I've gotten rid of the mercury and yeast.

Putting It All Together

Putting it all together, mostly I find it more astonishing that I went through that 'flash in the pan' of building muscle and getting quite strong a year or so ago than that I overdid it, burned out and came crashing back down to the reality of a very frankenstein'ed physicality. I am one grittily determined person! But with a gut so full of various yeast species (two were especially promiscuous but actually, according to the naturopath's reading of my test reports, there are five in there) to the exclusion of the symbiotic bacteria, with bones leaden like an old house's plumbing, with a thyroid that isn't functioning appropriately, due in part to mercury and probably just overstretched from all the starvation, there is evidently a long road of healing to travel!

Thank goodness my head has been so clear lately - before I cut out cooked/processed foods I was physically off-balance and in brain fog, losing my memory...

From my conversation with the naturopath, it seems clear that all of these observations are fairly typical for someone who has been anorexic.

Strength in Weakness Again/Renascence

Last night I had a moment of sadness, saying to Phil 'good grief - there's so much healing to do!' And then I immediately canceled the thought with 'but I'm getting well now.' His comment was 'This is your renascence. You really are coming back to life now.'
Having such a supportive partner plays a huge role in that, of course!